THE FLATLEY DRYER

[Stanley]

I wonder how many people will recognise the name 'Uncle Joe Santos'? See THIS to jog your memory. Uncle Joe's Mint Balls were well known throughout the North West on a par with Fisherman' Friends on the East coast and Kendal Mint Cake.

[chinatyke]

Uncle Joe's Mintballs Lyrics

[Tripps]

The Mintball almost defines the town of Wigan. I lived there in the 1970's.

Mentioned in Dr Derek J Ripley's scholarly work of some genius - his book "Forgotten Lancashire"
He describes it as "99% fact free" and I strongly recommend it.


Here's an excerpt -

Mintball Square.jpeg

[Stanley]

That recommendation doesn't surprise me in the least...
I mentioned in another topic the immersion heaters we used to cobble up out of an old tin can and a piece of dowel.
We could also get a kit from the model shop for making our own electric motors that ran off a twin cell cycle battery and I can still remember the smell that the arcing at the commutator caused as it was running. I can't ever remember running anything off them apart from a small fan made out of a can lid but we must have been learning useful things all the time.

[Tizer]

Mentioned in Dr Derek J Ripley's scholarly work of some genius - his book "Forgotten Lancashire"
He describes it as "99% fact free" and I strongly recommend it.

Isn't he the man who was ghost writer for Donald Trump's autobiography?

[Tripps]

Isn't he the man who was ghost writer for Donald Trump's autobiography?

No - that would be Tony Schwartz - widely reported at the time of his election, but fairly quiet since.

Can someone 'smart' explain why the two candidates for ths job are so pitiful?

[Stanley]

Thanks for that link David, I have just read the article and it's all news to me. I had heard the quote about 'putting lipstick on a pig' in this connection but didn't know the origin. All I can say after reading that is that you couldn't make it up. But then he did......

[Whyperion]

Dogs are on my mind this morning and I remember that the go-to tonic and cure all for dogs, very popular with the greyhound training fraternity, was a bottle of red liquid called Lintox.



It was very popular but I can find no mention of the original Lintox on the web.
Has anyone else come across it?

Anyone know how the chemicals within it actually work, has it been dusted off and checked for real effectiveness against coronaviruses ? does it kill the host cells before any virus etcs out ?

[Stanley]

Just after the war there was an upsurge in people trying to start businesses and make a market. The small adverts in popular magazines like Tit Bits were full of weird gadgets and inventions. I can remember a small tin loom that was used for darning socks, a fitting called 'The Zonk' for curing a loose stail on a brush and most memorable of all, 'The Seebackroscope' For keeping an eye on what was happening behind you as you walked down the street.

[Tizer]

This photo shows an apparatus used in the early 1900s for damping down the dust on roads. It sprayed water containing a binder. The photo is credited to the Beaulieu Motor Museum so it might have been take at the house there.

[Stanley]

Water carts were used routinely in summer on the early dry stone Macadamed roads to keep dust down. They still used them in NY in the 1980s in summer, not too sure why.
One of the things you soon learned on the dirt roads of Australia was to pull off onto the windward side of the road when you saw a road train coming towards you with its enormous rooster tail of dust. No wonder the early motorists rugged up and wore goggles even in summer.
Anyone ever get a bit of grit in their eye after looking out of the window on a steam hauled train? Shades of 'Brief Encounter.

[Stanley]

I saw a four wheel drive vehicle the other day with a bumper sticker, 'no poke without smoke'. This was a common ploy with the early diesels and the first Ford Trade 6D diesel wagons had an excess fuel control for starting that was accessible from the cab. It was often used when the engine was pulling hard to give extra power. Thank God that this is illegal now and consigned to the past. If you look at tractor pulling videos, especially in the US you'll see that it is still tolerated there.

[Tizer]

Reading about the motor car industry I see that it was in a terrible state after WW1. At the start of the war, armies were still relying on horse power and didn't have motor vehicles of their own so they acquired private cars instead. During the war period people became much more accepting of motor vehicles so after 1918 there was great demand for cars and trucks but the industry was big enough well enough equipped to meet demand. Henry Ford took a risk by borrowing $50 million to get back up to speed and then European manufacturers followed suit. It sounds very much like our present situation with the need for massive cash injections.

[Stanley]

Investment comes when an industry is stable and supported by government, that should be one of their main goals. That doesn't exist today in a world controlled by bankers and accountants who are only concerned with one thing, control of a system that gives them maximum reward. That same 'ethic' extends throughout all our systems now and is corrosive.

