THE FLATLEY DRYER

[Stanley]

Trade plates were usually a sure ticket to a ride, like you Bodge I have seen many of them and often gave them lifts. We saw a lot with the concrete blocks on them, they were out on test runs for development I suppose but of course in those days most heavy vehicles were virtually hand-built so they might have been bedding them in. In those days, if you bought a new car, you were always advised to 'run it in' for the first few months, avoiding high revs and not loading the engine at low revs. Tolerances and inspection are now so tight that this seems to have vanished. I once spent a very productive morning with a bloke called Johnson who was manager at Gardner's at Patricroft. (I learned more about engine seizure than you could poke a stick at!) At one point I asked him about service intervals and he said "Oil change every 5,000 miles, filter every 10,000 and bring it to us for a full check-over at 100,000 and it will last for ever". I think he may well have been right. The engine in my AEC Meteor tanker had done over 600,000 miles when I left the dairy and was still in good nick, the only problem it had was stretched cylinder head bolts at about 500,000. Funny thing is that after I left the new driver reckoned it was useless and 6 months later they scrapped it. Work it out for yourself....
One other little thing comes to mind about looking after a motor by good driving. Danny Pateman was the best man with a crash box I ever saw and he once told me that the man who taught him said that when changing gear you should always imagine that the gear lever knob was a small bird and the object was not to crush it! I don't know about modern gearboxes but the Albion constant mesh box was even harder to manage properly than the old crash boxes because you had to match the dogs and being fewer they were harder to find. Doubling your clutch got to be such a habit that I did it even on synchromesh.

[Stanley]

I was watching 'Gosford Park' last night (Julian Fellowes was doing a trial run for Downton Abbey here wasn't he!) and one of the characters opened her wallet (1932) and there were the old banknotes. It reminded me of the White Fiver, surely one of the nicest banknotes ever. I occasionally got hold of one of them and they were a proper banknote, you really felt you were holding serious money! Discontinued in 1957 when we were told it was too easy to forge. It was only printed on one side and legend held that a genuine one could be pulled through a wedding ring.

[Stanley]

An even earlier bank note....

[Stanley]

You were a millionaire if you had one of these in your pocket!

[Stanley]

Thinking about money. Our loose change in our pockets was a lot heavier in those days, Half-crowns, Florins, old pennies and halfpennies and of course the Threepenny Joey! All serious coins with a lot of metal in them. That was why they were modified, it got to the point where the scrap value of the coins was higher than the face value.

[PanBiker]

Three pennies weighed an ounce so a bobs worth was a quarter lb. The old Victorian thick pennies even heavier, spurning the "pennyweight".

[Stanley]

Ian, we must have had stronger pockets in those days! Some of the old florins (pre 1920 I think) were solid silver and we were always looking out for them when I was a lad but I never found one!

[PanBiker]

1926 I think when the mint debased the silver coinage by adding cupro nickel. Now we don't even have copper coins, most are iron plated with copper. I do like our modern two tone silver and gold (coloured) coins though, very stylish.

[Stanley]

I can remember the first time I got a 50p piece in my change instead of a 10/- note, I was in Scotland near Girvan at the time and it felt like an event, my world was changing. I still convert modern coinage into old money and still marvel at the way prices have 'risen' in monetary terms even though logic tells me that most things are relatively cheaper. When I was a lad, a wage earner who got £1000 a year was in middle or upper management. My monthly income when I bought Hey Farm for £2,200 was about £32 a month before tax! No wonder kids can't believe it today. Some of them have that much for pocket money! I am definitely getting old....

[PanBiker]

When I started work in 1970 I was on £7.12/6 per week as an apprentice, when I finished my time 5 years later at 21 I was on exactly £21.00 per week (easy to remember).

[Stanley]

In 1953 when I started work for Lionel Gleed at Whatcote as an agricultural learner I got £1 a week plus bed and board. 10/- went straight into a Post Office savings account and the rest went on Woodbines and the occasional pint of rough cider in the village pub. I enjoyed every minute of it and never felt hard done to. When I went into the army in June 1954 I think I got a pay rise! I've looked it up and I'm right, it was £1-8-0 a week in training and went up as I got qualifications.

