OVER in Wilmington, North Carolina, 70-year-old Blackburn exile Ken Brooks does not have to go far to see a connection with the textile mills that surrounded him as he grew back home.

For the place where he lives is an old US seaport that used to ship vast quantities of cotton to Lancashire.

But inspired by memories, including his own, in Looking Back earlier this year of when, in wartime, soldiers from his adopted country were billeted in one of those mills - at Brookhouse, not far from his former home in Oak Street, Bastwell - he wonders whether readers also recall how, during the Second World War, East Lancashire industries were flung into the war effort.

Ken, who, after working in engineering and draughtsmanship for several companies in Canada and the USA, ran his own company designing and making specialist machinery for various industries for 12 years before retiring, was plunged into war work as a 13-year-old when he started work in the fitting shop of the giant automatic loom works of British Northrop in Blackburn.

At the time, he says, the plant employed about 1,500 people, had a large foundry, several machine shops and vast assembly areas where, before the war, hundreds of looms a month were built and shipped worldwide.

Only vestiges of the works remain today. The business, hit by shrinkage from the 1960s onwards, finally closed in the 1980s and most of the buildings, then being used for storage, were destroyed in a massive fire in 1982.

Ken recalls: "By 1943, the major items produced were lathes, milling machines, arbor presses, broaching machines, complete 17-pounder gun breech and block assemblies, gun mounts for tanks and hundreds of components that were sent to other factories to be assembled into aircraft, tanks, mortars and the like. "Every few months, we would build one or two looms that would weave heavy canvas or some other fabric for the war effort."

He adds: "Being an apprentice, I was mainly involved in assembling metal-turning lathes. Most of the lathes we built had instruction plates on them in Russian. These lathes were heavily greased-up, wrapped in waterproof papers, encased in very heavy wooden crates and shipped out to Russia.

"I've wondered many times how many of the lathes we built are at the bottom of the sea as the Merchant Navy lost many ships and men in the convoys trying to deliver cargo to Murmansk."

Ken recalls that hundreds of the workers were women, filling the gaps left by men who had been called up for military service.

And though he also remembers other large works like the nearby Philips factory - where his father worked, converting completely to war work and scores of buses taking workers to the ROF "fuze" factory, where his mother was among the thousands working seven-day weeks on what seemed to him like 12-hour shifts - even small, one-man firms were pressed into the war effort. For he tells of peeping in a small wooden building in Harwood Street, Darwen, in 1941 after hearing the sound of machinery and seeing a man operating a single lathe, machining aluminium parts that looked like they were for aircraft.

"There were stacks of these parts, some machined and some still unmachined castings," he says. "This gives you some idea of the extent of the war production effort - from large operations like the Northrop and Philips, down to a one-man operation."

If you have any recollections of how East Lancashire industry helped to win the war, drop me a line.

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