THE mention in Looking Back last month of the end of home-based handloom weaving in Mellor in 1890 was followed by the rediscovery in our archives of a charming photograph of the last old-time weaver of the lot still at work - at a time when the ancient craft that was decimated in East Lancashire during the 19th century by cotton's mechanised mills was deemed to be history.

For when King George V and Queen Mary came to Blackburn in July, 1913, during a royal tour of Lancashire, a highlight of their visit to the town's Roe Lee Mill was a demonstration of how cloth was woven in the pre-industrial age.

Working an old handloom that had come from a cottage at Green Gown at nearby Pleckgate - a picture of it is in Neil Summersgill's recent history of Mellor that records handloom weaving ending in the village 23 years earlier - its owner, 80-year-old Richard Ratcliffe, showed the royal couple how it operated while his 78-year-old wife, seated at a spinning jenny, prepared yarn for him.

But while they watched this re-creation of East Lancashire's textile history in Blackburn, in their next port-of-call, Darwen, "Owd Eccles" was actually still making a living with a handloom.

His speciality - and the clue to the continuance of his trade - was silk cloth, with his yarn being got from Macclesfield, the country's traditional silk-weaving centre. For, as Neil Summersgill suggests in his book, the reason why some handloom weavers carried on as long as they did - until 1894 in Blackburn, for example - was because they concentrated on fine, fancy and mixed cloths that the power looms in the mills could not easily produce.

"Owd Eccles" (real name Edward Eccles, though some later accounts give his first name as Ephraim or Bradley) was pictured in his loom house attached to an old farm near St James' Church at Chapels - the oldest part of Darwen and at one time home to a community of silk weavers - in a feature on old Darwen in the long-gone Blackburn Weekly Telegraph in December, 1913, long after the royal visitors had departed, apparently with the suggestion that he should be presented to them in Darwen not acted upon. His distinction as the last surviving handloom weaver was marked two years earlier by the Darwen Gazette when he was in his '70s. The reporter, says colleague Harold Heys, of Darwen, described him as a "venerable figure, tall but a little bent, with a face that is a reminder of the patriarchs; a cheery optimist with unbounded optimism for the work he does."

"Owd Eccles" came from a long line of handloom weavers. His nickname and handloom were both inherited from his father, Richard, who was born in 1812 and who recalled the bloody riots of 1826 in which hundreds of power looms were destroyed - including those at Darwen's first factory, Bowling Green Mill, which was always known as t' Top Factory - by angry handloom weavers who believed they were robbing them of their livelihoods.

Several from Chapels took part - among them Edward's uncle who had to live in hiding on Darwen Moors for some time afterwards to escape arrest.

Old Richard was still weaving a little - without the aid of spectacles - in the year of his death, 1903, when he was 92, having worked during the reigns of five monarchs from George III to Edward VII.

It was Richard's father - known as "Shakespeare Eccles" because he could read and write and taught others to do so - who actually built the loom at which Edward was pictured. And although the last "Owd Eccles" did have spells in the mills as a weaver and tape-sizer, it was not long before he returned to working for himself at his cottage on Chapels Brow on the loom "Shakespeare" had made. He carried on well into his eighties, convinced, as he told the Darwen Gazette in 1911, that the hard times of his younger days and of his handloom-working ancestors - a weaver Eccles being mentioned as early as 1720 - had produced a sturdy breed.

"The porridge and rough keep of two or three generations ago produced a finer lot of folk than did the luxuries of the present day," he said.

Indeed, he seems to have adhered to such simple fare. For a photograph exists - among the unique collection of old photographs dating back more than 100 years that are in the possession of Darwen Camera Club - of the old-timer having a frugal meal in his cottage with his sister Rose.

Like this one of him at his loom, it is believed to have been taken by John William Smith, of Sarah Street, Darwen, who was an engraver at Belgrave Mills and a founder member of Darwen Photographers' Society which became the Camera Club - to which his widow gave a complete set of his old negatives and lantern slides in the mid-1920s.

It was from one of these that "Owd Eccles" came to be pictured in the 1930 booklet, Darwen in Retrospect, featuring old photographs that showed the changes the town had undergone in the previous half-century. The caption said that his loom had been presented to the town's public library.

But when the picture re-emerged in 1960 after Camera Club member Mr John Garland discovered the negative of it in the club's collection, many readers of this newspaper still recalled not only "Owd Eccles" but the cloth he wove.

According to one, her father went to Macclesfield to find yarn suppliers for him at a time when he was having difficulty obtaining it and "as a result was able to continue to weave the very beautiful stiff taffeta silk in dress lengths for his customers." Another reader wrote that the Eccles family used to supply silks and satins to royalty and one recalled seeing Owd Eccles still weaving in 1915 while his sister made the material into men's ties.

Researching the story at almost 40 years ago, the Evening Telegraph's Darwen reporter, the late Norman Bentley, revealed that his handloom, though dismantled, was in the possession of Darwen Technical College and after being used in lessons in its weaving department in pre-war years, made its last public appearance in the town's Coronation procession in 1937.

"Even the old oil bottle was still in its place on the left-hand pillar and the stump of the last original candle was still in its special holder," Norman wrote. The tableau also featured "Owd Eccles'" spectacles and snuff box.

But what has since become of this last relic with East Lancashire's handloom industry?

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.