STEEPLEJACK'S CORNER 2012

[Whyperion]

Dictionary.com informs me

In Cornwall, a mine. - Etymological and pronouncing dictionary of the English language. By Stormonth, James, Phelp, P. H. Published 1874. (noun) (n.) (noun - See more at: http://definitions.dictionary.net/wheal ... TXFZW.dpuf

Not over helpful, maybe an understanding of Cornish as spoken is needed , but I wonder if it more related to the external structures rising up or the sunken tunnelling going down?

[Stanley]

Peter Tatham on Ellenroad chimney in 1986. Nothing special about this pic unless you know the story behind it. It was in the early days and I knew very little about chimneys and ladders. I had got to the site early one morning and decided it was a nice morning for a climb, we were about to start work on the head after the winter lay-off. So I got onto the ladders and went up. I was sat there having a quiet smoke and enjoying the view when I heard a noise. I peeped over the side and saw Peter making his way up, I didn't distract him by shouting but waited for him to arrive at the top. He seemed to be taking a long time but it didn't bother me.
Eventually his head popped over the rim and he showed some surprise when he saw me. It turned out it was his first visit to the stack that year and he had been checking the lashings, tightening them up and replacing some of them. He asked me whether I'd noticed that some of them were a bit slack and I told him yes but if they were good enough for him they would do me because I trusted him. He thought it was very funny and told me that in future he'd rather I didn't go up until I had checked with him! Then we had a long and very enjoyable conversation about ladders and climbing. I told him that always at the back of my mind was the thought that my hands would leave go involuntarily and I'd fall off. He told me that he often had the same thought! He said that the day when I got to the stage I took the ladders and my grip for granted was the day I should stop climbing. He reckoned that any sensible person had fear of heights and that it was a good thing. Incidentally he told me that the only time he had seen anyone have a serious fall was a bloke who dropped off the first ladder and fell about ten feet, height had nothing to do with danger.
He was a good teacher and I still miss him. A good man.

[Tizer]

Wheal has become associated with mines because there are so many of them but it's a Cornish word meaning a place of work (like we refer to a `works'). It could apply to a quarry, mine, factory, farm etc. For mines it usually refers to a pit and engine house and is distinct from the `sett' which I believe is the ground owned by the company. A sett can have several mines, each with a `wheal' name. Some of the big companies (often with `consolidated' in their titles) could have a dozen or more mines each named Wheal something or other. Names often changed as owners changed or mines became connected underground and it gets complicated!

[Stanley]

Tiz, I've read Barton on tin mining and an older book called 'The Stanneries' and certainly got confused with the names. I like the fact that they usually have no connection to place names, they just seemed to make their own up.
I remembered something else about Peter last night. When we were rebuilding the top I wanted to put a band of white glazed brick in the head courses but Peter wouldn't do it! He said it wasn't original. No point arguing with him and upsetting the relationship so he got his way....
By the way. an LKF... Glazed bricks are always fire-bricks, they have to be to stand the secondary process of applying the glaze which was a higher temperature heat than ordinary brick making.

[Tizer]

Yes, some of the names are made up, they were opening so many Cornish mines at one time that you'd have to think hard to come up with something original*. Other names are from the Cornish language; Wheal Geevor for instance was Wheal an Giver which is said to mean `the place of the goats'. My version of that is it was simply were you kept goats. While on holiday I bought a nice bit of the unusual mineral francolite to add to my collection and I always look up the origin of the name - it's usually derived from the name of the first person to discover it or the place where it was discovered. I thought it must have been discovered somewhere like Spain or by a Spaniard, but no, it was first found in Wheal Franco near Tavistock, Devon! (Where I was on holiday earlier this year.) I don't know why the mine is called Franco. Another factor is that the English imposed their own versions of Cornish place names when making maps - they would transform the Cornish into something they recognised in English.

*That reminds me ... when the railway company expanded exponentially in the USA in the late 1800s and thousands of tiny stations or halts were created across the country most of them had no name. One man in an office in New York was employed by the company to create names. He started with his family's names, then his friends, then ...anything else he could think of, which is why some of those little towns out in the backwoods have what seem to us such weird names. And you can see how they got Lewisburg, Frankford, Craigsville, Danville, Chapmanville, Cottageville, Ironton - and those are bigger places that got the fancier names.

[Whyperion]

A number of washed up Spanish armarda invaders supposedly settled in Cornwall, giving rise to some Spanish sounding names, etc

[Invernahaille]

That is correct which is why Cornwall is member of the seven Celtic Nations.

[Whyperion]

That is correct which is why Cornwall is member of the seven Celtic Nations.

