THE FLATLEY DRYER

[BillHowcroft]

Two of my brothers are optometrists and one mentioned that elderly couples in those days often had more advanced cataracts in one eye than the other due to sitting in the same place after dark and getting more infrared radiation from the glow in the nearer eye.

Cataracts were early recognised as a problem in steelworkers and glassblowers. When I worked in the steel melting shops in Sheffield we were warned not to look at the molten streams and the teeming gangs had dark glasses and visors.

[Stanley]

I developed cataracts on both eyes Bill and often wondered whether it was a consequence of Arc Eye and using a gas axe without goggles, something I often did. I remember once using a carbon torch with a welder for local heating and getting severe sunburn on my face, instead of a face shield I used dark goggles. I never did that again! When you think of the abuse our eyes had to endure it makes you wonder why cataracts aren't more common!

[Stanley]

Taking note of the present day obsession with safety and cleanliness and looking back at the conditions my generation was raised in, the wonder is that we survived! Basic things like the air quality which was so bad due to coal-burning that the Luftwaffe never got a clear enough sight of Stockport to hit the railway viaduct. Then there was the far lower standards of hygiene in the food industry, raw meat on open display outside butcher's shops, milk that was so contaminated that in summer it had to be delivered twice a day. No packaging for food, loaves got dropped in on top of dirty potatoes in the shopping bag.
Yet despite all this, we never heard of allergies or the common Western Diseases that afflict us today. True there was more disease and medicine was still in the 19th century, remember that antibiotics didn't become widely used until after the war. But we were well nourished despite rationing and on the whole the population, children particularly, were in better overall health after the war than before. I believe I am still enjoying this legacy eighty years later. There must be a lesson here somewhere!

[Stanley]

Much is made of the fact that in the days before modern plumbing and indoor facilities like water closets and baths, the population was dirty and smelly. As I have said before this is a product of modern historians applying their own frame of reference and it simply isn't true. I was thinking about this and remembered that in the larger towns the public baths weren't simply swimming pools but you could go and have a good bath with lashings of hot water and in some, even a Turkish Bath. There were also public wash-houses where a house wife could take her weekly wash and again, get the benefits of plenty of hot water and modern washing appliances. Think about the trouble housewives went to scrubbing doorsteps and even pavements outside their houses. It was a competition! In many ways they were 'cleaner' than us.



Donkey stones for highlighting doorstep edges and surrounds. The one on the left is Lion Brand moulded stone and the right hand one is the red natural stone. Can you imagine modern wives going to this trouble?

[Stanley]

One thing that I remember, and it was reinforced when I did the interviews for the LTP, is the spirit of competition between housewives in matters like cleanliness of washing and standards of donkey-stoning. These matters were seen as evidence of worth. Sometimes it golt out of hand. My dad told me once about a street in Ashton-under Lyne where one woman extended her activities to black-leading the tram lines in the street and the others, not to be outdone, followed. Unfortunately it was a slight gradient and as the graphite in the blacklead is a good lubricant it caused the trams to get wheel slip. The council had to step in and prohibit the practice.
When I was running Bancroft the spirit of competition was still evident. The weaving manager Jim Pollard told me they competed on pick count as well, a good thing for him!

[Stanley]

Old photographs of mill workers can be very instructive. Weavers wore ordinary clothes but the higher grades like tacklers, tapers, spinners and twisters always seem to be dressed in white overalls which I always thought was impractical. I discovered when I was doing the LTP that this was down to the housewives. It was a point of honour with them that their men should go into the mill on Monday morning in spotlessly clean overalls so they used to bleach and scrub them, often with a yard brush as they lay on the floor, until they were almost white. The original colour was almost certainly blue but this soon faded under such aggressive cleaning!

[Tizer]

We used to go to saloon car racing events at various British circuits. The main Brands Hatch one was always extra fun because the Italian Alfa Romeo team turned out on the first day in spotless white overalls. They soon got grubby but they were spotless again on the next day. A point of honour again!

