Progress

Progress

It was all in the name of Progress 

In 1966 I was just 15, in my final school years, running around looking in molehills for roman coins, or any other shiny Antiquities.

There were radical changes happening in the world around us at that time. The way we shopped was changing, counter sales were being replaced by self service, which required a different type of building in which to operate. Much of Victorian Britain was at risk of redevelopment in one form or another. Whole industries were going out of business, and buildings being demolished. Shops, factories, and homes, were all disappearing in the name of “progress”.

Above all of these were the changes to the railways. After being appointed as the Head of British Railways to reduce the cost of the railway network, Dr Beeching published his report called ‘The reshaping of British Railways’ in 1963. His report recommended the closure of 5,000 route miles of track and 2,363 of the 7000 stations, also leading to the loss of around 70,000 British Railway jobs.

By 1975 the UK’s railway network had shrunk to just 12,000 miles and around 2,000 stations, but still failed to halt losses or increase profitability.

It may have been 1966, or 1967 when I went to meetings of another group of people, the Poole Industrial Archaeology Group. As far as I remember the other attendees were all men. Their interests were concerned mainly with the recently defunct industrial buildings and machinery that stood empty and unused, awaiting demolition. Modern methods of production and cheaper products from overseas were making businesses that survived to just before the war unviable. These men were fascinated by those industries, and the history of the industrial revolution, and wanted to record what they could, photographically and orally, before it disappeared completely, preserving what they could of it, if that was appropriate.

They looked on in horror as the Beeching cuts to the railway system took effect, and as the steam trains running on our railways were replaced by diesel and electric locomotives.

To them, I was probably “the kid from Bournemouth,” and in common with the archaeology group I attended in Bournemouth, I was the youngest person there. In retrospect, if there had been boys my age there I would probably have avoided it like the plague. The men would come to their meetings talking about the photography, and recording work they were doing on mills, brickworks, and old factories around the area that were disused, and awaiting demolition.

One man came to a meeting of the group with a pile of drawings that he had literally managed to rescue from the flames, clutched under his arm. He had been visiting one of the small local railway stations that was in the process of being decommissioned subject to the edict of the Beeching Act. When he had arrived at the station he found, to his horror that there were men clearing out the ticket office of the station in preparation for it’s demolition. On the ground in the station car park was an enormous pile of paperwork that had just been removed from the office. It included, tickets, building plans and elevations, track design layouts, all beautiful draughtsman line drawings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, posters and railway timetables. As he watched, the worker set fire to the papers, so he dived in and grabbed what he could before the flames caught them.

I wanted to do something too, and I asked someone if there was anything they could suggest. He had a think and suggested I might like to go around roads of Bournemouth, marking off on a street map the locations of “sea water” manhole covers. This was a system laid out, perhaps in the early years of the 20th century in which the roads of the town were dampened with sea water during the hot summer months, to keep the dust down, apparently. There were two red brick towers built either side of the town centre to which water was pumped and there stored in readiness for street workers to dampen down the dust on hot sunny days. I took my bike and fairly systematically cycled and walked the streets of old Bournemouth looking on the road surfaces for round cast iron manhole covers, with a single keyhole in their middle and the words “SEA WATER” embossed on them.

 

At another meeting I was asked if I would be willing to assist a participant in the group who was carrying out a photographic survey of a place called Sandford Pottery, near Wareham. I agreed to help and we set a date and time when he would pick me up for the job.

Sandford Pottery was a landmark on the road between Poole and Wareham. It was not far from the road and its tall chimney drew the eye of anybody who passed it by.

  

Built in the 19th century , It was intended to be a manufacturer of fine chinaware, but the local clay proved unsuitable for fine china and the whole venture failed. After 1886 the works were converted to a refinery for the extraction of oil from Kimmeridge shale. This process also proved to be a failure, and in 1895 the works were taken over by a company which produced salt-glazed drainpipes and fittings for the building industry.

The photographer I was assisting had clearly been there before and taken lots of photos but there was just one that he could not do. At least, not without a helper, preferably someone small like me. So, on the day that we had agreed he collected me from my home, and drove us there.

