THE FLATLEY DRYER

[PanBiker]

Eagle?

[Stanley]

I remember Rock Fist Rogan well Bodge. Wilson the athlete and Hoo Sung and the Rolling Sphere! You're right Tiz, the Rover! The Eagle came much later Ian.... I also had a bound copy of a year's worth of Boys Own from the 1920s and that had some fascinating stuff in it including science fiction. It would be worth a bit today had it not vanished when they did the flit from Stockport to Sough while I was in the army. I've never really forgiven the family for some of the stuff that vanished. My racing bike, the Big No 10+ Meccano, my ostrich egg and my collection of WW2 bombs and grenades!
I've just remembered how dirty your fingers got from the brass nuts and bolts in the Meccano set....

[Stanley]

I know that nostalgia means rose coloured spectacles but I still think that the hundreds of hours I spent with my Meccano and my interest in steam locomotives had a big effect on my track through life. What will gaming and hours spent posting on social media do for our kids? One thing is certain, we had no fear of getting our hands dirty, some of my happiest moments were spent doing just that!

[Stanley]

In 2003 five of us who had been to school together had a 50th anniversary reunion in Buxton. I was fascinated to find that four of us had finished up being associated with steam engines and the fifth had been an oil field engineer.

[Stanley]

We used to make a distinction between 'clean muck' and 'dirty'. We didn't mind the former and were less inhibited about dabbling in the latter! When I think of the hours I spent 'contaminated' by cow muck (and eating my butties without washing my hands) it makes me wonder whether that exposure has something to do with how good my immune system seems to be.....

[Tizer]

Talking of cow muck...we spent yesterday at the Bath & West Agricultural Show. Here's a photo of one of the sheds.

[Stanley]

It looks as though the bloke nearest the camera has a vacuum cleaner or perhaps an industrial hair dryer. I used to get between 20 and 20 beasts ready for sale at Gisburn ever Thursday morning. Lovely job and once Richard had realised I knew the job I was left strictly alone....Good memories....

[Stanley]

It looks as though we might have Barlick Summer today, possibly the warmest day so far this year. I was thinking back to the long hot summers of childhood (All right, I know, hindsight is 20/20 vision!) and reflecting that in those days we didn't have a refrigerator. The only really cold thing we could get was an Iced lolly from the most progressive shops! I can't remember ice cream during the war either. Milk was delivered twice a day because it went sour so quickly and we were naturally drawn to water but in those days most of it was heavily polluted and what ponds there were were stagnant. I can remember us getting a fridge shortly after the war but it wasn't cold enough to make ice, no freezer compartment so home made ice lollies were out! However it must have been a great relief for mother because she wasn't faced with having to cook food before it went off. It was quite amazing how we managed to eat joints of meat that were growing green fur, mother pared it off before cutting into it for us. Nobody would entertain it today! (And then there was the Rickets, Scarlet Fever, Diphtheria....... )

[Stanley]

Big quart bottles of pop with screw tops. I can't remember how much they were but I know you got money back for the empty bottle. My favourite was Dandelion and Burdock. There was a herbalist's shop in Prince's Street in Stockport where you could get the real thing brewed on the premises. Occasionally the bottle didn't get back to the shop, with a brick tied to the side and a bit of carbide and water inside it was lobbed into a clay pit and made a most satisfactory bomb! Another illegal activity comes to mind, I shame to say it but we used to pinch soda syphons from the back of the shop, break them and use the glass tube inside for a peashooter. (Sorry about that.....)

[Stanley]

I don't know if they are still there but there used to be an old fashioned herbalist in Rawtenstall town centre where you could till buy genuine herbal Sarsaparilla and Dandelion and Burdock concentrate.

[Tizer]

Is that stall still on Blackburn market that always sold sarsaparilla in a glass and as a concentrate?