[Stanley]

Exactly Tiz and I often think that religion had a lot to do with it. Remember we were always taught that cleanliness was next to godliness, I have little doubt that this applied in Italy as well.
We weren't posh enough to go to motor races. Our version was the Speedway at Belle Vue. My dad was keen on that because many of the early riders were Aussies.... I still remember the smell of Castor oil, the original Castrol-R racing oil that gave the company its name.
I came across Castor Oil as a lubricant again in later years as before the days of modern lubricant technology it was the best lubricant for high pressure situations and was a favourite for the pedestal bearings of large flywheels. The excess ran down the walls and gradually dried to a viscous shiny coating that never stopped flowing very slowly down the walls. We realised that when we laid some new concrete in the cellar at Ellenroad and a few months later the Castor Oil residue had spilled on the new concrete.

[Tizer]

We also we went each year to the Vintage Sports Car Club annual meeting at Silverstone. There you got as much castor oil odour as you could cope with. A marvellous event, beautiful, shiny, colourful old racing cars, just like the dinky versions I had in the 1950s.

In recent times castor oil has been extracted by Croda at their Hull Site in a special small plant to serve the few remaining applications. I once went there to see the plant because we were looking for a place to do small scale extraction of wheat germ oil. Unfortunately we couldn't use the plant because it was too costly to clean it for safe food use. The castor bean contains ricin which is one of the most toxic substances and we couldn't be sure it would be safe. Croda have done a lot of the work on speciality oils.

[Stanley]

Another natural oil that was very useful before modern technology was the use of Neat's Foot Oil especially in applications where a very stable thin oil was needed, in particular Clock Oil. The method of refining it was interesting. The raw oil was put in clear glass bottles and stood in direct daylight for about 12 months without disturbing it. The clear top part was then decanted into clean bottles and the process repeated. Each time the oil became more and more refined and pure. I still have some, one sample is clock oil and the other was developed specially for lubricating cinematograph projectors.

[Stanley]

Still on the subject of oil..... In the old days when most planes were made of wood, usually Beech because it is hard and close grained, when new they were dry. The way to protect them was to take them down to your local oil supplier, have them weighed and then hung in a storage vat of Linseed Oil for a year. Then they were drained off and weighed again and you paid for the weight they had gained by absorbing oil and a small charge for the service. This is why so many of them have survived and the wood is as good now as the day they were made.
Another use for Linseed Oil was in boat building. Any iron bolts that were submerged and subject to the corrosive effects of sea water were raised to red heat, dipped in linseed oil and driven into place through slightly undersized holes. This charred the wood as well. I have seen bolts that had been in the keel of a lifeboat for over 100 years and the section inside the timber was as good as the day the boat was built.

[plaques]

Never liked the idea of using metal screws and bolts in outdoor constructions. Far better to use wood dowels. The only place my old greenhouse rotted was at the bolt fixings.

[Stanley]

Another widely used oil was Whale Oil. A lot was used in the mills for treating leather. I have an idea that the first fluid used for power steering was refined from whale oil. Neat's Foot oil was used for the same purpose. Before gas lighting and mineral oils, the favourite oil for lighting was Colza oil which was refined Rapeseed oil. It was the standard oil for train lighting and the early lighthouses.

[chinatyke]

Another widely used oil was Whale Oil. A lot was used in the mills for treating leather. I have an idea that the first fluid used for power steering was refined from whale oil. Neat's Foot oil was used for the same purpose. Before gas lighting and mineral oils, the favourite oil for lighting was Colza oil which was refined Rapeseed oil. It was the standard oil for train lighting and the early lighthouses.

I once visited a factory in Paisley that formerly produced whale oil. Massive iron tanks on several floors, I was told they would each hold 2000 tons. Whales were cut up and rendered to extract the oil which was then pumped to the top floor tank and left to cool. Then it was filtered into the tank on the floor below and cooled again. Until eventually it reached the bottom floor and the oil was the purest and given a spec like 5degC, i.e. remains clear at 5C. The process took months and winter cooled oil was the best. The waxy residues extracted during filtration were also valuable and used. This factory also produced spermaceti wax extracted from the whale heads which was widely used for leather treatment and had low odour. When I visited it was making synthetic esters to replace whale oil derivatives

[Tizer]

In the early days rapeseed (colza) oil was used only for non-food, non-feed applications because it contained very high levels of erucic acid (damages heart muscle) and glucosinolate (deleterious effect on animal nutrition). Both of these components were bred out of rapeseed by conventional plant breeding to yield a high-oleic oil for food use. It now has a fatty acid composition similar to olive oil.

