IMAGINE a time when just one in 10 Barrow homes had electricity and if you wanted to join the lucky few it required the support of a council committee and digging your street up.

That was the situation in 1923 when this relatively new form of power was controlled by the Electricity Supply Committee of Barrow Corporation.

The councillors, advised by borough electrical engineer Mr H. R. Bennett, judged each new application for domestic or commercial supplies on its financial merits and could clearly not imagine a time when everyone would want electricity.

How the committee operated is revealed in a bound book of typed reports from the period April 1923 to August 1924 which turned up in Millom and was kindly supplied by Reg Heathcote, of Newton Street.

In 1923 the corporation coal-fired power station at Buccleuch Street could cope with peak demand thanks to help from the Vickers power station at Cavendish Park.

Councillors debated buying the Vickers power house for up to £300,000 as its much bigger capacity would allow the closure of Buccleuch Street.

History shows that the councillors expanded at Buccleuch Street and its cooling tower was a familiar sight for Barrovians into the 1960s and was replaced by another coal-fired power station at Roosecote.

In the years up to 1923 electricity use in Barrow was dominated by Vickers – particularly in the First World War when upwards of 30,000 people were working round the clock to make ships, submarines and munitions.

The Vickers power house produced 17.5m units of electricity in 1912 and this had risen only slightly to 18.5m in 1914.

By 1915 output rose to 25.5m, then to 34m in 1916.

It reached a peak of 38.5m in the year 1917 to 1918 at a time when the entire output by Barrow Corporation was just 10.2m.

The end of the war saw demand for shipyard production drastically decline and power output in 1919 fell to 14m units and to just 9.3m in 1921.

In 1923 coal for the Barrow Corporation power station was bought from the Whitehaven Colliery Company at just under £1 per ton.

Strikes by miners put the council in a difficult position as it struggled to get coal where it could.

A report for July 10 in 1923 noted: “Owing to the miners’ dispute no coal has been received from Whitehaven since June 16 and purchases have been made from various firms in the town.”

Councillors were keen to invest in extending the town’s network but were unsure how soon Barrow would emerge from what was a world commercial recession.

A report in May 1923 noted: “It is extremely difficult, especially under the present conditions of trade depression and uncertainty as to the future of Barrow, to forecast with any degree of accuracy what the output and demand upon your undertaking will be.”

We will look at the power company’s domestic and commercial customers and the household equipment you could hire in the 1920s in a follow-up article.