Elegaic lines for a cotton town past
THE Calder Valley town of Todmorden was built on cotton, dominating the lives of its people and shaping its identity.
But although it defined the town's history, what it meant to live and work in a cotton town is gradually going out of living memory.
How fitting then, that a member of one of the town's best-known mill owning families should write a book as elegiac as Lament For The Mills before first-hand experience is forgotten.
Robert Cockcroft left Todmorden and for almost 40 years taught in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham. His family ran John Cockcroft and Sons and he has turned his memories of growing up around cotton and all who built their lives around it into a stunning set of poems.
Robert's memories of the industry are frozen in time and crystal clear while he spent succeeding years, as he puts it, weaving the word in the mind as opposed to cotton in the mill.
His poems, aided by a few carefully-chosen poems written by his uncle Philip, bring to life his family, the company's workforce and some brilliantly descriptive lines placing them in the town's geographical setting and how they applied the industrial skills they had learned.
Of the five Cockcroft brothers - shown as boys in one of the photographs illustrating the poetry - John went on to win the Nobel prize for physics and was part of Rutherford's team which split the atom and Philip, who had shown artistic skill, suffered ill health for much of his life. The other three brothers, Eric, Robert's father Keith and Leo, ran the company developed by their father.
The first suite of poems set the family in their Pennine geographical context as ice shaped the valleys and the moors gradually became dotted with the mill chimneys. Todmorden's growth and decline as a mill town is in the title poem.
Then Robert moves on to more detail, bringing in the family, especially the powerful matriarchs. Here his words bring the women behind the black and white images to colourful life, influential lives remembered, none more clearly than in Kathleen Mary, written about his mother.
From there he takes us into the mill through the experiences of his father and uncles, first as boys allowed to roam through it in ways health and safety would have been wary of even in those days, and then as young men learning every aspect of the business (using Philip's wonderful Our Eric to outline the corresponding effect on home life).
Utilising advice also gleaned from a skilled workforce with lifetimes in the industry, the Cockcroft brothers ran the business in a way rarer in the 21st century - a genuinely felt duty to the town and townspeople who had helped build the family's wealth (family members frequently served in local organisations and on Todmorden Borough Council) until cotton's day was almost done, the looms at Birks Mill, Walsden, Robert's keenest memory, falling silent in 1980.
Poems evoke in wonderful detail the various "shops" in the mill and the people who made them tick. Among those with lines dedicated to them are Henry Lewtas, Hugh Basher and the other craftsmen and drivers including Harry and Dick Ellis, George Batts, Arnold Fielden, Austin Coupe, and more.
To conclude a poem about the industry's fall, Robert uses words framed by retired millwright John Sutcliffe, describing an engineering catastrophe that occurred one day: "All t' bolts was brokken, reyt down at t' bottom o' th' ashlar."
Robert explains that he had been developing the ideas in the book more or less since he left Todmorden for Nottingham, and some have been published before. They are now revised and reworked into the larger text. A visit to the town's Bayes art exhibition several years ago, which set an artistic family into their social context, provided further focus.
"What I am trying to do is to link in the history of the town with one of its firms, John Cockcroft and Sons, which my family ran. It's a symbolic piece and then a general account of the growth of Todmorden.
"The Cockcroft boys were allowed to roam freely through the mills, entrusted into the care of the people in the mill.
"Before long it will be out of living memory, so it is timely to revisit it through words and pictures. That's what literature is for, bringing something back to life in words," he said.
With lines as durable and skilfully woven as the warp and weft products of Cockcroft's looms were for decades, it is an aim in which he has succeeded.
- Lament For The Mills by Robert Cockcroft is published by Zak Publications at 7.99. It is available at Todmorden Tourist Information Centre, Burnley Road, Todmorden, Cryers Newscentre in Todmorden town centre, The Border Bookshop, Halifax Road, Todmorden, and the Bookcase in Market Street, Hebden Bridge.
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