THE FLATLEY DRYER

[Stanley]

I haven't looked lately but this sign for Atkinson's gents outfitters was visible on the gable end over Barclay's Bank in the 1980s. Another 'ghost sign'.

[Stanley]

In the days before mass media bill-sticking was rife. Any flat public surface was plastered with advertisements for everything from concerts and oratorios in chapels to people offering services or selling goods. I always said that reading these helped me to learn to read. I remember my mother used to take the time to help me. There were a lot of official advertisements in buses and trams. Here's one I saw in Colne in later days that made me laugh.



It was on the railway embankment on Primet Hill. It wouldn't have worked in the US!

[Stanley]

Today we are obsessed with hygiene. We tried to keep reasonably clean 70 years ago by having a weekly bath and domestic wash but there is no doubt that we were exposed to more infection and disease than today. Some of us believe that this is the reason why we had better resistance and immune systems. Some modern historians talk about the fact that people smelled bad but I have to report that if we did I never noticed and it wasn't a problem. By modern standards I am a dirty old man, I am more likely to have a good wash round the nooks and crannies with a cloth than leap into the bath but my kids tell me I smell nice, I know because I ask them! There is good evidence that very frequent showers, sometimes more than one a day, damages the body's first line of defence, the population of microbes and fungi on our skins that kills invaders. I remember my friend Ken Sansome, a GP with the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, telling me about a rash of skin complaints in young men which he eventually pinned down to the fact that they were all using a strong germicidal soap and frequent showers because of a large advertising campaign that assured users they would be more attractive to women! He persuaded them to use a milder soap and shower less and this cured the outbreak. There may be a lesson in there somewhere!

[Stanley]

I remember when I was doing the interviews for the LTP I was always amazed by the fact that the Friday night bath was universal. The sewage system must have experienced a tsunami of soapy water every Friday Night!

[Stanley]

Current discussions about the impact of modern robotics remind me of the 1950s when the big question was the effect of 'automation'. We were reassured that it meant more leisure, less overtime and higher living standards. That didn't go well.......

[Julie in Norfolk]

In the days before mass media bill-sticking was rife. Any flat public surface was plastered with advertisements for everything from concerts and oratorios in chapels to people offering services or selling goods. I always said that reading these helped me to learn to read. I remember my mother used to take the time to help me.

The first words my son read were "Persil Automatic", learned from television adverts and transferred the learning to the supermarket. That was when I started making flash cards and labelled everything in the house!

[Wendyf]

When I was little we used to play a spot the poster game on car journeys. We would each choose a favourite poster and the one who counted the most by the end of the journey won. Sometimes the game was counting makes of cars....imagine doing that now! I'm showing my age now....we used to sit at the side of the road writing down car numbers as well.

[PanBiker]

We did number plates as well Wendy, 1 - 999 in a notebook and then cross them off as you saw them.

[Wendyf]

I started doing something similar as a grown up not too long ago, though it became difficult when the number plates changed. You had to start with number 1 and go from there, but you couldn't miss any out. It became totally compulsive....car parks became fascinating places to walk around, especially at large horsey events where there were endless personalised number plates. I think my mother started me off, then I spread it to my friends.

[PanBiker]

When creeping up on Eddie Stobart trucks on the motorway we try to guess the trucks name, I think the current score is half a point each for getting half the name right. Eddie Stobart does a book with all the trucks in so you can bag them as you see them, a bit like an I Spy book. We keep a few I Spy books for the grandchildren when we have them in the car.

[Stanley]

There must be an attraction in reducing things to a logical order. Our version was train spotting and I am always annoyed when sad individuals are described as 'train-spotters'. We used the Ian Allen ABC books and were very knowledgeable about steam locos. We could identify many simply by the sound.



The motive power sheds at Heaton Mersey. We wandered at will here and nobody ever stopped us. It simply couldn't happen these days. No wonder we all grew up loving big bits of machinery!

[Stanley]

50 years after our school-days a group of us who were at SGS together had a weekend get-together in Buxton. It transpired that almost all of us had been associated with steam power and the others in general engineering. I think our teachers at SGS would not have expected this result from what was a largely classics based education. It was due solely to our contact with heavy engineering as lads including train spotting. There is a general view these days that school-leavers are not attracted to 'dirty jobs'. I can assure you that cleanliness never entered our minds, getting dirty was fun!

[Stanley]

In those days it was very common to see men returning home from work in their muck because facilities for washing weren't routinely provided. This applied particularly to miners. Chimney sweeps seemed to advertise their trade by being black!

[PanBiker]

By the early 60's we had a perfectly good bathroom provided by dad splitting one of the bedrooms up. He worked in the building trade and always wore bib and brace overalls. When he came home he always got washed in the belfast sink rather than use the bathroom, that was used for when he was cleaner Lasting memory of dad with bib down and stripped to the waist washing with carbolic or Lifebouy soap and flannel in the kitchen sink.

[Tizer]

One of the great advantages of being brought up in a council house was that they had indoor loos and bathrooms. There was no washbasin in the bathroom but the GP, on one of his visits told my parents to get a basin fitted to be more hygenic, which they did. Can you imagine a GP ordering people to modify their houses these days? Mind you, it would probably be a good thing if GPs did make more visits into people's homes; it helps if they know how their patients live.

