A MILLWORKER’S TALE …
IN 1831 Jonathan Dodgson Carr travelled from Kendal to Carlisle to set up a corn merchants and bakery. Later, he set up a biscuit factory in the city and a flour mill at Silloth - both of which are still operating today. In this special article for Yesterday magazine commemorating the 175th anniversary of Carr’s, Harold Bosward looks back on his half century working at the company’s flour mill at Silloth. Alan Air reports.
THE art of brushing a factory floor properly would surely be as lost on today's generation of youngsters as the ladder-climbing skills needed by powder monkeys on HMS Victory, or the dexterity of boy chimney sweeps in 19th century London. Brushing up dust is instinctive, surely? Hold brush, push down, sweep and repeat - brain disengaged.
WELL, suspend your modern-day attitude of smug superiority because you'd be wrong to think that. Well, wrong if you started as a mill boy at Carr’s flour mill at Silloth in 1952. You see, there is an art to sweeping up. Like there's an art to 'rudding' doorsteps, hanging washing on a line and digging out trenches to plant this year's crop of shooting seed potatoes: it's just that these days such traditional skills are not as cherished as they once were.
BUT for Harold Bosward, a polite, church-going, ruddy-faced 15-year-old lad eager to please, mastering the art of sweeping a floor was one of his first triumphs on entering Carr's flour and animal feed mill in Silloth back in 1952, the year Queen Elizabeth II ascended the throne - a different time, a very different world.
IT was 7.30 prompt on a bright summer morning when he stepped over the threshold of the sturdy red brick monolith built in 1887 that threw a long shadow over the docks.
"Even though my father was at the mill and I knew lots of people working there I was very apprehensive," he remembers.
BUT despite sweating palms Harold was quite self-assured in his initial task - delivering a battered leather satchel of orders to the hissing 7.50 steam train leaving Silloth for the Carlisle biscuit works. Mission accomplished (phew!), it was back to the 'mill bottom' for that sweeping lesson.
"Believe it or not I was taught how to brush properly," he smiles, acknowledging the look of incredulity on my face. "Slide the shank through your hands, knock the dust out of the head before going onto the next part of the floor - that was how it had to be done and I had to get it right. I had to master it."
HAROLD remembers it was 'Mr Steel', the general foreman, who greeted him that first morning and subsequent referrals to grown-ups as Mister this and Mister that evoke a more deferential season, when age and authority actually stood for something.
“You were brought up to have manners and Mr Steel was like a god, he was on a pedestal. He just had this aura about him,” says Harold. “You wanted to please, you didn’t want to let your parents down because everyone knew everyone else in Silloth back then and you didn’t want bad tales about you going back home.”
This hierarchal attitude where everyone knew their place - today’s worldlier generation would probably regard it as simultaneously quaint and repressive - was reflected in the Carr’s way of doing things, both at the Silloth flour mill and at their biscuit factory in Carlisle. Paternalism, respect, duty and job security went hand in hand. There was never, ever any union militancy. And it suited Harold. The third generation of Bosward to enter the mill, after his father (Harry), mother (Nellie) and grandmother (Sarah Chambers), he welcomed the stability and order that Carr’s gave his life. “I know it might sound daft these days but you used to relish going to work - you really looked forward to it! You knew you were going to be involved in something productive and the camaraderie among the men was a wonderful thing,” he insists.
Issued with two pairs of plain white overalls (“they had to last a twelve-month”) and mentors to oversee his development, Harold thrived. He learned how to mend the belts that drove the machinery, repair tarpaulin bags and he developed an understanding of the forces involved in the centrifugal drums that sieved the flour. He quickly got used to the mill’s distinctive smells, the busy clatter of pulleys and conveyor belts and the clocking on/clocking off routine of industrial life.
Wages day was the best day of the week.
