CAN readers add information to this old picture sent by reader Mrs Amy Richardson, of Little Harwood, Blackburn?

It's of a two-horse team drawing a decorated float carrying one of the looms made by the now-gone British Northrop Loom Company and is taken outside the firm's offices in Moss Street, Blackburn. Also on display on the cart are accessories once familiar to thousands of East Lancashire weavers -- shuttles and pirns on which weft yarn was wound.

The picture was obviously taken for a special occasion -- perhaps a trade event or a May Day, when horses were traditionally turned out with ribbons, plumes and polished brasses, as this pair is.

No date accompanies the photograph, but it has look about it of the early 1930s -- by when the firm was turning out 250 of its automatic looms a month, employing more than 2,000 workers on a massive site at Little Harwood that was to cover 27 acres and was supplying looms to textile mills throughout Britain and the world.

The business was started in 1902 when William Livesey, whose father had begun the Greenbank iron foundry and mill furnishers in Blackburn 38 years before, acquired the UK manufacturing rights for the automatic loom that had been developed in Massachusetts, USA, by James Northrop.

Its key principle was that it was much more productive than the standard power looms of the day -- because it was out of action less often as weavers had no need to change the loom's shuttle when the pirn with which it was loaded ran out of yarn. Instead, the Northrop loaded the shuttle with a new pirn from a constantly-refilled battery of them.

British Northrop's hey-day was over by late 1960s and its payroll continued to shrink despite earlier efforts to diversify into making furniture and earth-moving equipment. The firm's glide into terminal decline was signalled by much of its redundant factory space being rented to engineering and haulage firms.

But almost all of the giant works was to disappear in 1982 when a huge fire destroyed buildings being used for the storage of paper and engineering equipment. The ruins were demolished in 1990 after the site was bought for redevelopment. Today, only one block of the old Northrop buildings remains -- part of the industrial estate at Little Harwood.