The archive is extensive and we aim to make as many of these images available online as soon as possible.
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CORONAVIRUS UPDATE, OCTOBER 2020: We have now installed Covid 19 safety measures in our archive rooms but recent tighter restrictions and increasing numbers of cases mean that we are unable to invite volunteers back into the rooms until the situation improves. Some volunteers are now working from home and we will continue to upload images to the website.
50 Years Ago
Mr. Pat Hird, wool production and sales manager, with some of the men who pull the wool from the skins, and grade it. He came to Burnley from York when his family fellmongering business was taken over by F.M.C. and is responsible for removal of wool from the pelt, drying and classifying it into 40 grades, then binning and packing it.
It is often surprising how men in a tough or dangerous occupation develop a special pride in their job. You soon notice this among Burnley's fellmongers - the men who take the skins from slaughtered sheep and produce wool and pelts. So far as Burnley is concerned that now means a subsidiary of the Fatstock Marketing Corporation, a nation-wide group specialising in various aspects of meat production and sale. They took over the Plumbe Street premises of Samuel Smith and Sons, a firm founded in Colne over a century ago and have just acquired the adjoining Dean Mill which gives double the working space to keep pace with a 300 per cent increase in the number of sheepskins processed over the past few years.