“You worked a week laying on so that first week I got nothing,” he remembers. “But then I got my own clock number. Your wages were in a small tin with your number on that you collected from a cubicle where the pay clerks sat. Arthur Foster and John Todd were the pay clerks at the time. I got about two pounds and I gave it to my mother who probably gave me ten shillings back but she bought all my clothes so I never worried about that.”
For the next three years, until his 18th birthday, Harold got to know as much about the factory as geographical restrictions or his age would permit.
“You weren’t allowed to operate machinery in the milling departments or do heavy manual work until you were 18, but I spent a lot of time in the mill bottom and the bag room learning as much as I could about how all the various processes worked.”
On his 18th birthday Harold was called up for two years National Service. Wrenched from the cosy mill, a social life that included playing rugby and tennis, and sent down to Portsmouth for a life at sea was, at first, incredibly unsettling.
“Can you imagine how I felt?” asks Harold. “I had never been away from Silloth, apart from visiting relatives in Leeds with my parents, and suddenly I was on a ship and going all over the world. Only the rich went abroad in those days. I saw places that I never dreamed I would see, and did things I never dreamed I would do. I was in Cyprus, Suez and Norway and I learned discipline from my life at sea more than anything else. It was paramount.”
When his two years were up, he toyed with the idea of sailing to America for three months but the navy wouldn’t countenance such short-term ambition.
“It was sign up for five or seven years or nothing so I came home,” he explains. “I felt really out of sorts for a while but then I decided to go back into the mill.”
Harold joined the ‘rough gang’ in the animal feed warehouse, humping 12 and 14 stone bags of feed and piling them 20 high. It was physically demanding work, bearing in mind that he only weighed 11 stone wet through.
“You had to walk a plank carrying these bags so you needed good balance,” he says proudly.
A skilled rugby player with a natural ability to duck and dive, he coped well and even managed to hoist the ultimate onto his shoulders - 16 stone bags of barley, the size of a grown man.
The arrival of grain ships from North America into the adjoining dock gave Harold the chance to talk ship with the skippers and renew his love affair with the sea. The mill discharged its own cargoes even though the dock board was still on the go, a throwback to the general strike of 1926 when Carr’s wrong-footed protesting dockers and continued milling against the odds. Two large suckers from the factory reached down into the holds of the ships, vacuuming up the hundreds of tons of grain, a process that could last from first thing in the morning to last thing at night.
It was indeed, the halcyon days of the 50s, he says. Hard work yes, but laughter as well and jokers who raised a smile when spirits flagged. There were innocent pranks, too. Nailing someone’s shoes to the floor, gluing a billy can to the table or sending the green and wide-eyed to the workshop for a ‘long stand’ - the fate of nearly all new mill workers down the years. “It’s the characters I remember,” says Harold, smiling, trotting off a long list that I only partially reproduce for fear of imitating a roll call. Tommy Purdham, Stan Akitt, Jack Walker, John Slack, Billy Richardson, Duncan Chisholm, Hughie Stitt - names that live in the memories of those who encountered them. Then there were the staff outings to Keswick and other Cumbrian towns, friendly sporting clashes with rival local firms and the annual town procession where mill workers on board the Carr’s float would toss out 1lb bags of flour to laughing onlookers. It all helped to glue the mill together - workers, management, owners.
As the 1950s came to an end and the 1960s got underway, Harold’s life had settled into a comfortable groove. He worked hard and he played hard. Still living at home with his parents at Golf Terrace - no-one had ‘flats’ in those days - he was content, a single man with no real responsibility worries or concerns. Then he got promoted and his loyalty to the mill - which was never in doubt anyway - increased ten-fold.
“I had to take charge of the bag room, do the credit for customers and I was also the relief for the SR department where the girls - (all single, no married women were allowed to work) - made up the 1lb and 3lb bags of flour for the shops.”
His own thoughtful management style was influenced by Ivan Carr, and later Ian Carr, the last of the Carr dynasty stretching back to Quaker founder JD Carr.
