How Britain Worked Read online

  Having mentioned the environment, though, it does make you think back to the city factories with their smoke and soot. Here at Gayle there would have been none of that. There would have been smoke – mainly wood smoke – from the fires or stoves in local houses, but no factory chimney belching out into the atmosphere. The employees at Gayle would have walked to work in the fresh air of the Dales, not spluttering through the smog of the city. I know where I would rather have been.

  Tony first came to work at Gayle Mill as an apprentice in the 1960s and is now very much involved with Gayle Mill Trust and the restoration of the building. We joined him to help fix the leak. In order to sort that out, we had to find out what was causing it, and that meant splitting open the two dishes that formed the main casing. We had to take out all of the bolts around the lip of the ‘clam shell’ and Tony warned me that if I dropped one down into the sluice – where the waste water drained off back into the river – I’d be the one going to get it, because down there it was dirty, wet and very cold! There was snow blowing through on the hills outside and inside the mill was very cold – just as it would have been when it was a working factory. We were lucky, if that is the word, to be experiencing the same conditions as the nineteenth-century workers had done.

  Tony told me that no one so much as laid a spanner on the turbine from the time it was installed until something finally went wrong in the 1970s. Even then, all that had happened was that a bolt had sheared, not in the turbine itself, but on one of the control arms. It didn’t need an expensive repair: as Tony put it, ‘the bits cost ten bob,’ and then had to explain to me that ‘ten bob’ was 50p in new money. Come on, Tony, we’ve had decimal currency since 1971, so it must have been 50p then as well! The point is, after a century in operation, the only repair this turbine needed cost just 50p. That sort of reliability doesn’t come built in with many of today’s machines, does it?

  Will, the mill boss, came down to help use wedges and crowbars to prize the two halves of the turbine apart. It had to be done slowly and carefully, inch by inch, to make sure that we didn’t buckle, bend or break anything – including ourselves. It was then that I dropped one of the wedges down into the sluice. Tony just sighed, shook his head and told me to go and get it. He’s not the sort of bloke who’s wrong about anything very often and he was definitely right about it being dirty, wet and very cold when I climbed down into that sluice!

  Once we had opened up the turbine casing enough to see what was going on inside, it was clear that while the turbine was still spinning freely and working perfectly, the plates that directed water into the mechanism had worked themselves loose. I was mightily impressed that we were the first people to see the inside of the turbine since it had been installed – the first men to work on it for more than a century. Gayle Mill is reckoned to be the oldest working turbine still installed in its original situation and doing its original job in Europe – possibly even in the world.

  Clearly, it wasn’t going to take a great deal to put the turbine right. We needed to replace a few parts, but I was really keen to get it working again as quickly as possible so that we could try it out and bring in some timber to work on upstairs. Not that I wanted to waste good timber; I didn’t want to cut it up just for the sake of it. We needed to think of something useful that we could make using the machines powered by the double vortex turbine.

  TIMBER!

  In the meantime, if we were going to do some woodworking at the mill, we needed some wood. To get this, we needed to cut down a tree. Naturally, we had to do it just the way it would have been done in the nineteenth century. Or, to be perfectly honest, the way it might have been done.

  Most of the wood they use at the mill when producing garden gates, fence posts and the like is sourced locally. We chose an old elm tree to cut down that was just a couple of miles away. Back then, clearing trees from farmland was a major undertaking when all you could use were axes, spades, horses and hard graft. I had some extra help in the shape of my mate Mave who’s a joiner, not a lumberjack, but he knows his trees (if you’re wondering why he’s called Mave, it’s a nickname that comes from his real name, Mark Davis), and an 1875 traction engine called The Chief.

  We used a two-man saw, just as they would have done in the Victorian age – no chainsaw cheating for us – and Mave explained how you have to pull, not push, to keep the blade under tension for a straight cut. The tree was dead, but even so, it was still hard going. While I was working up a sweat, Mave – who had clearly been doing his homework – told me that the world record for cutting down a twenty-inch diameter tree is 4.77 seconds. It took us a good while longer than that just to get our cut biting into the tree trunk! We were at it for the thick end of an hour and had still only got halfway through. I don’t think that we were in line to break any world records.

