 Mae Byrddwynedd yn y bobl. O lawr y bydwyr yn y byd? Mae Byrddwynedd yn y bobl hwnnw credu hŷ oed wedi bwyl sydd o'u popeth, yn edrych gydr cubesodi nhw dribleis ac yn llwwyddodau clor wedi cael thawr. Ohau'n hearadwch,zo liy chasing pai. Oh, yr hyn o'r الآir wedi gweld iawnr crap y byddwyr yn y goddessewd ond am bobl y bydwyr wedi hŷ oeddrive. Iddo d tracked o'u fan o meddwl i'r gufner i'r Prif... I ow, fel byr, pot genncios? Mynd i ddim yn lasio ar gyfer. Mae gennym weithio ein bod y bydd yw roi yn 1066, ac maen nhw'n gwybod yn 1066. Mae ydych yn fath yn 1069. Mae gennym wedi bod gweld ddeinio y ddyn nhw yn un i gael gallu wlad am y selefydd yn cyfrifiadau. Mae Wyllianne'r fath dryd wedyn gyda'r barfod i'r bwysig yn yng ngwybod, a'r bwysig yn ddysgu'r llyfr yn deall yng Nghymru, ond nid i gynnig yn ymddeithas hynny, wedi'i dechrau yw ddod maen nhw'n yn gweithio. Yn y bwyllwch, sy'n dweud yn ymddeithas o'r cyfrin yn y Gwyllt Oedd, a dyna'r gwneud hynny, byddwyd yn ymddydd, ac efallai yn y bwysig yn y bwysig yn y bwysig. Gallwch yn gallu o'r fildiol, gallwch yn gallu hwyl iawn, Ydyw'r ddflis i gwybod am ddeunisiau i Dannau a Cyngorau Cymru sy'n dweud o gydag o'r fwylau Olyddion. Ac mae'n ei wneud y mynd. A byddau'n ideaeth bod rhyngwun amenesio. Mynd i gwybod i'r gwybod, a mynd i gwybod i'r gwybod i'r digwydd. Mae yna hamd afael i'r cyfnodd. Fy fydd nesaf, yna gynhyrch gyda eich gydag, The kids gond it, the women spun it, the chaps wore it and I'm not quite sure who it was that cut it up and made it into clothes, grandma or somebody perhaps if there was one. And they had a little domestic industry and it was quite a good idea. And this was therefore very, sort of rural, very sort of self sufficient little valley took to way in the hills. But technology begins to invade isn't it? Technology and the ideas come in, The first technology that really made a mark on this valley, the piece of it that made the mark on the valley still exists, it's just across the other side of the river. It's Hebdingbridge Mill, it was water power, and that mill was built in 1314. So that's pretty early technology. But it was very important because it took over from hand technology of the ladies of the household throwing the oats into a bowl and rubbing them with a stick until they were exhausted to try to grind the oats up. If you've ever tried oats, not easy to grind. So a wheel and a stone that could do it better technology improved the diet of the people living here enormously. It also enhanced the pocket of the Lord of the Manor because everybody growing oats had to take them to his mill to be ground. And so we had technology there. And there was a small timber bridge at the side of the mill. And the cloth making industry and the clothes making industry was taking off to such an extent that the hooves of the packhaws was crossing that wooden bridge, beat it to death. And the stone one that was built to replace it a little bit downstream survives today as it's known as the old bridge. It's actually the second bridge in Hebdingbridge. And so the technology of the clothing industry was developing a place. The first cloth hall, as opposed to a wall hall, I think I've disconnected somebody. Tricky on this, sis. All right. Thank you. Was both it happening? I'm moving about too much. No, I think this one has a really awkward clip. I don't know if you've got kind of needs a thick bit of fabric to put onto it. Well, you get the picture. Everybody on their own tool was busy at it at work and generating new ideas and, at the same time, inventing better ways of spinning and weaving and so on. And the cloth hall in Hepsonstall in the 1400s have been going for a long time before a chap would been up in Scotland trying to persuade the Scots not to separate themselves from England, set off on horseback to have a bit of a holiday. And he rode all around the island of Great Britain and he described where he went, Daniel Defoe. When he came here, he probably thought he was back on the island with the castaway. But he described it in pretty wild terms. But he was impressed by what he called one continued village. One of the big advantages of this area, there wasn't a Lord of the Manor in the sense of a big building and great estates and things like that, because the land here is just rubbish. Nobody wanted to farm it, really. And so he found all these smallholders, each house within a healing distance of another. But then he talked about the population. All employed, each with their hands sufficient for their upkeep. The whole family were just working, working entrepreneurs to the last person. And that's the heritage of this valley and that heritage has continued. And I don't think it's any exaggeration to say that the other WW, you know, we all know about WWW, but the one that came before it was WWIR, the Worldwide Industrial Revolution, which of course is still expanding as we speak. It began under those circumstances here, in my view. There's a lot of historical evidence to support it. So when I talked about power in the valley, it was the power of ideas and then the power of manufacturing and the technology of manufacturing better and better. You know, so I went on to spinning wheels and a frame propped up against the