“Mr Ivan - everyone called him Mr Ivan - took a great interest in everyone who worked at the mill,” reveals Harold. “He would visit, usually on a Tuesday or a Thursday, and he was great with the young lads. He’d ask one of them: ‘If a fire started over there what would do?’ When they said they would try to contain it if it was a small fire or press the alarm if it was a bigger fire he would bring out this bag of mint imperials and hand them out. He knew everyone by their Christian name. We were never in fear of him but probably in awe of him.”
Later, when Harold was promoted again, this time to general foreman (which meant a doubling of wages and enabled him to think of starting a family with his wife Joan); his position in the mill was assured. Under the mentoring of Josephine Robinson, general manager, Gordon Howe, production manager in the feed mill and Bill Cameron, mill production manager, he gained further insight into the Carr’s way of doing things. And in the works canteen one day he was given an unexpected pep talk by Ivan Carr, retired but still actively interested in the business.
“He said to me, ‘Harold. I’ve watched your career with great interest and I’m so pleased for you.’ Then he gave me some advice which has stood me in good stead throughout my life. He said to me, ‘You can’t possibly like everyone in life but if you try to be fair to everyone then you’ll never go wrong.’ And that’s exactly right isn’t it? You are only human, and some people rub you up the wrong way but you have to make everyone the same.”
Yet almost flying in the face of such traditional, paternalistic management, Carr's was the instigator of a remarkable October Revolution in 1963. Its £250,000 computerised animal feed compound plant came on line then, in its own way every bit as rocking as The Beatles topping the charts at the time with She Loves You.
“The control panel was incredible,” remembers Harold, “ and I spent some time in there, gaining a working knowledge of the formulations for cow cake and hen feed.”
The flour mill laboratory - where bread loaves were tested for quality - was another part of the plant to embrace modern technology, he remembers.
“In the early days Peggy Little used to bake sample loaves and part of my job was to go along with Josephine Robinson and cut them to make sure the crumb texture was right.”
Progress and the move toward oil-fired generators and a pneumatic mill put the magnificent coal-powered steam engine - that drove the plant processes via its giant flywheel and belts - out of action in the early 70s.
“It was an amazing piece of machinery and Josephine Robinson wanted the engine room turned into a museum but there were all sorts of problems with insurance with it being on an industrial site,” he says.
However, the engine is still there and turned every month to keep it in pristine working order, a time machine from an increasingly remote era. The distinctive chimney that carried the coal fumes away is long gone. It was unsentimentally demolished in the 80s by steeplejacks, brick by brick. It had to make way for the installation of the giant silos that now dominate the site and which arose out of the plant’s remodelling - essential to keep it at the forefront of milling technology and competitive in today’s globalised economy.
Understandably, it is not reminiscing about technological innovations that fires Harold’s memories but the skills and innate knowledge of his fellow workers; traditional millers like Tommy Slack who could instantly assess the quality of wheat grains simply by pressing it through their fingers.
“Sometimes they would shake their heads because it was too wet or too dry,” he says, “whereas today you cannot fail to get it right. Now, machines tell you everything and there is constant quality control throughout the milling process every hour of the day.
” Whilst we have gained uniformity, standardisation and constant high-quality, we have probably lost something that is much harder to put a finger on and which would never figure on a balance sheet. Romantics would call it the human touch.
One of the biggest shocks experienced by Harold at the mill - apart from the sudden deaths of workers through heart attacks or the occasional on-site accident - was the fire of June 1971. The second blaze at the mill in four days, flames gutted the upper three floors of the warehouse, destroyed hundreds of tons of flour, and lit up the night sky. It took fire-fighters 28 hours to finally extinguish the inferno.
“I remember talking to Ronnie Appleton, the police constable at Abbeytown, and arson was suspected but it was never proven,” says Harold. “But there was a long line shaft with bearings in the warehouse and lots of Hessian and paper sacks up there. If the bearings weren’t oiled properly they got red hot so it could easily have been that that.”
