THE FLATLEY DRYER

[Tizer]

Even the best of us can make mistakes but you must have had a senior moment to think olive oil at 80p a litre was going to be OK!

`Why are retro sweets tasting success?' LINK
These may appear `retro' but I wonder how many are made in the UK and how their composition and taste matches with their predecessors?

[Stanley]

Quite right Tiz. It was a senior moment! My only excuse is that Chaudrey's sometimes do have bargains like that as they use Asian wholesalers.
Funny thing but almost all the sweets mentioned in that article are modern ones to me. My favourites were the old loose boiled sweets sold in 4 ounce paper bags. Sarsaparilla Tablets, Winter Warmers, Aniseed drops and for a change, anything with Liquorice in it. Can you remember those short fluted extruded sticks of Aniseed? I know they are verboten but still enjoy a few occasionally just for the taste.
My all time favourite is the Maxilyn Flyer, a liquorice tube filled with Sherbet. I got hooked on them when I made a new treacle boiler for the firm who worked out of Swan No. 2 Mill at Bolton. The owner used to give me full boxes of the giant flyers. I still get one every now and then just to remind me of the taste. They used the very best ingredients, Chinese Spanish in large blocks, molasses and cornflour to make the Liquorice Tubes.
One interesting thing, I wanted to make the paddles in the boiler out of Stainless steel but he insisted on me re-using the old cast iron paddles as he said they gave the best flavour. Happy days!

[Tripps]

Can you remember those short fluted extruded sticks of Aniseed?

Would that be 'colts foot rock' ?

Goodness knows why that name, or why I still remember it.

[Wendyf]

Coltsfoot rock is made from extract of coltsfoot, a plant with hoof shaped leaves. It's produced exclusively in Oswaldwistle! It does taste of aniseed though.

[Stanley]

That's it! I got the flavour wrong. Coltsfoot Rock. It always reminded me of aniseed.

[Tizer]

`Bandstands: The industry built on Victorian social engineering' LINK

[Stanley]

All part of the late 19th century debate on Physical Efficiency which was boosted early in the 20th C by the fact that in industrial areas 60% of recruits were unfit for service. Included public parks.



In Barlick we went for the cheap option, a natural amphitheatre in Letcliffe Park.

[Stanley]

The late 19th century and early 20th were the high water mark of ornamental municipal ironwork, particularly in cast iron. Foundries like Coalbrookdale took the art to new heights.



Here's an example of a fountain. I don't know where our memorial Jubilee fountain was cast but it's a good example even though a marriage of stone and iron. Cast iron municipal street furniture ranged from architectural details and urinals to horse troughs and complete buildings. Many small villages had what we now call a Gormless. Ornamental lamps combining drinking fountains with no obvious use and often sited in the middle of the road, hence the name I think. Our example started in the middle of the road at the top of Butts, moved up to Letcliffe Park and when Town Square was conceived came back down into the town.

[Stanley]

Angus's pic of Town Square reminds me that I was against demolishing the old Co-op at the time but soon decided I was wrong. It is an asset to the town and was a brilliant idea.
There was another change that I thought was a bad idea and that was moving the recycling skips and bottle banks from the Pioneer car park to the Rainhall Road car park. I was wrong again and now they have been done away with and I assume the Council recycling services are dealing with the problem. Both areas look a lot better now but I notice that black bags of rubbish are still left at the Rainhall Road site occasionally.
I can remember the days of the old dust bins that took everything and were tipped by hand into a covered wagon once a week. At the time that was a great advance on the old middens that had to be raked out and shovelled into a cart. People complain about collection frequencies but they are lucky, the system we have now is far better.

