T HE art of brushing a factory floor properlywould surely be as lost on today’s genera-tion of youngsters as the ladder-climbing

skills needed by powder monkeys on HMSVictory, or the dexterity of boy chimney sweeps in19th century London. Brushing up dust is instinc-tive, surely? Hold brush, push down, sweep andrepeat – brain disengaged.

Well, suspend your modern-day attitude of smugsuperiority because you’d be wrong to think that.Well, wrong if you started as a mill boy at Carr’sflour mill at Silloth in 1952. You see, there is an artto sweeping up. Like there’s an art to ‘rudding’doorsteps, hanging washing on a line and diggingout trenches to plant this year’s crop of shootingseed potatoes: it’s just that these days such tradi-tional skills are not as cherished as they once were.

But for Harold Bosward, a polite, church-going,ruddy-faced 15-year-old lad eager to please, mas-tering the art of sweeping a floor was one of his firsttriumphs on entering Carr’s flour and animal feedmill in Silloth back in 1952, the year QueenElizabeth II ascended the throne – a different time, avery different world.

It was 7.30 prompt on a bright summer morningwhen he stepped over the threshold of the sturdyred brick monolith built in 1887 that threw a longshadow over the docks.

“Even though my father was at the mill and Iknew lots of people working there I was veryapprehensive,” he remembers. But despite sweat-ing palms Harold was quite self-assured in his ini-tial task – delivering a battered leather satchel oforders to the hissing 7.50 steam train leavingSilloth for the Carlisle biscuit works. Missionaccomplished (phew!), it was back to the ‘millbottom’ for that sweeping lesson.

“Believe it or not I was taught how to brushproperly,” he smiles, acknowledging the look ofincredulity on my face. “Slide the shank through

celebrating 175 years of Carr’s

A MILLWORKER’S TALE…In 1831 Jonathan Dodgson Carr travelled from Kendal to Carlisle to set up a corn merchants

and bakery. Later, he set up a biscuit factory in the city and a flour mill at Silloth – both ofwhich are still operating today. In this special article commemorating the 175th anniversary

of Carrs, Harold Bosward looks back on his half century working at the company’s flour mill at Silloth. Alan Air reports.

YESTERDAY: CARR’S

� LEFT: Harold Bosward at Carr’s Flour Mill, Silloth.

Celebrating 175 years of

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3YESTERDAY

your hands, knock the dust out of the head beforegoing onto the next part of the floor – that washow it had to be done and I had to get it right. Ihad to master it.”

Harold remembers it was ‘Mr Steel’, the gener-al foreman, who greeted him that first morningand subsequent referrals to grown-ups as Misterthis and Mister that evoke a more deferential sea-son, when age and authority actually stood forsomething.

“You were brought up to have manners and MrSteel was like a god, he was on a pedestal. He justhad this aura about him,” says Harold. “You wantedto please, you didn’t want to let your parents downbecause everyone knew everyone else in Sillothback then and you didn’t want bad tales about yougoing back home.”

This hierarchical attitude where everyone knewtheir place – today’s worldlier generation wouldprobably regard it as simultaneously quaint andrepressive – was reflected in the Carr’s way ofdoing things, both at the Silloth flour mill and attheir biscuit factory in Carlisle. Paternalism,respect, duty and job security went hand in hand.There was never, ever any union militancy. And itsuited Harold. The third generation of Bosward toenter the mill, after his father (Harry), mother

(Nellie) and grandmother (Sarah Chambers), hewelcomed the stability and order that Carr’s gavehis life.

“I know it might sound daft these days but youused to relish going to work – you really looked for-ward to it! You knew you were going to be involvedin something productive and the camaraderieamong the men was a wonderful thing,” he insists.

Issued with two pairs of plain white overalls

(“they had to last twelve month”) and mentors tooversee his development, Harold thrived. Helearned how to mend the belts that drove themachinery, repair tarpaulin bags and he developedan understanding of the forces involved in the cen-trifugal drums that sieved the flour. He quickly gotused to the mill’s distinctive smells, the busy clatterof pulleys and conveyor belts and the clockingon/clocking off routine of industrial life.

