Some family history...

... at the Queen Street Mill Textile Museum in Burnley, Lancashire.

This is an excellent working museum of the Lancashire cotton industry. It has fully working machinery which produces cotton goods for sale in the museum shop.

When my mother left school just before the outbreak of WW2, she went to work in a similar mill. I remember her telling me that she worked as a pirn winder. I used this visit to find out, for the first time, what exactly her job entailed.

The blip image shows cones of yarn. The pirn-winding machine winds the yarn onto the small stick-like pirns which then fit into the weaving machine shuttles.

The visit to the incredibly noisy weaving shed gave a really good impression of the working conditions.

A bonus to the visit was when I noticed the manufacturer's name on one of the old looms. Only a matter of weeks ago I discovered that one of my ancestors (this time through my father's mother's line) was actually a loom inventor. What a surprise then to find many of the machines at Queen Street were made by a branch of his company.

Of course none of his proceeds have filtered down the family line - its a good job the museum entry was only a couple of pounds, but well worth it and with some great photo opportunities.