Winding treacle on bobbins

One of my readers - Andrew - wondered if I had any idea about where winding treacle on bobbins comes from - the phrase that is, not the occupation? It seems the only two entries on Google (now three of course) come from moi!! Which I suppose makes me the world expert on treacle winding.

It was just one of those phrases I grew up with in Oldham, one of the last mill towns in Lancashire* before the Pennines resisted any further human development. Oldham does lay claim to some words unique to the town, such as slippy curry for an ice slide, but whether treacle winding originated there or in the area of towns and villages nestled on the edge the Pennines in both Lancashire and Yorkshire I have no idea.

It came with other descriptive phrases such as "a nose like a blind cobbler's thumb" for someone with an injured snout or just a plain old ugly nose, or "one eye's a lolly and the others trying t'lick it" for someone who was cross eyed or boss eyed as it was up t'North.

Anyone daydreaming or not paying attention was likely to be asked "are you wi us or wit' mission?" - a reference to the many outings by the non-conformist churches, missions and brotherhoods which occupied every other street corner in Northern towns. Any local beauty spot, fair or day tripper destination would have its fair share of visitors on mission outings with any frineds you met there likely to be part of some group or other.

My parents were members, on the committee no less, of Higginshaw Brotherhood where my mother ran the Sunday School for a while. The brotherhood was an offshoot of the Methodists, a part of the Christian religion which had more varieties then Heinz in Northern towns.

"You'll end up winding treacle on bobbins" or "end up wheeling daylight into dark rooms" were favourite phrases of Dubby Barlow who was an elderly chemistry teacher at Counthill Grammar School, an establishment that tried hard to educated me.

Another of his favourites was "you'd be better off sitting eggs than sitting exams" aimed at anyone having a bad lesson. This was in the days of course when science had not been neutered by 'elf 'n' safety and still involved real chemicals, explosions, horrendous smells, naked flames while physics still used mains electricity and we played with high voltages making sparks shoot from our fingers and hair stand on end.

We even had a visiting Prof who used to come round once a year with flasks of liquid nitrogen and oxygen along with a bag of gunpowder to give us a lecture on explosives. 'Elf 'n' safety would have had a real attack of the vapours over that one. Happy days.

Meanwhile, if anyone else has any odd but apt sayings from their home towns or their youth then let us know.

"Lancastrians don't have Greater Manchester - that's just a place for politicians and bureaucrats to ponce about in - in the real world Manchester is merely a city in south east Lancashire.