Wages day was the best day of the week. “You worked a week laying on so that first week I

got nothing,” he remembers. “But then I got myown clock number. Your wages were in a small tinwith your number on that you collected from acubicle where the pay clerks sat. Arthur Foster andJohn Todd were the pay clerks at the time. I gotabout two pounds and I gave it to my mother whoprobably gave me ten shillings back but she boughtall my clothes so I never worried about that.”

For the next three years, until his 18th birthday,Harold got to know as much about the factory asgeographical restrictions or his age would permit.“You weren’t allowed to operate machinery in themilling departments or do heavy manual work untilyou were 18, but I spent a lot of time in the mill bot-

� ABOVE: Packing flour.

‘Believe it or not I wastaught how to brushproperly. Slide the

shank through yourhands, knock the dustout of the head before

going on to the nextpart of the floor. I had to master it.’

�

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4 YESTERDAY

tom and the bag room learning as much as I couldabout how all the various processes worked.”

On his 18th birthday Harold was called up fortwo years National Service. Wrenched from thecosy mill, a social life that included playing rugbyand tennis, and sent down to Portsmouth for a lifeat sea was, at first, incredibly unsettling.

“Can you imagine how I felt?” asks Harold. “Ihad never been away from Silloth, apart from vis-iting relatives in Leeds with my parents, and sud-denly I was on a ship and going all over the world.Only the rich went abroad in those days. I sawplaces that I never dreamed I would see, and didthings I never dreamed I would do. I was inCyprus, Suez and Norway and I learned disciplinefrom my life at sea more than anything else. Itwas paramount.”

When his two years were up, he toyed with the

� ABOVE: Peggy Little who used to bake sample loaveswhich Harold, together with Josephine Robinson, hadtest to make sure the crumb texture was right.� LEFT: Josephine Robinson and Peggy Littletesting the loaves.

Celebrating 175 years of

�

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5YESTERDAY

idea of sailing to America for three months butthe navy wouldn’t countenance such short-termambition.

“It was sign up for five or seven years or nothingso I came home,” he explains. “I felt really out ofsorts for a while but then I decided to go back intothe mill.” Harold joined the ‘rough gang’ in theanimal feed warehouse, humping 12 and 14 stonebags of feed and piling them 20 high. It was physi-cally demanding work, bearing in mind that heonly weighed 11 stone wet through. “You had towalk a plank carrying these bags so you neededgood balance,” he says proudly. A skilled rugbyplayer with a natural ability to duck and dive, hecoped well and even managed to hoist the ulti-mate on to his shoulders – 16 stone bags of barley,the size of a grown man.

The arrival of grain ships from North Americainto the adjoining dock gave Harold the chance totalk ship with the skippers and renew his love affairwith the sea. The mill discharged its own cargoeseven though the dock board was still on the go, athrowback to the general strike of 1926 whenCarr’s wrong-footed protesting dockers and contin-ued milling against the odds. Two large suckersfrom the factory reached down into the holds of theships, vacuuming up the hundreds of tons of grain,a process that could last from first thing in themorning to last thing at night.

It was indeed, the halcyon days of the 50s, he

says. Hard work yes, but laughter as well and jokerswho raised a smile when spirits flagged. Therewere innocent pranks, too. Nailing someone’sshoes to the floor, gluing a billy can to the table orsending the green and wide-eyed to the workshopfor a ‘long stand’ – the fate of nearly all new millworkers down the years.

“It’s the characters I remember,” says Harold,smiling, trotting off a long list that I only partiallyreproduce for fear of imitating a roll call. TommyPurdham, Stan Akitt, Jack Walker, John Slack, BillyRichardson, Duncan Chisholm, Hughie Stitt –names that live in the memories of those whoencountered them. Then there were the staff out-ings to Keswick and other Cumbrian towns, friendlysporting clashes with rival local firms and the annu-al town procession where mill workers on boardthe Carr’s float would toss out 1lb bags of flour to

� TOP: The mill at Silloth� ABOVE: Building the chimney. This was eventually demolished in the 1980s.

