HOUSEHOLD TIPS NOT FOUND IN WOMAN'S WEEKLY

[Cathy]

I remember our Grandma putting tea-leaves on the cobbles at Back Colne Rd to help stop them being so slippery. We had to get down that side slope from the back to the front of Colne Rd to get to school etc. That was after she had given us school kids a spoonful of Malt to keep us warm... aaww

[Stanley]

Cathy, my mother used to give me cod liver oil and malt every morning in winter. Then there was Scott's Emulsion, not sure what was in it, it was white, but certainly lots of cod liver oil. They used to give us free bottles of concentrated orange juice and cod liver oil at the clinics during the war. All part of the Ministry of Food's effort to make sure we were well fed.

[LizG]

We got malt and cod liver oil too. Tasted the cod liver oil all day.

[Stanley]

I'm lucky, I can swig Cod Liver Oil straight from the bottle. The taste is from the oil breaking down and modern methods of purification plus keeping it in the fridge ensure that it's OK.
Another of my mother's standbys was to 'rub it with surgical spirits'. I still use it. She kept her chilblains under control by rubbing them. She had polio in her foot and when she was a girl the only treatment was to rub it with Neat's Foot Oil and she hated the smell of it all her life. TCP was another cure-all.

[Cathy]

Milk of Magnesia, what on earth was that for? Yuk!

[Stanley]

For upset tummies Cathy and you're right, it was chalky and 'orrible!
There used to be a 'tonic' called Easton's Syrup. It contained Strychnine, Iron Phosphate and Quinine and was prescribed for 'general debility'. That was even worse and I doubt if it did anyone any good!

[chinatyke]

For upset tummies Cathy and you're right, it was chalky and 'orrible!
There used to be a 'tonic' called Easton's Syrup. It contained Strychnine, Iron Phosphate and Quinine and was prescribed for 'general debility'. That was even worse and I doubt if it did anyone any good!

Maybe the strychnine killed off any tummy bugs, the first anti-biotic?

[Tizer]

Strychnine was commonly used as a tonic in the past and even as a bittering agent - some brewers even put it in their beer because it was cheaper than hops. At a very low concentration it provides bitterness and isn't toxic, but at higher concentration it's a powerful and nasty poison.

[Stanley]

It was thought to be a heart stimulant. Used also in veterinary medicine. My old employer Lionel Gleed once dosed me with Day's Red Drink when I was at Whatcote. I had a bad cold and it cured it but I remember my heart was racing! A lot of farmers use to dose cows with paraffin for Slow Fever and were convinced it worked because it made their pee frothy!

[Stanley]

Mentioning frothy pee reminded me of 'pee green pills'. I think they were Carter's Little Liver Pills and we knew they were 'working' because your pee turned green! Looking back I'm sure that this was the unique selling point. Funnily enough this reminded me of something I have forgotten for years. For some reason, during the war, it was decided I was very anaemic and my mother used to take me into Manchester once a week to Gartside Street children’s hospital where I was given an injection of iron. It must have worked because as far as I know I have never had a problem since.
In those days pills and powders were the great standby, my mother would never dream of missing her Beecham's Pill at bedtime, God knows what was in them but many women swore by them. Then there were Fenning's Little Healers, small pellets that cured anything to do with your lungs. Fenning's also made 'Fever Cure' a liquid that made your teeth feel funny after a dose. Look in any popular publication of the time and the advertisements were mainly for proprietary medicines that promised to cure almost anything.

[Cathy]

Understandably I don't recognise any of those products but it brings to mind Mothers Little Helpers. Was Bex one of those?

[Stanley]

Don't remember that one but Little Helpers rings a bell. Or perhaps I'm thinking of Lung Healers. I've remembered that at one time the sale of Methylated Spirits was banned from 4pm on Friday 'til Monday morning because the tramps used to buy it to mix with other things like tomato sauce. It was known as Red Biddy and was a cheap way of getting drunk but did terrible damage. Almost as bad as the bath tub brandy the Berliners used to make after WW2. You could make an intoxicating drink out of boot polish as well.

[Stanley]

I remember once reading a short story about a prisoner who escaped Gaol by blowing the lock off his cell door. According to the story he made the explosive from a pack of playing cards. I researched this at the time and found it was possible, something to do with the cellulose in the cards.
As a lad we were used to explosions, they happened almost every night and so we experimented with making our own. We made gunpowder but never really got a satisfactory bang. Our best one was to scrape the red tops off matches and pack the space between two bolts in a large not with it. Then we threw the combination at a wall until we got a healthy crack! The other favourite was some carbide in a screw top pop bottle with a drop of water and weighted by being tied to a brick. We lobbed this in a flooded quarry and got a good explosion after a short wait. It was powerful enough to stun small fish which floated to the surface! Don't try this at home!

[Tizer]

Almost as bad as the bath tub brandy the Berliners used to make after WW2. You could make an intoxicating drink out of boot polish as well.

