"Come on then! Get the looms running and let's make cloth!"

Inspiring stuff, especially when spoken from the pillared entrance of a grand house on a dark and snowy night, with a crowd of angry workmen carrying flaming torches below. They were, of course, turned by this appeal from trade union rebellion to renewed enthusiasm.

I was always too much of a cynic to sit back sentimentally and wallow in such rubbish.

"Where are you going to sell the cloth when you make it?" I mutter, as the credits roll. "And what sort of cloth are you going to make, without an order?"

Good stuff though, those black and white movies centring on northern wool mills and feuding families. Made in 1947, this one, with its many stars either dead or decrepit enough to make little difference.

In 1947 the textile scene was a good deal closer to the story's origins in Victorian times than today is similar to 1947.

Founding families were still the centre of textile growth and enterprise. Sons followed fathers, marriages were often guided on textile alliance lines, textile wealth was supreme in the region and thus the world.

"Simeon," (Jimmy Handley) said his old father Zebediah (Stephen Murray) at the end of the film, "aye, he'll be the next Master of Bankdam." Founder grandpa (Tom Walls) passed away earlier. And as the film concluded with family management still on track, you are supposed to sink back in your armchair and imagine them all living happily and wealthily ever after.

No such luck, in real life. This Simeon was much too nice a bloke to see the firm through successfully in the years ahead.

But this divergence from reality reminds you just how well the few genuine survivors, and their managerial successors from outside the old families, have done, when they really have managed to stay in the business.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.