The halcyon days –

hard work but laughter

as well and jokers who

raised a smile when

spirits flagged.

�

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6 YESTERDAY

laughing onlookers. It all helped to glue the milltogether – workers, management, owners.

As the 1950s came to an end and the 1960s gotunder way, Harold’s life had settled into a comfort-able groove. He worked hard and he played hard.Still living at home with his parents at Golf Terrace –no-one had ‘flats’ in those days – he was content, asingle man with no real responsibility worries orconcerns. Then he got promoted and his loyalty tothe mill – which was never in doubt anyway –increased ten-fold.

“I had to take charge of the bag room, do thecredit for customers and I was also the relief for theSR department where the girls – (all single, no mar-ried women were allowed to work) – made up the1lb and 3lb bags of flour for the shops.”

His own thoughtful management style was influ-enced by Ivan Carr, and later Ian Carr, the last of theCarr dynasty stretching back to Quaker founder JDCarr. “Mr Ivan – everyone called him Mr Ivan – tooka great interest in everyone who worked at themill,” reveals Harold. “He would visit, usually on aTuesday or a Thursday, and he was great with theyoung lads. He’d ask one of them: ‘If a fire startedover there what would you do?’

“When they said they would try to contain it if itwas a small fire or press the alarm if it was a biggerfire he would bring out this bag of mint imperialsand hand them out. He knew everyone by their

� ABOVE: Joining in Silloth carnival parade – mill workers used to throw 1lb bags of flour to thewatching crowds.� OPPOSITE TOP: A stand at a local show invites people to visit the mill and BELOW: In the labs.

Christian name. We were never in fear of him butprobably in awe of him.”

Later, when Harold was promoted again, thistime to general foreman (which meant a doublingof wages and enabled him to think of starting a fam-ily with his wife Joan), his position in the mill wasassured. Under the mentoring of JosephineRobinson, general manager, Gordon Howe, pro-duction manager in the feed mill and Bill Cameron,mill production manager, he gained further insightinto the Carr’s way of doing things. And in theworks canteen one day he was given an unexpectedpep talk by Ivan Carr, retired but still actively inter-ested in the business. “He said to me, ‘Harold. I’vewatched your career with great interest and I’m sopleased for you.’ Then he gave me some advice

which has stood me in good stead throughout mylife. He said to me, ‘You can’t possibly like everyonein life but if you try to be fair to everyone then you’llnever go wrong.’ And that’s exactly right isn’t it?You are only human, and some people rub you upthe wrong way but you have to make everyone thesame.”

Yet almost flying in the face of such traditional,paternalistic management, Carr’s was the instigatorof a remarkable October Revolution in 1963. Its£250,000 computerised animal feed compoundplant came on line then, in its own way every bit asrocking as The Beatles topping the charts at thetime with She Loves You.

“The control panel was incredible,” remembersHarold, “ and I spent some time in there, gaining aworking knowledge of the formulations for cowcake and hen feed.”

The flour mill laboratory – where bread loaveswere tested for quality – was another part of theplant to embrace modern technology, he remem-bers: “In the early days Peggy Little used to bakesample loaves and part of my job was to go along

‘Mr Ivan took a greatinterest in everyone

who worked at the mill.We were never in fearof him but probably

in awe of him.’

�

Celebrating 175 years of

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with Josephine Robinson and cut them to makesure the crumb texture was right.”

Progress and the move toward oil-fired genera-tors and a pneumatic mill put the magnificent coal-powered steam engine – that drove the plantprocesses via its giant flywheel and belts – out ofaction in the early 70s.

“It was an amazing piece of machinery andJosephine Robinson wanted the engine roomturned into a museum but there were all sorts ofproblems with insurance with it being on an indus-trial site,” he says.

