THE FLATLEY DRYER

[Julie in Norfolk]

I shall have to listen to that programme as I was part of the danish bacon industry for 20 odd years. Danepak started off in Selby and moved to Thetford, being one of Thetford's major employers as well as Thermos, Jeyes and Travenol, later Baxters.

[Stanley]

There's quite a lot on bacon in the programme Julie.
One of my favourite beefs about the food industries is the way they have modified 'bacon' over the years and progressed from proper dry cured bacon from a pig weighing at least 30 score to what passes for it today, brine cured, water injected cuts from small pigs that bubbles into a mass of white froth when you fry it as the additives come out of it. Proper matured bacon that was over half of it fat wouldn't sell now but if you ever get the chance to try some go for it!

[Tizer]

Julie, I guarantee you will enjoy the Kitchen Cabinet programmes. Here's their web page on the BBC site and you can download podcasts. The panel are definitely non-PC and non-H&S about food! LINK

[Stanley]

All true, the new series has just started.

[Julie in Norfolk]

Thanks, I shall use the link tomorrow. Funeral to go to today. Sister-in-law.

[Stanley]

Sorry to hear that Julie. Wrap up warm!

[Stanley]

Susan and Mick are taking me on a trip down memory lane on Thursday 18 October. We are going to Stockport and I shall look at some of my old stamping grounds..... It isn't an open market day but the rest of the market is open. I shall enjoy it and bore Mick and Susan to death with my memories!!

[Stanley]

One of the problems about living inside your head and having such a good visual memory is that you are never sure as to whether other people do the same thing. I never forget an image and (mistakenly no doubt) think that I have a very good recall mechanism. Not for everything, that would be insupportable, but in so many cases very detailed memories. A bit like having a Google Street View in your head but dialled in to the 1930s and 40s. That's why I am looking forward so much to our trip to Stockport, I think I shall be on sensory overload for most of the day!
One scene that often comes back to me, and it's a good example of how observant we are as young children, is that on Monday morning, as I was walking to school, and I'd be about five years old, I always saw a lot of women busy washing in the square of the block of property behind the pub at the top of Huntsman's Brow. By the time I went to school, we started at 9AM, they were outside hanging washing out on a network of lines across the courtyard and I remember seeing an argument one morning, no doubt over hanging space looking back, but I remember being puzzled at the time why they were shouting.
Does everyone carry images of small things round in their heads like this? How the hell do we have enough memory to do it? Talk about super-computers......

[Tripps]

Does everyone carry images of small things round in their heads like this? How the hell do we have enough memory to do it? Talk about super-computers......

I was musing the other day - I do a lot of musing - and wondered if the brain was a computer what size would the memory in Gb's be? Pluggy will know. I've had plenty of opportunity to test my long term memory this week, and I think I've just about.passed the test.

As to revisiting old haunts - I did that on Tuesday, between the Church in Royton, and the cemetery in Failsworth - the full length of Broadway, passing the top of the street where I grew up. Interesting experience - lots has changed - the Elk mill as was, is now the Elk Shopping Centre etc, and the M60 seems to get everywhere. The whole experience was a little bit bit negative - all too busy and crowded - and I thought this might be the last visit. Driving through areas of Oldham was certainly a culture shock.

Faith was restored in the North however, when the shopkeeper - unprompted - had a conversation with me, and in that magical moment when I stood absolutely alone, (solitary but not lonely) in the square in Barnoldswick. I'm up for doing that again.

[Stanley]

Nice..... I shall see how Stockport measures up on the 18th......
One thing won't have changed, the different levels, there was a local conceit that, like Rome, the town was built on seven hills and the river is in a rocky gorge.



The view from Wellington Road Bridge in 1979. The town had changed a lot even then after 40 years, that was the last time I had a walk round. Now it's another 40 years on....

[Stanley]

Thinking about WW2 and after seeing the reference to shrapnel collections in another topic reminded me that the effect of substantial lumps of jagged metal falling from heights that could be as much as 15,000 ft was no small danger. Recognise that this was 100% a result of our own Ack Ack shells. The shrapnel we collected was that which fell on the roads, it was raining down impartially over the whole area beneath the point of explosion. This resulted in other damage to buildings, particularly roofs and some of this wasn't immediately apparent.
About 4 years after the war when we were ensconced in 6 Napier Road on Heaton Moor we had a leak in the roof and after investigation it turned out to be a large lump of shrapnel embedded in the sheet leads of a valley gutter. For years it had evidently been self-sealing but corrosion had worsened the situation. Being in a valley gutter, it had escaped notice. I have an idea that there was a government compensation scheme for such damage and that father got a payment towards the repair.
I know of near misses from falling shrapnel but never heard of a casualty even though it seems obvious that there must have been some. Perhaps news of this source of injury from 'friendly fire' was deliberately suppressed. I had a furtle and found this on the web "The British later estimated that some 25 percent of civilian casualties from German World War II bombing attacks on their cities, were from friendly fire. That is, British anti-aircraft shells eventually falling back to earth, causing property damage and casualties." I don't know what the evidence for this is but it sounds reasonable to me when you consider the tonnage of metal we fired into the air.