[Stanley]

Something that has changed completely over the years is food processing. At one time this was mainly confined to canning and the flour milling industry, the demand for white bread has much to answer for! Then, coinciding with the early days of self-service shops and the eventual advent of the supermarkets entrepreneurs woke up to the fact that they could increase profit levels on foods by making them 'convenient'. This started with things like tinned steak and kidney pies but rapidly expanded to the creation of whole new areas of food like pot noodles and pre-cooked spaghetti in cans. Fast food, which had been restricted to small high street shops like fish and chip and pie shops moved onto the supermarket shelves with new breakfast cereals and ready made meals. Refrigeration helped here by extending shelf-life. The food scientist's ingenuity didn't stop there, they discovered that the shelf-life of many foods could be extended if they substituted hydrogenated vegetable oils and trans-fats for butter and lard. Hydrogenation to harden fats had been used for many years in the manufacture of margarine from a variety of fats and oils including whale oil. Today this is bolstered by increased advertising but as the tide of innovation in food design slowed the concept of convenience and more choice grew.
The latest development has taken fast food a stage further. Over the last few years the concept of home delivery of hot food that could be eaten immediately with no need to shop or cook started with the advent of "don't cook. Just eat", this was soon simplified to "Just Eat" and now we have the exponential growth of delivery firms who have further refined the concept by establishing 'cooking centres'. These are kitchens owned by the delivery firms which cook and sell foods under the brand of the high street shops but never see them, they operate as franchises.
All these innovations are designed with one idea in mind, the maximisation of profit. People are told they are to busy to do mundane things like cook for themselves when in reality they have more leisure time than ever we had in the past. I am constantly amazed by the prices people will pay for 'convenience'. Those of us who still cook enjoy food that is cheaper than at any time in my life.
If we enter a period of decreased incomes will cooking suddenly become the 'new thing'. I hope so but somehow doubt it. Perhaps we need to start teaching cooking in schools again and having a proper official body devoted entirely to nutrition. Surprisingly this does not exist at the moment despite the fact that proper diet is the way to health. We are at last beginning to realise that degradation of food by processors and the agrochemical industry is at the root of many of our modern diseases.

[Stanley]

Another food-related matter that has been transformed in the last 70 years is the brewing industry. I those days all barrels were wooden and the draymen were a breed of their own. All barrels were handled manually and they used to drop them off the horse-drawn drays onto a sack full of padding and then let them down a ramp into the cellar with a block and tackle hung from a cat head on the wall over the cellar trapdoor.



What was then known as The Barlick in 1983, originally The Commercial and now The Fountain, in Church Street. (Another change is the way pubs were renamed over the years.) You can see the wrought iron cat head with the trapdoor to the cellar underneath on the left corner of the building.
It was the custom for the landlord of the pub to give the draymen a pint of beer when they had finished and you can imagine how much they necked in a day.
The dray and the horses were seen as a good advertisement in large towns and cities and they were often specially decorated to enhance this.



This horse at Vaux brewery in Sunderland is more typical of everyday deliveries.

[Wendyf]

Tetley's used shire horses to deliver in Leeds right up until 2006.

[Stanley]

I think Thwaites did as well in Blackburn.

[Tizer]

They even have their own web page! Thwaites horses

[Stanley]

Quite a few steam traction engines and wagons got a reprieve as well. I remember Nelstrop's Flour Mills in Stockport running theirs as late as the latter days of the war. (LINK)

[Bodger]

I remember these working in Glossop up to 1960
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk ... eam-912370

[Stanley]

And they bought it after the war.... Fuel was still rationed in 1948.

[Stanley]

One of the most amazing things about the outbreak of war in 1939 was how fast the country was put on a war footing by the administration. It was obvious that a tremendous amount of planning had gone on in the 1930s and the Civil Service swung into action like a well-oiled machine. It should be some consolation to us now. Many years ago I said that the current unpleasantness was as serious as 1939 and needed the same remedies. I have no doubt that plans are in place for many eventualities like the introduction of food and fuel rationing. The same could apply to civil order. Don't be surprised at anything that happens from now on. It's a good bet that included in those plans will be an identity card scheme... (What a good thing we are recruiting 20,000 extra police)

[Stanley]

One of the things we learned in WW2 was the value of loyalty to local shops. As things got more difficult, especially at the butcher's and fishmonger, if anything was in short supply it was kept 'under the counter' and regular customers were the favoured recipients. In those days we tended to use the same local shops every day and the same thing applied at all of them.
Today we have the supermarkets which, even though they have loyalty cards will not be making these distinctions if there are any shortages, it will be first come first served. It could well be that the early bird may get the worm.
For anyone who thinks I am being slightly alarmist about these matters, you may well be right. But once bitten twice shy and in case you hadn't noticed gaps are already appearing on the shelves and prices are creeping up for some items.

