OneGuyFromBarlick

Lovely image and yes, noisy but lower frequency than the high velocity burning speed cordites used in Ack Ack guns and anti tank. The only explosive I know that got near those speeds is Underwater Blasting Gelignite and Torpex, the explosive used in torpedoes. In contrast, slower burning speeds were used in very large calibre naval guns because they wanted the continuous acceleration of the round up the bore to get maximum range with minimum erosion of the barrels.
If you read the accounts of extreme weapons like the Paris Gun (LINK) you'll find that the projectiles were numbered and each successive one was larger to allow for the wear on the barrel. The charge was adjusted round for round as well.
Special, very low burning speeds were used in rock extraction in quarries where what they wanted was a swelling effect with the minimum of shattering.
I've always been fascinated by explosives and of course this was triggered by my training in the army. I don't know what the policy is now but we were very thoroughly grounded in the use of different grades of explosive and it never leaves you. Very useful stuff used properly and the correct application.
One story about that. The most frightening explosions I ever heard during WW2 weren't the Jerry bombs, it was the mobile battery of Bofors Ack ack guns that set up one night in the park about 100 yards away from our Andersen Shelter..... Talk about jumping out of your skin! Very impressive for a five year old.

My mind goes back to the very early days of the war when Arthur Upton from next door and my dad were subjected to a lot of leg-pulling as they dug the large hole in the back garden for the Anderson shelter. The laughing stopped when the bombs started to fall. I have an idea that they were hard to obtain at that time but father had contacts at John Summers and Son at Shotton where they were made and got one before they were generally available.



Not ours but exactly like this one. We soon found out that there was a serious flaw in the arrangements. Due to the high water table the shelter tended to flood in wet weather so father fitted a pump just inside the door. The handle for this was chained up out of the way when not in use but occasionally it got dislodged and we soon learned to check it before entering. If you didn't it was just at the right height to trip you up and accelerate your entry!

I have very clear memories of the hours we spent in the Anderson Shelter and none of them bad which is surprising really because as you can well imagine, it was a damp, cold dark hole lit only by candles which were stuck in their own wax on the angle iron frame that ran round the inside at about the four foot level. Father had fitted wooden benches round three sides and when full there was quite a crowd in there. Besides my mother, myself and Dorothy my sister Mrs Upton was there with her boy and Walter Pitcher and his wife from number 34. Father and Arthur were usually out and about their duties as air raid wardens and they had to patrol their area during a raid looking for lights showing and any incidents. Walter was a Jeweller with a shop in Tommyfields in Oldham and he always brought a suitcase with him containing the high value items from his shop which he brought home with him every night. I remember Walter was very good at making small animals for us out of candle wax.
When the siren went Mother would make sure that Dorothy and I had a blanket with us and we would sit huddled on the bench listening to the adults. I have no doubt that occasionally someone nodded off but nobody really got any sleep. There were occasional bits of excitement. If it was a long raid Mother or Mrs Upton would go and make a hot drink and sometimes a sandwich. One night father stumbled in with blood running down his face from a deep cut on the bridge of his nose. He was a lot taller than Arthur and it transpired that in the black out they had collided and the sharp edge of Arthur's tin hat broke right through father's nose into the airway. He tried to convince Tommy O'Connell our doctor to leave it open as he had never breathed as well in his life but Tommy refused and sewed it up!
There must have been bad bits like near misses but I have no memory of them apart from one. We heard this whistling noise and then a big thump that shook the shelter. When father and Arthur investigated they found an entry hole in the ground about 25 feet away from the shelter and reported it as an unexploded bomb. The UXB squad arrived with the dawn and soon found that it wasn't a bomb, it was a length of railway line which must have been blown into the air when the marshalling yard nearby got a direct hit. It will still be there.....

Just imagine laying the stones to make the end wall of this chapel! It's at King's School, Taunton. Incidentally, both our builder and plumber were educated at this well-known school, they don't just turn out politicians and generals!

Most of the older buildings in Barlick are random rubble. Layered or coursed stones were a later development but of course cost more as the stones had to be dressed first.

I'm old enough to remember that a prominent feature of any building site was a pile of ash/lime mortar made by grinding ash and clinker from coal fired boilers with lime in mortar pans which were a couple of large cast iron wheels rotating in a circular trough with water until the two elements were completely mixed. This mortar was very slow setting and a quantity could be 'knocked up' with added water from the large pile. Used stiff to set very slowly but eventually became rock hard if properly constituted. During the war when energy was scarce and Portland cement heavily rationed the ash/lime mortar was easily made and readily available. It was supplanted by sand/cement mortar after the war.