[Stanley]

Don't know Tiz. Could be the same people?
Love my new slow cooker but couldn't help reflecting that it was the old 'Hay box' method of cooking retreaded. Some ideas are so good they surface time and time again.... Like soaking clothes before washing, some modern machines have a programme for this. My mother always soaked really dirty items overnight before washing day. That's why I like Dorothy Hartley's book on English Food which records the old ways of cooking on solid fuel stoves, much of it very slow cooking. There's no doubt in my mind that you get the best flavours this way. Modern methods of cooking based on the need in commercial kitchens to produce the goods fast leave me cold. I still believe that this contempt for well cooked meat with the consensus going for 'pink' or even 'bleu' meat is based on the need to deliver the dish fast. Give me long slow and thorough cooking any day! I fancy trying a small chicken.... I'll bet that kills the Salmonella!

[Stanley]

One of the lost dishes from my youth is the old fashioned suet pudding steamed or boiled in a cloth for hours. I still have fond memories of my mother's Spotted Dick! When I was teaching my American students I found that they considered the Brits to be sex mad because they had a pudding called Spotted Dick! Can you remember one of the large supermarkets renaming it because they were coy about the name? If I remember rightly they had to bow to a storm of protest and went back to the old name.

[Big Kev]

One of the lost dishes from my youth is the old fashioned suet pudding steamed or boiled in a cloth for hours.

The pressure cooker gets used for a Bacon suet pudding in my house.

[Stanley]

And it will do you no harm at all. The old canard about eating cholesterol rich foods increasing blood cholesterol is dead. It's caused by an imbalance of Omega-2 and Omega-6 fats. (That's a bit simplistic but basically correct)
We didn't used to be frightened of fat, it was one of our main fuels! We burned it off with hard work and play!

[Stanley]

There is too much high energy food easily available these days and it is cheap. The reason why we came out of the war in such good nick was that food rationing made sure we all had better balanced diets. Go figure!

[Stanley]

One of the interesting areas where we made substitutes as kids was in our effort to fulfil the childhood craving for sweet things. Rationing meant that we could only get I think it was two ounces a week. There were un-rationed substitutes, many of which I miss and would buy today if they were available. Dried and fresh liquorice root, locust bean pods after the beans had been extracted (Woolworths), dried Canadian apple rings and every greengrocer sold 'penny apples'. Occasionally mother gave us a treat. Jellies came in blocks of concentrate that were already partially quartered and she would tear a square off for us to suck.
We were experts at scavenging the hedgerows for sweet berries and of course there was always sapping, stealing fruit off any tree we could find!

[Stanley]

Even in the days of shortage, people never ate the core of an apple. You watched someone eating one and said "Give us your stump?" To this day, the only part of an apple I don't eat is the stalk.... The root of it may have been the old wives tale that if you ate apple pips they lodged in your appendix and caused appendicitis or even worse, an apple tree growing in your stomach!

[Tizer]

I couldn't think where to put this post and web link so here they are!
`Curling stones'
I've known for a long time that a favourite type of curling stone is made from the granite found on Ailsa Craig in Scotland. In fact there are three types of granite from the island that have been used. My interest is not in curling but in the geology. I've just received a specimen of an unusual rock called Essexite, named for having been first found in Essex County, USA. It's a very hard, black rock with large inclusions and known to mineralogists as an olivine monzogabbro (which sounds more like an Italian opera singer!). Whenever I get a new specimen I do some research and the results often surprise me. In this case I found that Essexite also occurs in parts of Scotland and notably at Craighead Quarry, Crawfordjohn, Lanarkshire...and that it was quarried for making curling stones, which were (not surprisingly) referred to as 'Crawfordjohns'. This is the quarry from which came my specimen. Further furtling revealed a marvellous web page about the 'Crawfordjohns'. it's definitely worth reading!

Crawfordjohns

[Stanley]

Ah Tiz.... You've taught me something new about one of my favourite places! Here's a bit from me memoirs....