[Stanley]

When there are shortages of anything the market reacts by raising the price. In wartime this was seen as profiteering and prices were controlled. In time this extended to almost all goods and was a very helpful factor for those on lower incomes. Today, when the market is king this does not apply, it is seen as 'too much regulation'. Will we see similar measures again as the world changes? Watch this space.

[Stanley]

It was not until the passing of the Dangerous Drugs Act in 1920, aimed particularly at opiates, that over the counter sales of what we now regard as ‘illegal drugs’ were stopped. Until then all these drugs were available over the counter. Anyone could purchase them, even young children doing the shopping for their mother. The most common of these soporifics was Laudanum. If you walked into a chemist’s shop in Barlick at any time before 1920 you could have obtained Laudanum or one of the proprietary medicines that contained it without comment. Some of these medicines survived into our time, I can still remember going into Elmer’s and asking for kaolin and morphine for diarrhoea. Also freely on sale until the 1950s was the proprietary medicine Dr J Collis Brown's Chlorodyne, “for coughs and colds”. Containing laudanum, tincture of cannabis, and chloroform, it readily lived up to its claims of relieving pain, as a sedative, and for the treatment of diarrhoea.
Remember that in the period we are considering one of the greatest everyday problems that afflicted the whole of the population was pain. The state of medicine was primitive and the only analgesics available for both rich and poor were the ‘soporific drugs’, usually alcohol and opiates. The public perception of these was completely different than ours. These drugs were friends and comforters and it is not surprising that they were universally and freely available.
As is always the case, human ingenuity found other uses for opiates. One old penny spent on Laudanum produced more comfort and relief from everyday life than a penny spent on alcohol and there is plenty of evidence that the poor used it as a substitute for strong drink. In a world where pain and misery were commonplace, the use of opiates in the search for oblivion was the cheapest means of escape.
I was struck by research done into pit villages where the main employment was destroyed with the pit closures. The availability of illegal drugs and their use mushroomed for the same reasons, it was a cheaper escape from reality than drink. Remember the quotation from Love on the Dole, "The quickest way out of Salford was six pints of beer". I may have got the quantity wrong but you get the picture.
Look for the two articles I wrote called "Drugged to Death", they are in Stanley's View. Then reflect that this same reason might be a partial explanation of our modern drug problem.

[Stanley]

When I was a lad the Victorian habit of keeping scrap books was still common. You could buy large books at the newsagents and fill them with things that interested you. I remember that during the war my mother would make flour and water paste for me, if you boil plain flour to make a gruel it becomes an adhesive paste. Lots of wall paper was hung using it in the days before proprietary pastes. I used to put all sorts in the book and I wonder where they all went, you occasionally see one at auction but tens of thousands must have been started and discarded.
Another very popular pastime was 'cutting out'. You could buy books of shapes that you cut out and could make things. The most popular for girls was a figure of a doll and clothes that you could cut out and dress it with using folded tabs. I wonder how many of them are sold now? I suppose like scrapbooks they are a casualty of the digital age...

[Cathy]

Gosh, I can remember the dolls and clothes and folding those tabs, haha.
Our mother seemed to be big on stickers, the kind that back in 'her time' had to be licked like a stamp to make it stick. Many times when she sent me a birthday card she would stick little stickers inside it. (These were modern day ones with adhesive on the back).
Today we often add a hand-drawn smiley face when signing a card.

[Stanley]

I remember those stickers Cathy and the sheets of coloured subjects for cutting out, there was a name for them but I have forgotten it.

[Bodger]

One of my hobbies was collecting truck drivers badges, these were lovely enameled lapel emblems of the manufacturer, I used to write to Leyland, Albion, Thornycroft , Sentinel etc. and the generally replied in the affirmative, i had over 12 at one stage but like other things i cannot recall where they went ?