I very much enjoyed the series of photographs of the Lancashire cotton industry in the mid-1970s (Loom with a view: Lancashire’s old cotton mills – in pictures, 5 March). As a sixth former in 1962, I spent the summer holidays working as a boiler scaler for a well-known north Manchester firm of chimney sweeps and boiler scalers – possibly the worst job I have ever done.
We worked in many a Lancashire mill during wakes week and once – in Baxenden I think – just managed to get our lads out when a cloudburst on the fells above sent thousands of gallons of water flooding into the boiler house. I saw one old scaler emerge from a flue and fall on a heap of coal, and saw his heart beating through the cloth of his overalls. Luckily, it stayed beating.
We began work at 6am, wore rags and a simple aluminium and gauze pad face mask that was completely useless. We worked cleaning the boilers at Prestwich hospital, Manchester, where people watched in amusement as we crawled in an and out of the boiler and the flues dressed only in rags. “Look at these daft buggers,” someone once shouted.
Lads climbed inside the boilers with pneumatic jackhammers to chisel the scale off with no ear defenders – imagine the noise. Those Lancashire boilers were the size of a box room; once that hammer bit, all hell was let loose.
The rest of us went on hands and knees throughout the flues, praying that there was no molten soot in there that would run like mercury on the surface. It did happen once and a man got his hands and forearms badly burned.
When we got back to the yard, we showered in a filthy changing room and were given squeezy bottles of concentrated bleach to clean ourselves. Often I would awake after a hot summer night to find the grey imprint of my body on the sheets. My mother was not amused.
For this I was paid 30 shillings a day (£1.50 – double time on Saturday.) For the record, we were called “boiler scalers” not “fluers” as in your description – and what you call “flue dust” was known to us as “soot”. After two months boiler scaling, a lifetime working as a comedian was a doddle.
Mike Harding
Settle, North Yorkshire