wall, went to a primitive wooden loom and that sort of thing. And so they were developing their technology as they went along. And then you've got people like Sir John, the Lord of the Manor of Wadsworth. He thought, well, there's these things called water wheels, you know, heard about them in Roman times and although their water wheels were a bit different. And in the Middle East and so on. And he wanted to build a mill with a water wheel. So he was taking his own leap into a new kind of technology. Well, 1314 to 1485, not that far apart as things go. And these wool makers must have hired this big wheel going around in the river and thought, it's not a bad idea really. We could save a lot of time if we could harness that to run our spinning wheels and our weaving frames. And they did. And over the next few hundred years, well, by the time that Defoe came, they were just at the start of it, that's the name of the chapel, was wandering them out, writing it all down. They were just about at the start of the transfer from domestic production to what you might call industrial production manufacturing. And during the 1700s, more than 250 mills with water wheels were built, not to grind, go on, because there wasn't that much of it, but to produce cloth. Every valley around here, they were extremely fortunate here in the topography. I mean, this didn't happen in the Cotswolds. They continued to thrive on selling wool. Here people were making cloth. They were playing the value added game. They were adding the value of their hands to the product. And so they were really fortunate in the climate. You might not think that we're fortunate in the climate here all the time, but for them at that time, they were. And it wasn't all that good, couldn't grow wheat, it could grow oats. But there's lots of rivers. And the other thing they were fortunate about was that when the ice melted at the end of the ice edge, the ice over Manchester and Rochedale and Burnley and so on was thicker than the Pennines are high. And when the ice melted, it melted at the edge, which ice has a bad habit of doing. And therefore, we got lakes pending between the ice sheet and the Pennines. And because the ice sheet was higher than the Pennines, the water came this way. And there weren't any ice sheets on this side of the Pennines because you need precipitation to make ice sheets, as well as low temperatures. Here we had the low temperatures, but all the snow dropped on that side of the Pennines. So it came this way, did the water, and we got the Culler Valley. It gouged out a sort of 200 meter trench through the hills that we now delight in. But the other thing was that the underlying geology here is alternating hard and soft rocks. If you look at the hillsides here, they go down in steps. If you look at the river, they go down in steps as well because where they're running through soft rock, they wear it away quickly and then they come through a band of hard rock. There's a waterfall or rapids, perfect place to build a water mill with a wheel. So, you know, they were all set up. They got the sites, they got the ideas, got the evidence, and all these hundreds of water mills were set up. And 250 years after the cloth hall was built in Hepton's cell, it became redundant, it was far too small. It's still there, just a little cottage at the bottom of the church yard with the plaque on the wall. So they built the peace hall in Halifax instead, quite a joint really. But like a lot of historical events, the peace hall was out of date before they built it because the factories had started to use coal and steam and they were building big mills. So at the same time as they were building the peace hall, they were building Deane Clough and Deane Clough had its own showroom. It didn't really need to take its cloth to a market to sell it. But the peace hall was so busy that it only opened for sales, you know, gosh, I wish the retail trade was like that now. They only opened for sales for a couple of hours on Saturday morning and closed at lunchtime. Then you'd got until four o'clock to pick up what you bought. So it was busy but it was going out and the mills were beginning to take over. And so, you know, we got this great industrial revolution taking place here before it started anywhere else. The parish of Halifax was the richest place in the world in the late 17th century. And that probably meant, you know, give a few people their own gold mines and so on, probably meant the richest place in the British empire, which probably meant that it was the richest place in the world at that time. And it all went from there. Halifax was an important city before Leeds and Manchester assumed prominence as more trading cities than manufacturing. And the manufacturing grew up around them. So that's the power in the valley that I'm interested in talking about. And it's relevant to today, you know. We've kind of run out of ideas today. I know you're all dealing with bites and there's, I presume we're talking about computers and things, you know, not zoosed. And so, and there's been, there are development here and there in the history of the WWW and so on. But nothing to parallel the absolute impact of industrialisation throughout the world in the WWW is a