  At this point, I reckoned that the traction engine, which we had intended to use to take our timber to the mill, might be able to pull on the tree and provide a bit of tension to open up the cut. Knowing what a job the steam-powered winch did on dragging my plough across that field, I was sure that once I got my hands on the controls of the traction engine, we could cut out some of the hard work. The engine driver confirmed that steam power was our way forward and, with a rope attached to the tree, we applied a little tension. The tree, well dead and sitting in soft soil on the bank of a stream, leaned over a bit and then, with a little more encouragement from me at the controls of the traction engine, popped out of the ground like a cork from a bottle.

  Once we had trimmed the tree trunk, it was loaded onto a trailer behind the traction engine. Mave and I then had the awesome task of driving the twenty-ton engine back to the mill. Driving The Chief is very much a two-man job. One of you has to steer – and that’s not easy because you have to turn the steering wheel right to go left and left to go right. The other person controls the power: you’ve got gears and a throttle, but there are no brakes or pedals like you have on a truck. To speed up and slow down, you have to use your own judgement.

  Mave had never been this close to a traction engine before, let alone driven one, but I was well up for it. We had a bit of a practice on the farmland and we must have been doing okay because The Chief’s owners were happy for us to take it out on the road. I shovelled coal into the firebox while Mave nervously guided The Chief along the narrow Yorkshire country lanes at a stately 6mph. You might think that a bike racer used to taking roads like these at 160mph would be a bit bored with 6mph – but not a bit of it. There’s a lot to do to keep The Chief on the move: stoking the boiler, keeping an eye on the pressure, making sure you’re in the right gear, and checking that Mave hasn’t had a nervous breakdown behind the steering wheel. On top of which, it’s a real honour to drive an engine like this. It’s part of our industrial heritage, part of our history, and there aren’t many like it still in working order. To be honest, you really wouldn’t want to go much faster than 6mph in a twenty-ton beast with no brakes. The Chief would take some stopping.

  Driving The Chief would have been a real job. It’s not like getting up, jumping into your van, turning the key and away you go. The Chief’s crew would have to be up at five in the morning to light the fire in the firebox and slowly heat the boiler. You don’t want all that metal getting too hot too fast; metal might warp or rivets could pop. The fire would be built up slowly until the engine got up steam. You’d then set off for a day’s graft: hauling lumber, ploughing fields, and taking on jobs for as long as there was daylight good enough for you to work in.

  The Chief was originally dismantled and put into storage some time around 1920. It didn’t see the light of day again until 2005. The restoration work took fully three years: the lads who restored the engine had to make a lot of parts from scratch and they have done a superb job. Given all their hard work, I felt fully justified in insisting that we drive it into a ford to wash off the mud we had managed to get splattered on the underside and clogged into the giant treads on the wheels. We had a bit of
wheel spin and some slithering about on the stones in the ford, but Mave, even though he was still far from comfortable as helmsman, coped admirably. The thing that took real teamwork, though, was negotiating the narrow entrance to the lane leading into Gayle Mill. We had just a foot or so clearance on each side: one nudge from The Chief would have destroyed a neighbour’s immaculate stone garden wall on one side, or the local telephone box on the other. With Mave adjusting his steering to get the right line and me dropping The Chief in and out of gear to control our speed, we inched our way forward... and breathed a huge sigh of relief when we made it without causing any damage.

  We used the mill’s original (fully restored) Victorian crane, hand-cranked by Mave, to lift our timber off the flatbed trailer and lowered it down to where it would be sawn into workable timber. Actually, we had to cheat a bit here for the TV show. It takes months, even years, for a freshly felled tree to ‘season’ sufficiently to be used. Our tree wouldn’t go to waste, though. It would replace the timber that we were going to use to produce – and Mave couldn’t quite believe it when I told him – a bike.

