THE FLATLEY DRYER

[Stanley]

You can make good animals with pipe cleaners can't you!
Writing about greaseproof paper reminds me that my mother used to save the wrappers off butter, lard and margarine for greasing the insides of her baking tins. We used to pinch them when we went to the park. Put one under your bum with the grease side down and you got double the speed on the big slide! I remember my sister getting into trouble with the park keeper one hot day for stripping down to her knickers while on the slide....

[Stanley]

Anyone remember the stuffed cloth Dachshund dogs that used to used as draught excluders?

[Stanley]

Lanry, the clear bottles like wine bottles, contained bleach made by Allan and harry Brown at Nelson, hence the name. Favoured by the white lightning distillers in Barlick for bottling the clear potato spirit they made! I hope nobody got them mixed up.... There was quite a lot of illegal distilling done in Barlick. I wonder if it was common in other towns?

[Stanley]

The small amount of clear liquid in the bottom of this bottle (not the original, he wanted it back) is what is left of the Barlick White Lightning I was given about ten years ago. My late wine merchant, John Martinez, who knew his spirits, sampled it and pronounced it as being a very good Marc probably made from grape juice that would, if kept, become a very good brandy. I wonder if it's still being made?

[Stanley]

I'm old enough to remember the pedlars and other people who used to be constantly knocking on the door. The traveller ladies selling lace, sprigs of heather and clothes pegs made from split hazel and a piece of tin cut from a food can at the end to stop them splitting. The Asian gentlemen with turbans selling small items of domestic drapery. The knife grinders with their grindstones powered from the back wheel of their bikes. The French onion sellers. The regular visits of the rag and bone men who kept you in donkey stones and windmills on sticks in return for recyclable waste. The occasional tramp asking for a hand out. And then of course the insurance men collecting on the burial policies and if you were a customer, the Providence man and the 'Scotchmen' who would measure you for a suit and deliver it the following week to be paid for on 'the Drip System'.
All gone now....

[Stanley]

Another thing that has vanished is street cries. At one time you could regularly hear the rag bone man crying out to let people know he was about. News vendors used to shout the headlines, fish and greengrocery hawkers used to come round with carts and advertised by shouting and even the milkman occasionally shouted 'Milko!". I haven't heard a street cry for years.....

[Stanley]

In Barlick until about 1950 we had vendors who went round the pubs at night selling out cakes, Kippers and Shellfish. Look up Stanley's Crumpets on the site....

[Stanley]

Ted Lawson and used to sell rabbits fresh from our ferreting expeditions in the pubs.... I'll bet that would be illegal these days. I've bought dogs in pubs as well...

[Tizer]

Ted Lawson and used to sell rabbits fresh from our ferreting expeditions in the pubs.... I'll bet that would be illegal these days. I've bought dogs in pubs as well...

And yet you can buy dangerous chemicals on Ebay. I just went to their web page and put `chemicals' in the search box and found you can get strong acids such as nitric, sulphuric and lots of other chemicals, some I'm not familiar with but would be very cautious about judging from the names!

[Stanley]

In my youth it always surprised me what you could buy from the local chemist's shop. We used to top up the chemicals in the chemistry sets that were popular then. They never turned a hair if you went in and bought industrial quantities of sulphur and nitrate (we could make the carbon ourselves). The last strange purchase was a large tin of carbide many years ago from Elmer's. I still have some and my acetylene lamp.....
You had to sign the Poisons Book if you bought arsenic and other poisons. The only other precaution was that they were sold in ribbed bottles (usually green) so you could identify them as dangerous by touch.

[Stanley]

Proprietary drain cleaners were often extremely dangerous. Highly concentrated acids and alkalis were common because the lead waste pipes from slopstones and sinks were prone to clogging because they attracted fat onto the walls. As is often the case today, these substances were kept in the cupboard under the sink, just the place where an inquisitive infant could find them! There were many cases of deaths from this cause in the weekly papers....