However, the engine is still there and turnedevery month to keep it in pristine working order, atime machine from an increasingly remote era. Thedistinctive chimney that carried the coal fumesaway is long gone. It was unsentimentally demol-ished in the 80s by steeplejacks, brick by brick. Ithad to make way for the installation of the giantsilos that now dominate the site and which aroseout of the plant’s remodelling – essential to keep itat the forefront of milling technology and competi-tive in today’s globalised economy.

Understandably, it is not reminiscing about tech-nological innovations that fires Harold’s memoriesbut the skills and innate knowledge of his fellowworkers; traditional millers like Tommy Slack whocould instantly assess the quality of wheat grainssimply by pressing it through their fingers. �

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8 YESTERDAY Celebrating 175 years of

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9YESTERDAY

“Sometimes they would shake their headsbecause it was too wet or too dry,” he says,“whereas today you cannot fail to get it right.Now, machines tell you everything and there isconstant quality control throughout the millingprocess every hour of the day.”

Whilst we have gained uniformity, standardisa-tion and constant high-quality, we have probablylost something that is much harder to put a fingeron and which would never figure on a balancesheet. Romantics would call it the human touch.

One of the biggest shocks experienced by Haroldat the mill – apart from the sudden deaths of workersthrough heart attacks or the occasional on-site acci-dent – was the fire of June 1971. The second blaze atthe mill in four days, flames gutted the upper threefloors of the warehouse, destroyed hundreds of tonsof flour, and lit up the night sky. It took fire-fighters28 hours to finally extinguish the inferno.

“I remember talking to Ronnie Appleton, thepolice constable at Abbeytown, and arson was sus-pected but it was never proven,” says Harold. “Butthere was a long line shaft with bearings in thewarehouse and lots of Hessian and paper sacks upthere. If the bearings weren’t oiled properly theygot red hot so it could easily have been that.”

In typical Carr’s style, the mill workers pulled uptheir sleeves and set to work clearing up the mess.“It was atrocious as all the water used to extinguishthe fire had turned the flour into slithery dough,”remembers Harold. “We spent days shovelling it upand dumping it into skips. No-one griped about itand the millers just bonded together. You see, thecamaraderie was there.”

Complaints about Carr’s flour were few and farbetween down the years – particularly as advancingtechnology took the chance out of the millingprocess, says Harold. Yet the company’s instinctiveresponse, reflecting their belief that the customer isalways right, prevailed. “One time an old lady fromWhitehaven sent us a letter about some flour thatsmelled of creosote. It turned out it had beenstacked in her local shop next to barbecue sticks orsomething like that.

“Josephine Robinson asked me to go and see herand to have a day out on the company. Well, you’djump through hoops of fire for a boss like that. So Itook this old lady two bags of everything we pro-duced and you would think that we had given herthe Crown Jewels. But that was the Carr’s way. Hercustom – which was maybe only a bag or two offlour for baking bread every month – was as impor-tant to us as someone buying ten tons a month andshe wrote back saying that she would tell everyoneshe knew about how wonderful Carr’s flour was!”

Occasionally, dignitaries visited the mill.Workington MP Fred Peart, the Duke of Kent andPenrith and the Borders MP Willie Whitelaw allpassed through at one time or other. Haroldremembers the former Conservative Deputy PrimeMinister with some affection.

“Willie was President of the Silloth Golf Clubwhere I played and a great friend of Mr Ian,” hesays. “He came down to the mill one day andGeorge Thomlinson, the silksman on the top floor,shouted for me to get my photo taken with him.‘You know Willie, I’m not a Tory,’ I told him and hejust laughed. But you know, it was the only photo-graph that didn’t come out!”

Another VIP memory is of Fred Dibnah. Thesteeplejack made famous by television was blowinga chimney at Miller’s shoe factory at Cockermouthwhen he heard about the mill’s old steam engine.“Well, he went into raptures over it,” says Harold.“Fred was just the same as he was on television, inthe same gear, everything, a great character.”

In 2002, 50 years after entering Carr’s for the firsttime as a nervous teenager and witnessing techno-logical advances that he could only have dreamedabout as a boy, Harold’s retirement loomed(although the family association with the companywould continue through his son Martin – the fourthgeneration of Bosward to work in the mill). In keep-ing with his unassuming manner that had won himso many friends down the years, Harold suggestedcommemorating his retirement with a quiet lunch.

