Bygone Burnley: Accrington Road, with historian Roger Frost MBE
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00:00Today we're on Atherton Road in Burnley and we're looking at the remains of one of Burnley's most important factories.
00:10This is the WH Dean Victoria Works which made a product which was famous throughout the country at one time.
00:22Deans were part of the Burko Dean Group. Burko meant Burnley Components and they made electrical white goods, electrical washing machines, cookers, that kind of stuff.
00:37And Deans were in the same business but their products were all gas products so they made gas cookers, they made gas washing machines.
00:48They were very good and well known throughout the country. It's not normally appreciated that Burnley was a major producer of white goods.
00:59There were about eight companies that made such machines going back to the later 19th century when as an offshoot of the textile engineering industry,
01:14the companies, because textile engineering was more liable to economic fluctuation, they had a second string to their bow which was the making of mangles, washing machines, cookers, kitchen rangers, things like that.
01:32So these companies lasted well into the 1950s, 60s, 70s and Burko Dean was just about the last one to exist. It produced other things too but the company, when the crisis came during the years in which we were members of the Corn Market,
01:55when German and French and Italian companies were making the same things, the British firms sold out and now nearly all of our white goods are made abroad.
02:09We're at the Small Shore Industrial Estate which is between Accrington Road and the railway station and all the railway lines and the goods lines of the Rose Grove station used to be only a few yards away.
02:25But this site, although it's an industrial estate now, used to be one of Burnley's first parks, or I should say recreation grounds. When Burnley became a borough in 1861, the council decided not to build large expansive parks like Queen's Park and Scott Park, although we've got them now.
02:50We didn't have them then. What they decided to do was for each of the 12 wards they were going to have a recreation ground which was a combination of sports ground with a football field, a children's play area and walkways for the adults through beds of flowers and shrubs and things.
03:13Now this one was at Gannow, we're very close to Gannow here, it was called Gannow before it became Small Shore and one of Burnley's most well-known footballers came here as a boy and learnt his trade.
03:32Now this was Jimmy Hogan and if you've not heard about him, Jimmy Hogan was the Englishman who took football to Germany, Hungary, Italy, other countries and over in those countries he's much more famous than he is here.
03:50But when I was about 11 or 12, I met him, he'd come back to Burnley to retire, he was a very old man and he came to present the prizes at my school and I won one. So I got to meet him, I had a little chat with him and it was one of the great moments of my early life to meet Jimmy Hogan.
04:11On Accrington Road, as many of you will know, there is the Moorhouses Brewery which is one of the best breweries in the country. However, the story of brewing in Burnley goes back a long, long way.
04:28The first brewery that we are aware of on a large scale was built in 1750, not by masses but masses came to own that building at Brig End. However, in the mid-19th century, Moorhouses established themselves in the brewing trade but they didn't make beer.
04:54They made mineral waters and they also made hop-based products for the brewing industry which they bought off masses to put into their beers.
05:10And then, I would say in the late 1960s and 70s, Moorhouses were bought out, the family had owned it since 1868, so they'd owned it for 100 years.
05:26The man who bought it was Hortelier who came from East Marston near Skipton and he converted the small building that was on this site into a proper brewery.
05:42As the years went by, it developed into the large brewery that exists now and, of course, Burnley remains a brewing town because there is the Readley Brewery also in Burnley so we've got two breweries still left.
06:02We were never a really big town in the beer trade but it's nice that the craft still exists in Burnley and that Moorhouses is one of its leading exponents.