[Stanley]

That reminds me of the only time I really got a shock from an explosion during the war. We were sat in the Anderson shelter one night listening to the drone of bombers and the crump of large bombs falling near us when all of a sudden there was an ear-splitting series of loud explosions very close to us. We found out next day that this was a mobile Bofors AA battery that had set up shop on the public park about 100 yards from us. very high velocity and as I learned later in life from my experience with the 17pdrs the crack from high velocity missiles is far worse that the relatively low key noise from much larger explosions. In fact the bigger the bomb, the less damaging the sound. Incidentally, the theory was that if you could hear them falling you were safe, it hadn't got your name on it. The theory was that you never heard the one that got you. I don't know whether that was true or not, all I know is that most bombs don't whistle as they fall, that's a conceit of the sound effects men when making war films.....
Incidentally, a little known fact for you. If you stand directly behind a large calibre gun as it fires, you can see the projectile leaving for a split second. Not many people know that as Michael Cain once said.......

[Tizer]

Another conceit of the men making war films has been the vivid flames when shells or bombs explode. Think about Kelly's Heroes and similar films, there's red and yellow flames everywhere. The truth is that you don't see any flames and not much smoke either unless it's napalm bombs or petrol tanks exploding, or material burning after the explosion. Think about the real film of WW1 trench warfare - a shell falls and the result is a fountain of earth.

[Stanley]

You must be as critical an observer as I am Tiz. I love identifying the film clichés... The unattended pram setting off down the hill, the car arriving after a long journey with condensation coming from the exhaust and men who take a .45 bullet in the chest and just crumple up. Not quite like that in real life.
The biggest effect of a near miss with a large bomb is the way the shock wave squeezes your chest.

[Tizer]

I remember reading that after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bomb blasts all that was left of some people was a shadow on a wall. It's like something from a sci-fi story - the person vanishes but leaves their shadow behind.

[Stanley]

A bit bigger than anything we faced Tiz! On Napier Road after the war we used to call the son of the house that lived opposite us 'Tojo'. He had been a POW near Hiroshima but as far as I know survived the Bomb.

[Stanley]

One of the things we found out after the war was that in 1940 the head of the SS, Himmler, instructed a minion called Schellenberg to compile an index of the names of people who were to be arrested immediately Germany successfully invaded. As far as is known there are only two copies, one in California and one in the Imperial War Museum. There is a facsimile edition called 'The Black Book' if you want to find a copy. The strange thing about the list is that it contains some surprising entries, for instance there are three famous riders in motor cycle races.
For this reason there is some amusement about the list but hang on a minute. The Germans compiled one of these lists for every country they invaded and the one for Poland contained over 60,000 names, many of whom perished either shot at home or killed in concentration camps. This was no joke. We do well to remember what was at stake.....

[plaques]

There is an Ordinance Survey map in Burnley library with nearly all the main points of interest, railways, coal, canals and factories all marked up in German. Probably similar maps exist for other towns.

[Bodger]

After the war my father ex, RAF, brought back a map of the Huddersfield area including Victoria nr. Hepworth where we lived, it showed all the farms, lanes etc all in German

[Tizer]

British archaeologists now use German maps and aerial photos of Britain made in the 1930s and 1940s. They are said to be very good quality and will show places and things of military interest not on our own public maps. The German maps or facsimiles can now be bought on Ebay.

[Stanley]

There was much speculation in the years prior to WW2 about the erratic course of the Hindenburg airship. It was suspected at the time but never proved that it was conducting aerial reconnaissance. All became clear after the war, it was doing just that.
Stockport was 'lucky'. The air was so heavily polluted they never got a clear picture and that could be why they never hit the viaduct carrying the main West Coast line.

[Stanley]

Can any of you remember when there was a widely believed theory that static electricity generated by a moving car could cause car sickness? 'Anti-static' strips of rubber with a copper element embedded in them attached to the car and dragging on the road became the go-to car accessory. Cheap skates simply hung a piece of brass bath plug chain down!
I never went for it but was aware that static build up in dry weather when the rubber tyres were an efficient insulator was a reality, especially on a wagon. I was told that the biggest generator apart from general friction was the end of the exhaust pipe where the flow of hot gas was the generator. You could get a sharp shock if you accidentally earthed the wagon with your body like climbing in the cab and grasping the grab handle. Being so high up, people generally jumped down the last bit when getting out.
There was another cause which I found by accident. The wagon and trailer bodies were steel framed. I used to park regularly on a roundabout on the Carlisle by-pass where, due to the building up of the road to give enough height for the flyover the vehicle was closer to the very high voltage Supergrid line passing overhead than usual.The wagon bodies frame acted as a collector and the wagon rapidly built up a considerable charge if condition were right. I soon found that out! If you touched the metal while stood on the ground you got a considerable belt! I used to jump up if I wanted to look in at the beasts but had great fun inviting unsuspecting passengers to open the calf door at the front of the box. Endless fun and entertainment!

[Tizer]

One of our previous cars used to give us mild shocks from static.

[Stanley]

There were many accessories designed to 'improve' engine performance and fuel consumption as petrol prices started to rise. Do you remember the ejector cones you could fit to the end of the exhaust pipe to 'drag' the exhaust gases out and improve running? Useless. There were carburettor add ons as well, some were restriction washers and others were wire mesh filters. They worked because they restricted the engine's ability to draw in air, trouble was that they reduced performance as well. They all fell by the wayside as engine design improved.
Then there was the miracle spray that you injected into the intake of a warm engine running at medium revs which 'cleaned all the carbon out of the combustion chambers'.

[Tizer]

Remember `Slick 50'? It's still around but now they place more emphasis on protecting your engine than on improving performance. Slick 50