THE FLATLEY DRYER

[Stanley]

I can still remember being sent out on cold windy mornings to get my dad's morning paper, I enjoyed the different smell of the air but coming from heavily polluted Stockport I didn't realise why it was so nice. There used to be a class of boarding house that was known as 'bed and cruet'. You took your own food and catered for yourself. In wartime, under rationing you had to hand in your ration book and if the landlady made a mistake it was a disaster. I can remember a burned blancmange that had to be eaten.....

[Stanley]

During wartime many amusements at the seaside were closed, I seem to remember this included the piers. As kids we were intrigued by the cast iron machines on railway platforms that, before the war, had dispensed penny bars of chocolate. I remember we used to try the slides on the off chance!

[Bodger]

My maternal grandparents lived in Sheffield, i remember when visiting that on Sundays the park swings etc were chained up to prevent children from ejoying themselves on the Sabbath

[chinatyke]

My maternal grandparents lived in Sheffield, i remember when visiting that on Sundays the park swings etc were chained up to prevent children from enjoying themselves on the Sabbath

Miserable lot in Sheffield!

[Stanley]

Not really, there used to be Park Wardens and their main task seemed to be to stop us every time we really started to enjoy ourselves! Chaining the rides on Sundays was quite common. Every park had a crown bowling green and as I got a bit older I got very interested in bowling. An old bloke gave me a very good pair of woods and right up to going in the army I enjoyed the game. My woods, like a lot of other treasures, vanished while I was in Germany.

[Bodger]

It can be a b-gger when you lose your bowls !!

[Tizer]

My dad pronounces the word as `bowels', which often causes confusion such as when he announced, out of the blue, that Uncle George had got `new bowels'.

[Stanley]

Many of the old lads used the same pronunciation. They were a great lot and helped us youngsters. We learned the mysteries of bowling on the ledge, the gutter and striking and soon got good enough to take them on. Happy and totally good days.
I remember once going to a pub called 'The Bowling Green' in Denton with my dad and they were worming the green. Worm casts play hell with your line! They had a applied a chemical and were barrowing worms off which had risen to the surface. Amazing sight, I didn't know there were so many worms in the world!

[Tizer]

My Uncle George pronounced it differently from both bowls and bowels and I can't think how to describe the sound except that we all pronounced `Bo' in Bolton with the same sound (and dropped the `L').

[Stanley]

The thing I remember most is the smell inside the pavilion at the bowing green on a warm day, a mixture of tobacco smoke, linseed oil and creosote.

[Stanley]

I watched a programme on the M6 last night and marvelled at the amount of traffic. My mind went back to the old days and so I went on the web and found this image of traffic on the final climb to the summit on Shap Fell, looking North. I reckon this is the late 1950s and it was just the same when I started using the road which was the A6 of course, since replaced by the M6. This is typical of how it was, notice how close together the north bound traffic is. What the image can't show is the speed which was governed by the slowest wagon in the queue, always a heavily loaded and under powered wagon in second gear doing about 10mph. You had no choice but to be patient! Notice also the larger gap between the wagons south bound. They are all in low gear because it was steep and you couldn't rely on your brakes. The Atkinson in front shows a typical sheeted and roped load. It's a bag manufacturer’s vehicle and the load is almost certainly jute sacks from Aberdeen.
Look at this and reflect on how things have changed! Apart from the speed, this road couldn't possibly cope with today's levels of traffic. To a modern driver this is unbelievable as he thunders down the road with up to 500hp underneath him. To an old fart like me, it was the reality and we coped with it and kept the country running. I had 90hp on a good day for 14 tons. The driver of the Atkinson almost certainly has a Gardner 6LW 120hp engine and if I remember rightly he was running at about 20 tons. We both had about 6hp per ton. A modern 40ton outfit has twice as much, over 12hp per ton. They don't know they were born!

[David Whipp]

Thanks Stanley.

I saw the M6 programme; the plastic bottles of driver's piss were quite interesting...

Without plastic bottles, was the cry of 'waggoner's rights' heard much in the '50s?

[Tizer]

I might have mentioned before about Little Jimmy who drank in the Oozebooth pub on the corner of Bastwell Road and Oak Street in Blackburn in the 1950s. He'd driven horse-drawn wagons over Shap and had tales to tell - sleeping under the wagon in winter, for example.

... a mixture of tobacco smoke, linseed oil and creosote.

That sounds like a lethal mix, suitable for offering to the Kurds to use against ISIS!

[Stanley]

Nothing quite like the smell of a creosoted wooden shed in full sun. In particular I remember one at Gilpin Mill in the Lake District. The sun was shining through the window in a shaft sparkling with dust motes and when my eyes got used to the gloom I saw the biggest, meanest motor bike in the world. Tom and his son had got the biggest JAP vee twin they could find and built a bike round it, then they took it to Bonneville Flats to see how fast it would go! Amazing what men do in sheds... He got it out and we went for a short ride in the lanes, me hanging on to a leather belt he put on for my benefit. One of life's unforgettable experiences!
David, there may be people who don't know what you mean by 'Waggoner's rights'. I was always told that a carter could stop and have a pee under the wagon anywhere and be legal. Never tried it in a town but I remember 3am one night in 1962 being half way across Scotland on the road from Lairg to Skaig Bridge and I stopped for a pee. I was quite comfortable until a lion roared just behind me. I have never moved as fast in my life! Turned out later that it was a stag rutting and probably half a mile away. As far as I was concerned it was dangerous!
There are more tales about Shap than you can poke a stick at. Things happened up there that couldn't have happened down below. How about three fish wagons running a police car off the road after they had been harassed for speeding. They boxed the car in and pushed it over the edge....
You could write a book about Charlie Alexander's fish wagons from Inverness. Their job was to beat the fish trains to Billingsgate and it was like the Wild West!

