Jacey Bedford's Journal

A couple of comments on my previous local history post got me thinking about Birdsedge.

It's not old as English villages go. There are some old farmsteads dating back to the 1600s, and some cottages in the village show signs of having had weavers' galleries on the top floor (very recognisable by the windows), but the village as it is now didn't really spring into being until the industrial revolution brought the weaving trade out of the cottages and into the mills. I'm guessing most of the older houses (terraced cottages mostly) were built between 1770 and 1830. They were probably buit to house millworkers as the mill in the village grew. Most of them were one-up-one-down and according to the census returns people were raising families with eight or nine children in these tiny two-room houses. The ones nearest to the camera in the forst picture look to be two rooms deep, but we think they were originally built as back-to-backs. The ones furthest away from the camera are only one room deep. Yes, that's a gas lamp halfway along the row. These two pics were probably taken some time between 1905 and 1911. The building that sticks forward on to the roadside furthest from the camera is now the village hall, but it was then a school, built by two Quaker benefactors soon after the 1870 education act. It wasn't until 1911 that they built the current 'council' school.

The River Dearne rises behind our house and there's a small dam, which drains into a culvert beneath the road and thence into the mill dam proper. The undershot water wheel (once at the extreme left hand edge of the mill photo) is long gone, but the course of the mill race is still visible. More importantly, the mill dam in Birdsedge controls the water flow into the Dearne from here to Denby Dale, the next village down the valley. The Hinchliffe family, which owns the mill in Denby Dale, also owns the mill in Birdsedge, and I suspect the water flow is the main reason they've kept it going as a viable working mill. Of course the water isn't used for power in Denby Dale, but they do still actively dam it, so I expect it's used in some kind of process.

I must ask James Hinchliffe when next I see him.

In a cottage-weaving situation several families would collaborate to buy one or two hand looms, and keep them working as long as there was light to see by (which in summer, in this part of the worlc, can be from 4.30 a.m. to 10.30 p.m.). Though some weavers' lofts were individual, some spanned several houses. I suspect that might be the case with the first three cottages here at Sunside. If you look carefully there are blocked up windows at either side of the upper ones (and at the back, too). Only the first three cottages were built as housing, the rest of the row was part of a farm range which was converted to three dwellings some time between 1905 and 1911. In an earlier photo you can quite clearly see a tall barn door where, in this picture, is a lighter patch of front wall. Barn conversions are not a new idea. (The farm house is part of the same structure, but is round the back)

You can see blocked up weavers' windows much more clearly on this 1960s photo of the back of Sunside cottages. Imagine the light in that gallery with a long row of mullioned windows at both the front and back of the gallery. Compare the size of the domestic windows downstairs where it was more important to keep heat in even if it meant shutting light out.





And here is the farm house. The photo is probably from the 1960s. It remains a farm - or rather a smallholding - to this day.












It's a bit more prosperous looking, but the top floor of what was the Crown Inn was obviously a weavers' gallery. The mullions of long-blind windows are still very obvious. I can see this building from my front window. It's still lovely and is now an artist's gallery rather than a weaver's one.

Having a weavers gallery on a third floor was fairly common, giving more space to the family. The weavers at Sunside must have been amongst the poorest, probably each family living in just one room and sleeping upstairs next to their looms.

Earlier this morning I listened to an item on BBC Radio4 about the importance of libraries, in particular about the importance of establishing the reading habit early and often. It's what I spent my early years pushing, firstly in Wakefield, freshly minted from Library School and then in Barnsley as Children's Librarian.

It's just come to my attention that despite a huge petition from users, Barnsley is about to close and demolish its central library - a building only opened in 1975. Apparently this is not because the library is not fit for purpose, but because it occupies part of the site, on Shambles Street, required for a new sixth form college.

When I first got the Barnsley job in 1972, the central library was housed in the Victorian Civic Hall (once the Public Hall), smack bang in the middle of town, on the main shopping street, just a blink from the bus station and a step or two from the market. Say Victorian and library in the same breath and you already know the sort of place. Monolithic entrance hallway (doubling up as the entrance for the theatre upstairs), polished wood, high ceilings, decorative plaster work, Victorian tiled floors. The scent of old paper permeated the whole building except when it was overtaken by the stench of decaying rat following the local council's annual purge with rat poison, which was sadly spread about without a scheme to remove the corpses from the heating pipe channels beneath the floor grills. (There are many interesting stories about the building from the Victorian disaster in which nine children were crushed to death on a staircase in a fire panic to the visiting circus which let a tiger escape in the back yard... but I digress...)

My department was the only one at the front of the building (top picture), occupying the space behind the arched windows on the first floor to the photographic left of the main entrance. There was no canopy over the front door in those days, so the huge arch was much more impressive. In truth I was comfortable in that space - it was the library I'd grown up using, never dreaming that it would eventually become mine to look after. But it was old-fashioned and we knew we could do so much better.