  PEDAL POWER

  Now it’s no secret that I’m pretty passionate about bikes. I race motorcycles and I also race the pedal variety – the motorcycles in road races and the pedal variety on mountain courses. You might think that to build a bicycle I would want a mechanic rather than a joiner like Mave, but you’d be wrong. The first proper pedal-powered bicycle was actually made of wood. And if you think that a wooden bike isn’t something that could ever be raced, then think again. The first organised bicycle race was held in Paris in 1868 and was won by an Englishman, James Moore, riding a wooden bike with iron tyres.

  The development of the simple bicycle closely followed the development of the Industrial Revolution, from the early part of the nineteenth century all the way into the fully industrialised twentieth century and beyond. A German inventor named Karl von Drais first took a trip on a bicycle of his own design in 1817, but it wasn’t a bike as we know it. It had two wheels and a saddle but no pedals: instead, the rider sat astride the machine and ‘walked’ the thing along. Presumably, once you had got up enough speed or were rolling downhill, you would be able to lift your feet and cruise along. The first bicycle to use pedal power didn’t appear until 1839, when Scottish blacksmith Kirkpatrick MacMillan devised the MacMillan velocipede. The pedals still weren’t quite like the modern versions, however. Instead of turning a cog that spins the rear wheel via a chain, they operated crank arms, a bit like on a steam locomotive, that transferred the pedal power to the rear wheel. Like the German bike, the Scottish bike was made of wood, and it was MacMillan’s design that we were going to replicate for my bike.

  That meant taking a look at a MacMillan velocipede up close, which is a bit of a problem as no examples of the original nineteenth-century version have actually survived. There is, however, a copy at Drumlanrig Castle in Dumfries, home of the Scottish Cycle Museum, so Mave and I popped up to take a look.

  Drumlanrig Castle is a huge house built in 1691 by the first Duke of Queensbury and it sits in a vast estate, all of which is now open to the public. The stable yard is where the Scottish Cycle Museum is housed, although it’s not only old bikes that they have at the castle. You can also hire a mountain bike and take off round some of the MTB (mountain bike) trails on the estate.

  The old MacMillan wasn’t really the machine for that, though, so we tried it out instead on a stretch of nicely surfaced castle forecourt. The bike took a bit of getting used to. There are no tyres on the MacMillan, and no suspension, just wooden wheels with metal ‘tyres’ on the rims. Because it uses cranks and levers, you don’t push down on the pedals like you do on a bike with a chain drive. You have to sit on the bike, walk forward until you pick up enough speed to stay upright, and then carry on that ‘sit-down-walking’ motion, pushing the pedals back and forward. It was quite pleasant on the flat surface outside the castle, but I wouldn’t fancy it much on a muddy forest path or charging down a mountain track.

  Once I’d got the hang of it, we went for a bit of a ride on the estate roads, with Mave joining me on a penny-farthing from the museum. The roads were nice and smooth, except when I crossed a cattle grid: that sent a real shock up my spine and diddled around other bits that are best not diddled with when you’re trying to film a TV programme! It’s hard to believe that MacMillan rode his original velocipede from near where we were all the way to Glasgow. That’s a distance of about seventy miles, which he completed in a day: the man must have had balls of steel! Unfortunately, when he got to Glasgow he knocked over a child and was fined five shillings for riding on the footpath. When he got home, so the story goes, he set his cycle aside and never rode the thing again.

