Better homes – at a price
BEFORE the 1950s, many people in the Heavy Woollen District lived near the town centre in houses which were mainly back-to-back with outside toilets and no hot running water.
The environment was drab, and nearby mill chimneys poured out smoke, night and day, and few houses had gardens.
Suddenly in the 1950s, a housing revolution took place which completely changed the social scene in mill towns like Batley, Birstall and Dewsbury.
Thousands of people were transferred, almost overnight, to new houses on far away estates, and old neighbours were separated, and close-knit communities broken up. There was, however, a bright side to these social changes, people were able to breath fresh air on a daily basis, sanitation was improved, and they had gardens front and back.
TOWN CENTRE
Some people in Batley were moved miles away from their former homes, but those who went to the Healey Estate were lucky, they were still within walking distance of the town centre.
But this didn’t stop them complaining, especially about high rents, and children and dogs wandering into their unfenced gardens.
Mrs G Preston, of Linton Avenue, told a News reporter: “I don’t agree with the increased rent charges. Our husbands aren’t earning extra money, and the rent is too high.”
Tenants also complained about the lack of fencing, and Mrs J Allerton, of Aysgarth Road, said she was unable to grow anything in her garden because of the dogs that were allowed to wander in and out.
Mrs O Fox, of Malham Drive, complained that if she wanted any repairs doing, she had to go down to the town hall herself to report them.
Mrs G Oldroyd, of Linton Avenue, said the houses had not been properly finished, and Mrs C Oldroyd, also of Linton Avenue, said she had to lay asphalt paths as well as provide her own fencing.
Mrs M Whitehead, of Aysgarth Road, who lived in a prefabricated steel house, said they only had one coal fire and the fireplaces were of such poor quality, some tenants had had their own fitted.
But Mr J Christian, of Hayburn Road, was thoroughly satisfied with his prefab home and said the surroundings were much better than those of his last home in Queen Street.
PEOPLE who were moved on to the Fieldhead in Birstall were furious they were so far away from their homes that had been near the town centre. They felt they had been ‘dumped’ on an estate on a hillside, with only one bus an hour, and miles from anywhere. The Fieldhead Estate was to have solved Birstall’s housing problem, but local councillors always knew there would be problems because of where it was situated.
The council built 600 houses on the estate and set aside land for building a community centre and a church, but local residents showed little interest in either. One new tenant remarked: “We are too far from the town centre – the corporation just dumped us out here and then forgot about us.”
Mrs W Leach, of Nussey Avenue, said: “The atmosphere is much healthier for kids up here – but they have too far to go to school.” Parents were faced with another shock when they were told that West Riding County Council was not prepared to pay the bus fares of children travelling to schools that were sometimes three miles away. Mrs A Bedford, of Howarth Road, said: “Most of us are right out of the world here and we feel Birstall is too great a distance away”.
A general view of Healey Estate in 1956. Healey Lane is in the foreground with Hayburn Road at the bottom right hand corner.
These youngsters play cowboys and indians among the building materials and rubble left by builders on Fieldhead Estate in 1956.
Business booming at the mill
IT IS difficult for people today to imagine the vast number of people who used to work in the mill when the textile industry was the lifeblood of towns like Batley and Dewsbury.
Someone from nearly every family in both towns worked in the mill, sometimes the entire family working at the same place, and we all remember the big names, like Taylors and Stubleys in Batley, and Mark Oldroyds and Wormalds and Walker in Dewsbury.
The firm of JT and J Taylor, Limited in Batley was different from most in that its chairman, Theodore Taylor, was a staunch Liberal who believed in profit sharing, and his workers benefited in the annual dividend share-out.
The history of Taylor’s Mill started in the late 1700s when Abraham Taylor, of Chapel Fold, Staincliffe, began to manufacture a coarse kind of woollen cloth, which he sold, a piece at a time, over the counter at the Leeds cloth market – and at times had to hawk his goods round the district from door to door.
He passed his accumulated knowledge on to his son, Thomas, and soon, with improved machinery, Thomas was able to manufacture a much finer cloth, and became one of the first proprietors of a whole woollen mill in the country.
It was, however, left to three of his sons, John, Thomas and Joshua Taylor, to found in 1845, the firm which grew and prospered and eventually comprised three mills – Blakeridge, Cheapside and Branch Road – as well as warehouses in Station Road.
Character
It would be impossible to write about Taylor’s without mentioning Mr Theodore Cooke Taylor who died in 1952 at the age of 102. Mr Taylor was a character, undoubtedly the most notable man that Batley ever produced.
He was born in Carlinghow in 1850 and entered the family business at the age of 16 and became sole proprietor in 1895. That same year, he inaugurated his famous profit-sharing scheme. Blakeridge Mill, which closed down some years ago, will shortly be converted into apartments and new houses will be built in what used to be the mill yard.
But there are still many living in the area who worked there and will remember the happy times they spent there and the high quality of material they produced.
Taylor’s in the 1950s employed over 1,000 workers, 600 of them at the Blakeridge Mill alone, but before the war, the mill employed 1,400.
The mill exported cloth all over the world, its chief customer being Canada, but they also had big orders from America, New Zealand, Holland, Denmark and South Africa. But the great danger to the textile trade eventually came when many of these countries started producing their own wool, followed by the introduction of man-made fibres, which eventually led to the closure of many mills in the area.
The uncertainty of the textile trade led to many young people being afraid to follow in their parents’ footsteps for fear of redundancies, and shortage of labour was another nail in the coffin of the Heavy Woollen District’s textile industry .
ABOVE: Workers from Taylor’s Mill in Batley leave work after a hard day.