I worked in the old city museum when it was on the first floor of the Leeds Library building. When it was moved out of the library I had a choice of either moving to Armley Mills or going to Lotherton Hall. I thought I’ll try Armley, because I like to build things. When I first arrived twenty two years ago I was told I would be running the Platt Bros condenser mule used to spin wool, a very rare, very valuable machine. I said to them no pressure then!

It took a few months to learn it. I do the daily running of the machine. It’s maintained by a Tuner. One afternoon I was running it for a couple of visitors and the fibres kept breaking. The Tuner(Chippy Wood), who’d worked at Armley when it was a working mill came round the corner cupping his hand around his ear. I stopped the machine and he says, “you’ve had a lot of drops today haven’t you” and I said “yes, how do you know?” And he said “I can tell by the sound” Hence the name - Tuner.

I was telling a couple about the machine spinning cloth used by Hainsworths for military until 1998 when they began to use the American machine that is also on display, because it’s compact and very fast. And he said, yeah, we’re the best(he was American) and I said “well, it is a nice nice machine very compact, but” and I took a piece of fibre to show him. “This machine has a four second draw, which means it twists the wool over 4secs” so I twisted it for four seconds to show him and then pulled it, and it came apart. I said my machine is set for 20 seconds. I said I won’t turn it the full 20 seconds, we’ll go ten, so I twisted the fibre for roughly 10 seconds, then pulled and it was strong. I said “yes, you’ve got the quantity, but we’ve got the quality!”