THE FLATLEY DRYER

[Tizer]

I think it's less likely now because parents are more militant. My parents just accepted what they were told by the teachers.

[Stanley]

You may be right.....
I've just had an interesting example of the 'falling slate principle'. Just when you think things are going fine a slate falls off a roof and hits you on the head. Some things never change..... I always remember the small gravestone I saw in Accrington; "Killed be a falling slate in the great gale....."

[Stanley]

You all know now what the falling slate was.... I am reminded of the war and the big bombs falling round us as the Germans tried to knock out the Stockport railway viaduct. You were in the hands of fate, if your name was on the bomb, that was it and no point worrying about it. I have speculated many a time on what effect this had on us, no counselling then, you just got on with life. I marvel at the fact that despite my deepest fear becoming reality, burying a child, I seem to be coping OK. Tiz said in another post that I seemed to have it together and I think he's right. It could be that those bombs all those years ago were some sort of training. Having said that I know that life events make us vulnerable and I'm doing my best to look after myself. The response I am getting from the site and elsewhere is wonderful and essential. Thanks to all of you.

[Stanley]

As you all know I am now in the 21st century! If anyone had told me 70 years ago that I would have a phone that talked to the miracle we call a computer I wouldn't have been able to grasp the concept. How things have changed....

[Stanley]

Of course there are drawbacks to reliance on miracle technology! You are buggered when it fails! The phone has died, I am working on it. Janet isn't the only one in this family who can run a project!!

[Stanley]

I woke up this morning to 25 messages. My mind went back to the days when I had to book a phone call to Oz 24 hours in advance and I think it cost £1 a minute..... Things have certainly changed, I can have a conversation in real time and it's free......

[Stanley]

I can remember when my Dad, because of his war work, was given a phone at the beginning of the war. I can still remember the number for General Gas Appliances where he was works manager, It was Denton 2474. Can't remember our number at Norris Avenue but at Napier Road it was Heaton Moor 3159. Isn't it strange how things stick in the memory. (His car, a Vauxhall 14 was DRF 954 which I think was a Bristol number....)

[Stanley]

Thinking about our recent medical experiences, I look back 70 years to the state of medicine then and it looks like the Stone Age. Janet would have been dead under that regime, we are so lucky..... They were still taking tonsils out on the kitchen table at home in those days.....

[Stanley]

Aerials are on my mind and I remember the days when you had to have an aerial wire strung out to get wireless reception. A more modern version was a bunch of wire cable compressed into a holder and fanned out into a brush before mounting as high as you could on the house and then connecting to the aerial wire of the receiver.
Later, remember the squariel?

[Stanley]

How much tidier a well fitted satellite dish looks than the stacks of aerials we used to have.....

[Stanley]

August 1923 outside John Pickles's workshop at Barlick. L to R; Herbert Hidersley (an amateur clockmaker from London, friend of JP), John Pickles, Newton Pickles, Dennis Pickles (no relation, worked under John at Browns, Brierley holding dog, he was a greengrocer on Wellhouse Road in Barlick. I remembered this pic yesterday when my mates visited.



Mick on the left and John Mills on the right. The common link is that what brought both groups together is a common interest in sheds.... Nice!

[Stanley]

Johnny was very active in the amateur clock-making world and was well known as someone to come to if you had a machining problem. He had modified a Drummond lathe to do a particularly difficult job, making a volute fusee chain drum for special accurate clocks. The fusee drum was a conical shape and was 'screw-cut' with a continuous shaped groove to accept the driving chain from the spring to even out the force the spring exerted on the clock movement. Herbert Hildersley was in Barlick picking up a fusee that Johnny had made for him. I wonder how many men could do that today? Not many in sheds!

[Wendyf]

Stanley, what do you know about the clock in St Mary's, Kelbrook? A question was asked at our History Society meeting last week. The church itself was endowed by Frances Richardson Currer in 1838, but who commissioned the clock? I forget the date given for when the clock was installed but I think the 1850's.

