THE FLATLEY DRYER

[Stanley]

I do Tiz! We were never without it! Friar's Balsam on a sugar lump, Flowers of Sulphur in Black Treacle, Easton's Syrup, Oil of Cloves and Fenning's Fever Cure were all standard remedies in our medicine cupboard. My mother, like many other women, always took Beecham's Pills at night, if she didn't she was convinced she would die of something. Oh, and Fenning's Little Healers for chest complaints as well. They and the Beecham's Pills were in a small screw of paper.
Of course, in those days we had to pay for the doctor so everyone self-medicated.
Two more come to mind. Armenian Boll on a lump of yeast for blood disorders like boils and a common standby, cattle medicine like Day's Red Drink (Largely strychnine!) for flu...... Mrs Hanson at Admergill cured my very intractable carbuncle when the doctors had failed by poulticing me with Diatherm a compound used for blistering horses legs.

[Stanley]

I've remembered another old stand-by. Thermogene Medicated wadding. You taped it onto the affected part and waited for relief. It was quite effective, it was cotton wadding infused with something like Sloan's Liniment. This was very powerful stuff, not to be rubbed on but simply applied. It worked by inflaming the skin and promoting blood flow artificially to the affected area. Vera once poured some onto the small of my back and as it was cold I arched my back and it ran down the crack of my bum. Not to be recommended! I had to sit in 3" of cold water in the bath to get relief!

[Stanley]

I tripped over my copy of the Chatterbox Annual for 1908 yesterday. Looking into it reminded me of a different world. What's the equivalent for kids today?

[Stanley]

I've always said that despite being regarded as 'Penny Dreadfuls' (They were twopence actually) I learned my grammar, spelling and punctuation from my weekly comics, Rover, Hotspur and Wizard. These names will mean nothing to youth today but they were text only and full of memorable characters like Wilson (Won the Tour de France on a butcher's delivery cycle) and Rockfist Rogan! I suppose they would look dreadfully old fashioned today but they were well written in correct English and I am sure I am not the only one who benefited from reading them. The very act of reading became a habit and led on to the adventure of the Stockport Public Library!

[Bodger]

I think Rockfist Rogan was in The Champion ? another was Limp a Long Leslie the footballer

[Stanley]

Thanks Bodge, I think you're right. The Champion is the comic I always have trouble remembering. Another image that comes to mind is Hoo Sung and the Rolling Sphere! How come trivia and fantasy like this doesn't seem to have damaged me irreparably? Could the same be true of modern electronic games?

[Stanley]

I went searching for this image for use in steam engines but I'm repeating it here because of the man in the pic, Jim Sutton of Brierfield. He was father to my flue cleaner Charlie Sutton and he told me that Jim was a hard man. He once asked him why he was so hard on them and Jim told him it was because he'd seen people starving to death on the streets of Nelson in his youth and I can believe it. Even now, in a country as rich as ours there are children going to bed at night hungry. It bears thinking about every time you have a good meal.

[chinatyke]

.... and Jim told him it was because he'd seen people starving to death on the streets of Nelson in his youth and I can believe it.

When I was young there were no fats kids in our school in Colne and we often went to bed hungry. Both our parents were working so I'm not sure why that was. I know my dad "had a fancy woman" on the side so perhaps that's where the money went. I never heard of anyone actually starving to death though.

[Stanley]

Jim would be born in the late 19th century China.....
Something that came to mind last night was the sideshows at every travelling fair where you could throw wooden balls at shelves with plates on and smash them. They were unfired seconds from the pottery industry and were doubtless dirt cheap. I haven't seen one for years but when you thing that the pottery industry in Staffordshire is nowhere near the size it was perhaps that's the reason.

[Tizer]

Our village street fair still has fun smashing pottery but I think it's now secondhand stuff rejected by charities. The fair is a bit olde worlde and rural in character. The parish council chairman walks around wearing a straw boater and taking entries for `The Drop'. You buy pay him and then put your name in a square of your choice on a large board marked with lines in a checkerboard array. The board represents one of the farmers' fields in which a cow is later let loose. Wherever it makes its first drop, that square wins the prize!

[Stanley]

That's my kind of non-destructive fun!

[Stanley]

Along with the Gentlemen of the Road other itinerants have gone as well. A frequent visitor was the Gypsy woman with the basket. She sold sprigs of heather, small lace items and most prolific clothes pegs made from split hazel with a metal binding at the top made out of a sliver of tin cut from a food tin and held in place with two small carpet tacks. These were surprisingly efficient and my mother usually bought a few. You could have your palm read as well if you were particularly gullible.