"A bit further up the A74 past the Lanark turn off the road entered some wild country. It was a grass moorland that was only good for sheep and forestry, I think a lot of it belonged to Lord Home of the Hirsel whose seat was just up the road at Douglas. There was a turn off to the west which eventually brought you out at Sanquar on the Ayr road, a couple of miles down this road was Crawfordjohn, a regular port of call for me and David on a Monday morning. There was a local saying which described the place well; “Into Crawfordjohn, out of the world.” The farm was run by the Wilson brothers, one of whom was married, the main brother was called Willy and to put it mildly, he was a bit fond! We always had a cup of tea and there was plenty of bodily contact on the settle and I got the occasional knee fondle in the early days until Willy realised he was flogging a dead horse so to speak! I once took my friend Colin Barritt in there on a trip up the country but didn’t warn him about Willy, he got the treatment and has never forgotten it! There was always a coal fire burning in the cottage range in the kitchen and the baking was superb. The farm was spotless and one thing that always struck me was the old fashioned practice of feeding the cattle in the byre on whole oat sheaves just as they had come from the binder. Harvesting oats with a reaper-binder was still common practice in Scotland as the oats dried well in the shook and didn’t need any fancy machinery to cart and store. The cattle thrived on the oat straw and grain and it was a very natural food for them. I once asked Willy whether the cows could digest the grain because in my time at Harrods Farm at Whatcote Lionel Gleed had showed me how to ensure that I was grinding barley fine enough when making our own feed. You had a look in the cow muck to see if anything was passing through the beast undigested, simple ways are always best! Willy said that very occasionally you’d see an odd grain but nothing to worry about. No need to go to any expense grinding the sheaves."



Willie Wilson at Lanark Auction Mart in 1977.

I knew Ailsa Craig well. I often had to go down the coast road through Girvan and soon realised that Ailsa Craig is on wheels.... It was fascinating how it appeared to change its position as you went south down the road!

[Stanley]

You might wonder why I have posted this pic when what I am going to refer to is shopping in the town. The man with the dog is 'Gara' Pickles. Short for Garibaldi this was also his father's name and for many years the family were common carriers in Barlick, running a regular service to Skipton two or three times a week.
What's this got to do with shopping? During my LTP interviews it became obvious that many of the better off families in the town, like that of Emma Clark, had a weekly order with bigger shops in Skipton and the goods were delivered by Gara and other carriers. I suppose that was the early 20th century version of internet shopping. Today it is quite possible to get everything you need in the town and occasionally online. We tend to forget that this wasn't always the case and if choice was limited in Barlick, ordering groceries from Skipton was the alternative.
By the way, this also applied to water. Gara's father used to deliver water from the Wood End spring to houses in the town before the days of clean mains water.

[Tizer]

Your mention of Mr Wilson being a bit fond and giving you the `hand on knee' treatment raises an interesting question. Sometimes young people today are surprised that oldie heterosexuals seem a bit homophobic. Of course, when we were kids we ran the gamut of things like the `hand on knee' treatment and you were warned about being careful who you encountered in the public lavatories etc. I suppose now we have the `gay scene' and gay people find it easier to meet up, so the `hand on knee' treatment isn't necessary.

[Stanley]

Willie's behaviour never bothered me because essentially he was a good man and very gentle. He was also that peculiarly Scottish type, 'an able man'. In those far off days behaviour like that was seen as 'being a bit fond'. The atmosphere in the farm at Crawfordjohn was lovely. Willy lived with his married brother and his wife and they had obviously found a way of working together and supporting each other that worked. The whole house and farm was spotless and well run, I'd have been happy living in an atmosphere like that. I still think of them with affection...... Perhaps it was just a nicer age, people were more tolerant of each other's foibles.

[Stanley]

It's worth having a look at the map and realising that there is a huge stretch of uninhabited country between Lanark and Sanqhar. Leadhills was the highest and most remote mining community in Britain. This was why the locals always said 'Into Crawfordjohn and out of the world'. There was a definite sense of this once you turned off the A74 and headed West.
We may be an overcrowded island with one of the densest population rates in Europe but there are still huge stretches of land like this which are like the land that time forgot.
At one time this was a factor when it was proposed to build a new administrative city on the moors above Rocking Stones between Rochdale and Leeds when London prices started to rise. It never came to anything, the situation wasn't attractive enough to those who would have been forcibly re-located!

[Stanley]

We all have occasional 'light bulb moments'. I hated Linguistics when I was forced to study the subject in my first year at Lancaster but have to admit that there were a few redeeming features. One was when I learned about the Isogloss, a line on a map drawn to connect places where some element of linguistics changed, like different words for common objects. If you construct them for England you find you have marked the boundaries of the old kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex and East Anglia. I find that fascinating, through thousands of years of development and amalgamation the folk memory has preserved the old language.....