[Stanley]

The pre war and immediate post war haulage industry was a jungle, only partially improved by transport nationalisation in 1947. As soon as de-nationalisation came in the big hauliers went back to their old ways. I can remember the Davies Brothers from Charlton being stripped of their licence, the Traffic Commissioner said they weren't fit to have a dog licence. The transport manager at Slaters Haulage in Leeds was gaoled for six months. There are more stories about the hauliers than you could poke a stick at! I met Sammy Davies in Glasgow once but that's another story.....

[Stanley]

I found this on the web. One of Davis Brothers old Leyland Hippo wagons.

[chinatyke]

What a well secured load, nice to see it done properly.

I wish I could show you the load that was on our TV last night. Someone had taken a semi-trailer and welded on a 10 metres extension at the rear. All braced and it looked a professional job, except for the 40' overhang and the 100' overall length! It was loaded with I presume low density stuff, and sheeted and roped. All went well until it was on the curved slipway to the highway. It didn't look like anything broke, just twisted at the back and dumped the still sheeted load onto the highway, completely blocking the slip road.

You wouldn't believe the loads on the roads in China. There are 31.5m long car transporter trailers with cars two abreast top and bottom, 14 cars on top and perhaps 10 underneath. Here is a shorter version: http://www.autoblog.com/2011/01/01/vide ... ansporter/

Overloading is common. Have a look at this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... s-16m.html

Also commonplace are large vehicles that have "fallen over" when they hit soft verges on country roads.

[Stanley]

Roping and sheeting was where you could show the other drivers you knew your trade.

[David Whipp]

"No such thing as spare rope..."

[Stanley]

Or a spare rope hook. When I built a flat I got Jimmy Thompson to make a rope hook for the end of every bearer, plus hooks on the back of the back bearer and the front of the front bearer. Another part of the kit was plenty of dunnage, pieces of for by four timber the width of the flat. They were used for dropping heavy lumps on like ingots and most importantly aS CHOCKS AT THE FRONT OF REELS OF PAPER. tHESE WERE VERY HEAVY AND ALWAYS LOADED CROSSWAYS AND IT WAS A MISTAKE TO THINK THE HEADBOARD WAS ENOUGH TO HOLD THEM IF YOU BRAKED HEAVILY FOR SOME REASON. (bugger caps lock!) The Davis driver in the pic has used cross ropes at the front for the same reason. I also had two long chains with tighteners for use with machinery and high loads of sawn timber. Yo never knew what you were going to get when you went to a clearing house and had to be ready for anything. A favourite load was 45 Gallon drums, needed no sheeting and only roped on the back corners. Favourite ropes were the ones made out of waste cotton, I used to soak mine in oil, you could get them tighter.

[Tizer]

Also commonplace are large vehicles that have "fallen over" when they hit soft verges on country roads.

We get that here in rural Somerset when a road is closed for repairs and the lorry drivers follow their satnav and find themselves on a narrow lane with ditches either side, and they are deep ditches too.

[Stanley]

You don't have to actually go on the verge for it to happen. Many country roads 'grew like Topsy' and have no foundations near the edge. A heavy axle load can break through even though technically you are on the road surface. It happened to John Garnett near Crickle Farm below East Marton one day when he was on the way to Bradford with a full load of bottles on the Queen Mary. The lollipop man was stood a bit too far out in the road and John was too polite to tell him to step back. He got too near the edge and gradually rolled over to about 45 degrees. Not many bottles broken, just the caps bulged so we had to bring the whole lot back to the dairy for re-capping.

[Tizer]

It's interesting that you mention the soft edges because they are particularly dodgy where we live, in and around the Somerset Levels. Some of the main roads were once simply drove roads and they often cross the moors that flood in winter. In particular, the road near us where they set up the big Dutch pumps last winter is having a makeover although all we've seen so far is exploratory drilling to test the soil and surveying. I suspect they've had a shock and found that all those big Tesco artics and the like are riding over peat!

I'm noticing that, locally, the big wagons coming towards me on the country roads often have their offside wheels on my side of the white line until they get close, when they shift over just enough to let me by. Perhaps they're being told to avoid the edges? It's a bit intimidating though to see an artic coming at you like that!

[Stanley]

I doubt if anyone has given direct instructions or advice Tiz. It's just common sense driving if you are aware that point loads on one side of an axle can reach five or six tons even though the axle is limited to 9 tons. Think of a heavy camber. Particularly true if you have a high, heavy load like a stack of timber. This was why I always enjoyed compact heavy loads like 45 gallon drums, sheet steel or heavy sacks. You could switch off the part of the brain that protected you if you had a difficult load. An interesting example these days is the big farm milk collection tankers. They don't have baffles because that inhibits thorough cleaning so when they are partially full the milk can move around in the tank. Very strange sensation when you have to corner of brake with a load that can surge. Just think what that can do to point loadings on tyres....

[Bodger]

Thomas Ward, Sheffield,
http://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/at ... t-1liz.jpg