[Stanley]

How many people remember Woodbine cigarettes? Un-tipped and strong tobacco they were aimed at the lower end of the market. Apart from being cheap they were sold in packets of five as well as the more usual tens and twenties. In those days there were many different brands of fags, my favourite was always Player's Navy Cut. The packaging for these had a legend associated with it. If you pushed out the slide and looked on the back of it there was a black and white version of the picture on the outside of the packet and it was slightly different. (LINK). I looked them up and was surprised to find they are still available today.

[Bodger]

an old tale, a man lost in the desert joins up with a camel train on the way to the docks, as he's walking beside the camels he keeps hearing voices counting, 1,2,3,4, etc. at every camel he heard the same, the man puzzled over this during the trek, at the docks when they were unloading the packed camels he saw that their packs were of tobbaco. It is at this point the person telling the tale opens his pack of Senior Service cigs, and on the inside flap shows the audience the logo " it's the tobbaco that counts"

[Stanley]

The old ones are the best Bodge! Churchman's were 'the 15 minute cigarette', Craven 'A' were 'good for your throat' and the most famous one was probably 'You're never alone with a Strand Cigarette' together with the famous image of the bloke stood on a bridge.

[Stanley]

I don't know why but I was reminded the other day of a driver who used to go and give kids a ride round the back streets on the back of his empty wagon while his neighbours kept his place in the queue for loading at the docks in Liverpool. He said he always got invited in for a cup of tea and who knows, perhaps there were other side benefits.... One thing was sure, it relieved the tedium of waiting, sometimes for days, to get in the dock and get loaded. The docks were a world on their own, different rules applied in there. You had to be very careful not to upset the dockers or like as not you'd be subjected to a search by the dock police when you eventually got out. Surprising how often a stolen bottle of whisky or something similar was found concealed under your sheet on the flat. It was all a fiddle of course between the dockers and the police who were often in on the tremendous amount of pilfering that went on, 'the bunce' as it was called. Containerisation stopped all that of course and this was one of the reasons why the dockers were so vehemently opposed to it. There were many disputes during the change-over about who should stuff the containers because that was where the bunce was. The dockers lost of course and the old way of life melted away.

[Stanley]

I always drove for small firms and wasn't hampered by a lot of rules so I gave people a lift many a time. It was amazing what interesting characters they were and many a time I learned useful things from them. A young lad came to me one day in Gargrave and asked if he could have a ride with me. I was off to Scotland later that morning so I went round to see his mother and find out what she thought. She was recently divorced and told me that she thought the lad was missing his father and said she was happy with it so I took him up to Kelso and back. The first of many trips he did with me. He was a good lad and we did a lot of talking. Funnily enough, years later when I got divorced I was heavily influenced by what he had told me about his views on the divorce and how it had affected him. I often wonder where he ended up, I still have a soft spot for him! (Perhaps he ended up being a long distance driver.....)

[Stanley]

One of the things that gets very little mention when 'the old days' are discussed is the length of the working day, especially for wagon drivers. True we were regulated and had log books but in all my time driving mine was never inspected. Good job too! I would have been in serious trouble. Times were hard and we just did the work and made as much on overtime as we could. The result was incredibly long weeks. I regularly did more than 90 hours and sometimes even more, it makes you wonder how we stood it. I always had the reinforcement that I knew why I was doing it, to support my family and pay the mortgage. I can remember vividly that the only time I felt hard done to was say on a Saturday evening, I would be tramming along somewhere in England and seeing all the young lasses dressed to the nines on their way out for a night out and there was me, still hard into the collar. It was hard on the family too. Vera never knew when I'd be home when I was on the tramp, usually just once a week.
But, we had it do do and looking back I'm glad I had the experience. There was nothing quite like tramping, looking for your own work. For all the drawbacks you were captain of the ship and nobody bothered you as long as the wheels were turning and there was a load on the flat.
Mind you, I wouldn't like to go back and do it all again!