Being interested in minerals and geology I like serpentine rock which occurs in a few places in the UK, most notably the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall. It's well-known due to being relatively soft and easy to carve and has long been sold to tourists from small workshops near Lizard village. In the late 1800s and early 1900s there were serpentine factories at Poltesco and Penzance producing large objects such as church fonts, fireplaces and shopfronts, the latter being sent far afield (e.g. to London and Paris). Geologists come from all over the world to the Lizard peninsula to study these rocks and minerals which were formed several hundred million years ago when two tectonic plates collided. The edge of one plate, a sea bed, was curled up and over the other, then the whole area was eroded flat. This has left a section of sea bed with its underlying strata now exposed at 90 degrees to their original plane. This is best seen at Coverack where walking from one side of the beach to the other takes you from the mantle, across the Moho boundary, to the crust.

Why am I writing all this? Serpentinite, the mineral in serpentine rock, is formed from another mineral, peridotite, near the sea floor. The chemical reaction (serpentinisation) is exothermic, raising the rock temperature to as much as 250C and giving rise to non-volcanic hydrothermal vents on the sea floor. These vents are where it's now thought that life first formed, using methane and hydrogen sulphide as an energy source, and which are being sought on other planets by astobiologists as potential locations for other life forms. The chemical reactions involved in serpentinisation involve magnesium oxides and we now find that they are analogous to the reactions that take place when Portland cement sets, except that it involves calcium rather than magnesium. It's strange to think that setting cement is so closely linked to the reactions that help kick start life on Earth!

Wonderful post Tiz! It's explanations like that which make me wish I had studied geology.....
Setting concrete is exothermic as well. When we poured the mass concrete in the flywheel pedestal support base in the Whitelees pit at Ellenroad you could feel the warmth if you put your hand on the strong-backs supporting the shuttering. I was watching a programme on the building of the Hoover Dam in the US and they had to pour the blocks in the dam wall in a staggered formation to allow the heat to escape more easily. The estimate at the time was that if this was not done the dam would have taken 125 years to cool down to ambient temperature.

I look at the latest Swedish study on the bad effects of drinking sweet canned drinks and my mind goes back to the halcyon days when we had enough money to buy a big bottle of 'pop' and share it between us. Then there was the argument about who took the bottle back and got the deposit, I have an idea it was 3d. Were we doing ourselves irreparable damage? That got me to thinking about glass jam jars. The Oxford Cinema in Dukinfield used to let you in free to the children's morning matinee if you gave them a clean jam jar. I suppose they had a value during the war because of the amount of energy needed to make them.
I've mentioned before that Moorside Road on Heaton Moor in Stockport was the first suburban road I ever saw covered in tarmac. I was watching some archival film the other night and caught a glimpse of such a road. The asphalt didn't have any stone content to give grip and so the break up the smooth surface it was impressed with moulds that produced a dimpled surface. Only a small thing but nice to be reminded of this small detail.

We sometimes sacrificed a pop bottle to make a bomb. The favourite location to deploy it was in the deep water filled pits in the gravel quarry next to Hans Renold's factory in Didsbury. We tied a brick to the bottle so that it would sink and after putting some water in added a few chunks of carbide which was easily obtainable then. Shut the stopper tight and chuck it on the water. It took a while but eventually the pressure of acetylene built high enough in the bottle to make it burst and we got a satisfying underwater concussion with a burst of gas at the surface. Dangerous? Yes it was but remember that we were used to explosions, they were part of our lives....
Another thing springs to mind. Soda water syphons.... Even in those days I think there was a 3/- deposit on them and if we could get hold of one we broke it to get the glass tube out. These made excellent pea-shooters!

One of the people I worked with in the early 1990s brought a 2-litre bottle of Coca-cola with him every day and it was empty by going home time. He was addicted to the caffeine and I wonder what state of health he is in today with all that caffeine, high-fructose syrup and phosphoric acid that he was drinking.

He would have a clean stomach - look what it does to loos and pennies!

I thank God that I have never been attracted to canned drinks. You'd be amazed at the number of kids who go into the Co-op every morning to buy their 'breakfast'. Red Bull and chocolate seems to be a favourite. What is that doing to them? Can you remember the advertisement of the kid walking down the street surrounded by a warm glow after a good breakfast of hot cereal? Perhaps some mothers don't get up early enough to cook a breakfast.....
Even in the war we always had three hot meals a day; breakfast before we went out, school dinners and a good tea when we got home. Treats were fruit and proper liquorice root. A greengrocer called Mather near Hope Memorial school sold fresh liquorice root, not the dried stuff, and I can still remember the taste. Another treat was whole dried Locust pods. The beans were rock hard and couldn't be eaten but the pod was sweet and tasted lovely. I don't think any of these did us harm!
I found out later when I worked in the mill that the beans were extracted from the pods, the red outer covering removed and the bean ground up to be used in the size used for strengthening the warp before weaving. The pod residue was sold as cattle food.

Mention of locust pods used as cattle food reminds me of what farmers called 'Coarse Ration'. This was a mixture of grains and pulses fed as concentrate to milking cattle. When I worked for Richard Drinkall I asked him why he always bought expensive Coarse Ration instead of the cheaper pelleted cattle cake. He told me it was because with Coarse Ration you could see exactly what you were buying and feeding. Cattle cake was a mystery. He was right, over the years I found that many strange things went into cattle cake. The worst of these were Hoof and Horn, Bone meal and even chicken muck from broiler houses. All these were technically protein enhancers but as we found later with Mad Cow Disease (Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)) they could be potentially very dangerous. Needless to say they are now banned.

