A POSTCARD view of Manchester Road, Burnley, recently published in this column (No. 547) elicited a few helpful comments in response to my admission I have not studied the more technical side of the introduction of trams into Burnley.
This is true of the initial steam powered vehicles of 1881 and of electric trams about 20 years later.
I referred to the overhead cables which carried the electricity and to the iron columns which supported them. Though the former, not accurate
ly, could be seen on the postcard there was no evidence of the later.
However, the image published today shows the iron columns to which I referred, though in a different part of town. There are five of them on the right of the photo and you can see how they are used. Note there is only a single-track on this stretch of Briercliffe Road. The "arms" which hold the cables are not as long as some I have seen but they perform the task for which they are designed very well.
In the background, on what was then the Burnley/Harle Syke boundary, you may be able to make out a double-decker tram. It was not about to enter the village as tram lines were never built in Briercliffe. There were two reasons: Burnley Road, particularly between Harle Syke and Briercliffe Mills, was not deemed wide enough, and, the parish council (together with the old Rural District Council), were not prepared to subsidise Burnley Corporation's Tramways construction work.
It was in 1912 that the trams started operating from Burnley to the Commercial Hotel in Briercliffe Road. To be more precise, there had been a tram service along the length of Briercliffe Road from Duke Bar to the bottom of Lanehead Hill from 1903, but Burnley Corporation was reluctant to construct a line to Harle Syke because of the hill and the continual incline to Harle Syke.
The project was quite considerable. Not only did the engineers have to consider the hill, the inclined parts of Briercliffe Road were very narrow. If you want to see what I mean, parts of Old Briercliffe Road still survive as Marsden Road.
The section to visit is from the Black Bull (now a restaurant) to the old buildings of Lanehead School (now converted into attractive houses). Walk between these two points and you will see what difficulties the engineers had to negotiate or obviate.
It is not surprising they chose the latter, abandoning what became Marsden Road for the newly constructed (1910-11) Briercliffe Road which runs just to the south of the old route. The engineers faced another problem or two higher up. The first was an area called Swamp Top (where the old road flattens out a bit) and the problem, with such a name, needs little explanation.
Then the road itself passing a considerable bed of clay, had poor foundations, another difficulty which needed addressing.
You might ask why Burnley Corpoation decided to extend the tramway to Harle Syke. The answer is not obvious to us, these days, but, by the early 20th Century, the village had become a major employer, not only of people who lived there, but numerous weavers from Burnley. They needed to get to their place of work as efficiently as possible – and the tram was better than walking!
By the time I was a boy (the 1950s) buses had replaced trams on the Harle Syke run, double-deckers from Burnley (following the same route as the trams, but now using Burnley Road and Queen Street), and single-deckers from Nelson.
The Burnley-Harle Syke bus route (numbers 50 and 51, as I recall) had been established 20 or more years before and the arrival of up to 10 special vehicles from Burnley was something of an event for us youngsters who lived in Burnley Road in the village.
The buses brought with them hundreds of Burnley weavers who had a considerable impact on the economy of Harle Syke. In those days, the village had an amazing choice of shops and Briercliffe-made bread and pies, together with meat, groceries, greens, tobacco and newspapers, were carried to Burnley in the evening when work at the mills was completed and the fleet of buses returned.
All of them had to pass along Briercliffe Road so the stretch of highway you can see in today's picture must have become very familiar to Burnley's Harle Syke weavers. The card is not dated, but the photo was taken after 1912 as the tram line is clearly in use.
There is no maker's name in the card, but you will notice a number (01) after "Burnley". This refers, not to a date, but to the fact this card was the first in a sequence of cards derived from photos taken, perhaps, in the same area. If that is the case I have, unfortunately, failed to find the others.
The image itself shows Briercliffe Road between the Craven Heifer, which can be seen, extreme left, and the Commercial Hotel, which though you can't see it, is located near to the tram in the distance.
The houses in between are collectively known as the Cop Row, though there were originally, three rows. Now there are four rows because the longest row was split into two when Saxifield Street was created in c1900. In doing this a few cottages were removed though the house, now known as Bow Cottage at the bottom, left, of Saxifield Street, appears to have been extended in the process.
The 'Cop Row' was built piecemeal as an examination of the buildings will reveal. When first built there were some 40 dwellings, mostly occupied by handloom weavers.
The property itself constitutes some of the best handloom weavers cottages in Burnley, but, not to be out-done, the row opposite (the row with the shops in the middle distance) has an interesting local name which is gradually being lost.
The houses are Victorian, and much larger than the small cottages of the Cop Row, but they have an odd design feature which resulted in the equally odd name.
Each property has a large front window which is shared by its neighbouring house. This gave rise to the unofficial name of "one-eyed row", because residents of the properties, though they had substantial front windows, only had use of half of each large window!
The Cop Row itself has an interesting name. It appears to derive from the textile industry. Many of you will know cops were used in the spinning process, but what you might not know is that the Cop Row almost had the status of a village.
It was outside Briercliffe and detached from Burnley, almost a village or hamlet in its own right. The cottages were once supplied by water from their own water company – the Cop Row Water Company, which stored water in disused underground galleries of a coal mine which existed close to the site.
I am often amazed by the stories which are associated with some of our smaller districts in the borough. Briercliffe Road, Cop Row area is no expection.
