THE FLATLEY DRYER

[Stanley]

I remember once, in the early days of the M6 seeing a Silentnight van stopped on the hard shoulder. In those days you stopped if you saw someone you knew in trouble. He had an engine problem and told me that he had rung home and a fitter was on his way out to sort him so that was OK. However, in the course of conversation he mentioned that he was heading for a town on the East coast, I forget exactly where. I didn't say anything to him, it was not my business but I drove away wondering which way he was thinking of going, he should have headed out towards Leeds and the A1 from Barlick not down the M6.
We didn't have sat-navs in those days, it was all map reading and I always had a bunch of the free Esso maps that were handed out at filling stations and never had any problems. I have an idea that map reading skills and experience don't figure much in today's transport world. We have all seen large continental wagons in almost impossible situations simply because they have trusted inadequate sat-nav programming.
I seem to remember when they first came in a story about a Mercedes car driver in Germany who drove into a river because the map showed a bridge on his new device and he trusted it rather than his eyes.....

[Stanley]

I like the historical transport videos you can find on Youtube and am amused by the fact that the vehicles I used to drive and the roads I used are now regarded as history. I suspect I would be lost in a modern HGV cab!

[Tizer]

We've heard about how the National Gallery paintings etc during WW2 were moved for safety to a Welsh slate mine, and how the biggest paintings required a very large lorry which had to have its tyre pressures lowered to get it under a bridge. The entry to the mine was difficult as they needed to get the lorry in through a very awkward opening. What I didn't know until now is that the special buildings made inside the mine to keep the paintings safe and all the air conditioning etc was kept going after the war in case of future trouble. In the 1960s a test run was organised to check that they could still move the biggest items into the mine. When it came to that biggest one they had to find the original lorry driver from WW2 to do the job because no-one else would attempt it!

[Whyperion]

Were Overland a USA import or made in a uk factory? If they didn't have the long stroke narrow bore if most UK engines that would add to relliability. I guess Manchester early Saturday traffic would be minimal too many traffic lights these days. The new M6 link road bypasses Mere as such but is not on my sat Nav or Google maps it's also a dead spot for mobile signal being in the middle of fields

[Stanley]

Overland..... LINK
Here's one for Tiz, he loves anything to do with the West Country. See THIS Wiki article on Richard Tangye, born in Cornwall he was the first man to make a successful hydraulic jack.
When I first started wagon driving I was fascinated to find that all wagons carried a spare wheel and a 6 ton Hydraulic jack, these came as standard with a new vehicle. I knew that wheels had to be changed at the side of the road but had never thought how this could be done. The hydraulic jack was always a miracle to me. A weak human being could easily lift enormous weights by hand using them. Later on I encountered Tangye hydraulic jacks up to 100 tons capacity and they are still made.



Lake and Elliot must have made tens of thousands of these 6 ton cast iron jacks and they never let you down.

[Tizer]

Thanks for the Tangye link, the story makes good reading. I note where it says: `His collection included many rare manuscripts and printed books, medals, paintings, objets d'art and a bizarre assemblage of 'relics'.' Mrs Tiz would tell you at she has to put up with my `bizarre assemblage of 'relics'.

[Stanley]

I thought it was an apt description of everything in my house including me and Jack. Glad it hit the spot.
Was Tangye a common name in the West Country?

[Wendyf]

I used to enjoy reading Derek Tangye's books about his life at Minack in Cornwall.

[Stanley]

New to me. Thanks Wendy.....

[Wendyf]

It must be over 40 years since I read them, so I can't vouch for them being any good. If I remember rightly they were about living a very simple life and cats.

[Stanley]

You've reminded me of a man called Mt Chapman. He lived a simple life alone with a tribe of cats. He owned a moribund lead mine in Great Hucklow where we were evacuated away form the bombing at the beginning of the war. A smelly but fascinating old man, I was 4 at the time and used to go down the lane to visit him on my own, he always had home made lemonade even in the war!



Painting of the mine when it was working.

[plaques]

Lake and Elliot must have made tens of thousands of these 6 ton cast iron jacks and they never let you down.

I know where one of them is, in my garage. Bought it so long ago I can't remember when it was or how much I paid for it. Lifts the 4 x 4 like nobody's business.
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[Stanley]

That's the one P. Indestructible.

