AP WMS 16(1) s1 f01 v1 e1

Jimmy Jones speaking to John Reid about the origin of the Tyldesley Historical Society and the history of Tyldesley. Recorded on the 19 October, 1981.

Audio description below:

HOW DID YOU GET INTERESTED IN THE TYLDESLEY AND DISTRICT HISTORICAL SOCIETY?

Well probably i`ve been goin` ten years. I started about the second week after it`s inception.  It was more or less a bit of casual interest, We were talking one night, it was all about and I found  out after the first meeting that it was something I could really get interested in and as from then I think in the number of years i`ve been, so much so i`ve never missed a meeting.  I think i`m probably the only one that`s a hundred per cent record of goin` there and there`s such a fascinating background to any local town or even a village.  It`s well worth while goin` to these places, you can play amateur detective yourself,  a bit of rootin` and tootin` and enquiring.  It gives you scope for talking to people in your leisure time, reminiscing with people your own age, talking to younger  people , school kids and there`s quite a source of pleasure in bein` a member of a local historical society .  My own town  for instance, Tyldesley, it`s  quite a background due to its…. Shall I use the word participation in the industrial era of mill and mine, which has never been fully recorded.  Probably the pits have but there`s very little known about the mills in the area. There`s little known  of the kind of trades that this particular period brought with it, the wheelwrights, the blacksmiths, the foundries, you mention it. When the place was booming there was that many subsidiary  trades. Builders build certain building where they got their bricks from and all this , because quite a lot of bricks weremade locally and different  fascinating things that you find out about local history and as long as i`m able  I`ll carry on.  I`ve got involved myself now, again sometimes it`s a bit tedious, you get enquiries,  there`s quite a run on these days on tracing family trees and you get involved and if you do have a bit of success and you do help somebody, as I say , it`s like being a detective and winning a case and you can have it like that,

WHO HAD THE ORIGINAL IDEA TO START A SOCIETY?

When it first came it was arranged by a local councillor, Councillor Gordon Thomas, with the help of the then present Vicar of Tyldesley Church, a chap called Oliver St. John and with the aid of the local historian, who was living at the time, a chap called John Lunn,  this was founded.  Again with the idea that was now developed by Wigan Metro Archives and Museum Department.  They intended starting that at local level and starting a small folk museum, gathering aarchives but since then, as I say , it`s gone across to what I call the  professionals, the archive and the museum people and these are paid people ,  skilled people and whatever we`ve had passed onto them for posterity.  So much has been lost in the past through neglect and at least anything that I gather and I think it`s worthwhile , I pass it on.  So anyway this was the idea of the original society, to do these things and it`s never  been an extremely large society,  I don`t know why because today I Should imagine we`ve a population in the area of at least twenty odd thousand  and to think we only get an average of twenty five to thirty persons at every meeting is a bit disappointing at times but anyway the society  carried on from there and we have ten monthly meetings and try to invite…  well we invite speakers to come along to speak on some subjects  that is if possible of local interest,  such as tramways, railways, mines, mills. Quite a variety of subjects we`ve covered and I think many a time we do deserve better support but we keep carrying on.

WHEN DID TYLDESLEY START?

Well the history of Tyldesley goes back a good way, the name Tyldesley anyway, not the town of Tyldesley the name Tyldesley.  Your`e goin` back to the twelfth and thirteenth century I believe.  What I quote, i`m quoting John Nunn,  he did write a history of Tyldesley, a short history of Tyldesley in the 1950`s for Tyldesley Council, so I must quote him . He was the authority and the name Tyldesley goes back  to  the  thirteenth , fourteenth  century but the town of Tyldesley , I should say , only came  in the 1750`s when a chap bought the whole of Tyldesley Banks Estate, a chap from Bolton called Thomas Johnson and although he didn`t develop it, his son and grandson  did . Now this estate ran roughly from Hindsford right through to Boothstown, the Tyldesley Banks Estate and to quote quite a few people that`s talked about Tyldesley and published material on Tyldesley they always quote it as being on the first rise of Cheshire Plains.  So that`s the banks of Tyldesley , the Tyldesley Banks Estate and one of these Johnson`s , the son or Grandson, he was intent on building Tyldesley up, so that he was selling land at that particular time for a farthing a square yard for a total of nine hundred and ninety  nine years.  Well you could imagine  today what that  would cost .