[Tizer]

A couple of interesting early photos connected with motoring. The first shows an early steam-powered wagon (the tallest thing in the photo is a factory chimney, not part of the wagon!). The name plate on the side says Cooper St., Preston but the company name can't be made out even under a hand lens, unfortunately. Perhaps Stanley will explain the workings of engine and transmission! The second shows Pratt's Motor Spirit (petrol, or benzine as it was often called then) being delivered in cans by a horse-drawn cart. I was surprised to read that when the first petrol pumps began to be installed outside shops, garages etc they were sometimes also installed at pubs! Click on the photos to enlarge them...

steam_wagon.jpg

Pratts_spirit.jpg

[chinatyke]

The company is T Coulthard & Co Ltd, Cooper Street, Preston. They were an engineering firm and were taken over in 1907 by LSMC (Lancashire Steam Motor Co) and they became Leyland Motors later that year. I'm sure there is a lot more on the web if you want to dig further.

Source: https://tractors.fandom.com/wiki/Lancas ... _Motor_Co.

[Tizer]

Excellent, thanks for that China! I'd wondered if someone would be able to identify the company - there's a lot of knowledge on this forum. I did think the start of the name looked like Coult... but I didn't know any businesses up there with a name anything like that

[Stanley]

Well done China. Very primitive and early. The Pratt pic looks like a refuelling station on a rally.
In the very early days chemists sold petrol as well.

[Tizer]

A story told by a man who lived in a village near an RAF base in WW2...
When the Americans came to the base they had petrol delivered in a great big tanker. When it left the base it would stop off at the village garage and leave us with about 50 gallons of fuel. This was because the garage owner had a taxi service and the Americans depended on it to get to the pubs and to town. It was all unofficial and the story put out was that when they emptied the tanker at the base they couldn't get out the last 50 gallons because of the ground not being level. At the garage the ground was OK so they could leave the fuel there instead.

[Stanley]

'Ullage and spillage' was accepted even by the revenue. I think it's generally accepted when dealing with liquids. At the dairy we had an agreed allowance from the Milk Marketing Board for processing losses.
I used to deliver to the bonded warehouses in Scotland where the raw cask malt was stored to mature and if I remember rightly there was a small loss on each cask from spirit permeating through the wood. They called it 'The Angel's Share'.

[Tizer]

You remember rightly! The crews of the puffers did quite well too, transporting the casks from the islands to the mainland, tapping the odd cask and re-plugging it.

[Tripps]

Re the petrol scam. The definitive book (for me) on the subject is An Underworld at War.

I sent Stanley a copy, which he dutifully read. It's an account of the real situation in the War and a good counterbalance to the slant of the news, and propaganda films of the era.

I think the author of Foyle's war got a lot of his plot lines from it.

Imprimatur Tripps.

[Stanley]

Quite right David.
If you read Ernie Robert's's evidence in the LTP you'll find one little gem in there from his army days when he was helping with bomb damage rescue in London. He said the first job on any site they were sent to was to break the gas and electric meters open and nick the cash. I always think of that whenever anyone mentions 'The Blitz Spirit'.

[Stanley]

I'm listening to Jim Al-Khalili talking to a lady who designs satellites. She has described one called Aeolus (LINK) which measures global wind speeds using LIDAR and she has just pointed out that prior to Aeolus the main source of wind speed data was commercial airliners and since Covid the number of these over Europe had declined by 90%.
This got me to thinking about weather forecasting when I was a lad. You can get some idea of how primitive it was by looking at the story of how important the weather forecasters were to planning the timing of D-Day in 1944. The tools they had to work with were primitive, mainly reports from ships at sea. No wonder our forecasting was on the level of dried seaweed hanging outside the door!
Just imagine how it would have been in 1944 if they had today's technology.

[Stanley]

Jim Al-Khalili was talking to a lady who is expert in Autism yesterday and what struck me was that she was still working on alerting doctors to the fact that degrees of autism are far more subtle than they realise, and not surprisingly there is a major gap when it comes to identifying the syndrome in women.
I was reared in a time when the only facet of this complicated subject that was recognised was what was then called Mongolism and was based mainly on physical appearance. Any other behaviour was classed as 'Naughty' or 'disruptive'. We have come a long way and the programme left me wondering if any of us is completely free from a least a light dusting of the condition.
Thank God for researchers like that lady and the fact that the old attitudes are receding. That's why they qualify for being Flatley Dryer country.