THE FLATLEY DRYER

[PanBiker]

In this day and age I assumed CGI Kev but I suppose a cushion is a much cheaper option, still as stupid though.

[Whyperion]

If you don't like moneysupermarket, what about metalsupermarket (yes really) http://metalsupermarkets.co.uk/?gclid=C ... 0wod7Y0CUA - Catch line is Any Metal, Any Size - so stanley to put them to the test, who wanted some wrought iron ?

[Stanley]

Glad to see I am not alone in my hatred of that advert..... I'm with you David, total modern 'culture' disconnect....

[Wendyf]

You are definitely not alone Stanley, I can't bear to watch that ad! It's the same with most of them actually, the only one that makes me laugh is the car advert where the pug smiles at the guard dogs.

[Tripps]

Best recent ad - Morrisons - where the little girl has the last doughnut and says she will share it. Dad perks up - then she gives the other half to her teddy bear.

[Big Kev]

In this day and age I assumed CGI Kev but I suppose a cushion is a much cheaper option, still as stupid though.

My mate Dave got a lot of stick when the car first aired, a lot of it from me I must add

[Stanley]

Possibly the best and most intelligent advert ever. The last advert for Silk Cut cigarettes.

[Stanley]

One thing that struck me last night when that bloody advert appeared again was that perhaps the bloke is simply 'blessed' with a bubble butt.

[Tizer]

I wonder if I'm the only person in the world who has never seen that advert?

[Stanley]

Quite possibly Tiz. Still, when you think about it, it has worked! Here we are discussing an advert....
Many years ago when I was working for John Ingoe scouring the country for redundant boilers that could be bought, renovated and resold I called in at a printing firm. Their main customer for many years was Unilever who manufactured Persil in the UK (LINK). They had samples of every Persil packet they had made in an archive and I have often wondered what happened to them. It was interesting to see how the presentation had varied over the years.....

[Tripps]

Perhaps they ended up here - Museum of Brands I hope so.

[Tizer]

I remember visiting it when it was Robert Opie's museum in Gloucester. It was packed with stuff then and must be even more so now. One of the trends that has helped preserve so much is the rise of `collecting hobbies' and particularly the interest in `ephemera'. We're going to a small postcard fair in Glastonbury on Saturday, held by the Mendip Postcard Club, and it will have ephemera as well as postcards, stamps and all sorts of postal history. I've just bought on Ebay a lot of modern postcard reproductions of old Art Deco advertisements and similar.

[Stanley]

One of the things I loved about being 'open all hours' at Sough was that we stocked many pre-war items like blanket soap and Dr Lovelace's soap that were still adorned with their original art work. All gone now of course but some of them were very ornate.

[Stanley]

The blanket soap was very good stuff. It was in a tin and was a clear jelly with flecks of camphor in it. Made specially for the annual washing of heavy woollen blankets in the days before duvets.....

[Stanley]

'Open All Hours'. In the 1960s we were still selling biscuits loose out of the large tins. When you got to the bottom the broken biscuits were sold cheaper to empty the tin. Potatoes still came in 1cwt sacks and I remember that when we were pricing them we worked on 100lbs of spuds and 12lbs of soil to the sack. Bacon came from Vale of Mowbray in sides, if the side included the shoulder it was called a Spencer. We sold a lot of PK pork in tins that came from Poland, it was good stuff. Canadian tinned bacon was very popular as well.
We were just beginning to see modern packaging. We sold a lot of frozen sausage and one day I had a complaint from a customer that her husband found the 'skins' very tough. No wonder! They were in tubes of plastic film which you were supposed to remove before cooking....
Times have changed......

[Tizer]

That's like my story of the fish & chip shops dropping polyethylene bags of lard into the frying oil, bag and all, when the fat manufacturers starting lining the cardboard boxes with PE bags. The excuse was that it saved time. It was one of those unintended consequences and the manufacturers had a fit when they found out!

In the `good old days' my mum & dad had their meat delivered weekly by a butcher and he became a friend of the family; we always had a good chat when he called. His father had trained my young uncle as a butcher at the start of WW2 and later we got our meat from Uncle's own shop. There was much more of this kind of what we now call networking in those days in our day to day affairs and it had many advantages. Even now, in our village, we have a long-established, multi-generation baker. The older villagers can buy their bread, cakes, buns etc from people they've know for years and trust. If necessary they can just open their purse and let the staff there take out the money. Not everything has been progress!

[Stanley]

When my eyes were at their worst the lads at Chaudrey's were very good, I held my hand out with the money in it and they took what they wanted. They often knocked the odd pennies off if the change wasn't quite right. In older times, monthly accounts for groceries were common, even in corner shops the 'Shop Book' was common. Credit was essential in times of uncertain income like the mills. If a weaver had bad warps in, under the old piece work system they could find they had no wage at the end of a bad week but a better one the week after. It all depended on whether you got your pieces into the warehouse before accounting day, usually a Wednesday.