[Stanley]

Looking at that jack reminds me that we got certain things right many years ago and they didn't need to be changed. Hydraulic jacks are still exactly the same but made out of less durable materials. This got me to thinking about cast iron. There was a time when it was the go-to material for everything from tin openers to structural columns and steam engines. Think of the number of lamp posts that were used.
I remember someone once saying to me that steam engines were wasteful of material because they contained so much iron and were so overbuilt. I pointed out that the great thing about cast iron was its value as a raw material when scrapped, it was easily recycled to in fact a steam engine was less wasteful of materials than for instance a car.
In the days when all the mills were being scrapped 'textile cast' was the highest grade of scrap iron because of its age, it was much purer iron being made from ore and not remelted scrap as is usually the case today. That was also true of some grades of scrap steel. For instance, scientists constructing experiments that involved heavy steel construction were always looking out for scrap plate from ships that had been manufactured and sunk in the early part of the century. The plate was used without remelting and manufacturing because its value lay in the fact that it had been made at a time when background radiation was much lower and had been protected from contamination by being submerged.
When I was at West Marton we occasionally got the job of taking tankers full of spring water to a scientific establishment near Ripon. The tanks there were made from steel from Scapa Flow, the spring water was from an aquifer and our tanks were the cleanest commercially available. In that way they cut down as far as possible on any contamination that would affect the very delicate readings they were taking.

[Stanley]

My AEC Mercury with the Darham stainless steel tank parked up at Hey Farm in 1968. Lovely motor and a lovely job. As we were taking milk, cleanliness was an absolute necessity and swabs for bug counts were taken at least once a week. In those days there was no such thing as automatic tank washing, we did it by hand.
The first stage was to get your dedicated plastic wellies on and climb into the tank with a hose and an ordinary semi-stiff long handled sweeping brush, this too was never used for anything else. First swill off and brush the whole of the interior with cold water. Hot water was a mistake, it left a deposit of 'milkstone' on the interior which was an ideal breeding ground for bacteria. When that was done you switched to near boiling point water and brushed the whole of the interior using one of the proprietary cleaning chemicals. The most widely used was called ODC but I had seen too many people suffer with stomach ailments and even cancer which could have been caused by this so I used a different, milder compound, I forget the name but it was pink. After a through scrub with this swill off with cold water, get out of the tank, drop the lid but leave it propped open slightly, and push the hose in through the cock at the back of the tank and steam for about 15 minutes. Then leave the tank to ventilate and cool down before refilling. This was all done at the dairy where you had just delivered the milk and so by the time you had driven back to Marton with the lid and cock open it had cooled down and was ready to be refilled.
I always had a good bug count and when you delivered milk to a dairy they always took a sample and ran a culture of it to make their own assessments. I never had any problems.
A story about this. I used to deliver to the Co-op dairy behind Strangeways gaol and they bottled Kosher Milk for the large Jewish community in Prestwich. I was always chosen for this based on my good bug counts and what happened was that as soon as I had lifted the lid and stirred the milk to distribute the cream which had risen to the top (remember this was raw unpasteurised milk) the local Rabbi would climb up on top of the tank, don his prayer shawl and say prayers over the milk. I once asked him what difference this made to the milk and I suspect he had been asked the question before. He looked at me very kindly and said that that was a matter between the milk and God. Good answer!

[Tizer]

Medical scanners are made with the recovered Scapa battleship steel...
`Why do we build medical scanners from sunken battleships?' LINK

[Whyperion]

The MMB Vehicle policy tended to be - I think , memory fades over time - for a Six Year Life for the Wagon (seems low but a lot of work was done on optimum cost of operation) , but the tanks were definately twice as long - 12 years so the tank would be taken off and put on a new chassis unit at the six year interval. When the MMB went into milk delivery when some of the dairy companies left the business I think the diesel milk floats got a 10 year life. I am not certain if the electric ones ever got an official life before replacement, one reason why Smith Brothers and the other main electric manufacturer had problems - their products were too good !

[Stanley]

Good article Tiz. First time I have ever seen documentary proof of my assertion. What he didn't mention is that in the process of recycling the steel it is modified as little as possible as any process risks incorporating modern background radiation. The tanks I saw weren't even welded, the joints were made using drilling and bolting, the object being to avoid raising the temperature as this was another possible source of contamination.
The end of WW2 produced some surprising results. One was that suddenly, in a world of shortages aluminium sheet became plentiful as it had been stock piled for building aircraft. My father's friend Harry White the sign writer in Stockport started a lucrative but short lived business making caravans after the war. (There was a firm in Butts doing the same at the time.) However he did have one set back, the first batch of sheet he bought was Duramin, the very tough aluminium alloy developed for aircraft, it was like spring steel and impossible to work using normal methods.
Incidentally he had one other disappointment, soap was very scarce and he bought a job lot of army soap but then discovered it was foot soap which was laced with grit to make it effective.....