  The penny-farthing Mave was riding came along thirty years after my MacMillan and bicycle technology had come on a long way in the meantime. Although he was sitting really high on a big wheel, he was turning pedals that directly turned the wheel. But was he faster? We raced down the castle driveway and, as competitive as I am, I had no chance. He was miles quicker. When we came to a hill, though, it was a different story. It takes a very brave man to hurtle down a slope on a penny-farthing with no brakes to speak of. The penny-farthing does have a brake that presses on the tyre, and you can slow it down by ‘back pedalling’, but using the brakes generally meant that the penny-farthing rider took a ‘header’ and shot off the front of the thing, especially going downhill. Mave decided to fight against the pedals to control his speed and took it slowly. I didn’t have any brakes either, but being lower down, I knew I could slow myself by scraping my feet along the ground if I had to. Mave would have needed legs six feet long to do that. Despite my advantage, the velocipede was still a bit hair-raising going down the slope. They told me I was doing about 11mph, but with no tyres, no suspension and no brakes to rely on, it felt like I was doing at least 25mph. It was fantastic. Coming back up the slope was a different story. It wasn’t really much of a hill and you wouldn’t think twice about powering up it on a modern bike, but on the MacMillan I was better off walking. Mave wouldn’t have managed much better on his penny-farthing.

  The official name for the penny-farthing was the Ordinary Bicycle. It was called the penny-farthing because the large front wheel and small rear wheel reminded people of the large penny and small farthing coins laid side by side. It used tubular steel in its construction and was much lighter than a wooden cycle. The bicycle’s inventor, Englishman James Starley, is often referred to as the father of the bicycle industry. Starley was not the only enthusiast working on penny-farthing-style, large-wheeled machines and these innovators established the use of wirespoked wheels, braking systems and rubber tyres (albeit solid rubber ones). Air-filled pneumatic tyres didn’t come along until two Scotsmen – a vet named John Boyd Dunlop and a selftaught engineer called Robert Thomson – independently hit upon the same idea of wrapping a rubber ‘balloon’ around a wheel so that you could ride on a cushion of air. Thomson’s tyre originally had the rubber tube inside a protective leather cover, while Dunlop is credited with having devised the first practical rubber tyre in 1888.

  The Starley family never gave up on the cycle business and in 1885, James’s nephew John launched his Rover Safety Bicycle. This was something that we would recognise today as being a proper bike. It had a ‘diamond’ frame just like most modern bicycles, pedal power with chain drive to the rear wheel and handlebars to steer the front wheel. The Rover Safety was more expensive than a penny-farthing but much cheaper than a tricycle, which was what posh folks preferred. There was no awkward or undignified balancing to do with a tricycle and a gentleman could even take a lady passenger for a spin.

  Cycles of all types had initially been playthings for wealthy enthusiasts, as only the upper classes could really afford them. Buying a new one was a bit like buying a luxury car today. Just like expensive cars, once the original purchaser had owned it for a couple of years, it was time for a new one and the old model could be pic
ked up relatively cheaply – maybe even for nothing if it was damaged and regarded as little more than scrap. The less well-off would be on the lookout for such bargains because if a bike could be fixed, it could be used in races, and races meant cash prizes. A Newcastle man, George William Waller, won the world long-distance cycling championship on a penny-farthing in 1879 and earned a fortune competing as a professional bicycle rider.

  At a time when most ordinary people never travelled more than twenty-five miles from their own homes, bicycles started to make day trips to the countryside a healthy and desirable thing to do. The middle classes – professional people who, unlike most factory workers, were allowed the occasional day off and could afford to buy bicycles – started making forays along roads that had long been forgotten by travellers now using the railways. Cycling clubs were formed and country inns that had previously served the stagecoaches now acquired a new lease of life. The Cyclists’ Touring Club was founded in 1878 and hotels were so keen to do business that they offered special rates to club members. It meant a lot to a hotel owner to have the winged wheel emblem of the Cyclists’ Touring Club on the wall outside. You can still see the cast-iron plaques on the walls of some country hotels today.

  The cycle tourists weren’t only good for the hotel trade; they were also good for the roads. Since rail travel had brought about the demise of the stagecoach business, there were fewer carriages and carts than ever on Britain’s highways. Roads were not being maintained and had fallen into disrepair, something that the cycle movement set about putting right. They demanded good roads and quickly became such an influential sector of society that politicians dare not ignore them. Cyclists lobbied for better roads and, slowly, improvements were made. It was the cyclists, long before motorists came along, who ensured that Britain’s road network was not allowed to deteriorate completely.