JM: Well, after the new machinery. Textile, you know, spinning, twisting, 

LMI: New machinery came in? 

JM: Came in. 

LMI: What was that like? 

JM: Then the people started losing their job. These people, instead of handling two machines, they moved to four machines.

LMI: One person was looking after two machines. 

JM: Two machines. And they started, you know, on and on, going harder and harder. 

LMI: So, were they actually making people redundant? 

JM: Yeah. That’s the story.

Our skill set was weaving Jacquard furnishing fabrics. So we weren’t a worsted or wool weaver, which the rest of our contemporaries in Bradford were involved with. We wove pattern fabrics for wholesalers. And Dad had been to this trade fair in Milan and seen a British invention, which was a computerised Jacquard machine. Which was basically a mind-blowing invention because it increased the speed of the production of fabric, or the number of picks. The method in the 1980s for transferring a pattern into a woven fabric, they used to have to draw out the patterns onto graph paper which was transferred into the punch cards that the looms read. But computer aided design came along in the early 1980s, and this is what my dad had seen initially. So this time-consuming process of doing the designs suddenly, with this computer-aided design equipment, that could be done an awful lot quicker. And the British mills, particularly in the Aire Valley… we were very fortunate to be in the right country for the developer of the computer Jacquard invention, which… They were based in Gateshead, called Bonas Machine Company. And so, they needed to prove their invention, and what better way of trial… letting the local mills trial this new invention? So the Aire Valley, there were several mills: Ourselves, a company called Downs Coulter in Thornton. And the real pioneering company – a tie weaver, a silk and school tie weaver called Masons in Skipton, they had the first prototypes of this modern computer technology. It offset the cost of the designs. We were suddenly more competitive. Although you still have to invest in the new technology, which the government helped with grants for. It enabled us to respond quicker than the foreign mills. It was a window of about three to five years where the British mills got this leg up with the technology, that enabled them to kind of defend their order base, if you like.

I didn’t like being an overlooker. But I am fascinated by processes and how it all worked. Like the people who invented all these machines, and stuff like that. Like… on here now, at this end of the factory, called the Old Mill, they put some brand-new machinery in, and I were in charge of it. And it was called ASD -Uniflex. And that was…rather than, like we said with bit drawing, all them operations, it cut down to three operations in the drawing, rather than seven.

It was a bit of a panicked time. We found that the… if the waste merchants had been buying from the large manufacturers, a lot of the manufacturers were going out of business. People like W & J Whitehead at Laisterdyke, they were a very big company, they were spinners. And all that work stopped. And so it got it got more difficult to to get work. And eventually we ran out of customers, you know. We had a bad recession in the middle ‘70s. And another one… well, two in the ‘80s. And the worst one was about 1988, ‘89 when there was no work coming in at all. And we had a workforce… we had…. [it was a] terrible time for me because I was having to make chaps redundant. Chaps that had been there for years. And there was no option. But we knew they had got families and mortgages and all the rest of it. After travelling every day for 30 odd years from Bradford down to Dudley Hill, I got to the point when I was so worried about the business continuing that I would get to the bottom of Wakefield Road in Bradford, and I felt ‘I can’t go up the hill. I can’t go to the mill.’ And I would turn round that roundabout at the bottom of Wakefield Road and come home again. And quite often I burst into tears. And I was having a bit of a nervous breakdown. And I’m not that sort of person. I didn’t know what was happening. And this went on for about three months, I suppose, and I just got worse and worse. I couldn’t answer the phone. I’d get to the mill sometimes, I’d open the bottom door, and couldn’t go up [to] the mill. I couldn’t go up the stairs. I couldn’t answer the phone. And so, eventually my brother, eldest brother, who came in occasionally, but his two sons were working there, they said, ‘Uncle Roger, go home.’ And so I did. This would be the late ‘90s. And I didn’t go back. I’ve only been back to the mill four or five times since then, because it’s all changed. I think I felt I’d failed but I couldn’t do anything about it.

I arrived in the country in 1977. And I couldn’t see no… a lot of people getting out of the mills in… the end of the shift, but soon after, I don’t know which year, they closed down altogether. Early ‘80s, I remember. And then there was… because a lot of… I believe on Thornton Road then, that there was a whole line of mills there, they was all demolished at the end of the ‘70s. Also on Thornton Road, I took my son once to see a chimney being demolished one afternoon.