I worked at the old library in the Civic Hall for three years, and then the new one on Shambles Street for another three, and well remember the move from one to the other in February 1975. Because the council was too mean to pay for a proper specialised removal service the library staff had to do it (90% of us female) and we were only allowed to close for 2 weeks. We physically moved all the books in the first week (thousands upon thousands of them) and then spent the second week shelving and getting ready for the grand opening. Probably the most tiring two weeks of my working life. Those of us in charge of departments weren't exempt from hauling heavy boxes.

In case people forget - Barnsley's new library was - at the time - cutting edge. Just having a coffee bar in there and a children's story room, homework room, 'teenage' collection and an exhibition space, not to mention a music library and an archives section, may be fairly standard now, but it was all pretty new for libraries at the time.

I was given the opportunity to work on the design brief and floor-plan for the interior of the new children's library and though I didn't get everything that I asked for I did get most of it: my 'teen' section (in the very early days of Young Adult book publishing), a separate (quiet) homework room and an inviting shelf layout, though we all had to put up with the architect's doughnut-shaped counters. Whose bright idea was that, I wonder? (The thing about circular curved counters is that... books are square. Duh!)

Don't forget this was in the wake of the trauma of the massive Local Government Reorganisation in 1974 when Barnsley's library service had suddenly expanded from just three branch libraries to over 30 branches and a mobile service. We'd inherited a chunk of West Riding County Library Service buildings, staff and books in the local authority shuffle as Barnsley Borough had become a much bigger Metropolitan Borough with the loss of the West Riding and the creation of South Yorkshire. (Don't get me started on that one. Just dont...)

Never underestimate the amount of storage needed for books and materials. When we moved from the Civic all the books we had would not fit into the Shambles Street library due to the architects misinforming us about the dimensions of the bookshelves. We'd carefully calculated the mileage of shelves required on the information given - that the shelving bays were all a full metre wide with so many bays and so many shelves to a bay - but when we got into the new building, although the number of bays tallied, a considerable number of them were much less than a metre wide, some as narrow as 70 centimetres. That's a lot of shelf space to lose. The cumulative result being more books than shelf space. Big oops. (Thanks, Lanchester and Lodge, Architects.) Any new library building needs book space and people space - not only the public space, but behind-the-scenes work space, office space and 'stack' space for the books not on display. It needs vehicle access and a loading bay. (Hey, book deliveries are heavy!)

But apart from a few niggles, which we worked around, we did get our new library and it was mighty. We were only the 2nd library service in the whole country to computerise cataloguing and book issue (Oxford was the first). That was forty years ago. It's still fit for purpose, but now the council wants to demolish a built-to-order central library because it occupies a corner of a site they can redevelop to use for a new sixth form college. Thing is... they haven't made decent provision for a replacement. If I've absorbed the council's intentions correctly they are talking about moving their library service into what used to be the Co-op's Arcadian restaurant - another Victorian building entirely unsuitable for conversion to a library space and out on a limb on the edge of the town centre.

Hey, how about moving the library back to the Civic? At least it's nice and central. Barnsley would only be slipping back in time forty years instead of a hundred.

The Shambles Street library is a good facility, but it was always in the wrong place. The central library needs to be in the middle of town - not stuck in the old Arcadian buildings - which would be a doubly retrograde step.

I believe that petitions from library users have finally gained a promise that a new central library will be built 'in the town centre' in 'three or four years'. Well, jolly good - if it happens. When it happens. I lived through the building of the Shambles Street library. The late Tom Hayes, then Chief Librarian, fought for it in committees for years, then the job was put out to tender (architects first and then builders). I still have the brochure from the opening. It says the design brief was submitted to the architects in 1968 - so by that time the council had been persuaded, set aside funds, the land acquired and the architects selected. From the design brief being submitted to the library opening took 8 years. Therefore from inception to opening took closer to a decade or more. Three or four years is more than ambitious. Besides... have they even got a suitable site in the town centre? Perhaps they could pull down some other new purpose-built building to make way for it. The Market Hall perhaps. Yeah, right!

Epic FAIL, Barnsley.

11) 21/3/11
Pamela Cooksey: Joseph Wood 1750 – 1821, A Yorkshire Quaker

A biography of Joseph Wood who lived in my village two hundred years ago and left hundreds of notebooks, letters and ephemera which have survived in a private family collection as a hugely important archive contributing greatly to Quaker studies and 18th century studies.

I came at this from a local history point of view. Joseph chronicled daily happenings, interactions with his neighbours and accounts of his travels. Sadly the author is far more interested in Joseph's life, his Quaker ministry and his travels, so though I found it interesteing to a certain extent I am less interested in Joseph Wood's fairth, ministry and travels than I am in his house (New House Farm - still standing), his neightbours, his cloth business (mentioned but never in detail) and the daily life in the village in which he lived.

Sadly this book, though fascinating in itself, barely touches on them, however, Pamela Cooksey has transcribed Joseph's notebooks for eventual lodging in an accessible collection and thus a closer reading of them might reveal what I need ad an amateur local historian.