A CELEBRATED Edwardian beauty, Lady Monica was presiding over afternoon tea on the terrace of multi-millionaire mill machinery magnate Sir George Bullough's opulent retreat of Kinloch Castle when one guest accidentally dropped a sandwich.

He bent to pick it up, but was restrained by her ladyship who rang for the butler and drew his attention to the sandwich.

The ladies talked while he returned indoors and reappeared carrying a silver salver and a pair of silver tongs. He retrieved the sandwich and placed it on the tray.

"Don't waste it. Have it for your tea," Lady Monica told him.

The incident is a snapshot of a bygone age -- swept away by aftermath of the First World War, it was one of magnificent mansions bought and built with immense wealth generated by industrial toil and of deferential servants following the orders of an imperious lady of the house.

No doubt the attitudes of the haughty Lady Monica were shaped by an upbringing as the daughter of a French aristocrat.

But at Kinloch Castle, built by her fabulously-rich husband, Sir George Bullough, on his private island of Rum in the Hebrides, she was, in any case, far removed from the hundreds of ordinary folk in Accrington where the family's fabulous fortune was made.

It had been there that two generations earlier James Bullough, who had been a handloom weaver at the age of seven, had 49 years later in 1856 joined forces with John Howard, an engineer from Bury, to form the famous Globe Works firm of Howard and Bullough.

It was destined to become largest manufacturer of ring spinning frames and weft frames in the world. Three-quarters of its machines went overseas to every quarter of the globe.

At its peak in the mid-1920s, giant Globe Works employed almost 6,000 people and had a floor area of 52 acres.

The workforce occupied half of Accrington's homes.

George Bullough, a 6ft 5in old Harrovian, had become the company's principal shareholder on the death in 1891 of his father, John, who had acquired control of the business after the deaths of co-founder James Bullough 23 years earlier and of his partner, John Howard, two years before that.

The Bullough family home was at Rhyddings Hall, Oswaldtwistle, but John Bullough had bought for a sum equal to more than £2million today the island of Rum as a sporting estate in 1886.

In his will, he left more than £1million, the present-day equivalent of £68million, with his elder son, George, who was just short of 21, getting half the business and the island while his five-year-old younger son, Ion, also got half of Howard and Bullough.

A cavalry officer at the time, George had earlier spent time at Globe Works learning the business, but now with an annual income from his shareholding in excess of £300,000 -- worth some £1.8million today -- he was able to become virtually a full-time gentleman of leisure, with a magnificent island as a playground and a world to explore in his ocean-going steam yacht, the 670-ton, 221-ft Rhuoma.

The story of the Bullough connection with Rum is told in chapters of a new book* by Giggleswick author Bill Mitchell.

It includes the amusing tale of Lady Monica and the dropped sandwich at the dream house of Kinloch Castle that George began to build there in 1897 for £250,000 -- the present-day equivalent of £15million --and later filled with expensive souvenirs from their world-wide cruises. After the Boer War broke out in South Africa in 1899, the Rhuoma spent a year off Cape Town as a hospital ship and sailed home to Rum with a complement of convalescent soldiers who were the first guests at the newly-completed Kinloch Castle. It was for his generosity that he was knighted in 1901.

For a decade after his marriage in 1903 to Lady Monica the castle was to be the scene of lavish social gatherings as for ten or 12 weeks a year, when they were not at their other homes in London and Worcestershire, the Bulloughs entertained on a grand scale. It was a glittering era that ended with the First World War.

Sir George, who later bought a house at Newmarket where he kept a string of racehorses, died in 1939 while playing golf in France. Lady Bullough sold Rum and Kinloch Castle to the Nature Conservancy Council in 1957 and lived on at Newmarket until her death at the age of 98 in 1967.

She was buried alongside her husband in the Doric-style mausoleum that he had had built on Rum and where he had had his father re-interred from the family vault at Christ Church, Accrington.

Howard and Bullough merged into newly-formed Textile Machinery Makers Ltd. in 1933, in which it was the second-largest stakeholder after Platt Brothers of Oldham.

In 1970, Howard and Bullough's name at the Globe Works was changed to Platt International. In 1975 it became Platt, Saco, Lowell and in 1982 amid deep recession it plunged into receivership, with hundreds of workers being made redundant. It was bought by an American manufacturer and finally closed ten years ago.

Today, the giant factory's old office block is the Globe Centre, redeveloped in 1999 as a business and leisure complex where more than 600 are now employed.

*Destination Rum, by W.R. Mitchell (Castleberg, £7.99). The story of the Bulloughs and the Rhuoma's wartime role are told at greater length in Despatches from Local Lads in the Boer War, 1899-1902, by Jack Whittaker, and Round the Globe to Rum: The Bulloughs of Accrington, by George W. Randall, both of which are in Aspects of Accrington, edited by Susan Halstead and Catherine Duckworth (Wharncliffe Books, 2000, £9.95).