[Tizer]

We forget how the smell of horse dung was such a normal part of life in the past. Even in my childhood in the 50s we had coal delivered by horse and cart, and also each week a cart would come round with those stone bottles of Sarsaparilla and Dandelion & Burdock. There were the rag & bone men with carts too.

[Stanley]

It was an unwritten law that if the horse dunged outside your house it was your property for the garden! My mother used to send me out with the coal shovel to collect it.......

[Stanley]

One of the things that strikes me these days is that despite the fact that for much of my childhood the economy of what we called Britain then was shattered. There was never any question of cuts in education which was run at a local level by the local councils. Even in the days when I delivered school milk in the 1960s tiny country schools flourished. Almost all of them are gone now and the old schools sold off and converted to private houses. When I went tu University on the late 70s I was fully funded by discretionary grants form Pendle Council. My question is simple, what the hell went wrong? Is education a lower priority today? It's worth thinking about!

[Stanley]

I have no memory of shortage of money impinging on my early life. I have no doubt that my mother and father bought their brand new semi detached house on a mortgage just before I was born. What I do know is that when I was about eight years old we bought the house next door when Mrs Nixon's husband died and she was short of money and she paid us 6/- a week rent from then on, when we moved I used to cycle down each week to collect it. At the time my dad was on about £850 per annum as a works general manager so I suppose we were lower middle class or working class aristocracy. My point is that even in those difficult times (It included the war years of course) and including the fact that as father and mother weren't married and her previous husband was claiming the tax relief on us kids, we could make progress. How different from the situation today......

[Stanley]

On the same subject, the price of houses and property, young people can't get their heads round the fact that as a relatively low paid worker (15p an hour) I could afford to buy a good house and seven acres of land, Hey Farm, in 1959 for £2,200. The repayment to the bank of the loan was £15 a month, half my income. It was hard but we managed it and I think it took 15 years to pay it off. A red letter day! Compare and contrast with today's market and ask yourself where we went wrong......

[Tizer]

House prices are now about 8 times wages again, which is where they had got to in 2007 just before the credit crunch.

[Stanley]

I've just done the maths.... Hey Farm was 4.4 X my annual wage before tax. And my bank manager was quite happy to give me credit on a charge on the property because he knew me personally and trusted me. Mr Batkin of Lloyd's Bank in Burnley. You don't forget people like that!

[Stanley]

Note that how we got the money for Hey Farm was a loan backed by a charge on the property, the bank held the deeds. Another route to ownership was 'Rental Purchase' where a price was agreed, the interest was added and the whole was split into manageable weekly payments that roughly equated to a slightly higher rent. Many houses were bought like this as private arrangements between the owner and tenant. I don't know whether this still exists.

[Stanley]

The thing I remember most clearly about my transactions with Lloyd's Bank in Burnley was the fact that I got monthly statements typed out and delivered by post. If you were in credit the entries were in black ink but if you were in debt, as I was for 15 years, the entries were in bold red. Hence the expression 'in the red' as a description of debt. I can tell you it was a 'red letter day' when the colour of my statements suddenly became black! This colour scheme was also followed in the master ledgers at the bank.

[Tizer]

If they still used posted statements in red ink on paper then red would be the default colour for many people's statements these days!

[Stanley]

Buy shares in red ink manufacturers!
You've just reminded me of something..... I once delivered a load of old textile reeds to a small plant near Ashton under Lyne. The main part of them was very fine iron wire and at the plant they burned metal at high temperatures to oxidise it and produce different coloured oxides at different temperatures for use as pigments.

[Big Kev]

On the same subject, the price of houses and property, young people can't get their heads round the fact that as a relatively low paid worker (15p an hour) I could afford to buy a good house and seven acres of land, Hey Farm, in 1959 for £2,200. The repayment to the bank of the loan was £15 a month, half my income. It was hard but we managed it and I think it took 15 years to pay it off. A red letter day! Compare and contrast with today's market and ask yourself where we went wrong......

Can I ask what the interest rate on the £2200 was?

[Whyperion]

BoE base rate, i guessed was 4% in 1959 , and more or less right http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/statisti ... serate.pdf weren't mortgages about 1 to 2 % over base ? - personal and business loans generally were 3 to 4% over base