THE FLATLEY DRYER

[Stanley]

My dad once had a problem with his fundamental orifice..... He was convinced he had cancer. Tommy O'Connell did a quick investigation and that was a fish bone also. It had made its way right through him. The mind boggles at the damage it could have done.....

[Tizer]

Did he do a DIY job with tweezers or did the doc get to the bottom of the problem?

[Stanley]

Tommy could be a bit brutal. He probably used his finger!

[Stanley]

My dad had two polyps on his back which annoyed him. They must be hereditary because I have one..... One day when I was scrubbing his back in the bath he told me to get his cut-throat razor and take them off. I did so with glee and was amazed by the amount of blood. So was Father! He told me to ring Tommy O'Connell and he arrived very quickly, took one look, congratulated me of the tidy job and ordered Father down into the kitchen. He lit the gas ring, got a little tool red-hot and cauterised them. This definitely got my dad's attention. He showed me the tool which was like a small heavy spoon, he told me it was made of platinum which impressed me no end because I knew it was a rare metal. I would be about ten years old at the time..... I remember it well.

[Stanley]

Tommy dispensed his own medicines in the greenhouse of his large house at Didsbury which was also his surgery. He had three large bottles, one labelled 'Mistussi' and the other Mist. Expec' The first to stop coughing and the second for helping expectoration. I asked him what the third was for and he said it was for anyone that the first two didn't apply to! I was always vastly impressed that when you went through to his office from the waiting room there were two doors. The first was heavily padded and covered with leather, the second was a very heavy normal door. I suppose it was to stop the screams of the patients getting to the waiting room.

[Tizer]

One of the first things I was taught when I started work at Boots was to ask customers with a cough whether it was a dry cough or a phlegmy cough. For the former we gave them a suppressant, usually Boots own brand Tusana, and for the latter an expectorant to thin the phegm.

[Stanley]

Tommy would have approved. I found out during a conversation with Peter Birtles, our managing director at Bancroft, that his family doctor had also been Tommy O'Connell. This spider's web of connections throughout the world fascinates me, I have come across so many instances over the years. I definitely go for the 'six degrees of separation' theory.

[Stanley]

Crown green bowling is almost always seen as the preserve of old men. When I was a lad in Stockport my mate Bill Rae and I got into the game at a local park and the old cocks were very good to us. They gave us a set of woods apiece and showed us the principles and we soon became quite good and familiar with concepts like 'bowling on the ledge' and 'striking'. It was only my departure for the army that put a stop to this. I don't know what happened to my woods......

[Tripps]

Your mum probably sold them while you were away.

[Stanley]

David, they did the Big Flit to Sough while I was doing my bit for Brenda. Lots of treasures vanished, ostrich egg, mills bomb, 25lb practice bomb, Boy's Own Annual, No. 10+ Meccano set..... Gone but not forgotten! I may be peculiar in this respect but I have a vivid memory of the treasures of my youth.

[Tizer]

No. 10+ Meccano set.....that explains everything!

[Stanley]

It arrived one Xmas during the war, second hand but in good nick. It had all the parts necessary to make the famous block-setting crane that Meccano used as an advert except for the electric motors. Best Meccano set ever! This was the first model I made....

[Stanley]

My dad was interested in my progress and after the steam roller he challenged me to build a structure three feet long that would support my weight. He gave me a few clues about compression and tension in structures and left me to it. It took a couple of days but I succeeded. He told me I had re-invented the Warren Truss....

[Stanley]

When we moved into the house on Napier Road which was three storeys and had a very long back garden I got into aerial rope ways. I made a beauty from the attic window to the end of the garden, about 100ft long, and had a wonderful time making the winches and cars for it out of Meccano. Even my dad thought it was impressive. Looking back, he never pushed me but always fostered any practical bents I possessed. I often think it was inevitable that in the end I found my way into various forms of engineering. I wonder if there is a gene? Daughter Janet and her son Harry are both inclined the same way......

[Stanley]

In 2004 a group of us who had been close friends at the grammar school had a 50 year reunion. Funny thing was that all of us had gone into engineering and three of us had experience on steam engines... I think that was quite remarkable for grammar school lads!

[Stanley]

Forgive me for being a wet blanket but what is on my mind this morning is when my mother went into a coma just before she died. I had been caring for her for a few years and the night she died I went home and had a sleep to find, with relief, that she had died peacefully during the night. The Sister on the ward told me she knew I was the carer because of this. I hope my daughters experience the same sense of relief in our present situation. Caring is a form of grieving.....

[Stanley]

I remember when my father died (and again I was not there because he promised he'd stay alive while I went home for a meal and a shower!) a young bobby came round to deliver the news as we hadn't got a 'phone. He was more upset than I was and I finished up getting some whisky down him and comforting him. It was the first time he had had to inform a family of a death......
That's just reminded me, can you remember the SOS messages that used to be delivered on air by the BBC if someone was dying and close relatives couldn't be located and informed?

[Stanley]

Before we had a 'phone and when I was on the tramp my way of getting an important massage to Vera at home was to ring the pub at the bottom of the lane and failing that the police. They would call in and deliver the message. I think you'd be accused of wasting police time now.....

[Tizer]

I remember as a student in Liverpool queuing up for ages outside phone booths to make a call and sometimes standing in a booth waiting for someone to call me at a fixed time (with people outside shaking their fists at me!).

[Stanley]

I remember once taking a two hour call from the US on a telephone on the wall at the end of the corridor when I was bunked up at Lancaster in 1979....

[Stanley]

Looking back and thinking about funerals in the family I realise that the ethos in those days was to protect the children. I have no memories of deaths apart from the ones from the bombing. We couldn't be protected against them, we were in the thick of it. I often wonder what effect that had on us. No counselling in those days, you just got on with your knitting!

[Tizer]

I remember as a child being deposited in the back room of pubs with other kids and their toys while parents attended weddings and funerals. They'd come back for the after-event food and drink and then (if they remembered!) collect you from the back room.

[Stanley]

I often wonder what effect our 'normality' during the war, especially in the early years when we were under bombardment, had on us. There was no way we kids could be be protected from what was happening and we learned to deal with it. We were very close to reality! I think it must have changed us and everything after that was a bonus. Today, many people try to ignore reality and I believe that is much more dangerous. I suspect that 'celebrity status' is the ultimate rejection of reality and there are some very troubled people in that category. Include me out!

[Stanley]

I remember one night as we sat in the Andersen Shelter in the garden listening to the bombs dropping about a quarter of a mile away as the Luftwaffe tried to demolish the giant brick railway viaduct we heard a roaring noise and there was a very big impact very close to us. The shelter and the ground shook. My dad recognised straight away that this was most likely an unexploded bomb so in his capacity as an Air Raid Warden he informed HQ. A bomb disposal team was with us at first light and sure enough there was an area of disturbed earth in the gardens about 50 yards behind our shelter. After a couple of hours they got down to it and gave us the good news, it wasn't a bomb but a length of railway track complete with sleepers that must have been blown out of the sidings and plunged down like a great spear. They filled the hole in and it will still be there.....



The viaduct in 1977.

[Tripps]

I can't look at that photograph, without thinking of this Stockport Air Disaster