When the old ways faded

From our house in Hunsworth on the outskirts of Cleckheaton, I could see a railway line running across a hillside about half a mile away. Along the line, every evening at about 7 o'clock, came the "double-header" – the Liverpool to Newcastle express drawn by two locomotives.

The rays of the setting sun reflecting from the wheels and valve gear of these two giants of the age of steam made a memorable sight at a time when austerity and shortages meant there was not much drama to be had. This fleeting glimpse, played out for all of 10 seconds, between a bridge and a tunnel, was sufficient to stir the imagination, and maybe the soul of a six-year-old boy.

The much-anticipated nightly event was to have a major bearing on my future. From this time onwards, stacks of drawing books, made up of cheap post-war pulp paper, were filled with drawings of railway engines, and sometimes aircraft – enthusiasm for the latter was started by a visit to an air display at Yeadon aerodrome, near Leeds. The dawn of the jet-age and attempts by the likes of test pilot Neville Duke, to break the sound barrier regularly made the headlines and dazzled schoolboy imaginations. These exploits provided further inspiration to fill ever more drawing books.

In those days in the 1950s, railway locomotives and aircraft were an antidote to the daily grind of life in a West Riding town into which the stories of my family had been deeply interwoven over several generations. Like everyone else around here, these were all people who were used to hard graft. My research into the past for my version of television's Who Do You Think You Are? revealed that my family had connections with most of the main activities which made the area what it was – mining, engineering, textiles (including shuttle making) and paper bag making.

These are what put this part of the world on the map. The degree of pride that it gave local people can be judged from the motto of the local council and secondary school: Industry Enriches.

Memories of an early childhood in the Spen Valley are coloured by unlovely presences all around. My walk to school, a good mile away, passed through a gap between two of Cleckheaton's major employers, the wire drawing works of Charles Hirst & Sons and the equally sprawling complex of Scandinavia Mills – home of Mintex brake and clutch linings. Moorend Church of England Junior School was itself in the shadow of the local gas works and its 120-foot high gasometer.

A little more than a football pitch away stood Yorkshire Tar Distillers, which to my schoolboy imagination seemed to represent a somewhat dark and mysterious side to industry, with is intriguing array of pipes and scaffolding. Its spirit seemed to re-visit the area recently, when, for a time, the construction of a housing development on the derelict site, eerily exhumed the once all-pervading smell of tar.

Art was always my strongest subject at school. This inevitably led to my enrolment at art college in a neighbouring valley in the late 1950s. Here in Batley the smell of tar was replaced by the more agreeably aromatic aromas from Fox's biscuit factory.

Art college in Batley broadened my artistic horizons and industrially there was also a change of pace. Batley seemed to have even more mills than Cleckheaton, but most of these were connected to the reclaimed fibres, the shoddy industry for which the town was renowned. The mills, chimneys and terraces of houses filled the valley and eventually spread to merge with those of Dewsbury, a few miles away.

These were not pretty landscapes to charm the artist. But they did provide challenging exercises in perspective, drawing and pictorial composition during countless outdoor sessions with a sketchbook. There's one I still have, completed on November 11, 1961 of Shaw Cross Colliery at Dewsbury. It had been sunk in 1904 and the drawing shows a loco steaming energetically away. Today all traces of the colliery have disappeared.

Yet in my early days it all appeared as if it had lasted forever and was fixed for all time. And then, just as my time at art college was ending, the familiar world started to become the past. Slum clearance and smokeless zones brought sweeping changes to the landscape and to the lives of people in what was still referred to as the "industrial West Riding".

The world-conquering textile industry was dealt fatal blows by cheap imports. In Cleckheaton, names on which the town had been built such as Wadsworth, Anderton and Mitton, and all the mills associated with them, would soon be no more. So many things were changing so fast. Who could have guessed that lives confidently founded on the certainties of slow-moving heavy industry could be overturned by things which by comparison seem so insubstantial – television, car ownership and supermarket shopping.

In a short time, the old workplaces and way of life passed into the history books. I was the living embodiment of that social change. My working life began in an advertising office in Leeds, making me the first in my immediate family to get a job outside Cleckheaton.

But it did not seem right for the old landmarks to vanish. My growing interest in photography and illustration fuelled a desire to record in some way the disappearance of mills, railway stations, cinemas, chapels, terrace housing and corner shops. Thirty years on this archive of photographs and illustrations became my first book. Something I saw at the Bradford Industrial Museum gave me an idea for a new one. It was a Slotter, a machine tool made in Keighley over a century ago. In its time it would have made and repaired other machines. Along with thousands of lathes, drills, saws and other similar machines it was one of the unsung heroes behind Britain's reputation as the workshop of the world.

It was not a glamous icon of industrial Britain like Flying Scotsman, but the Slotter had the pleasing surface patina of a much-used and appreciated machine. Its makers would have scorned the suggestion that their handiwork had pretensions of artistic merit. But in my eyes, it could more than hold its own in an exhibition of sculpture or installation art.

This dour industrial workhorse seemed to present a challenge to take another look at our industrial history. As an illustrator it presented me with a task which would offer the key for a greater appreciation of Yorkshire's craftsmanship, inventiveness and resourcefulness.

Railway locomotives, aircraft (and airships) would also be part of this story, as would coal, iron and steel.

It set me off on a trail which took me along broad highways, to steelmakers in Sheffield for example. It also led me down fascinating by-ways. I came across an organ builder who began life as a weaver, a cotton mill mechanic whose ingenuity led him to build a wonderful longcase clock, and a former blanket mill worker whose vision helped to make the roads throughout the world safer to drive on.

It proved to be a fascinating and inspirational journey.

Hard Graft by Terry Sutton, The Dovecote Press, 20. To order your copy, ring our order line 01748 821122 Mon-Sat 9am-5pm. Or by post, please send a cheque or postal order, plus 2.75 postage, to Yorkshire Books Ltd, 1 Castle Hill, Richmond, DL10 4QP. Order online, www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/shop

YP MAG 27/11/10