Carr’s had different ideas, throwing a big party atthe town’s Golf Hotel and presenting him with twotop-of-the range golf clubs – one bought by col-leagues, the other by directors.

“It was such an emotional time for me,” saysHarold. “I was pretty choked; you could haveknocked me down with a feather.” But the ties thatbind have endured. Today, Harold still enjoys around of golf with Duncan Monroe, managing

� ABOVE: A replica of the souvenir programme fromthe re-opening of the flour mills in 1905, when theyhad been enlarged and re-equipped.� OPPOSITE TOP: After the fire in 1971, which guttedthree floors of the warehouse and took 28 hours toget under control.� OPPOSITE BELOW: A ship comes into the dock.

�

�

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10 YESTERDAY

director of Carrs Flour Mills Ltd and a spot of lunchevery week with Ben Clark, mill manager – work-based friendships that have stood the test of time.

Sadly, his much-anticipated retirement with hisbeloved wife Joan was short-lived, after she unex-pectedly suffered a fatal heart attack two years later.Once again, the famed Carr’s paternalism emergedwhen Ian Carr’s widow, Rilla, acknowledged hisloss with a personal sympathy card.

“I had only met Mrs Carr two or three times soshe had no need to do that. But that was the Carr’sway,” Harold says.

Although Ian Carr, the last of the founding blood-line to actively run the mill, died in 2004, Harold’sfaith in the old way of doing business – the familyway, the paternal way, the mutually respectful way– is undimmed and he relates the following story byway of explanation.

When his son Martin was young he was takeninto the Cumberland Infirmary in Carlisle followinga severe asthma attack. Naturally anxious, Haroldrushed to be at his side, only to find on leaving thatPrincess Anne was on an official visit to the build-ing. Ian Carr, who was chairman of the hospitalboard at the time, spotted his employee andexcused himself from the official party.

“He left everyone to come across to find out whyI was there,” says Harold. “He was genuinely con-cerned, genuinely worried and wanted to knowwhat he could do to help. That was the man. Thatwas the Carr’s way.”

Nothing evokes the smell of yesteryear more thanthe aroma of delicious, fresh-from-the-oven homebaked bread! Of course, nowadays it is so mucheasier to create your own loaves in an automaticbreadmaker – which is why Carr’s created a rangeof special breadmaker flours.

In this exclusive Yesterday magazine competitionyou can win a top of the range Panasonic SD-253automatic breadmaker and a supply of Carr’sflour. To enter just answer the following question:

What was the Christian name of the last member ofthe Carr family to run the Carr’s flour mill at Silloth?

Send your answers on a postcard to CarolineDale, Marketing Manager, Carr’s Flour, Old Croft,Stanwix, Carlisle, Cumbria, CA3 9BA.

Terms and conditions: All entrants must be over

Win a PanasonicSD-253

breadmaker and asupply of Carrs

Breadmaker flour

Competition . . .

the age of 18. The competition is open to amateursonly. No entries from employees of Carr’s and itspartner companies or their families will be consid-ered. The closing date for entries is 30 April 2006,and the winner will be the first correct entry drawn.The winner will be named in the June 2006 editionof Yesterday magazine. First prize is a PanasonicSD-253 Breadmaker and a supply of CarrsBreadmaker flour. No cash alternative to the prizewill be offered. The judges decision is final and nocorrespondence will be entered into. For furtherinformation about Carr’s Flour visit the websitewww.carrsbreadmaker.info

� ABOVE: Flour packers.

�

Yesterday

Celebrating 175 years of

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11YESTERDAY

� THIS PAGE: The ceremony officially starting the newly installedsteam engine in 1905 and INSERT the closing ceremony in the 1970s (from left) Chairman Ian Carr, his daughterMelanie, Director Colonel Sandy Matthew, Financial Director SydneySmith and Managing Director Ronald Naylor.

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