Bygone Burnley: Butterworth and Dickinson, now home of Futaba, with historian Roger Frost MBE

Butterworth and Dickinson began life in 1780 on Parker Lane as a wool warehouse, founded by Jeremiah Wilkinson.

Renowned local historian Roger Frost MBE presents the video from outside the home of modern day Burnley company Futaba Manufacturing in Liverpool Road, Rosegrove, a later home of Butterworth and Dickinson, which moved to the site around 120 years ago due to its proximity to the Leeds and Liverpool Canal and the railway.

Jeremiah Wilkinson, Roger explains, was initially a wool merchant and manufacturer who had to make, and repair, his own textile machinery because there were so few textile engineers in the early days of the Industrial Revolution.

“After some years the machinery-making side of the business had outgrown his wool and cotton interests and he became a textile engineer, making machinery for both the spinning and weaving sectors, particularly of the cotton industry, though the firm also made equipment for wool and linen production.”

The company also had another factory, this time in Trafalgar Street, the Globe Foundry, built adjacent to the Burnley to Todmorden railway line.

The firm remained in Wilkinson hands for five generations but the last of them, Samuel Wilkinson, had no sons so the textile machinery-making business was taken over by his two nephews, John Butterworth and William Dickinson.

They added the Globe Works to Saunder Bank and the firm began to specialise in the making of all kinds of weaving machinery. Burnley became a weaning town in the later nineteenth century.

Spinning did not cease in the town but weaving became much larger so it was natural that Butts and Dicks, as the firm became known, should make preparatory machines, such as beaming engines, cop winding machines and sizing machinery as well as looms.

The third factory of Butterworth and Dickinson’s, also known as Globe Works, was on Liverpool Road, and is currently the home of Futaba.

The firm remained independent until the early 1970s when it was taken over by Wilson and Longbottom, of Barnsley, to where the Burnley firm was transferred. Globe Works was taken over by Tenneco Walker, an American maker of exhaust systems for motor vehicles.