[Tizer]

Some of the acids sold are Ebay are dangerous concentrated mineral acids. I'm surprised they can send them through the post or by courier. I once emailed an Ebay seller to tell her that the cinnabar she was selling was mercury sulphide and poisonous by ingestion or absorption through the skin. She wasn't a specialist seller of minerals or chemicals, just an ordinary woman wanting to sell things she'd found or bought in car boot sales. She replied and thanked me, saying she'd hide the colourful cinnabar away because the kids had been playing with it!

[Stanley]

It can be a surprise where poisons still lurk. Lead oxides are very insidious long acting poisons and were a common ingredient on paints. I once sanded an old wrought iron gate off before repainting it and had some very strange symptoms, hallucinations mainly. It was a while before I realised what had caused it, breathing in the dust from the paint.

[Tizer]

White lead (lead carbonate hydroxide) is the chemical that was used in the past to make paint white and still is a danger when sanding down very old white paint. Thankfully it was replaced in recent times by titanium dioxide which is much safer and is used in many products now, such as paper.

[Stanley]

It was old fashioned red lead primer that got me!

[Nolic]

Still waiting for the decision from Europe as to whether manufacturers are to stop using cadmium in artists paints. Nolic

[Stanley]

I was asked the other day by the nurse at the clinic if I was making water more frequently that usual and I told her no, but that didn't mean I went infrequently. I wonder how many of you were imprinted by their mothers, as I was, by her always asking 'Do you want to wee?' just before we went out anywhere. To this day, I have to go..... Incredibly powerful influence.
And another thing! I realised this morning that I was down to my last five toilet rolls so bought another nine because I know that if I ever run out I will die.... Mother seemed to believe this, the airing cupboard was always full of toilet rolls even in the worst shortages during the war....

[plaques]

For some reason you don't see these any more.

[Stanley]

You see them in the country P but more likely as separate items near the front or back door. They were common in towns before the advent of paved roads and proper pavements because everywhere you went, even in the main shopping streets, your shoes were picking up mud. Just think of the state of the hems of long clothes as well, they must have been filthy. This is still the case on a farm or in the country so that's where they survive. If you look on the web even M&S sell them.

[Tizer]

I was asked the other day by the nurse at the clinic if I was making water more frequently that usual...

"Do you pass water frequently" is one of those questions where you're never sure whether the best answer is yes or no. Which ever answer you give you'll probably be given a course of pills to put it right!

[Stanley]

I told her that I always have peed a lot because I drink a lot of water. That satisfies them.....

[Stanley]

Do kids still pay with marbles? Collecting 'glass allies' and playing games where you either lost or won marbles was one of our favourite occupations. We swapped them with each other and learned trading and bargaining and I found a good source was smashing old large bearings from the scrap pile at Cheshire Sterilised near where I lived on Norris Avenue in Stockport. A 1" ball bearing was a desirable object. I remember swallowing one once in class and never saw it again. I worried about it for years but of course it would soon pass through my system.... (I hope!)

[Tizer]

Working in a chemistry lab, my PhD supervisor used to tell us to take in a lot of fluids because that would help flush the organic solvents out through our kidneys. We managed to comply by making frequent visits to the pub...and he had to come with us to make sure we really did comply.

[Bodger]

I worked in the pilot lab at Sterling Mouldings, Stalybridge, making polystyrene, this was done in a two stage reaction, first stage, monomer mixed with butadiene and catalyst, as the brew reacted in the stirring vessel at a cerrtain viscosity it was decanted into a filter press for final reaction into solid slabs, this press had steam heated plattens and residue plastic had to be removed before the next batch, this was done with toluene and rags, we used to get as high as kites from the fumes, but the company was good to us we got a free pint of milk to to save our innards !

[Stanley]

In the pickling department at General Gas Appliances they had a degreasing tank full of hot trichlorethylene . It had a condensing coil round the top but the bloke who ran it used to pop his head in the fumes and get a cheap high. He had to be taken off it!