THE FLATLEY DRYER

[Tizer]

When we lived in the village it was on what used to be the main route from Bath to Taunton, very busy before the days of motorways. Old people in the village living on the main road told how they used to provide food and drink for travellers who asked. They stopped doing it when travellers started stealing from their houses.

[Stanley]

Helping travellers was almost a civic duty. I don't know if it still applies but part of the licensing conditions for some public houses was the obligation to cater for 'bona-fide travellers' at any time, day or night.
I suspect this is now Flatley Dryer country.

[Whyperion]

Another thing I remember was that if you knocked on someone's door and politely asked for a drink or to use the toilet you were seldom refused. I wonder what the response would be today? (Or indeed, if anyone would knock and ask.)

Probably easier when the privvy was in the shed by the back gate.

Meanwhile a quote (if anyone wants to add to the quote page), might be worth holding onto for the Prime Minister's words to use in planning applications or funding for heritage projects.

"And I think if people democratically want to remove a statue or whatever, that’s fine. But I think that, in general, we should preserve our cultural, artistic, historical legacy - that’s my view."

[Stanley]

I can remember a time when the sight of men going home dirty from the day's work was a common sight. A friend of mine in Australia once told me that he wanted to leave school and go to work so he could go home in his dirty overalls so everyone would know he was a wage-earner. Conditions have changed now, if a job is dirty the employers are bound to offer bathing and changing facilities and even the dirtiest jobs don't mean a worker goes home dirty. That's Flatley Dryer country now and the sight of a worker in his or her muck is vanishingly rare.

[Stanley]

I remember when I came off the tramp and went back to the dairy how clean the work seemed and that got even better when I went on tankers. The dairy didn't supply overalls and hat always surprised me. Other dairies like Express saw a driver in clean white overalls as a good advertisement for the firm. That never seemed to occur to Associated Dairies! Attitudes like that are Flatley Dryer country now, corporate uniforms for employees exposed to the public are de rigeur.

[PanBiker]

I can remember a time when the sight of men going home dirty from the day's work was a common sight.

So can I, my dad was a builder and always wore bib and braces overalls at work. One vivid memory it that despite him partitioning one of the bedrooms off and making an upstairs bathroom in the late 50's and building a kitchen extension in the early 60's. He always got washed in the kitchen sink when he came home from work. I can picture him now, bib down, stripped to the waist and the smell of red carbolic soap. He always said he was too mucky to go upstairs.

[Tizer]

In the 1990s we had a popular plasterer known to everyone as Jock. His work was immaculate and he was much in demand. His little white van was a mess - completely white inside due to plaster dust!

[Stanley]

"He always said he was too mucky to go upstairs"
I always did the same when I came home. When I was working with cattle there was the added problem of the germs I was bringing home from the cow muck and the cattle infections like Brucellosis. The Brucellosis got me but never the kids and yes, strong disinfectant soap was favourite!
This morning's Flatley Dryer example is triggered by politics. It used to be a given that certain people could always be trusted to tell the truth. One of these was people in public life particularly politicians. Indeed, lying was a resigning matter as was culpability for mistakes. Remember Peter Alexander Rupert Carington, 6th Baron Carrington, Baron Carrington of Upton? He took responsibility for the complacent attitude of the Foreign Office that led to the Falklands War and resigned.
Today we have a Prime Minister who is a proven liar and somehow this doesn't count any more. The taint has spread throughout politics and public life. The only people I can think of who I would trust are the Supreme Court judges......

[Stanley]

This morning's Flatley Dryer example is one that not many people will know about.
One of the strongest elements of the cattle trade in the North of England and Scotland was the 'Tides of Cattle' that flowed with the seasons between England and Scotland. The Scottish farmers were supreme stock rearers and cattle bred and reared there always did well when they moved south for fattening. The north of England with it's large conurbations and farmer retailers was a good breeding ground for the best dairy cattle and a good market for heifers in calf. This meant that there were recognised flows of cattle. Beef calves for rearing moved south, some as calves but many as stirks, young cattle. Good dairy calves moved North for rearing and bringing into milk and the resulting dairy heifers moved into the North of England where the farmer retailers had the money and the markets to give the best price. When dairy cattle got some age on them the Northern farmer retailers sold them on to dealers from Cheshire who liked big baggy milk cattle.
All this meant that there was continuity and a stable trade which everyone understood. By the 1970s the farmer retailers were being knocked out by the big supermarkets undercutting them and destroying the doorstep market. The visible result was the end of the milk chap delivering each morning. Deeper in the system it knocked out the demand for the best quality from the farmer retailers, this killed the trade in good dairy calves and the return of in calf heifers from Scotland. In turn this undercut the markets, farmers, hauliers and the Northern dealers. The trade collapsed and with it the seasonal tides of cattle. The days I saw in the early 1970s were the last days of that trade. I am assured by my old employer and friend Richard Drinkall that there is nowhere near the market there was and the old days are gone forever. It's Flatley Dryer country and many will never have realised it existed.

[Stanley]

Lanark auction in 1977. That group of men next to the office door were all major dealers and spent millions of pounds a year buying cattle. They held real power in the farming community from Aberdeen to the middle of England and beyond. They tell me the trade is but a shadow of what it was. (Note that the market provided an electric fan heater for them!)