There  was coal here, there was plenty water, so it was ideal for developing under the industrial age.  He helped  to build the first Chapel in Tyldesley, which is locally known as the Top Chapel, the proper name is the Countess of Huntingdon Chapel, that was opened in 1789.  He planned the market square what is now.  He got a fish stall to come , he started a bit of a cattle market there.  In fact he went so much as to have a small unit of soldiers, which didn`t last long .  In it`s day it was called Squire Johnson`s  Defensibles and he had these chaps marching up and down drilling.  He provided the first  bellman, he provided the first stocks.  So he was a chap that to me, I should say, was the father of Tyldesley.  It was his idea and he is remembered today, not to very many people but to such as I by the roadway known as Squires Lane.  It led down  to the Squires House,  who was Squire Johnson. which is lower  Elliot Street.  He lived at a place called Tyldesley  House, which has been long gone and that was the way down to the Squire`s  house and we`ve a street in Tyldesley, Johnson Street.  So there are two place names connected with Johnson.  He also opened a couple of  small mills,  in fact I can rightly say that he built a mill and installed a twenty five horsepower steam engine.  This is again, when industry  was developing and it was one of the first for many many miles and it was called the Great Leviathon and people came from everywhere to look at this amazing twenty five horsepower.  It`s laughable today , we can laugh today but in those day`s it must have seemed a monster,  So this is the many ways that Squire Johnson  helped to build Tyldesley and  over many years it did develop,  Twenty one shafts actually winding  coal at one period I think in the Tyldesley area,  the Tyldesley  boundry.  It is recorded by the coal board at least two hundred shafts within the Tyldesley boundry.  Now talking about shafts, they might  be thirty yard shafts, what they call bell pits but they have recorded them but the period i`m talking about,  1900-1910 that way on,  we`d twenty one what you call deep winding shafts within the area.  One within the township itself,  St. George`s, only a hundred yards from St. George`s Church . I worked there as a lad,  I started as a Tally lad, a tally hanger, I`ll give  you some details of that later but with that probably one Caleb Wright Mill alone the Barnfield Mills… They were a combination of six mills in one , number one, number two,…  that was just one unit of Caleb Wright and we`d  Burton`s factory, again this was several mills that came under one heading .  So we`d probably ten or twelve mills  goin` at the same time and you can imagine the work that it was  bringing in and the people it brought in from Staffordshire, Wales, Ireland, Durham, beside more local people, like people from Worsley, that way on where the mines had run out or were running out and they just moved across to Tyldesley. 

So this is how Tyldesley got built up, through the coal and cotton.  The railway came through as early as 1864, the Manchester-Wigan, Manchester-Warrington, Tyldesley was a junction.  The canal at Astley had existed long before that. The pits were getting` their coal away on the canal, on the railway, so everythin`  was  goin` for Tyldesley. So it was from about…  shall we say 1760 onwards that Tyldesley from three farms and ten or twelve cottages started  probably in 1881 six thousand people, you know, thirty years after and it jumped up to ten thousand people, fifteen thousand over the years, so this is how Tyldesley… again I said the name goes back a good while but it`s been Tyldesley in many more places in Lancashire and is subject to a lot of research in the last few years and the latest bookI`ve seen the name Tyldesley,  this particular writer breaks it down as Tyldes Ley  Tyldes Field, Tylde being a Saxon word.   Now John Nunn in his history of Tyldesley breaks the word down from a Norse  word  brisk.  It  developed   then  from brisk to a bank.  So the word brisk John would explain is a hillside cleared of green and dead wood. Which Tyldesley was, it was a bank, it was a hillside.  So the  word  brisk, came into the language then as banks, so you had the Tyldesley Banks Estate in 1750 odd.  Banks, due to the  traditional  way  it  was  spoken in this area for three, four hundred years or more, what we call dialect,  the word banks  got changed into bonks,  an  incline, to me as a boy.  You never went down a bank, you always went down a bonk.  So you repeat yourself  Tyldesley Bonks, Tyldesley Bonks, Tyldesley Bonks, this Bonks easily slid into the word bongs and it`s a name that`s been with it over many many years,  Tyldesley Bongs, which probably  is one of the only words connecting it with the far distant past, with the  word brisk and the dialect word bongs.  So bongs and banks is derived from Norse, Anglo Saxon period but the term itself, as I started explaining, they only did that since late 17… goin` into 1800`s when the coal was being dug.  There was plenty streams about, the facilities for water were good,  in fact I think, again, according to Nunn, we`d at least  three water wheels running  mills, corn mills in the area.  One was running a tannery, where hides were tanned .  Again Tyldesley`s  seen quite a lot, as I say with the historical society, we`ve a lot to dig out and learn.  Records have been burned, lost and we`ve got to rely many a time on word of mouth, which is not actual proof but it still makes interesting detail even recording that,  just as you`re doin` you know.  So unfortunately now we`ve gone from an industrial town,  we`ve  taken a full circle now, we`re goin` back to a dormitory town. We`ve  one mill left and that`s making artificial fibres.  We`ve no foundries and no pits,  we`ve no subsidiary trades as we know, no foundries, no  Wheelwrights.  So in the passing of this era we`ve lost quite a lot, in different ways,  especially in skill, Wheelwrights and things like that, everything`s automated today.

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