[Tizer]

That sounds like one of my undergraduate pals who bought a flat-pack bookcase by mail order from a newspaper advert. When it arrived he found it was made of cardboard!

[Stanley]

And probably did the job! I have little doubt the seller worded the advertisement in such a way that it didn't contravene the Trading Acts. They laughed when the Mosquito was made out of plywood but soon changed their tune!

[Stanley]

During the war there was a short lived craze for running cars on town's gas which was stored in large bags on the top of the vehicles. The scheme failed I think because the constant flapping soon made holes in the rubberised fabric. I remember in Stockport that the Bagwash Laundry used them for a time.



Later in the war we started to see these trailers being towed behind some heavier vehicles, particularly buses. I remember the North West Road Car Company in Stockport favoured them for a while. They were gas producers that were fuelled by charcoal and made producer gas which could be used to fuel the engines. Whilst they worked I suspect they had so many problems that they too were a short-lived solution.

[Stanley]

There were many weird and wonderful idea for transport without rationed fuel during the war but I think this one might have been a one off.
Most of the 'new' ideas related to reducing fuel consumption. The most common was a restriction in the throat of the carburettor below the fuel jet which had the effect of de-rating the engine. Water injection was also tried and special venturi that could be attached to the end of the exhaust pipe to lower the pressure at the outlet and allowing the engine to breath more easily.
None of these cunning wheezes had any appreciable effect and nobody made a fortune.
Those large firms that had steam powered vehicles recently retired brought them back into service, Nelstrop's flour mill in Stockport was one such firm.
The Co-op in Stockport took a different route, already a significant user of horses they expanded their use of horse drawn transport. Coal and milk were two obvious areas and general goods haulage was another. The railways were historically big users of horse transport. In the years just before the war they had started phasing horses out but reversed this and were still using horses in the late 1940s when the war was over.

[plaques]

Something a lot of us can still remember is the delivery brewery horses.

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This image is of one of Thwaite's Blackburn wagons. Can't find an image of the Massey horses. Burnley's Massey's still had theirs nearly up to closing in 1975. I think they only did delivery from their Bridge End brewery Westgate into the flat portion of town.

[Stanley]

Harry Tudor was still delivering milk for West Marton Dairies in the late 1950s. Almost every small retail business had a horse and float at one time. It's surprising how delivery vehicles appear in so many old images of small towns.



Here's a good example, School Lane in Earby in about 1900. The butcher is delivering orders.



The last one I saw was this rag and bone man in Salford in 1977. I can remember a firm called Mathers in Stockport that hired out horse drawn floats to rag and bone men on a daily basis.
One of the consequences was the amount of fodder that had to be brought into towns and the amount of horse muck that had to be taken out when stables were common in built up areas. Even in a small place like Barlick it was considerable. The Co-op stables in Stockport were in a large multi storey building with ramps between the floors. My mother used to take me there to see the horses and I remember a big black one called Hitler!
Town horses needed regular shoeing so there was a demand for local farriers.
I seem to remember a recent study that suggested that the economics of horse drawn transport were once more favourable, the arguments against were the infrastructure needed and the fact that they weren't fast enough.

[Stanley]

Another aspect of transport 60 years ago was the predominance of goods delivery by rail.



This enormous goods warehouse in Stockport is a good example. In major cities they were even bigger and effected daily deliveries of everything from heavy goods like stone and coal down to parcels, mail and newspapers. The wholesale fish industry relied on specialised rail transport.



Barlick in 1914 was a relatively small town but possessed a goods sidings. In major towns they were enormous and one of my childhood memories is lying in bed at night listening to the sound of shunting operations in the nearby marshalling yard in Stockport. When I was doing the LTP one of my questions was about the impressions of the 1926 General Strike and one common comment was the absence of sounds from the railway. It was part of everyday life.
It should be remembered that the railways were the first to use container transport. True they were only small but the concept was there, avoiding transhipping. In late years of course this is what killed off the railways and closely related industry of goods handling in the docks.
Films like the Titfield Thunderbolt and Ghost Train took a humorous view of the vast network of branch lines but eventually flawed economics was the only thing that mattered and we got the Beeching Axe which decimated the small but socially important local rail network and we lost a vital link. This isn't just sentimental maundering, it is a fact of life. Money isn't the most important factor that governs our lives but try to tell that to the current breed of 'leaders'.