Henry Brown, Son and Pickles. Engineers - Part 6

Ten days after Henry Brown collapsed, the Calf Hall Shed Company had got a competent engineering firm working out of Wellhouse again.  J A Pickles and Son.  They had a consummate craftsman in charge, Johnny Pickles.  Three good men, Stanley Fisher, Dennis Pickles and Leonard Parkinson and an apprentice, Newton Pickles.  Setting them up wasn't charity, it was self interest.  The firm was an asset to the shed company.  Newton told me that when Edward Wood went to see Johnny he said "Now then Johnny, we can't do with you out of business and all these mills stopped."

When Teddy said this he was acting for the Calf Hall Company.  This applied even more so to Proctor and Proctor's interests because they were managing other shed companies as well.  Both he and the company were perfectly well aware that one piece of the jigsaw was missing, they hadn't got an ironfounder in the town, an essential element in maintenance engineering.  However, the Calf Hall Company  owned a foundry and they knew where there was a competent founder.

James Cecil Ashby had come into Barlick sometime just after WW1 and it looks as though he had been encouraged to come by Henry Brown because he gave him the job of foreman at Ouzledale Foundry at the mill on Longfield Lane.  Harold Duxbury once told me that James worked there and lived in the cottage at Ouzledale.

What we know for certain is that there is written evidence that James Ashby was in business at Ouzledale in 1932 as a tenant of the Calf Hall Company and trading as Ouzledale Foundry.  Anecdotal evidence and Harold Duxbury says that he re-opened Ouzledale as a foundry immediately after the closure of Havre Park where he was also foreman.

I once asked Harold why there was no mention in the Calf Hall Company half yearly accounts or the minutes of the Board of Directors about this tenancy and Harold just laid his finger along the side of his nose and smiled.  Harold used to do this with me when I asked him a question he didn't want to answer or, being a wily old bird, when he didn't know the answer but wanted me to think that he did.

However, there is one concrete piece of evidence;  in the half year Profit and Loss account for the Calf Hall Company for the six months ending 30th June 1929 there is an item for Ouzledale Income of £2-11-3.  For a while there is almost no income but in June 1931 Ouzledale brings in £48-2-2, a full income from the foundry.

There are times when documentary evidence fails and the historian has to join the dots up.  This is one of them.  I think that what happened was that Edward Wood consulted with Johnny Pickles about the lack of a foundry and took his advice.  James Cecil was a newcomer to the district and hadn't an extended family to fall back on for a loan like Johnny and so I think that Edward Wood approached James Cecil and arranged for him to re-open the foundry on an unofficial basis rent free.  Remember that Calf Hall was a public company and strictly speaking they had to maximise gain for the shareholders.  There is no doubt in my mind that Teddy Wood got a wonderful deal for the shareholders and the town because whatever went on between him and James Cecil Ashby resulted in the birth of another major employer in Barlick, Ouzledale Foundry.

I can't resist comparing the events of that hectic fortnight in the back end of 1929 and the results that came from it with what would happen in similar circumstances nowadays.  I don't think our industrial organisations would move as quickly or be as sure-footed.  The key factor was that the men involved were practical operators, they understood the industry and the men and had the confidence and freedom to trust their judgement and act.  It was a very short chain of command, a couple of conversations, a knock on a door at night and the job was sorted.  You have to admire their style.

There's one more piece of evidence that suggests James Cecil went straight into Ouzledale.  Newton said that shortly after they got back into Wellhouse Anthony Carr came into the shop and gave Johnny an order for 2000 pair of ten inch loom pulleys.  The More Looms System was coming in and one essential element in making it work was to slow the looms down.  The easiest way to do this was to put larger driving pulleys on them.  This was a big order.

Johnny made some wooden patterns and took them up to Ouzledale for James Cecil to cast four sets of aluminium patterns, on a big production run aluminium patterns were more durable.  Once made, two pairs of patterns were sent to King's foundry at Skipton and two pairs left at Ouzledale.  Both foundries started to make castings and Newton said they were getting 90 pairs a day in the shop.  Johnny had made the patterns so that they were easy to mount on a fixture on the faceplate of the lathe once they were bored.  

Turning rough castings straight from the foundry is hard on cutting tools, they have to deal with hard metal and embedded sand.  Johnny had been reading his engineering journals and knew about some new German cutting tools called 'Wimet' which were tipped with Tungsten Carbide, apart from diamond this was the hardest substance known to man.  He got four Wimets and they started making pulleys.  Newton was 14 years old and he said he turned pulleys until he dropped so the date was 1930.  Some days they worked from half past seven in the morning until half past nine at night.  The Wimet tools only needed sharpening once a fortnight.  They got another order from Blackburn for 1000 pulleys and in the end made over 13,000.  Newton said that Johnny had £1,000 in the bank at the end of that job.

So our two young firms are in work and making money.  What a recovery, in twelve months they have both gone from wage earners to independent employers by grasping an opportunity and through having ability and good friends.

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© Stanley Challenger Graham 2003

Page updated: 13 OCT 2003