X44    BOW c.1850 DRA

Size: 27” * 40”      Material: Paper

Date and scale: unknown

Condition: good

There is not much internal evidence concerning the date and purpose of this plan, although fortunately Upper Croft Mill, Bowling Back Lane, is quite well-known. Bowling (along with Horton, Manningham, and Bradford itself) formed part of the original borough of Bradford created in 1847. The spinning mill was already constructed by that time and appears on the first Ordnance Survey map of the area (surveyed in 1847). Victorian Bradford historian William Cudworth records that Upper Croft Mill was actually built in 1845 for James Marchent and others. I should explain to those that don’t know already that worsted yarn was spun in a ‘mill’, but worsted cloth was woven in a ‘shed’.

James Marchent had become an engineer, metal founder and machine manufacturer. He was in partnership after 1848 with Isaac Webster and James & John Cole (as Cole, Marchent & Co.) at Prospect Foundry, Bradford. Their premises had been built as a mill by Bowling Iron Company in 1831, and in fact I believe Marchent had a role in that company as financial manager. This partnership broke up in 1857 on his retirement. Marchent had been born in Holbeck, Leeds in 1794 and by the 1850s seems to have been buying land and mill sites, and ended up with quite an extensive portfolio. In the 1851 census he describes himself as ‘engineer’ but strangely was living quietly in Markfield Road with his second  wife Elizabeth, and a granddaughter, but no domestic servants. By the 1861 census he was in Wakefield with his wife and two grandchildren: at least there he had one domestic servant aged 14. He died in York in 1863.

We can see from the plan that adjacent landowners to Upper Croft Mill were George & John Lumby, also John Sturgess and Co. (Bowling Iron Company). Upper Croft Mill clearly produced and stored its own gas, a situation which I believe was not uncommon at that time. When Marchent owned it Upper Croft Mill was divided up between a number of small tenants, presumably renting on a ‘room and power’ basis. One of these tenants was the father of James Marsland Tankard. JM Tankard eventually came to operate the entire spinning mill and founded a substantial business there. Towards the end of his life Tankard lived in Bolling Hall, and he died in 1887.

So, by the 1870s Upper Croft Mill (National Building Register: 62583) was run by James Tankard Ltd, worsted yarn spinners, a situation which continued for another century, although latterly this company was part of Illingworth Morris.

Our plan does not indicate what a busy industrial area this was but a detail from the first OS map makes the situation perfectly clear. The location of Upper Croft Mill is indicated (extreme right), and as well as the Iron Works you can see collieries, coal pits and a ‘brick field’. The fields on either side of the mill seem to be unexploited in the OS map but Cudworth recalls that later Mr Edward Gittins (a well-known brick manufacturer) quarried the hard stone ganister (used for fire resistant bricks and furnace linings) under the Better Bed coal seam, ‘opposite Upper Croft mill’. South of the mill was the Broad Lane Fault.