[Stanley]

I have a book.... Or rather a two volume set 'The History of Unilever'. They had their own source, The Southern Whaling Company and its factory on South Georgia to supply them.
Reading these informative replies I thought "I wonder how many of our politicians could write like this?" Yet they regard us as uninformed proles not to be trusted with 'complicated matters'. Can't imagine how that came into my head......

[Stanley]

One of the things that constantly gets my attention as I ferret about in the past is the high levels of skill and manual dexterity exhibited by 'ordinary' workers. 150 years ago people like Marx and William Morris identified the erosion of skills caused by increased mechanisation and industrial methods. Today we see this accelerating with the growth of computer control, robots and soon, artificial intelligence. In my researches I have come across people who, with the minimum of tools, made clocks and even ground lenses to a high standard on their kitchen tables of an evening just to pass the time. Think of knitting and sewing and making clothes at home. From what I can see many homes don't even have a hammer in the house or the ability to knock a nail in! Are we doomed to atrophy on the sofa in front of the 'home entertainment centre' to the point where we are helpless?



Stanley's Shed.

[chinatyke]

Maybe, but it is progress. Why should Johnny stand over a lathe for 12 hours when a robot can do the same thing, probably more consistently, in less time and work 24 hours a day? Yes, we have lost some skills but have gained other skills, our culture changes. What is culture? I like the definition 'everything a particular society knows and does at a particular point in time.'

Life is better today than it was yesterday and likely to be even better in the future. Should we lament the past? But if we had to go back to past practices, could we?

[Tizer]

I've just been reading another book about industry in the Forest of Dean. There's a bit from a report about children and it describes one young boy working in a tinplate factory. He had to light the fires between 04.00 and 05.00 then work from 08.00 to 18.00, every day.

[chinatyke]

And it was usually accidents involving these young children that led to changes in employment practices.
In 1821, 49% of the workforce was under 20.
Source

[Stanley]

But the employment practices were changed and some of us enjoyed our work. The skill and hard work brought security and that's something that is sadly lacking today. Everyone wasn't locked in the 19th century sweat shops!

[Bodger]

In the 1960s a plastic goods manufacturer took over Lumb Mill Droylesden , to prevent pilfering etc they used to lock the night shift workers in till morning

[Tizer]

Another quote in the book on the Forest of Dean tinplate industry relates to the use of mechanical shears for cutting the sheet. Injuries were common but a quote was: "The curtailing of a couple of digits leads to greater care in the future".

But I agree with Stanley that we have, nevertheless, lost some good aspects of the old ways of working. It's a case of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

[Stanley]

"they used to lock the night shift workers in till morning" And in doing so contravened the Factory Acts!
Quite Tiz. That's my point. I occasionally watch the Youtube videos of CNC machines doing magical things at high speed and note that the machine minders have no input beyond pushing the occasional button. I much prefer to watch men and women doing one-off jobs and making all the decisions.
One much neglected machine is the old fashioned shaper but of late there have been some very good videos of good work with big shapers on Youtube. My favourite turner Adam Booth is in the process of installing a big one in his shop. I always liked shapers, they are slow but can do jobs that no other machine can manage because they are not rotary but linear cuts. Search for 'shaper' on Youtube and have an enthralling experience! (LINK)
Mind you, Ian will probably prefer paint drying......

[Stanley]

I learned lots of things in my time running the engine at Bancroft shed during the 1970s. One of them was what lovely people the weavers were. They were working in what would be regarded now as impossible conditions, even then they were terrible compared with other jobs, dirty, noisy, unrelenting and badly paid, the best weaver in the shed got £40 before tax and you could get more than that sweeping the floor at Rolls Royce. Despite all this I have never seen happier workers, the most common description of Bancroft was that it was a holiday camp. They all knew exactly what their job was, were incredibly skilled, had a short chain of command and could see the results of their labours rolling off the loom. Contrast that with attrition of modern working, in some places they even carry chips so that their performance can be constantly monitored and analysed. Give me the old fashioned way every time!