[Stanley]

Note that in the image of the dealers, all the dealers and the auctioneer wear ties, the farmers don't. Like Bowler hats in earlier times, a collar and tie was a badge of office. Some would say it still is.

[Wendyf]

This item from the Craven Herald popped up in my Facebook feed the other day, it makes an interesting comparison with your Lanark photo.

Screenshot_20220112-072309_Opera.jpg

[Stanley]

[Wendyf]

Ive just seen that the photo is from a previous year of course, no masks or safe distancing!

[Stanley]

I noticed that Wendy. Would the same sale this year attract as many entries?

[Wendyf]

The report is about entries at this year's sale Stanley, just an old photo.

[Stanley]

Yup..... Silly me..... Senior moment Wendy.

[Stanley]

When I was a lad...... Buses and trams always had a driver and a conductor who took the fares and monitored safety. Trains always had Guards and even goods trains had a guard's van at the rear with a guard who was responsible for a lot of the safety actions needed like setting fog signals if the train stopped.
This is now Flatley dryer country on buses and trams and train companies are trying to remove guards from trains, all in an effort to reduce wages.

[Stanley]

I always thought that being a guard with a coal fired stove in the van wasn't a bad job!

[Stanley]

Until well into the 1950s, the sight of a watchman with his brazier guarding a hole in the road at night was a common sight. He also looked after the red paraffin lamps that marked the works and in foggy weather used Well's flares as the orange flickering light showed up better in fog than the paraffin lamps.

[Tizer]

The ironmonger's shop seems to have become Flatley Dryer territory. The ones we have known have all disappeared either due to B&Q type competition or simply the owner selling up due to illness or worse. Now we occasionally find one when we're on holiday - there's still one in Porthleven, Cornwall, for example (if it's still there after the pandemic). Often we've sought one out because we couldn't get what we wanted in the big stores or on the web. My parents best friends had an ironmonger's shop in their house near Skew Bridge on Whalley New Road in Blackburn. I remember it as a child - the smell of paraffin and firelighters!

[Stanley]

You are so right Peter and I regret it. Even the ones that are left like Morten's in Ilkley are more like pound shops than old fashioned ironmongers. You could go into Morten's and buy a piece of silver steel, a wood plane or a micrometer 40 years ago but not now. We had a good one in Barlick, Elmer's.



Here it is in 1982, it's been a tanning salon for years.

Another trade that has withered away is the old fashioned chemist's shop. They actually sold chemicals and non branded pharmaceutical ingredients, remember the rows of labelled drawers? Strychnine as rat poison and photographic chemicals. Now all they sell is proprietary brands at inflated prices. To be fair they acknowledge this in the job title, they are not chemists any more but pharmacists....
(If you look carefully at the pic of Elmers you'll see that the shop to the right in Newtown has the word 'drugs' on the shop front. This was John's father Mr Elmer who ran the best chemist shop in the town.)

[Tizer]

When we moved to Somerset in the mid-90s our nearest small town had a family-owned DIY store. It was a big shed, had several assistants behind the counter and was like an ideal cross between B&Q style and an old-fashioned ironmonger. The staff were very knowledgeable, helpful and had a sense of humour. You could have a joke and a gossip with them as they helped you. They stocked everything that we needed. The time came when the family had to sell up because none of the younger generation wanted to carry on the business. After that it became targeted at tradesmen only. We couldn't get advice and nothing had a price tag on it. No browsing. So we stopped going there. As the years went by someone eventually took the plunge and now there's a little ironmonger's shop in the town again and it seems to be thriving!

As for the chemist's shop, I worked at Boots Chemists in the 1960s and the shop still had all the old drawers behind the counter and shelves stretching up to the ceiling - we needed a ladder to reach the upper shelves. I think it might have previously been a Co-op shop or, if not, had been based on the same design. Double windows at the front, doorway in the centre. Counters either side running front to back. Chemist's on one side, toiletries etc on the other. The counters had been changed from the old flat top by putting dividers across the surface in which goods could be displayed - those that were safe to let customers choose themselves. We sold cameras and film but I don't remember selling any developing chemicals although we might have had some in stock. We sold a lot of meths and ammonia, weedkiller, cleaning chemicals, caustic soda, rat poison etc. The dispensary was in a corner at the back behind a screen. Behind that were extra old rooms, still with their original stone-flagged floors and a big ceramic sink. Also a flagged yard outside the back. There was a flagged cellar too, running the whole length and width of the shop, stone-flagged, full of spiders, cold and damp and used to store stuff that wouldn't suffer from the conditions. Above the ground floor was a second floor which had a small tea room for staff and the rest used to store other goods.

[Stanley]

Some of the things I bought off Mr Elmer. Hydrochloric acid, concentrated H2SO4, Warfarin rat poison and for medicines, Armenian Bole, Fuller's earth and Chlorodyne. I'd challenge anyone to find them in Barlick now....

[Tizer]

Reading about Bletchley Park in WW2 I noted that they used, among many other things, Hollerith machines and cards. I remember these were still being used by British Northrop in the 1960s when I started work there as a progress clerk. I guess the machine now qualifies for the Flatley Dryer tag, although it was the beginning of the use of binary code in the late 1800s, led to the formation of the IBM company and eventually the digital world we now live in. Hollerith and IBM