Archived report · 3 min read · Set in Vallis Reach ·
The Counting of the Empty Floors
The clerk of works sweeping a condemned mill floor by floor for demolition consent finds the empty low floors swept again each morning, on a printed schedule that names the floors and the hours but no sweeper at all.
- filed: "before demolition consent"
- reference: "VR/BF/22"
1. This report is made by the undersigned clerk of works, acting for the demolition board on the proposed consent for the six-floor mill at Vallis Reach, known on the rate book as Colworth's. The consent papers require a full floor sweep of the building, floor by floor and room by room, with the result of each floor entered in the consent book before consent can be considered.
2. The sweep began on the 6th of the month and was allowed nine working days. The survey men worked upward from the ground floor, weighing the sweepings, sounding the beams, counting the windows, glasses and tools, and entering each floor in the book on the evening it was done. The building was locked behind the work each night and the key returned to the gatehouse, where the chain over the yards is locked and counted by the watchman, Mr W Pell.
3. On the second morning the survey men found the ground floor swept contrary to their entry of the evening before. Their own sweepings were gone, not drifted, and the floor was swept past the point at which a sweep stops: the corners under the notice boards shone, and the oil trap under the hoist shaft was skinned clean. By six that morning the second floor, not yet reached by the men, showed the same condition, and the pattern held for the nine days of the work. Every floor the men left at dusk was found, by the six o'clock round, swept again.
4. In the gatehouse book there is a sweeping schedule. It is printed on the mill's own blank, the headings being TIME, FLOOR, SWEEPER, and it carries the whole six floors down the left-hand column with an hour against each, the hours running from twenty to six at the ground floor to ten past six at the sixth. The sweeper column is empty on every line. Nothing has been written on any line since the schedule was found, and the watchman, who opens the gatehouse book, does not know when it was found or by whom.
5. The schedule is kept up to date, which is the part the consent book found hardest to enter. As the board's proceed work climbed the mill, the lower floors were struck through in a soft pencil, one line to a floor, and the striking-through ran exactly ahead of the survey men and never behind. On the morning this report is filed, the first two floors of next week had been given hours.
6. Checks were made under the consent rules. The mill's last staff ledger, closed when the spinning stopped, carries four names and no sweeper among them. No wages file answers to sweeping after that date. The watchman's own rounds end at the chained yard, the gates being his charge and the floors no part of them, and his tallies do not vary. The register of this Archive holds no writ against the mill, or against any sweeper of it, which is the only line I am able to sign with comfort.
7. For the consent itself the position is orderly. Every floor of Colworth's mills is certifiably clear on the morning the board requires it clear, and has been clear since six. The board's book can be signed floor by floor without amendment, and the rooms will be emptier than the board asked them to be.
8. Consent can now issue on the papers as they stand. The question the papers do not answer, and that I am obliged to leave standing at the foot of this report, is whether the schedule is there to speed the wreckers or to keep something in order in front of them, and what floor it will be found sweeping on the morning after consent is spent.