In typical Carr’s style, the mill workers pulled up their sleeves and set to work clearing up the mess.
“It was atrocious as all the water used to extinguish the fire had turned the flour into slithery dough,” remembers Harold. “We spent days shovelling it up and dumping it into skips. No-one griped about it and the millers just bonded together. You see, the camaraderie was there.”
Complaints about Carr’s flour were few and far between down the years - particularly as advancing technology took the chance out of the milling process, says Harold. Yet the company’s instinctive response, reflecting their belief that the customer is always right, prevailed.
“One time an old lady from Whitehaven sent us a letter about some flour that smelled of creosote. It turned out it had been stacked in her local shop next to barbecue sticks or something like that.
“Josephine Robinson asked me to go and see her and to have a day out on the company. Well, you’d jump through hoops of fire for a boss like that. So I took this old lady two bags of everything we produced and you would think that we had given her the Crown Jewels. But that was the Carr’s way. Her custom - which was maybe only a bag or two of flour for baking bread every month - was as important to us as someone buying ten tons a month and she wrote back saying that she would tell everyone she knew about how wonderful Carr’s flour was!”
Occasionally, dignitaries visited the mill. Workington MP Fred Peart, the Duke of Kent and Penrith and the Borders MP Willie Whitelaw all passed through at one time or other. Harold remembers the former Conservative Deputy Prime Minister with some affection.
"Willie was President of the Silloth Golf Club where I played and a great friend of Mr Ian," he says. “He came down to the mill one day and George Thomlinson, the silksman on the top floor, shouted for me to get my photo taken with him. ‘You know Willie, I’m not a Tory,’ I told him and he just laughed. But you know, it was the only photograph that didn’t come out!”
Another VIP memory is of Fred Dibnah. The steeplejack made famous by television was blowing a chimney at Miller’s shoe factory at Cockermouth when he heard about the mill’s old steam engine.
"Well, he went into raptures over it," says Harold. "Fred was just the same as he was on television, in the same gear, everything, a great character."
In 2002, 50 years after entering Carr's for the first time as a nervous teenager and witnessing technological advances that he could only have dreamed about as a boy, Harold’s retirement loomed (although the family association with the company would continue through his son Martin - the fourth generation of Bosward to work in the mill). In keeping with his unassuming manner that had won him so many friends down the years, Harold suggested commemorating his retirement with a quiet lunch.
Carr’s had different ideas, throwing a big party at the town’s Golf Hotel and presenting him with two top-of-the range golf clubs - one bought by colleagues, the other by directors.
"It was such an emotional time for me," says Harold. "I was pretty choked; you could have knocked me down with a feather."
But the ties that bind have endured. Today, Harold still enjoys a round of golf with Duncan Monroe, managing director of Carrs Flour Mills Ltd and a spot of lunch every week with Ben Clark, mill manager - work-based friendships that have stood the test of time.
Sadly, his much-anticipated retirement with his beloved wife Joan was short-lived, after she unexpectedly suffered a fatal heart attack two years later. Once again, the famed Carr's paternalism emerged when Ian Carr's widow, Rilla, acknowledged his loss with a personal sympathy card.
"I had only met Mrs Carr two or three times so she had no need to do that. But that was the Carr’s way.”"
Although Ian Carr, the last of the founding bloodline to actively run the mill, died in 2004, Harold's faith in the old way of doing business - the family way, the paternal way, the mutually respectful way - is undimmed and he relates the following story by way of explanation.
WHEN his son Martin was young he was taken into the Cumberland Infirmary in Carlisle following a severe asthma attack. Naturally anxious, Harold rushed to be at his side, only to find on leaving that Princess Anne was on an official visit to the building. Ian Carr, who was chairman of the hospital board at the time, spotted his employee and excused himself from the official party.
"He left everyone to come across to find out why I was there," says Harold. "He was genuinely concerned, genuinely worried and wanted to know what he could do to help. That was the man. That was the Carr’s way."
Ends
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