FORGOTTEN CORNERS

[plaques]

I nearly ran over one of the tambourine dancing lasses one year who managed to faint spectacularly right in front of me in the procession! Happy days and simple pleasures,

I'll keep an eye out for you when I'm in Barlick don't want you laughing your socks off just because you knocked me down.

[PanBiker]

I didn't know you majored in tiny skirts, white pumps and ankle socks Ken.

You asked for that one.

[plaques]

You've just blown my cover. That's my saturday night outfit. Normally I go round dressed as an emu but surprisingly nobody in Barlick seems to notice since most of them generally dress as chickens.

[Stanley]

Ken is right about Pratchett, he drops pebbles in your pond! One such gem yesterday in 'Money' was a reference to the use of stamps as currency. I can remember when may small purchases made by post could be paid by 'enclosing postage stamps to the value of....' I can't remember when I last saw that in an advertisement, perhaps the advent of credit cards saw it off. A forgotten corner.

[Stanley]

Mention of stamps as currency brought another stamp related matter to mind. At one time you regularly saw appeals from charities for donations of used stamps. There must have been a small cottage industry out there sorting them and detaching the interesting finds from the paper they were stuck to. It always fascinated me. Haven't seen that for years. There was also the parallel matter of donations of milk bottle tops.
The only current practice I know that equates to this is the collection of old clothes from the doorstep and the Salvation Army collection points like the one in the Pioneer car park. Someone, somewhere is sorting these. It must be a funny old game and one would think dangerous in these Covid times. Cue a study to ascertain the incidence of Covid in these workers?

[Cathy]

I can only speak for Sth Aust. , but our Salvation Army stores were closed for months, with signs out the front saying not to leave any donations.
They have been open again and accepting donations for a month or so now.

[Stanley]

I think the same applied here for a while Cathy with the large metal collection points but people just left bags full of clothes anyway and I think they had to start collecting again. I haven't had a plastic bag through the letter box with a request for old clothes fro doorstep collection for months. Another avenue of employment hit by the virus!

[Stanley]

Tramp driving was a great education, it never ceases to amaze me, some of the things I learned. We were the lowest of the low and always got the jobs nobody else wanted. This meant that if there was a load of noxious smelly material that needed shifting we ended up with it. That's how I found out that there was a market for almost anything. Cowhides packed in salt and stacked loose on the flat was probably one of the most acceptable but we soon found out about 'greaves' (Half rotten minced up dead cattle.), tannery waste and anything peculiar like doll's eyes. (Yes, I once had eight tons of them in paper bags.) I learned that the reason fellmongers were usually out in the countryside was because of the smell and the awful effluent which in those days almost always ended up in a nearby watercourse. Fellmongers reclaimed wool, and 'sheepskins' from slaughtered sheep. Later, in another incarnation as a boiler repairer I found out where fly-blown and maggot ridden butchers waste went, It was boiled, dried and became 'Protein Granules' which went into pet foods.
My point is that even though these are forgotten corners they still exist, the waste has to be dealt with. It's a profitable trade, look up firms like Prosper de Mulder and ponder on their dividends.
Similarly, I found out where out of date cheese, oils and cooking fats end up. They go through a miracle factory and come out as 'baker's shortening' with a shelf life of 6 months and ersatz Mozzarella 'type' cheese for cheap pizzas.
Years later I found that the reason why Tennant's Stalk in Glasgow was one of the highest chimneys in the world in its day at 435ft was because the majority of the processes at the chemical works it served smelt so bad the locals complained and making the chimney which exhausted those fume that high meant that the smell was dissipated over a larger area. Incidentally that practice is still adopted today. The biggest coal fired generating stations in the UK were all on the East coast and had tremendously high chimneys. This was to get the plume out over the North Sea to dilute it.
There is almost a conspiracy to shield the public from practices like these that are essential to our lives but we don't like to be reminded of them. It suits the industries concerned for them to be 'forgotten corners'.