[Stanley]

One ploy often used by the weavers was to dab the 'cut mark' on the warp, placed there during the taping process to mark the end of the piece, with a wet cloth. The ink was soluble so it could be easily washed out during finishing of the piece so this dabbing could bring the ink up to the top of the web of yarn and mean that a piece could be taken out of the loom and booked in the warehouse in time for that week's accounting. Officially frowned upon it was nevertheless often overlooked by the cloth-lookers as a slightly shorter piece meant that the next one would be longer so nobody lost out.
In 1932 there was a joint agreement in the industry which formalised the More Looms System and as part of that agreement a guaranteed wage was introduced (Called 'The Retention Wage) which guaranteed weavers just over 66% of their normal wage or 28/- a week, whichever was higher. Eventually this was modified into the 'bonus' system which continued until the end of the industry. A guaranteed amount was paid each week which the weavers confusingly referred to as the 'bonus' although it was actually a basic rate. On top of this a piece rate based on the number of picks woven and measured by the pick clock was paid and thus a fair rate was established.



The Orme Pick Clock. The weavers friend!

[Stanley]

Before the days of DIY many men had a shed or a corner in the house where they did wonderful things. They also repaired family shoes and in this area re-ironed clogs. My shed is a throw back to those days but I suspect pure shed culture may not be as pervasive as it was once.....



Remember my birthday and all the work you lot did on the images?

[Stanley]

Tacklers were quite active in some very esoteric areas. Newton once told me a story that his dad told him about a tackler who made a working steam locomotive with no tools beyond a hand drill and a vice. He lived up Townhead somewhere. He also made a telescope and ordered his lens from a famous firm in London. When they arrived he tested them and sent one back saying it was not accurately ground and polished. He was right and the firm offered him a job, they were so impressed by his skill. He stayed a tackler all his life.....
In this respect I am a wimp, that's why my shed looks like it does!



I get hold of as much tackle as I can! Mind you, I qualify as a shed in one important way. Johnny and Newton once went to inspect a bloke's shed in which he said he did many things. Johnny had his eyes open and when they emerged he said to Newton "Did you notice there was no swarf in the joints of the floor boards? The man has done nothing!"
I pass that test......

[Stanley]

Life can be quite surprising..... I was thinking yesterday that if anyone had told me in the 1940s and 50s that I would still be alive today and going off to teach students from across the Atlantic it would have been beyond my comprehension! Perhaps the lesson is accept change, grab opportunity and look after yourself! What amazes me is the pace of change, I sit here in my kitchen and talk to my Kids on the other side of the world. I talk to you lot and everything I say or write is instantly available world-wide. For years we didn't even have a telephone! Who'd have thowt it!

[Stanley]

Looking at the reports of the latest atrocity in France where at least 80 are dead after being mown down by a lorry as they were celebrating reminds me of something that puzzled me from a very early age about religion. If it is so good why is it used as the excuse for causing so much trouble?
I still have that same problem.....

[Tizer]

If it is so good why is it used as the excuse for causing so much trouble? I still have that same problem.....

To me it's the same as political parties, nationalism and football. Lord Sacks on Thought for the Day on the radio said "Whenever two or more men get together they become `us' and immediately look around for someone to call `them'"

[Stanley]

Quite. I have always thought that about Communism, a perfectly reasonable and workable concept but when the suits got hold of it they discussed it, modified the principles to suit themselves and finished up with what was quite properly regarded as a repressive regime.The course of most religions has been the same mistake.

[Stanley]

I can remember when I was a lad that even then, religion puzzled me. My mother had been reared strict chapel, Ebenezer Primitive Methodists in Dukinfield and my dad reckoned he was a Buddhist because he had one been rescued from the gutter by a Buddhist priest somewhere in the Pacific. Mother evidently believed in backing all the horses to spread her bets, she made sure I got Chapel at Wycliffe Sunday School on George's Road in Stockport. That was about as radical nonconformist as you could get and I still have a good working knowledge of the Bible thanks to them. She also made sure I was acquainted with the Anglicans by sending me to St Martin's and not only that, on the choir so I had two services every Sunday. Later when we moved I was in the choir at St Paul's Heaton Moor. St Paul's was definitely 'bells and smells', Alfie Jeff the vicar was high church, Freemason and very conscious of his status. We had a very strange choir master who needed to inspect our genitals to assess when our voices would break..... Funnily enough I never saw anything wrong with this until many years later! We distinguished ourselves at St Paul's by having a choir boys strike against the discipline.We locked ourselves in the church tower and threw pigeon muck at the Vicar, verger and choir master from the top. I remember that one thing that intrigued me was a strange mechanism on the tower roof which I later realised was the Air Raid Observer's table for assessing height and direction of incoming planes.
Nothing I learned in all those years got me any nearer to understanding religion..... Funnily enough my most vivid memory is of a Masonic Service where they were all dressed in their regalia, couldn't understand that at all. The most senior men were of course on the front row and I remember one fat old man looking as though he was asleep with his mouth open and as we watched, beer came welling out of his mouth and all over his apron etc. He must have been absolutely full of the stuff! Fascinating and nobody mentioned anything about it.....