Henry Brown, Son and Pickles. Engineers - Part 5

We have a positive date for the building of the foundry at Havre Park this week and a picture as well.  All thanks to Brian Ashby who has lent me an offprint of an article in the British and Colonial Review of November 1922.  It is a 'Description of the activities of Messrs. Henry Brown and Sons, Wellhouse Works, Barnoldswick.'  The date for the build is as I suspected, 1922.

The article itself doesn't tell us much, it is an unashamed advertising puff for the firm.  It implies that they made full sized mill engines and talks of 'many hundreds of their engines' being installed 'up and down the country'.   Newton told me that they actually made 48 and these were all donkey engines.  

However, back to our story.  By 1922 when the foundry was built Henry Brown and Sons had replaced most of the old Bracewell machinery in Wellhouse with larger and more modern machine tools.  They were still renting the premises from the Calf Hall Shed Company.  When Johnny Pickles designed Havre Park the idea he had in the back of his mind was to move the Wellhouse machine shop down on to the same site.  This would make them more efficient and save the rent paid on Wellhouse and Ouzledale.

He was supported in this ambition by the fact that a lot of their work came in through a man called Edward Wood.  He was Secretary of a firm of accountants in Grimshaw Street Burnley called Proctor and Proctor who acted as managers for all the local shed companies including Calf Hall.  He was an engineering enthusiast and a great friend of Johnny Pickles and if there was a problem at one of the firms he acted for he simply instructed Henry Brown and Sons to fix it.  Browns had their own work as well and so with the opening of Havre Park and a full order book everything in the garden seemed rosy and Johnny pressed for the removal of Wellhouse on to the new site.

Under Johnny as foreman, Henry Brown and Sons were doing bigger jobs and had the machinery to cope with them.  A typical example of Johnny's enterprise came during WW1 when Browns got an enquiry off Yates and Thom at Blackburn who wanted some large gun bases turning for the war effort.  They were full up with work and needed a sub-contractor.  Browns hadn't a lathe big enough to do the job and there wasn't one available to buy but Johnny said this was no bar, they could make one.  He sat down in the kitchen at home and designed the lathe.  The patterns were made at Wellhouse and the castings made at Ouzledale and Stanley Fisher and Johnny built the lathe in Wellhouse works.   It was a big useful machine, a 'break lathe'.  It had a 48 inch face plate, could take 36 inches over the saddle and was eighteen feet between centres.  You needed big tools for the steam engine repairs and this lathe was working right up to the firm finishing in 1981.

It seems that Henry Brown's weren't too keen on coming out of Wellhouse.  Their thinking was that if they vacated the premises there was a possibility of someone else stepping in, renting the space and stealing their work off them.  Truth to tell, this was no problem, their best insurance was their reputation which was based on an expert work force but the management didn't see it this way.  Havre Park was under-used and put their overheads up and worst of all, the cotton trade began to falter.  

In October 1929 the unthinkable happened.  The Calf Hall Shed directors were informed on the 16th October that Henry Brown and Sons were filing for bankruptcy.  On the 20th of November Calf Hall Shed Company bought the contents of the Wellhouse Machine shop off the Receiver, R S Windle, for £425.  Browns saved the Earby workshop and carried on there but their days as Barnoldswick engineers were over.  When the dust settled the Receiver paid out 19/6 in the pound, an indication that there was actually no need to finish, they were almost solvent and could have worked their way through the difficulty.  Newton said that the problem was that the building society who had financed the building of the foundry forced the matter by foreclosing on Browns.

Meanwhile, Johnny had been busy and what happened is as good an indication as any of his standing as an engineer.  The day after the closure was announced Johnny went down to Kelbrook and borrowed £500 off an aunt.  He and Stanley Fisher went to Keighley and bought a 12 feet bed, 10 inch screw-cutting centre lathe and got permission of the Calf Hall Company to set it up in the old Moorhouse's warehouse at Wellhouse.  They got a 6 inch treadle lathe out of Johnny's workshop at home, Fred Windle at the Vicarage Road garage lent him a gas engine and welding set, Watson at the garage lent him a pillar drill and Fred Holt that was the blacksmith at the end of Wellhouse Road lent him a portable forge.  Johnny started paying Stanley Fisher immediately and a week later had re-engaged Dennis Pickles (no relation) and Leonard Parkinson.  The same week, Crampton Hoyle at the Corn mill gave them their first job, re-cogging the bevel wheel at the bottom of the vertical shaft in the Corn Mill.  They were back in business!

There was one more significant development that week, Johnny told his son Newton it was time he started work and set him on doing odd jobs, he was almost 14 years old.  In November the Receiver had arranged the sale of the machinery at Wellhouse.  Teddy Wood came down to Federation Street and had a word with Johnny.  Johnny grabbed a piece of chalk and with Newton went up to Brown's old shop.  They put a cross on every machine they wanted and at the sale next day Calf Hall Shed Company bought the lot.  Johnny was given the shop at the same rent as Browns, £25 a year.

That same week they moved into Wellhouse and started trading officially as J A Pickles and Son, Engineers and Millwrights, Wellhouse Machine works.  Another chapter was about to be written.  But they were short of a foundry.

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© Stanley Challenger Graham 2003

Page updated: 13 OCT 2003