[Stanley]

In 1967 the UK had one of the worst outbreaks of Foot and Mouth Disease in history. I was driving cattle wagons at the time and got an intimate knowledge of it. Suffice it to say it was a difficult and trying time.
Two forgotten corners stick in my mind from the time. The first was the immediate demand for the cattle wagons to be spotless and disinfected for every load. This was a bonanza for the manufacturers making disinfectant and they soon became scarce and prices rose. Somehow we managed this situation but was struck me was that right at the end of the epidemic it was 'discovered' that the most effective disinfectant was a solution of washing soda which was cheap and plenty was available. That always struck me as 'very fortunate' for the firms making regular disinfectants.
The other thing was the disposal of the bodies of slaughtered cattle. Almost always on the infected farm. For this to be done you needed fuel and the standard method of building fires hot enough to reduce the carcasses was a grid of creosote soaked railway sleepers reinforced by run of the mine coal. Both these were in plentiful supply, we still had a coal industry and so many railway lines were being ripped up that there was a glut of sleepers that up until then had been almost unsaleable. I know at least one haulage contractor who got his start sourcing and transporting sleepers for the fires. We got used to seeing large fires all over the country.
It became obvious that the availability of sleepers was a forgotten corner in the subsequent outbreaks of 2001 and 2007. The price of them had changed as well, the popularity of sleepers in garden renovations and the short supply naturally led to inflation and other ways had to be found to dispose of the carcases. This proved to be commercial incineration sites and rendering plants and anyone lucky enough to be in that industry had another bonanza! Haulage of carcases and disposing of them was a massive economic opportunity during both outbreaks.
I got a reminder of the sleeper forgotten corner much later when Gissing and Lonsdale were taking the Jubilee Engine out of its house at Padiham and moving it to Masson Mill. A ramp had to be constructed up to the level of the engine house.



I asked Terry Gissing where he got the sleepers from and he told me that they came from Poland and were very expensive. He resold them after we finished but there was no way they could have been used as an economic way of burning cattle!

[Cathy]

Foot and Mouth Disease, gosh a very sad time, must have been heartbreaking for many farmers, and not just money wise.

[Stanley]

You're right Cathy, a tragic case of the damage a virus can wreak on society. We forgot that and now we have the same thing but directly attacking humans. Today's forgotten corner is that we don't learn from history!



Notice on Letcliffe Park in 2001.

We are very likely to have another reminder of history very shortly. I don't see any way we are going to avoid a re-run of the bad days of the 1930s as the combined effects of Covid and Brexit hit us at the end of the year. In both cases caused by the failure of politics and the modern capitalist system. I really do fear for the future of our children and grand children. There is enough technology and money in the global system to avoid much of this but leadership is absent and selfish.
Then, if you really want a wallow in gloom, there is the ongoing crisis of climate change and our management of the planet. Even in the war we had hope and faith in our leadership. None of that is evident at the moment.
[What a gloomy post!]

[Stanley]

Today's forgotten corner is an effort to be less gloomy! It's the retreat of all the infectious diseases that plagued us 80 years ago, Measles, Diphtheria, Tonsillitis, Scarlet Fever, Infantile Paralysis, Rickets, Mumps, Tuberculosis and deaths from the complications of Influenza, Pneumonia, Pleurisy and long term lung damage. There were more threats that while not usually life threatening were feared, carbuncles, dentistry and infestations of lice, fleas and nits. Reading a list like this makes you think that we must have been permanently terrifies but that wasn't the case. These dangers were part of life and on the whole we ignored them. Better standards of life and vaccination and immunisation defeated them and the sad thing is that incidence of them is, in some cases, rising again because of anti vaccination scares. Show an Oldie like me a vaccine and I will take it! Experience has shown me that while nothing is 100% risk-free, vaccination and immunisation are a good bet! That attitude is, in some ill-informed quarters, a forgotten corner.

[Cathy]

I came across this a few days ago.
What a sad way to be.

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[Marilyn]

Mind you, there was a time you could be “committed” for having period pain ( known as period hysteria)...or for masturbating for that matter. Considered unnatural...as was aversion to the sexual advances of your spouse...( it didn’t matter if your spouse weighed 400lbs and never ever washed and was an absolute bully...all the woman’s fault)
I recall many people telling me they had recovered from Polio, but it must have been terrifying at the time.

[Stanley]

My reply to Cathy seems to have vanished.... Mother had it in about 1910, treatment was rubbing it with Neat's Foot Oil three times a day. It did no good and she went through life with a club foot and an aversion to the smell of Neat's Foot Oil.
Don't forget the torture of the 'Iron Lung'...

[Marilyn]

When we were in the kid’s home , I recall kid’s in heavy iron callipers on their legs, with leather straps all around. Quite normal in other ways, but you know how cruel kids can be...I don’t think I was ever cruel ( I was too busy focused on wanting to find a way into the kitchens and learning to cook! That was my main focus!) I shelled a lot of Peas, before they trusted me to sit on a stool and stir anything on the stoves...
I do regret that now. I have been cooking for too many years and find it boring. I would be happy to live on sandwiches from here on in.

