Kendal Oral History Group aims to compile a picture of earlier times through recorded memories. Mr Thompson, born in 1914, who worked for Cropper’s all his working life, was interviewed in May 1991www.kendaloralhistory.com

The mill at Cowan Head was steam driven, steam and part electric.

When I went to school there used to be horses and trams. There was a tramline to Cowan Head from Burneside. It was only a narrow line to start with, about half the size of railway lines.

They got another one a bit bigger later on and they put these lines in up to Cowan Head. It started by the church in Burneside, it’s all green now is that; it used to be a big coal dump.

When we’d orders from Burneside we used to come down with the Cowan Head people on the wagon and they used to bring it down and reload it in Burneside Mill. It used to be the way you got your groceries at Cowan Head.

You would bring your order down in the morning to the Co-Op (what is the post office now was the Co-op then). They would put the orders up and two or three lads would take them up to Station. They had their dinners in a cabin up there, and the chap on the tram would take them up and you would bring the truck down for the next loads a couple of days later. That’s how we got our food at Cowan Head.

After the horses they got an engine. It was a railway engine, but it wasn’t really like one. It hadn’t any front like a railway engine. It was just like an up and across and up and across and a chap used to sit in the middle and it would go either way.

Then they went on to lorries after that, loading and unloading the coal much quicker.