It struck me that much the same situation as I have described for cattle cake in the old days applies today to modern dog foods. They chase the cheapest ingredients to give the required analysis and the consequence is that the dog food industry is actually the waste bin for the food industry. I won't horrify you with some of the stuff I know goes in there but believe me, if you want to keep a dog healthy feed it the best biscuit you can get and good meat, Jack gets £5 worth of best mince a week. Not expensive and you save it in vet's bills. £1 a day isn't bad for properly feeding your best mate.....

When I was a lad there was no cheap waterproof work wear and on a day like today promises to be outside workers were often 'rained off'. It was recognised that work was impossible if you were soaking wet. The advent of cheap waterproof clothing has changed all this. No more sitting in a cosy site hut with the coke stove burning red hot while the rain hammers down! The watchmen on excavations and other road works used to have a coke brazier in front of the wooden sentry box they could use for shelter during the night.

In those days the road works were empty of workers when the rain poured down. Now the road works are empty of workers come rain or shine!

That's very often true Tiz. In 1945/46 in Stockport a lot of the road works were done by Italian POWs. They were a cheerful lot and always talked to us on our way home from school. They gave us sweets and chocolate! I think they were better fed than we were.

What is very seldom mentioned in accounts of WW2 is that once the intensive bombing phase was over, I suppose this was around 1942, we settled down into wartime life and it became the norm. There were still occasional alerts and even a V1 in the latter days of the war but the danger we felt receded. The 9PM news was a must and we often stayed up to listen to it. Of course, the worst of the losses were concealed from us but there were nightly reports of bombing in Germany, I remember that until it was explained to me by my dad, the town of Marshalling Yards seemed to get it in the neck every night! We got used to rationing and never went hungry, we learned to eat what was on our plate and not to expect anything between meals. There were occasional treats, we used to get Care Parcels from a business associate of father, Ernie Hommell in Ohio, his firm made enamelling frits, the powdered material that melted into porcelain enamel when fired at high temperature. I remember the sticky fruit cake which was so rich it made us queasy if we had more then a small piece. If I remember rightly fish wasn't rationed and a friend of ours on the avenue who ran the Carlton Cinema in Stockport seemed to be able to get hold of it regularly. Horse meat wasn't rationed and mother regularly got meat from Bert Slack, the horse meat butcher just off Prince's Street in the town centre. Father couldn't eat it but us kids thought it was great!

Stanley wrote:I remember the sticky fruit cake which was so rich it made us queasy if we had more then a small piece.

That was because you weren't used to having much sugar in your diet. Now we eat so much sugar that the natural control doesn't operate and we eat more and more. My relatives who have been cutting down drastically on sugar are having to be careful they don't suddenly binge on it otherwise they might feel sick.

Jack Drummond (LINK) and the ministry of food served us well in WW2. Some people call us 'The Last Healthy Generation' and the evidence supports this. The lessons I learned then about diet have been with me all my life and I attribute much of my good health to how we were started off in those days. Life long good eating habits. There is a lesson there for the present generations but they can't see it.

We take so much for granted these days. The only modern piece of labour saving equipment in the house until after the war was a gas cooker. When we moved to Napier Road in 1945 a fridge suddenly appeared in the kitchen. What people forget nowadays is that food storage in a cellar or pantry demanded that the rooms were as cold as possible. The arrival of the fridge meant that mother had perishable food handy to where she was cooking and the room could be warm. In terraced houses there was another drawback to the cold kitchen. The door to it from the living room had to be kept closed at all times to avoid both warming the kitchen up and cooling the living space down. Only a small thing but totally forgotten these days when the whole house is heated.

I remember getting our first fridge. The idea that you could make your own ice lollies was as exciting for us as getting an iPhone is for today's children.

As kids we loved the cylindrical ice lollies made by the elderly lady who had the small shop opposite the playing fields at Pleckgate, Blackburn. The red ones were best, followed by the orange. They never had time to melt; we sucked all the colour out of them until only a colourless cylinder of ice was left. I now know why that happened. As the lolly mixture freezes, pure ice crystallises and leaves the soluble solid components concentrated in a liquid fraction dispersed through the ice crystal network. We were sucking out that concentrated flavour fraction - no wonder it tasted so good! Americans in the Appalachians used to make their applejack liquor by freeze concentration of cider. They left a barrel of cider outside in winter to freeze. Then they opened the tap at the bottom or turned the barrel on its side and let the concentrated liquor flow out. We tried it in the lab where I did my PhD by using home made wine. It worked well but the product wasn't safe to drink - as well as the ethanol, the method concentrated all the fusel oils and the drink gave a terrible hangover!

Tizer wrote:We tried it in the lab where I did my PhD by using home made wine.

I'm pleased to know there's someone out there as daft as me. Only I didn't know what the end products were.