[Stanley]

Maz, I lived off sandwiches and packed lunches for years and always felt sorry for Vera who tried to come up with interesting variations. (And I told her so as well!) I never ever complained about what she gave me.
That's today's forgotten corner, all those little parcels and a flask that went out of the door every morning.
One thing about Vera and flasks, she was superb at keeping them clean. In the days of the old glass vacuum flasks she regularly took them to pieces and washed the whole shebang in bleach. Nothing worse than a dirty flask that made everything put in it smell fusty!

[Stanley]

Something came to mind this morning. Many years ago the Craven Herald was famous for having a title page full of advertisements, a common practice in the early days of newspapers. Being an agricultural district many of these were for Farm Dispersal Sales. The wording was archaic and seemed to be a convention. They all started with the name of the farm and the farmer and then; "due to his having declined farming, there will be a sale of live and dead stock...." That stuck in my mind and always pleased me.

[Stanley]

This morning's forgotten corner is a little known technical fact. Lead and sulphur are both lubricants. The moves over the last twenty years or so to remove them from the environment particularly in regard to air pollution has resulted in them being almost totally eliminated from engine fuels. Apart from the demise of leaded petrol this process of elimination has been unnoticed but has had big consequences. I had reason to dig deep into all this when my Son in Law Harry was killed in a light plane crash and learned of some of the problems. The main casualties were in fuel injection systems. The marginal lubrication effect of sulphur in fuel wasn't fully recognised until fuel injection pumps in high performance situations like aero and tank engines became a big problem and took quite a while to solve. The reason Big Harry died was because a badly manufactured replacement bearing for an engine fuel pump was made out of an aluminium/bronze alloy instead of a bronze with a very high lead content.
I wonder what problems changing fuels yet again to hydrogen based alternatives will throw up. Some of the additives already in use like organo-phosphorous compounds are already having repercussions. What will the peripheral costs of improving air quality be?

[Stanley]

In pre Covid and Brexit times we all had concerns about a variety of things, Child Abuse and Social Care of the elderly spring immediately to mind. The recent CSA report which was damning of the activities of the churches has not caused a great response as it would before and the underfunding of Social Care is still with us but in a way both have become forgotten corners in the face of the tsunami of Covid concerns. I fear that if we were to dig deeper we could soon identify many other concerns. In the end, if the dust ever settles, we may find out that the worst consequences of Covid and Brexit were not what was immediately identified. These are forgotten, but very important, corners.
(Later, the CQC have issued a report laying out the dire state of adult social care in the community and care homes. They are confirming my fears.)

[Stanley]

The October end date for the improvements in the Town Square and elsewhere may be becoming a forgotten corner. Very slow stuttering progress all round, it doesn't look to me like a project nearing conclusion.



I've often drawn attention to the amount of Rediffusion wiring still existing in the town but this morning I noticed this junction box near the public toilets. I must have passed it thousands of times and not noticed it but this morning I did. I didn't realise that the network included underground wiring as well.

[PanBiker]

I have never noticed that either Stanley. Lots of information at your feet if you care to look. Out of sight, out of mind.

[Stanley]

[Stanley]

Just struck me Ian. The above is down to my 'Manhole Cover Syndrome', I read what says on them! Sad isn't it...
Closely related to the manholes and definitely Forgotten Corners are redundant and badly maintained street furniture. We had an example this year when the parking restriction sign outside Singhs fell over because it had rotted at the base. If you keep your eyes open there are many examples. One noticeable one is any sign directing you to 'Tourist Information'. They all need revising since the closing of the Council Shop! The 'Fag end quiz' receptacles next to the bus stops could do with a bit of attention as well.

[Stanley]

Ian mentioned the ginnel through the Parrock on his walk.





Parrock Laithe above and the garages on the Parrock in 2014.
I doubt if many people would know where the Parrock was or what it was these days. It was a land holding that stretched from Butts Beck at the Parrock Laithe east to Gillians Beck. At one time it was owned by the chapel in Wapping as part of their endowment and later the Calf Hall Shed Company bought it to build an extension of Butts Mill on it but never put that plan into operation. It was sold off piecemeal and finished up with a variety of uses including housing.
However, the original deeds were very vague about boundaries and rights and there were many disputes and long negotiations, see the CHSC minute books for a full account of them.
One consequence that Harold Duxbury told me about was the fact that the owners of the garages paid a small rent to the Calf Hall Shed Company and on the demise of the company Harold, as a former director of the CHSC still collected the rent but didn't know who to send it to so it was put in a separate account and built up over the years. He never told me the end of that story.
Much the same would apply to the land the Clinic stands on today and all I know for certain is that the Conservative Club once had a bowing green on the land next to the clinic which is now part of Carlson Filtration. All in all a fascinating piece of ground and now a forgotten corner to most people.