sort of subsidiary that's one of the children of that. So, we're looking at something really, really significant here. Now it's... 2025 is the 300th anniversary of Daniel Defoe's description of this area. And one of the things I'm proposing is that in 2025, if we'll survive to that time and who knows what we'll be doing, but there are some won't say that we shall all start to death before we get there over the next week or two. But that's politicians for you. We should have a festival, we should have it here and we should celebrate Daniel Defoe's book about his travels throughout the island of Great Britain, in particularly here. There are so many unique circumstances came here. Most of the places he went, there were lords and serfs. Here, there were independent people and independently-minded people. And it's gone on like that. It's a very independent... I mean, I'm part of the old independently-minded, awkward squad of the original Hebding Bridging, called the Valley, and I have every intention of getting more so. You know, when you get old, you can say anything to anybody, can't you? And they don't take a fence. I was in a meeting a lot longer ago in Spain and we were having a bit of an argument and I rather upset him over there. He happened to be a policeman as well as being a Spanish policeman. What a combination. And he got so incensed about what I was saying, but he got up and then he drove back and he said if it wasn't for his age I would hit him. I thought, well, there are some bonuses, aren't there? So it's all true. So, where are we at now? We've got a lot to celebrate. The unique circumstances of this area being very, very poor soil and therefore not supporting great landed estates or great monasteries like you find up in North Yorkshire, because a lot of the Norman lords didn't want to be bothered with the North of England, so they got some religious order to look after it for them. I've only got fountains, Abbey, and all the others out of that, but nobody built an Abbey in the Calder Valley. I mean, there just wasn't enough agricultural productivity here to pay for anything like that, and there probably weren't any monks that want to come and live here. The only ones that wanted to get there were the sort of Nair Dwells that escaped from the Norman killing spree. And these were independent people, rugged independent people, and they came up with ideas and they carried on developing ideas and they developed this thing. So we've got the people, we've got the minds, we've got the imagination, we've got the spur of necessity because they needed to survive, and we've got the geological landscape that lent itself to waterfalls, we've got the climate that lent itself to floods and lots of rainfall to run waterwheels, and we developed the markets, and then we began to develop more and more different sources of power and eventually different sources of transport. The first railway across the Pennines came through Hebedin Bridge. The first canal across the Pennines came through Hebedin Bridge. And it's quite a remarkable history, and it's a history of ideas as well as all the rest. And it's continuing, and there are some remarkable things going on in this area. We went through a very bad patch in the 50s and 60s when the textile industry collapsed due to the tariffs being removed and imports flooding in, and this place became a ghost town, but it recovered. People came together. I forget the name of the first speaker, I was talking about mutuality. It happened here. People came together. Working parties came out on the streets every weekend. People turned out for three hours in the rain, in the snow or whatever to scrub this place green, to get rid of the dirt and the disorder and to build a new economy. And you biting people are very much a part of this new economy. Now, whereas it grew up as individuals working in little cottages, and if you walked around the area in those days, you'd hear the clack of a loom from nearly every cottage as the hand-loom weavers were working hard. It's not quite the same now. You don't hear the clack-clack-clack of a loom. You don't really hear it at all, but you've got very good hearing. You might hear the tap-tap-tap of a keyboard. And there's a lot of people in this area now with independent one person, two or three, four people businesses based on the tap-tap-taps of keyboards. There's a lot of offices in this building. There's lots going on, and in a way this is a resurgence. The economy of this area is happier in many ways, and it's building on the history. It's a reinvention of the domestic industry of the past that was very much about the use of the hands and the use of materials. And now it's still using imagination and ideas, and it's prospering. I think you know better than me, but as a bystander I get the feeling that it is prospering. There are all these people doing things which I confess I don't understand at all. There are all these waves playing about in the air. I mean my computer talks to a cloud. I mean how daff can you get? And that cloud talks to me on the computer, and occasionally they both get it wrong. But that's the way it goes, so I'm absolutely fascinated by the history of this and all these things that plug into it. And