[Tizer]

Ian, we must have had stronger pockets in those days! Some of the old florins (pre 1920 I think) were solid silver and we were always looking out for them when I was a lad but I never found one!

I missed these posts while away for a fortnight and I'm catching up now. In the 1880s there were even heavier `double florins' (4 shillings), known as `barmaid's grief' because they were too easy to mistake for a crown (5 shillings) and to give too much change to the customer. As for pennies, Boulton & Watt's `cartwheel' penny at the start of the 1800s was very thick and heavy. And the cartwheel tuppence was twice as heavy! The tuppence only lasted a few years and the penny for a couple of decades - pockets couldn't cope with them!

[Whyperion]

I missed these posts while away for a fortnight and I'm catching up now. In the 1880s there were even heavier `double florins' (4 shillings), known as `barmaid's grief' because they were too easy to mistake for a crown (5 shillings) and to give too much change to the customer. As for pennies, Boulton & Watt's `cartwheel' penny at the start of the 1800s was very thick and heavy. And the cartwheel tuppence was twice as heavy! The tuppence only lasted a few years and the penny for a couple of decades - pockets couldn't cope with them!

Oops just sold to a friend's daughter a small cache of victorian worn coins, charged here 8x face value , but I think I charged as crown the double florins. The sale elsewhere of the money box they were in kept the petrol money fund in balance, (necessary journeys unfortunately)

[Stanley]

Long ago and far away, before the days of TV and electronic games there was the Saturday morning matinee for children at the local cinema. On Heaton Moor, a suburb of Stockport where I lived it was the Savoy. I think the performance was 10:00 until about noon and we were in there every weekend goggling at Flash Gordon, The Perils of Pauline and short cowboy films. Remember Roy Rogers and his horse Trigger? Looking back they were very simplistic with visual effects like a rocket ship on a piece of string with cigarette smoke trailing out of the back of it moving across the screen. No matter, we were riveted and didn't miss a frame. I think the price was 3d in the front rows but I also remember that when we went across to my Auntie Alice's in Dukinfield we went to the Oxford which was Katie corner to her sweet shop at the top of Sandy Lane. During the war jam jars must have been short and the two front rows were reserved for anyone who took a clean empty jam jar in as an entrance fee. There was another advantage of course, Aunty Alice used to give us a two ounce bag of boiled sweets as well. Certain pieces of music that were used as signature tunes still trigger off images of moustachioed villains tying Pauline to the railway line and the Merciless Ming!

[Stanley]

When they showed 'Gone with the Wind' at the savoy, a very long film, they had an interval half way through and the usherettes (!) came down the aisles and sprayed us all with a scented disinfectant.

[Stanley]

Can anyone remember the double seats on the back row at the pictures? And the usherettes who came round occasionally and shone their torch down the row to discourage any excessive behaviour? The ice cream ladies with the trays hung round their necks? They usually came round while the advertisements were on, in the days before TV this was high powered marketing! Then there was the news, Movietone. Pathe and an American one called 'The March of Time'. (See THIS LINK)

[Stanley]

Another thing I remember about the Savoy is that on Saturday night when the evening performance finished there was a news seller outside the cinema selling the next day's Sunday papers.....

[Stanley]

One of the common items in the home 70 years ago was a small tub, usually in the hearth, full of 'spills'. These were very thin, coloured pieces of wood about six inches long and were used to get a light form the fire for a cigarette or lighting the gas stove. You put them out by knocking the end on something and used them again until they were too short. There must have been millions made and used every day.

[Wendyf]

As young children we used to make spill holders at school, I must have really enjoyed making them as I remember it vividly and all the colours of the spills. This must have been around 1955/6 in Wyke.
Spills & pipe cleaners....takes me back to my grandma & grandad's cottage in Wyke, playing happily with few pipe cleaners and spills, and the dominoes and coloured wooden shapes kept in a big Nuttall's Mintoes tin which lived in the cupboard at the side of the range.