Every Lid Opened Is A New Adventure...

More finds from my uncle's (now empty) house. We had to wonder how long it had been since he actually saw any of this stuff himself? Looking through the possessions left after a relative dies is in turns nostalgic, surprising, incredibly sad, wondrous and, in the next moment, hilarious. Who, for instance, would have had any idea of the incredible number of cookery books that Uncle Geoff had amassed? Every now and then he would say he had baked some buns, or made some mince pies near Christmas. But I'm talking a stack of books by TV chefs that would reach as high as three feet...

Upstairs in what had been the main bedroom we uncovered a treadmill Singer sewing machine. My other Nana had one of these and we used to love it when she disengaged the sewing mechanism to let us sit at it, treadling away making the wheel spin so fast it burned your hand if you tried to stop it by grabbing the wheel! Of course (ahem) I was only a kid in my fifties then...

There were tins everywhere. Not all in great condition perhaps, as can be seen from this photograph. The tin is obviously one brought out around the time of Queen Elizabeth II's ascendency to the throne, or Coronation perhaps. But a label had been stuck over her face at one time and although removed, it has left remnants of gum that I couldn't shift. The tin contained oddments of buttons. There's something like it in every grandparent's house, whether a tin or a jar. My other Nana had a big Oxo tin and my Mum had a massive glass sweets jar...

Crawford's Red Lion Shortbread from Edinburgh. Scottish shortbread was one of those regular Christmas purchases. Still is, if it comes to that... I wonder if there's any left...

It contained combs. And a couple of fierce looking fancy combs designed to be worn rather than just for combing through your hair. The spikes on one look as though it is secured right down into the brain and beyond... There's also a couple of forerunners of those 1970s K-Tel comb-with-a-razor-blade instruments of torture. The cream coloured Sabo which bears the message "Do it yourself hairdresser" and the grey Easytrim towards the bottom. Top right is a blue long-handled comb with bristles on the side for that extra tug on your tangles (ouch!) There's enough samples of DNA attached to clone a few members of the family too...

This tin from many Christmases past doesn't give away what it was intended to contain but has a design of fruit trees, acorns, birds, deer and squirrels.

Roka Cheese Crispies. I don't remember these at all. But it all serves to remind us that there was a time before Twiglets and After Eight... Just the thing to go with your Cherry B.

Would you believe it? All the cheese crispies have gone and it now holds a bunch of candles. Memories of all those power cuts during the 1970s perhaps.

Elastoplast in a tin. It came in a massive roll and you cut off how much you needed. As kids in the 1950s our play areas were not spongy, impact absorbing soft-surfaced ground coverings. As likely as not public playgrounds were thoughtfully protected with a covering of rock hard, irregular shaped, lumpy, pointy, nasty tearing things called cinders. They were the charred clinker left over from fires and furnaces that were almost indestructable and would certainly come off best in a match against knees and elbows. Grown-ups would tut in sympathy and wash the grit out of your cuts and then splash on the iodine, which not only stained your skin purple, but was incredibly painful as it stung every exposed bit of flesh. "There, you'll be alright now..."

There were so many tins. My Grandad Burke was a pipe smoker for most of his life. As often as not instead of flaked tobacco he would buy rough cut which had to be rubbed in the hand to break it up before stuffing it into the pipe bowl. We saw an Iron Jelloids tin in yesterday's article. Let's have a look inside...

Paper clips and strips of rubber letters that look as though they have come from some sort of printing toy.

We did, in fact, find a John Bull Printing Outfit No.6. The little letters were mirrored and you arranged them to spell your message between the runners of the stamp (the red thing with the handle on the left in the box). The tweezers were so you didn't get ink on your fingers, but were incredibly good at springing a line of letters all over the room so you inevitably lost some. Inky fingers were much to be preferred than losing letters... Then the stamp pad - the other red bit) and hey presto! You could create a message. Though some letters would be darker than others because you hadn't pressed them as deep into the runners as other letters... The box also contains a rubber eraser that has seen better days and a box of gummed reinforcers. In the days when we used to put a lot of papers into ring binders, these were for reinforcing the punch holes so they wouldn't tear.

Also in the photo are a John Bull fountain pen, a bottle of ink, a Marathon pad for cleaning suede, a Progress typewriter ribbon tin now containing dip pen nibs and drawing pins, a maroon rubber endorsing ink container that was squeezed onto stamp pads in the John Bull outfit, and roll of gummed tape - pre-cursor to sticky tape but requiring you to lick it!

Old halfpennies or ha'pennies. There were several tins with old coins and some complete sets of pre-decimal coinage in old paper change bags. There's a few larger coins in there too. They are pennies.