so where's it going to go from here? You know, hopefully it's going to carry on. One of my projects of the past, going back to the 1980s, was to save... Well, going back to the 1970s, my project was saving that building, the first building in Hebdingbridge, Hebdingbridge Mill. The mill that Sir John Dathorn held, the Lord of the Manor, built in 1314. It is still there inside that building. It's been extended in every direction. You can't see much of the original because it's wrapped up in layers of later development. But that's the heart of it. And then the next one that I took on, after I took that on, was the next one upstream, Knuckloff Mill, thought I'd go for a biggie. It was going to be demolished as that was. That was going to be demolished and I had a big row with the owner. And he said, well, I've sold it. I've sold it to a demolition contractor. He's just buying it for the stone. He said, if you're so serious that you consternationists, you're all cheeky on both, really. But you know, you're telling me what I should do with my property, I'm not joining. You want to do it, do it. Put your money where your mouth is, it's an old Hebdingbridge phrase. And he said, I'll sell it to you. You can buy the stone and you can keep it in position if you want. I said, I haven't any money. He said, don't be daft. I haven't any money. What's money got to do with it? You want to do something, you borrow it. Go to the bank and ask him. Come on here. I've been brought up that he didn't borrow money. And I said, but they'll want it back. I got this pitying look from Mr Greenwood. Mr Greenwood, I won't tell you which one. There's so many of them you won't be able to identify with. He said, of course they will. He said, look lad, felt about so big. I think he was probably younger then than I am now, but anyway. He said, you borrow the money. You make it work a bit harder for you than it does for them. And you live off the difference. And that's called business. Oh, I thought. I went to and thought about it. I used to be a fairly bright lad. And I thought, well, I can't get insane, really. He's right. So I borrowed the money and bought it. I was terrified, terrified, terrified it was going to fall down. It took me five years of working 10 hours every Saturday and every Sunday before I could even get anybody to agree to be a tenant in it. But gradually people came and rented bits and that come to the next bit and so on. So after 10 years, when the broses were beginning to decline a bit, I looked at Knopfloff Mill. And the old West Yorkshire County Council had it on their demolition list. You know, that five storey 35,000 square feet lump up the valley there. Well, I went to see them at the County Council and said, you know, it's going to cost you about £50,000 to knock this place down. The way council spend money. I said, why are you doing it? Well, it's unsafe. And nobody wants it. It's been abandoned. I said, well, there's a lot of things like that about it. Can I just knock them all down? Well, I mean, I think they were trying. I said, well, I'll relieve you of the problem. What do you mean? I said, well, you can give it me. That will save you £50,000. Then you can give me the £50,000. Well, it worked. I actually bought Knopfloff Mill for a pound. I mean, that has to be an exchange of cash apparently. And so I gave the chairman of the County Council a pound note. I think it was a paper pound note in those days. And she accepted it. And they gave me some money. And then the government, through various things, gave me some money. We got rural program money through the rural development body, which I wasn't a member of at that time, so I wasn't inside a training. They made me a commissioner on the rural development commission to stop me applying for grant sign. Then I got some urban aid money, which was absolutely strictly illegal, because Ebedinbridge was either rural or it was urban. Well, I didn't care. I pocketed it. And then I got some European money, just short of £100,000. But we didn't, because you have to do the work first. And you get the grants afterwards. And I'd arranged with the manager at Lloyd's Bank, when A, they had a manager and B, they had a bank, to borrow the money on the strength of a letter from the Department of the Environment in London, Secretary of State himself, promising to pay the 100,000 when the European money came through. But he didn't. Some lawyer in Brussels found a little clause. And where it said that was it usually said, everywhere else it said, eligibility for this grant is public sector, private sector and voluntary sector. Somebody who wrote the one for this area missed off and voluntary sector. So Brussels refused to pay it. They said it would be illegal to pay it. I said, well, I shouldn't worry about that. Everybody else has paid it. And anyway, it never came. And the bank got very cross. And threatened to take the building off us and put us in jail. Actually, my colleague at the time, David Shorten, our Lord, you know the right honourable Lord, we were actually locked in the manager's office in the banking every bridge until they'd sorted it out. I mean, a meeting was going to happen. So I wrote to our MP at the time and I just put across the top of the