I’m having the sorts of Sundays that other people do. It’s a real healing thing. A nice afternoon stroll around Oakwell Hall; watching old blokes playing George Formby songs (very, very well) outside a pub at the Otley Folk Festival; and today – applauding the Saddleworth Clog and Garland Dancers and mootching about old steam engines at Ellenroad Engine House, Newhey.
This is serious entertainment. When I arrived up in the Engine Room the gent in the suit and tie standing alongside the 3000 horsepower twin-tandem steam engines Victoria and Alexandra was giving an introduction to the few who could hear him over engine hum and steam hiss, and the first words I heard him say were amusingly disparaging ones about ‘The Health and Stupidity Regulations’.
I looked around and, carrying a metal teapot full of oil, preparing to open up a large valve to start the beast of an engine, was a lady in overalls whose long white hair would not have been allowed to flow so freely near any 28ft diameter flywheel in any modern power plant (not that such a dangerous piece of machinery would be anywhere near as exposed or unguarded as the Ellenroad wheel is). Parents sat their babes on railings literally inches from giant metal pistons which would shortly be hammering away at high speed, and haphazardly placed on a table by the entrance sat a very large spanner which might have taken someone’s kneecap off if it had been accidentally knocked to the ground.
SAFETY, says a heading on page three of the four-page Ellenroad guide. This is a working industrial site. There are wet surfaces, slippery slopes, oil and other hazardous substances. Please do not run! Children must be accompanied at all times!
At Ellenroad Engine House, on the first Sunday of each month, you can see the only fully-working cotton mill engine with its original steam-raising plant. You can see volunteers (who are they in everyday life – civil servants? bankers?) stoking coal into giant boilers and loving their faces becoming increasingly blackened. You can feel a scream at the core of your brain as another man starts up the replica aircraft turbine engine he has built (clue for next time: when he prepares to demonstrate his engine he puts on ear protectors). I bet if you got too close to the garland dancers, sidling past to the refreshment table while they were performing, it’d hurt a lot having your toes trodden on by a clog.
It’s not even safe looking at the paper exhibits. For here, another sort of toughness surfaces. The toughness of the mill owners to their workers. Here, evidence that in 1937 ‘learner weavers’ were on five shillings a week (two week’s work would buy you a cuppa at the Ellenroad tea bar today – and that’s cheap). And here, evidence of the shrinking of workers’ holiday allowances in 1952. 144 hours a year; two weeks six days off. And tough work, low-paid, when you were on. No wonder that from time to time in this and nearby textile towns the workers erupted in protest.
I left thrilled and provoked by all this. Bought a bobbin of cotton and a book about the pioneering spirit of Rochdale’s workers. More, I suspect, on that subject, tomorrow.