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KNOTTINGLEY
IN 1968
10th October 1968
KNOTTINGLEY ARTICLE
BY 'SOCCO VOCE'
Knottingley
people have taken up the trail of lime road history as suggested recently
in ‘The Express’ may have been for lime wagons leading from the
ancient Knottingley lime workings to the River Aire for barge loading.
From
evidence of cobble stones and other clues, ‘The Express’ traced a
possible road of the past down which lime carts travelled from Womersley
Road across the site of Bagley’s glassworks and the canal, to Aire
Street and waiting ships or barges on the river.
There
are of course, lime quarry workings from time immemorial in many parts of
Knottingley, and now appears as was also suggested, the probability of
more than one road.
Mr.
Granville Burdin, of Pontefract Road, recalls a channelled "way"
which crossed under the Pontefract Road, at Hilltop, just west of the Bay
Horse Inn, and presumably ended in what were then called ‘Brewery Fields’,
at the River. This was known in his younger days as "the wagon
road". The belief is that the lime was taken on it, probably on
tramways from the quarries, of which there is ample evidence in the
Headlands and Simpson’s Lane areas, and still further south. During the
last war the "tunnel" was used as an air raid shelter.
Mr.
Burdin expresses the belief that probably several roads took lime from the
south of the town, north to the river, and later to the canal. A tunnel,
indicating an access road, lay under Weeland Road between the old Town
Quarry above which stands St. Botolph’s Church, and the recess in the
bend of the road there, which gives on to the canal. But probably the
access road turned in earlier days, toward the river.
Again
lime would be in demand, suggests Mr. Burdin, not only for agricultural
purposes but as stone for reinforcement of the canal (as can be seen at
many points in Knottingley) and for other canals; and so in turn the canal
became the departure point of loads, not only of lime, but of limestone.
Mr.
Burdin recalls that as a young man his grandfather worked with William
Bagley when they were both at Brefitt’s, Castleford. A history of glass
at Castleford, given in ‘The Express’ Charter Supplement in 1955,
mentions developments in Castleford about 1846, and notes at "about
that time, Bagley and Burdin left Castleford for Knottingley".
He
cherishes many a memory of the skill, dry humour, hardiness and customs of
the "glass folk" among them; the custom of a firm giving to a
newly fledged craftsman, a gold watch, to which the foreman of the lad’s
particular team of workers would customarily add a gold Albert.
Mr.
Burdin recalls that in the early 1880’s, William Bagley formed the
Bagley Company, and Burdin & Co was formed in 1887, specialising in
the making of glass carboys.
Memories
of her childhood in a haunted house in Knottingley, were recalled by the
‘lime road’ article for Mrs Rachel Taylor, of Bryan Close, Whitwood
Mere. Now aged 84, she moved to Knottingley with her family from
Mexborough at the age of six. Her father was a glass founder at Bagley’s
works and he had a wife and seven children to support.
Their
now demolished cottage near the Cherry Tree Inn, at the junction of Cow
Lane and Marsh End was haunted says Mrs Taylor, by the vision of a lady
wearing a bustle, with a long skirt trailing on the floor, who seemed to
walk through walls and sometimes appeared at Mrs Taylor’s bedside.
Less
well off in those days, many people made the best of what they could at
Christmas times, and in times of difficulty. At Harker’s Shipyard, where
children played among the half-constructed boats, at Christmas Time they
collected a log of wood for a Christmas fire, says Mrs Taylor. Poor
children received a free Christmas dinner at the Church School and to
supplement the family income, ordinarily her father shot for rabbits and
pheasants with a gun kept in the beams of the house.
She
recalls soup being distributed to the poor in hard times and queuing with
her jug at the Town Hall every Friday morning. No water being available to
the house, the children at her home were sent for water from the pump in a
nearby butcher’s yard. She also recalls the belief which many present
Knottingley folk will remember (and maybe experienced) that inhaling smoke
from the burning lime kilns in the quarries was curative. Her mother sent
the children to inhale the fumes as a cure for whooping cough. But when
her brother caught smallpox, the entire family was locked up in the
cottage for six weeks, their food being placed on the windowsill.
Other
childhood memories include picking cinders from slag-heaps before
breakfast; buying corn, which was cooked and eaten with thick black
treacle, from a local flour mill; buying brewers yeast from the local
brewery; and staying to watch the beer made.
"I
Hated School", she declares; and she rarely went. Her father taught
her to read but to this day she cannot write. At the age of 16 she joined
Bagley’s as a bottle washer and there met her first husband, Jonathon
Price. They were married at St. Botolph’s Church and lived on Primrose
Hill.
Mr.
Price suffered the loss of a leg in the First World War and was able to
work only part-time. He died 40 years ago, leaving Mrs Taylor with seven
children aged between two and eighteen years.
Thirty
years ago she met and married Mr. Fred Taylor, a miner, who died 11 years
ago. Mrs Taylor now lives alone but delights in recalling, and with
pleasure, despite the harder times, how different is their childhood to
what hers was.
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