letter and big red letters, help, help, help, help. You know, I spelled the case out and said, the press are sniffing round. What am I to say? This is just going to blow a hole in the whole government policy of public-private voluntary sector co-operation. I got a check in four days, actual piece of paper, you know, those old-fashioned things. In four days, for 91,000 pounds from the Department of the Environment, with a little letter saying, don't tell anybody where you got this from. Because they'd already paid the 95,000 pounds that we were using as matching money for the European money. So instead of it being 50-50, it was 100-0, which is against all the rules. So when you hear people on the telly these days talking about it being unconstitutional, there's no such thing. What they do, what they want to do, they do make no mark, no mistake. And it's happened better than some of the other systems that are around in the world. So that mill was saved. We, because there was a set-up benign heritage then, so we had a trust benign heritage and the trust benign heritage raised about one and a half million pounds to re-roaf that building, put new floors in, put new window frames in, get it back to a working building. And the idea was to turn it into an industrial nursery, small businesses and so on, bit like the wind here. And we got a few people in and if you're letting places off to small startups, you finish up with some that are successful and you finish up with others that stop paying the rent and leave you with a pile of rubbish in the middle of the floor. We got some of both. And some of those that grow, so we're growing a bit, but one of them was called Colrec. And it was growing a lot and every time somebody else's space became vacant, they said, can we have it? And look where they are today. You know, there's something like, I don't know, 200 jobs or something like that in Hebdingbridge and sort of not just bottom of the pile jobs either because we saved the building. This was part of our strategy in the early days. This place is down on its knees in the 60s. Get working parties out, clean it up, get rid of the rubbish. You know, if you're going for an interview, put your best suit on. And so we put Hebdingbridge's best suit on, and they persuaded people to start cleaning buildings. Then we said, well, now that we've done it, we better get people to come and look at it, let's spread the word. So we had all sorts of daft festivals. We had a weekend called Awake. That was brilliant, that was brilliant. We had all the arts performing groups in town on all the same weekend. Every venue in town was full, fantastic. There was a marquee on the park with everything from John Bull and his puncture repair kit to a four-hour unexplicated version of King Lear. And it was full of people. I mean, it was really fantastic. There was anybody else here old enough to remember it, but 1970 was the date. And you know, it was just a tremendous event and there were lots of them. Swethwych, anybody remember that? You know, all sorts of things. We had Dorothy Sutleford at a back in the shop in a pair of hot pants pretending they were laid a horse and trying to yodel on the hillside near Weasel Hall while Yorkshire TV were filming. I mean, the noise, just... But people came to look at all these peculiar folk doing. And then the third element was we wanted to translate the visitors into the best visitors of all, the ones that stayed 365 days a year, because the population here had been falling like a storm. Population of Ebdenbridge used to be about 7,500, and it shrank to about 4,000 over, you know, 10 years or so. People just abandoned their houses. You know, I'll make you absolutely green now. You could buy a really nice cottage for 50 quid. I know somebody who got one for a penny. And I think those days have passed on a bit. It's long time since I bought the cottage, but I think there are a bit more than that now. So, and then the final part of our effort, save the mills because we didn't want to be a commuter place. You know, we're near enough to Leeds in Manchester, but we wanted things to happen here. We wanted ideas to flourish here. We're back to ideas, imagination, and then get up and go. And that's what we started to get. I mean, I'm on dangerous territory, but the house prices have gone up too. So, I was on this branch trust in the trade club, and they were going on about house prices. They were blaming people who had upped the reputation of Hebdenbridge. They were blaming the estate agents for putting prices up. I stood up and said, don't blame anybody else. I know who put the prices up in Hebdenbridge. It's you. The other people who put the price, the person selling a property, determines the price at which it sells, and you all want to get a bit more than the chap next door got. And that's what puts the prices up, and it's a sad fact. And because the prices are going up, we don't have as many vibrant ideas generating people moving in. We have more fairly well-healed public sector pensions moving in. Now, I know I'm on dangerous ground saying that, and I might not live to see the end of the week, but it's a fact. And so I'm not being ruled if the cap for it. Something most of you don't look, because