Ireland, Scotland, Wales, (argueably the celts never were eradicated from England), France, didn't know celts got into Spain.

[Stanley]

Tiz, origins of place names can be fascinating. One of my favourite little known facts is that when Lee Van Cleef got off the train with his horse in the opening scenes of 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' the station sign says Tucumcari. The film makers had it wrong I think because it that time it was called 'Two Gun Crossing'. The City fathers decided to change the name to Tucumcari, the name of a tribal princess who had a nearby mountain named after her. I found that out when I visited the town when I drove Route 66. (We may be poor but we've seen life!)

[Stanley]

Young Tom and Peter having a breather on Ellenroad stack in 1986.

[deebee]

Stanley,
Did the insides of a chimney ever need work doing to them?

db

[Stanley]

Interesting question. Most chimneys had a fire brick liner for the first quarter or third of the height to protect the common brick from the high gas temperature which could be well over 600F. In some cases it must have been higher, the Jubilee liner was vitrified for the first twenty feet. I've never seen a repair on the inside except at the very top where the weather can get inside the head. I think the bottom line is that weather is far more damaging to the structure than the flue gases and heat. Water ingress through bad pointing or porous brick and subsequent frost action do far more harm.

[Stanley]

When Ronny Goggins and his gang were felling the stack at Jubilee at Padiham it looked as though they were in serious trouble because despite a good gob being cut out, when they burned the props out the stack didn't fall until they had a stroke of luck. The wind changed and a particularly strong gust did the job for them. The problem was that Ronny (quite understandably) had failed to realise that the fire-brick liner was far stronger than he thought due to the fact that the stack had been hard fired and the surface of the fire-bricks had vitrified. (The face had melted and fused back together in a block)

[Stanley]

Swabs was a strange chimney. Apart from it's size, almost 350 feet high and forty feet across in the interior of the base, it had a very short liner because the gas had travelled over 300 yards from the boilers before it reached the stack and so had cooled down. It was only about 30 feet high. In the pic you can see one of the lightning conductor tapes that came down the inside of the stack, very unusual, never seen that before. They must have been very worried about lightning!

[Stanley]

The modern equivalent of the old air terminal on the lightning conductor. A coronal band on the chimney head at Ellenroad in 1988. This was reinforced by a second band half way down the stack.

[Stanley]

What many people forget is that any lightning conductor system needs a good earth contact to be efficient. The Earth Test was an annual check. Many of the older systems used a large copper artefact like an old pressure vessel buried in the ground as an earth terminal. Modern ones are most likely to use a copper bar driven well into the ground. Both work better if they contact the water table, dry ground is a very bad conductor.

[Tizer]

BBC, 4 November 2014
`Windscale Piles: Cockcroft's Follies avoided nuclear disaster'
"They were labelled a waste of time and money, but in 1957 the bulging tips of two exhaust shafts rising above Sellafield arguably saved much of northern England from becoming a nuclear wasteland. The shafts - known as Windscale Piles - have been a landmark for decades but soon the last of these Cold War relics will be gone. Cumbria's skyline will change with the removal of the piles - known as Cockcroft's Follies - but had they not been in place 57 years ago, the entire landscape may have been drastically different."
Full story here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-29803990

[Stanley]

I remember Windscale as it was known then opening and the optimism of the time. Electricity was to be "too cheap to meter". Despite all the problems over the years the plant has pushed the development of safe nuclear power forward and I'm glad it had it's day. Interesting to contrast the health effects of the plant to the health and climate effects of coal. Perhaps the pioneers were on to something they didn't even realise. I still believe that fusion power is eventually going to be the way forward, there is an immense amount of energy and funding going into it now. I wonder whether the new plants when they come will have any vacancies for steeplejacks.....

[Stanley]

Steele-jack’s skills could be used for other things than climbing stacks. I was once talking to a man who was bemoaning the fact that he had to refurbish the face of a mill in Burnley that had its footings in the canal, the scaffolding was going to cost a fortune. I told him that Jacks could do all the work without that expense, They tell me he took my advice but never even thanked me.....

[Stanley]

Peter Tatham and Tom Philips managing quite well without scaffolding.

[Invernahaille]

Stanley,
I remember Peter doing that job on his house on Bridge St, Milnrow. Its location was handy for a swift half in the Tim Bobbin at lunctime.

[Stanley]

You are quite right! Here's Peter doing just that with Daniel Meadows in 1970.

[Stanley]

Peter Tatham at home taking his ease at Tims Terrace in 1986.

[Stanley]

An abandoned stack in Ashworth Valley Rochdale in 1978.

[Stanley]

Brownside Mill chimney at Worsthorne, near Burnley, in 2001.