No 6451The End
What is still standing
After the closure of 1963 and the shed's in 1965: what of the works survives on the Openshaw ground, in the collections, and in the engines still running.
Entered by Walter Emmott · checked by Nell Dewsnap · 592 words · about 3 min on the bench ·
The last entry of the book is a stock-take. The works closed in 1963, the shed followed in 1965, and the site was cleared through the years after. What remains of a hundred and fifteen years of work is distributed across three kinds of survival: the ground, the objects and the engines.
The ground
The ground remembers least. The erecting shop, the machine shop, the smithy, the pits and the canteen came down, and the Openshaw land passed to the uses a cleared industrial site always passes to: new building, new roads, the quiet erasure of the bays' geometry. The canal is still there, because canals outlive the works they watered. The line is still there, because the railway that caused the works is still running. A walker on Cornwall Street today stands on the ground where the offices received a fourteen year old boy and his father, and nothing marks it, which is the normal ending of an industrial site and the reason books like this one get kept.
The objects
The objects remember more. Works plates, drawings and small tools went into the collections: the Science Museum Group holds material from the works and the railways it served, and a Gorton works plate turns up in the places works plates turn up, on the walls of the men who carried them home and in the sales where their families send them. A brass oval plate is the works' signature on an engine, and the survival of the plates is the survival of the signature.
The engines
The engines remember best. One A5 tank, the class the men called Gorton Tanks, survives in preservation at 69824, the only one of its kind, and engines built next door at Gorton Foundry survive on three continents: Beyer, Peacock's Garrats still run in Africa and stand in museums from Manchester to Australia. A preserved engine is a works' product, method and pride rolled into one artefact, and every time 69824 is wheeled out for an event the erecting shop gets one more entry.
The record
The record, finally, is kept by the reading. The old gorton-tank.com site kept the memoirs and the roll call from 2003 to 2011; this book keeps the reading of them, dated, signed and checked. Between the two the men are remembered twice, which is about the measure of respect a works earns.
The reading that remains
One more thing stands that is neither ground, object nor engine: the reading. The old site's pages survive in the archive, the memoir of the apprenticeship survives in the telling, and the roll call survives in the names men still answer to in Openshaw families. Industrial memory is a chain of keepers: the works kept the men, the men kept the memoirs, the memoirs keep the record, and this book keeps the reading of the record. The chain is the point. A works is not preserved by its walls; it is preserved by the next person who reads the entry and writes one more.
And the book itself is part of what stands now. An entry kept on a rebuilt site is a small thing, but it is a thing that did not exist before, and the works' long habit of writing itself down deserves at least one keeper still on the job.
The entry, checked
The survival of the class, the collections' holdings and the works' chronology rest on the sources below. Where the record is silent, the entry has said so; that is the last rule of the book.