if you're on pensions yet. I am, I'm a benefit baby. The government gives me a pension every month. It's wonderful, it's wonderful. But it does have its drawbacks when everybody is doing that because it makes everybody feel a bit too comfortable. The people who really set this area going were escaping ethnic cleansing and hungry, and they had to do things. So that's where we've come from, and that's where we are. And I hope we're going to get progressing and have every intention of getting this part of the valley, about power in the valley, recognised as the centre of WWIR and given world heritage status, which I know isn't going to bring the house prices down, but it is going to help more people to be concerned and supportive and helpful about keeping this amazing heritage that we've got here. And if I want to leave you with any message for other invites, it doesn't matter what sort of, but this is such an amazing part of the world. You know, and we've a long way to go in ideas, haven't we? I've been doing my bit over there. The government are going on about being zero carbon by 2050. Well, I've just written to them and said, well, what's keeping you? I've been zero carbon since 2014, and I have. Over there, we generate all our own electricity, and in fact, we generate four times as much as we need, and we sell the other three quarters to the grid. So you're all living on my electricity. So you better be good. I might turn you off. And part of that electricity goes into a couple of machines called heat pumps, and they take heat out of the water. Now, I've got all this up on the walls in there, and customers come in and they read it. Most people have tremendous difficulty in distinguishing between heat and temperature. I mean, you want, you're all educated biters, and so you know what it's all about. Like, heat is like little packages that come floating in the river. And at the back of the mill, I've got four domestic radiators, well, actually two double radiators, in the goate of the mill, and the water flows over them all the time. Now, the temperature of the water in the river is probably quite high now for that river. It might be 15 degrees centigrade, but in the winter it's probably more like 5 degrees centigrade. So there's not a lot of heat, but you only need to take a little bit of heat out of a recubic metre that passes, and it can add up to a lot. And so through these two heat pumps, which work on latent heat principles, which I'm sure you all understand, but I won't go into it now, the water coming in at 15 degrees or 5 degrees is a heat exchanger, and I've got a tank of 800 litres of water at 65 degrees all the time coming out of the river, because it's just like a fridge in reverse. The water coming in evaporates a refrigerant liquid into a gas, and then a compressor driven by the electricity from the scroll squashes that gas back into a liquid in the process of liberating latent heat that goes into the water system in the tank. And that's... If you go to the gents or the ladys and you put the heart tap on, please don't leave it on like some people do, and hold your hand under it, you won't hold your hand under it for long, because it comes out at about... So, we've got heat, we've got central heating, we've got electricity, wow. And the government pay me to do it. There's a thing called feeding tariff or electricity, and there's a thing called renewable heating incentive for the heat. So I do it at my house. I've got eight holes in the ground and pipes come out the holes and carry antifreeze at the temperature of the ground long way down, and that heats my house. And the government sent me a check for 1500 quid every quarter to pay me for doing it. It's a no-brainer, why are you all doing it? I don't know, I can't understand it. I've put heat pumps in Bridge Mill, two massive industrial heat pumps in the Birchleif Centre, so that place is like toast now, it's wonderful. My daughter's place over in Lindenmill, farm a friend of mine in Ripondin, another one up with Toposgate. Why aren't you all doing it? I mean, save the planet and make money. So it's a no-brainer, why don't we do it? I mean, I've got the screw there, I've got the piddly little weir across the river, about 1.5 metres high, I've got much head. There isn't much flow, especially at the moment, this river's drying up, I don't know why. Somebody has to ask the offshore water at the top. But I'm generating kilowatts of electricity from that. Why didn't the town hall do this when it built its new extension and refurbished the town hall? Why didn't they have a turbine out there? I don't know, why don't people do these things? Why don't we have a turbine on every estuary in this country? Or why don't we have dozens of turbines on multi-basin dams across the Bristol Channel? Liverpool Bay, Morkham Bay, the Solway, what's the thing called at Glasgow? The Clyde, you know, and right around the fourth, the Humber. We could supply Europe with electricity. We could become the Saudi Arabia of Europe in some ways. We could be powering it. We didn't buy it all from Russia or anybody else who was going to hold us to ransom. Why don't we do it? I'm just about the other ideas, people. Get at them. Thank you so much, David.