[Stanley]

I was brought up washing in the kitchen sink and still use it more than the basin in the bathroom which is used for major stand up nook and cranny work! I don't have hot water in the kitchen so I am using cold water, very good for the complexion! I know that some people would recoil in horror at this but it's how I was reared, if we were really dirty we were sent to the sink in the cellar where mother did the washing. We had a bathroom but that was only used once a week! My dad improved our bathroom in the 1950s by installing black vitriolic tiles which were actually very deep purple glass.



I went back to look at the house on Napier Road just before it was demolished in 1988 and the bathroom, like the rest of the house, was just as we left it in 1955. It had been badly converted to flats. The vitriolic tiles were as good as the day they were installed.

[Tizer]

I thought about you yesterday and your advice about dipping the end of your kitchen tap in boiling water to stop it getting slimy growth on the end. I guess this is the cold water tap because you've disconnected the hot one. It occurred to me that the modern mixer tap used in kitchens has the advantage that there is only one outlet and that gets sterilised every time the hot water is run through it. A good reason for having a mixer tap instead of two separate ones. What triggered the thought is that we have separate hot and cold taps on a basin in the utility room and the cold tap had got slimy at the outlet. We don't use it for drinking or food use so it doesn't matter too much and a quick clean with a toothbrush now and then does the job.

[Stanley]

I've just brewed my coffee and that ritual each morning includes bleaching my pint pot, the sink and the tap. I had a good look at the spout on the tap and it's perfectly clean. It struck me that we were probably better off in the old days with brass taps because I know that copper has natural germicidal properties and perhaps brass had as well.

[Tizer]

I picked up an old, large magnet yesterday and idly moved it past metal objects to see the reaction. It's interesting to see how many metals in our everyday environment are non-magnetic, presumably because alloys have become so common as well as the usual brass.

[Stanley]

In the old days one of the advertising points for watches was that they were 'non magnetic'. Old watches have to be occasionally de-magnetised to keep them efficient.

[Stanley]

One of the biggest hidden improvements over the last 80 years has been the enormous improvements in permanent magnets. They are many times more powerful today than the old soft iron magnets. This is why firms like Dyson can make tiny high speed electric motors powerful enough to run vacuum cleaners and hair dryers. They are used in many more applications but are hidden and we don't notice them. Your microwave oven depends on a pair of powerful magnets.

[PanBiker]

Fun with Magnetism.

First generation colour TV's based on CRT technology were very susceptible to stray magnetic forces. All the CRT's had degaussing coils fitted around the outside of the main glass envelope but these could not compensate for outside forces.

Colour CRT's work by firing three individual electron beams through holes in a very thin metal plate mounted behind the front glass of the tube (shadow mask) to strike individual coloured phosphor dots which made up the display. The dots were arranged in delta formation Red, Green and Blue. The three electron beams from the guns mounted in the tube neck were scanned horizontally and vertically across the shadowmask and deflected onto the correct phosphor dots. The holes in the shadow mask were tapered which ensured that each beam struck the correctly coloured dot. The shadow mask was slightly concave and very thin (only a few thou) and was spot welded to an internal metal band fitted to the inside of the front face of the CRT. The elctron guns in the CRT neck were controlled by deflection coils around the CRT neck driven by the horizontal and vertical scanning circuits (timebases). A lot of precision controlled electromagnetic forces, under normal operation the shadow mask would inherit a magnetic charge, this was neutralised each time the TV was switched on during the first few seconds, you may remember a short buzzing sound as when you operated the on off button. This was the degaussing circuitry in operation. A thermistor controlled, (decaying) current was passed through the degauss coils to clear the shadow mask of any residual magnetic fields. This was all fine and dandy and once the sets were aligned properly at installation (a process known as static and dynamic convergence) it all worked very well.

One of the problems encountered was that most living rooms have lots of metal objects in them which can hold random magnetic fields, central heating radiators were the main culprit often sited under the window reasonably close the the TV in the corner. These stray magnetic fields could cause havoc when you were installing a set and trying to align it properly. The fix was to manually degauss the room before commencing the convergence.

To this end we carried a mains operated degaussing coil. This comprised a plastic cased hand held coil About 9" diameter) with a momentary push button which activated the coil when you held it in. The coil had a very long lead and the method was to plug it in (usually in the same socket where the TV was installed). Uncoil the lead and then activate the coil next to the suspect chunk of metal. You then moved the coil in a circular motion as you backed away across the room before releasing the button to turn off the coil. You often repeated this a few times in different orientations within the room. This effectively cleared the room of latent magnetic forces. You occasionally had to revisit some properties to repeat the procedure.

[Tizer]

You could have made a fortune out of claiming to clear people's houses of ghosts and other evil manifestations! Remember the Yeovil man's bomb detectors? Some people will believe anything. (Some even voted for Trump.)

When I got my latest hearing aids the box had a little brush for cleaning them. It's a few centimetres long and on a stem about 3mm diameter. One day I left an old battery in the box. When I tried to pick it out for disposal the brush came with it. If I held the brush the battery dangled from it and was very firmly attached. I was most impressed and looked at the brush more carefully. The end of the stem has metal embedded in it and I assume it must be a tiny neodymium magnet. Model railway enthusiasts now use these to couple and uncouple wagons in their trains.

[Stanley]

I still have two degaussing coils that are a hangover from the days when I was using tape recorders. One is a very fine tip for de-magnetising the recording heads and the other is a larger coil for bulk erasure of tapes. I was always very careful where I used them!

[PanBiker]

Minesweepers and other vessels in WWII had huge degaussing arrays run from the ships generators, the coils were hung around the hull. They created a neutral bias for when the ships were dealing with magnetically triggered mines.