[Stanley]

Not a lot really Wendy. When Johnny Pickles was into his turret clock making phase (Riley Street Chapel in Earby, St Joseph's Barlick and Holy Trinity) he went round inspecting all the clocks in the area. Only two gems trickled down via Newton. Kelbrook clock is notable because it has four faces and Carleton church clock was made by a local farmer and when Johnny saw it what caught his attention was the fact that it had the earliest free-wheel he had ever seen on the governing motion.
A story for you.... When Johnny was building Trinity clock he got Newton to drive him down to the Science Museum in London one Saturday in the works van. When they got there he told Newton to wait outside parked in the street (!) while he went in to 'take particulars' of the maintaining motion on a clock in the museum. 15 Minutes later he came out with the information in his notebook and told Neston to get going so they could pick up some blood puddings at Bury market for tea..... He incorporate the motion in the Trinity clock.
We forget now that this was the original purpose of the South Kensington Museum, as a reference library for engineers so they could see examples of mechanisms and ideas.

[Wendyf]

A lovely story. Kelbrook clock was made by Thomas Cooke of York, a scientific instrument maker famous for his refracting telescopes. It was installed in 1855.

[Stanley]

The fact that a farmer made the Carleton clock is a pointer towards the wide interest many people had in mechanics and optics outside their normal work. They didn't flop in front of a screen, they made things, often on the kitchen table!

[Tizer]

John Harrison who invented the marine chronometer was the son of a carpenter and became a carpenter himself. As a young child he was confined to bed with smallpox and given a watch to keep him amused. This led to a lifelong interest in repairing clocks in his spare time.

And the Wright Brothers were cycle makers by trade but known better for dabbling in aeroplanes. The Clarke's shoe family started out as sheepskin glove makers in a small way but one of the sons branched out into sheepskin slippers and, as they say, the rest is history. The Pester family of Yeovil made small engines for farmers but ended up as Westland making helicopters.

[Stanley]

That was the point I was making on John's video about Johnny Pickles. His most brilliant innovations came in his spare time in his shed at Federation Street and he was by no means alone in Barlick. I have many examples. Many of the best economic studies on the source of innovation and invention in industry come to the same conclusion. It wasn't management or mad inventors in garrets but ideas coming up from the shop floor. Many of us think that this in turn was the product of the wonderful way young people were mentored through sometimes seven year apprenticeships on low wages. It made completely competent workers with deep levels of basic skill. Contrast with the minder of a modern CNC machine.....

[Stanley]

As the weather gradually gets colder I watch and wait for the house core temperature to drop below 18C [it's on 19C at the moment] as it signals the advent of the heating season when the gas CH kicks in. My mind goes back to the days when the fire in the living room at Norris Avenue [75 years ago!] was the only source of heat in the house.... We are so lucky today!

[Stanley]

We had Crittall metal framed window frames and of course a single pane of glass. They pumped heat out of the house faster than the fire could put it in. In winter you woke to a complete covering of ice on the inside..... I used to warm an old penny and hold it on the glass to make a spy hole.

[Stanley]

We are so lucky these days. The house was beginning to feel a bit dank as things get colder so I cracked this morning and put the thermostat up to 19C and have gentle, comfortable heat. So much easier than laying fires and lighting them! We forget how easy some things are......

[Stanley]

I love this fireside pic. He hadn't got much but his toes were warm. One of the big changes today is that with CH you have a bigger house because in the old days you lived on the hearthrug in winter.

[Tizer]

My granny used to sit in front of the range like that in her cottage. The doctor turned up to see her one day and found she was sitting there feeding one end of a length of 4x4 timber into the fire with the other end in her lap! He took it off her and threw it into the yard. She wasn't impressed!

[Stanley]

I once went to view a farm in Wales near Haverford West that I was thinking of buying. They burned anthracite dust on the open fire and in order to make it burn you had to burn wood with it. The wood was split 3x3 and in 3ft lengths. They fanned out on the hearth in front of the fire and to keep the fire going you just pushed them into the anthracite as they burned with your foot. It worked!

[Stanley]

Can any of you remember the fold-down mangle in the kitchen that converted into a table? We had one at Norris Avenue in the 1940s and it used to fascinate me. That kitchen was tiny and the top of the mangle when it was folded down was where mother did all the food preparation.