This one contained farthings. There were four of these to the penny and 240 pennies to the pound. Hands up if you can imagine there being anything to buy using a 1/960th of a pound? The last issue of the farthing had a picture of a wren on the reverse (there's one in the middle of the tin). Earlier ones had that truly British image of Britannia with her shield. Even earlier ones had her between a ship and a lighthouse. There are some of those visible too.

Yardley's Brilliantine. It was hair oil. You put some into your hand, rubbed your hands together to make a horrible squelchy slapping noise...and then slapped both hands into your hair and rubbed the oil and goo all over your head. This gave your hair a brilliant shine as the light reflected off it (hence "brilliantine") and also made it possible to create horns and waves and sculptures of Blenheim Palace with your hair... Uncle Geoff had a habit of plastering on the hair oil and then grabbing lines between his fingers to create four deep waves. Always one for a bargain he must have bought it by the case... He wasn't planning on going bald, was he?

No, he wasn't...!

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A Chilly Visit to York

Blimey! The 27th of January and not a single blog post until today in 2015! Sorry folks! Busy doing other things, but some of those things will form the basis for more entries over the next few days with a bit of luck.

Last Sunday saw our first proper outing of the year when we got into the car and set off across the Pennines to York. Notwithstanding the M62 being a mess of roadworks and speed restrictions, we arrived late morning and decided to go into the excellent York Castle Museum.

This is the famous museum with a street. Shop and other building fronts have been collected and set up in a street setting with the sound of horse hooves and displays of contemporary goods in shop windows. There are also a set of period rooms from the 1600s right up to the 1950s. The final room depicting the 50s bears an uncanny resemblance to my grandparents' living room from that time. I'm never really comfortable with publishing lots of photos from museums so will limit myself to the above and a couple of items that form a more temporary display of toys and childhood, both of which have personal memories for me.

The first was this - a 1950s toy called Ball Mosaic which was as simple as they come. A perforated sheet of cardboard and a small collection of shiny coloured balls that sit on the holes and can be arranged to form patterns or pictures. A sheet of paper shows a few samples to give ideas. And then the child is only limited by his or her (or parents') imagination!

The second item is a John Bull No.6 Printing Outfit. These comprised of a couple of wooden (later red plastic as shown) holders into which you fitted small rubber stamps, each of which was of a letter of the alphabet or a number in reverse. A pair of tweezers was provided to pick up the letters but invariably you would try to pick up a row or a word and squeeze the tweezers too hard, catapulting letters all over the place. Once you had spelt out your message with the letters, you stamped the face of the letters on an ink pad and then on a piece of paper to print your message.

This was a great hit with all little boys who liked to get messy and, I'm sure, a disaster for all mummies of the time who would unwrap this present for her offspring and happily anticipate ink blots all over her carpets, tablecloths and furniture... Luckily the letters soon got lost and the toy thrown away!

In 1969 I used the remnants of my John Bull Printing Outfit to print envelopes for first day covers of the stamps commemorating Prince Charles' investiture as Prince of Wales.

We came out of the museum to a dull and cold day and this view of Clifford's Tower, the keep, and only surviving building of William the Conqueror's castle apart from some curtain wall which also forms the town walls. The mound, or motte, never fails to impress me and the castle has seen some horrendous events in its past. Here in 1190 some of York's Jewish community including wives and families barricaded themselves from rioters in the tower. With either forced conversion to Christianity or, more likely, death at the hands of the mob staring them in the face the men killed their families and set fire to the tower, committing suicide. Those who escaped the flames were indeed killed by the rioters, many of whom owed money to the money-lending Jewish society. Following the massacre, the rioters broke into the Minster and burned the records of their debts.

Here also in 1537 on the orders of King Henry VIII, the leader of the Pilgrimage of Faith, Robert Aske, was executed slowly and cruelly by being hung, festooned in chains from the walls. Without a noose, with no drawing and quartering of his body, he remained alive in his chains until he died of exposure and thirst, this taking days of agony. The good old days eh...?

We had a leisurely lunch in Gert & Henry's, a 16th Century building near the Shambles (shown). Some American girls came down to pay at the counter which was near our table. "How is it still here?" asked one on being told the age of the building. "It was built well..." replied the owner. A biker couple in their late twenties came in for lunch, she being in leathers so tight and well-fitting, that the mere sight warmed me up far more than the excellent food!

The Shambles is a fascinating street to wander down. It contains some very old buildings with overhanging upper storeys that come so close to each other at the top that it would be almost possible to shake hands across the street.

Windows have tiny panes of glass in sturdy frames and street lighting is noticeable by its absence. In fact the only downside is that the street attracts lots of people! But if you go there yourself, you can hardly complain at that...!

We walked the full length of the short street and back again. Then a slightly rash decision to walk through the shopping centre on our way back to the car park.

Walking down Stoneygate we pass Mulberry Hall, another ancient building from 1434.