I remember reading the obituary of a British officer who served in Greece in WW2. If they gave the local liquor maker an order for whiskey or gin it would be delivered the next morning, but brandy was special - it took two days!

As for the exploding pack of cards...an explosion is really just `fast burning' and if the burning is in a confined space then the generation of a large volume of gas will destroy the container. All you need is a readily combustible material and a substance that provides the oxygen necessary for combustion. In gunpowder the charcoal and sulphur are the combustibles, and the potassium nitrate (saltpetre, KNO₃) supplies the oxygen (the O in the NO). The more finely and intimately mixed, the faster the burning and the bigger the explosion. A major advance was to combine chemically the combustible with the oxygen supplier. Thus, in nitrocellulose (guncotton) the NO is chemically combined with the combustible, cellulose, and the explosion is more powerful than with gunpowder. Nitrocellulose has also been used widely in plastic coatings and the playing cards may well have had such a coating. The story is that nitrocellulose was discovered by a scientist who spilt nitric acid and wiped it up with a cotton (cellulose) apron which he then hung on the front of the stove to dry - once dry it exploded into flame.

[Stanley]

I've posted an article I did on explosive matters.
In Berlin in the 1950s we could get a litre of bath tub brandy for a 2oz tin of Nescafe. It didn't taste too bad but was very dangerous, we were constantly warned about it, it must have been a big problem. Do I remember Fusel Oil?
In those days the chemistry sets you could buy in toy shops contained stuff that would be illegal today. I remember we once used wood ash and fat to make some soap. We put it on the window cill in my mate's bathroom to dry out and when we went to pick it up the paint came with it! We decided it was perhaps a bit too powerful and disposed of it. My chemistry master at school was always chiding me for using 'industrial quantities' in the classroom. I remember blowing a test tube up one day. You put whatever it was into the tube and boiled it dry. As it drove off the last of the water it exploded with a 'pop'. Mine finished with a very satisfactory bang! No safety goggle in those days....
We'd once dropped some balls of Sodium in a grid in the school yard one night.... Very spectacular! Hydrofluoric acid fascinated me, it dissolved glass and had to stored in vulcnised rubber bottles. We weren't allowed to touch it and was only brought out for demonstrations. Exciting stuff!

[LizG]

Understandably I don't recognise any of those products but it brings to mind Mothers Little Helpers. Was Bex one of those?

I think you're right there.

[Cathy]

Bex powders (pain killers) came in a yellow box with blue writing. The slogan was 'A cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie down'. It was the housewifes drug of choice in the 50's 60's and part of the 70's until they were shown to be highly addictive and were linked to causing kidney damage (cancers). Banned in '77.
Might have just been Australian ??

[Tizer]

The slogan was 'A cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie down'.

Sounds like a permanent lie down!

[Stanley]

Cathy, could have had Ephedrine in them. I remember that there was a small Norwegian town where the local doctor formulated a similar cure-all. Years later they found it caused kidney failure and Ephedrine was the culprit I think.
Many common cure-alls were very dangerous. I'll bump an article I did, 'Drugged to Death'.

[Stanley]

Worth noting that aids to helping children sleep at night used to be common, a drop of gin was a favourite. Some medical people think that this is still happening today. Common children's medicines like Calpol have a sedative effect.

[Tizer]

At last some medics are beginning to realise that it was a mistake to make the powerful ibuprofen and nurofen painkillers available over the counter in pharmacies and supermarkets.

[Stanley]

It took me years to find out that all pain killers were bad for me. Things are much better since I ditched them....

[Stanley]

Winter is coming and I mentioned in another post about use on the inside of the bedroom windows when I was a lad. There were some strategies which we don't need to observe in our modern overheated lives. Leaving a tap running slowly helped stop it freezing up during the night. With only one fire in the house, all doors were kept closed! Particularly the one into the room where the fire was. If it was open the draught caused by the open fire could be cruel. Outside, an old pair of socks on the outside of your boots helped on pavements covered with shot ice. Gloves used to have a string sewed between them so that when popped down the coat sleeves from the inside, it was impossible to lose them. In even earlier times it was a common practice to sew children into their under clothes for the winter. Washing freezing on the line outside was seen as a good thing because the clothes were softer when they dried out. That reminds me of a very old account about a wealthy man buying a new linen shirt. He gave it to his steward to wear for a year to break it in!
All this sounds incredible nowadays but things were very different then!

[David Whipp]

Not all of what you recount is in the far distance, Stanley.

My two youngest have grown up with threaded together gloves... and tap running slowly to prevent pipes freezing up has been used in our household.. (though I slipped up in the really harsh winter a couple of years ago and ended up with no supply for two weeks(?) at Christmas!)

[Cathy]

Very interesting Stanley. Are we wimps today? I don't think so. Thank goodness things have improved or we would be a sorry lot wouldn't we?
(with hindsight that is)