Even then the road from Poole to Wareham was quite busy, and turning right across the traffic proved to be a temporary difficulty. As we drove into the grounds my guide found a place to park his car. There were plenty of places to choose from around the enormous factory building. Where once there may have been stacks of products and raw material, now thistles and Rose Bay Willowherb forced there way through the cracked tarmac laid about the building. There were no vehicles either, or carts, or evidence of any activity at all. Walking around the building we found a back entrance into the place. The door with its green paint peeling, was closed and padlocked, but the photographer had a key and he let us in with that.

Outside it was a sunny day, and the sky was blue, but inside as we entered through the old door the light was peculiarly monochrome. As our eyes adjusted we picked our way from room to room, through workshops, stores, and machine rooms. The photographer knew where he was going, and I was following him, carrying the tripod for his camera.

We went through another door, and here the light level dropped again. In fact it was quite gloomy. What light there was came from small windows, high up in the ceiling, and in that light we could dimly see the curved brick built surfaces of the three massive kilns.

He called this the kiln Hall, and took the tripod from me, beginning to make preparations for the photograph he wanted to take while I gazed around at the big empty space.

The kilns were big enough to fire the architectural terra cotta that was commonly used on Victorian buildings, also ceramic drainpipes, and roof tiles.

They stood in line, the three kilns, cylinders of brick, with small access tunnels through their walls into their interiors. I could crawl through, into the kiln, and inside there was enough space that I could easily hide from view. When I was in there, using a torchlight, I could look up at the funnel of circular brickwork receding into the black distance above me.

Each kiln was mounted on a podium which was raised in a brick lined trough around all three of them. This may have been a basic barrier against workers getting too close to the heated kiln while it was firing. To get at the kilns I had to scramble down into the trough, and up out of it onto the platform around each of them.

The photographer wanted to take a photo on a long exposure using available light as much as possible. His problem was that when he did so the kiln mouths did not show up, they were just black holes in the picture. I was asked to add a focus of light to the interiors of each kiln. I carried a flash gun, part of the photographers equipment, and clambered up onto the apron around the first kiln, climbing through the little tunnel into the interior. I hid myself from view and waited for his call for me to press the button on the flash gun. When I did the interior filled with light for a brief moment. Then I climbed out of that kiln, and skipped to the next kiln, and to the third kiln repeating the flash, all while the camera shutter was open.

That was it, it was easy really, a little time setting up the camera and tripod, a bit of clambering around in the gloom, then dismantling the camera and tripod, and we were ready to go home.

As we had done what we had come to do we walked back out of the pottery through the workshops and offices. We passed the stacks of empty mouldings. I could recognise Acanthus leaves and Fleur-de-lis impressions, not that I could name them, but I had seen them in red terracotta around the entrance doors of the older shops and houses in the town. Here the light flooded through the grimy workshop windows onto the benches where tools, hand made for specific tasks, were laid out in tidy order. There the piles of moulds were stacked waiting to be filled to shape clay for a firing that wasn’t going to happen. The high seats that the workers had so recently used, made in the factory’s own workshop here, were pushed in under the workbenches, each one having an overall draped over it’s back as if the person who left it there might come back tomorrow, shrug himself into it and resume his work where he had left off. Everything here was pale, coated by the settled dust of powdered clay that overlaid everything, and the months of quiet disuse.

The building remained standing for many years after that, but was demolished in 1979, on 25th November when the winner of a competition run by the Bournemouth Echo, the local newspaper, pressed the button to detonate the explosives which took down the magnificent chimney.

Peter Stickley was my friend from the South Wessex Archaeological Association. He was ten years older than me and he befriended me first on one of our day trips out with the group. We would hang out together at their excavations, especially at the Christchurch Necessarium, as there were always more people for jobs than jobs for people. With not much to do, we would often go and dig small holes in inconspicuous places close to the excavation, just to see what we could find. He called it Clandestine Archaeology.

Peter had trained as a cook, but had found that he was allergic to flour, so had had to give that up as a career. Instead, he worked as a shop assistant. One day he asked me to come and help him at the shop he worked in. It was a Saturday morning and the manager of the shop didn’t work on that day, so Peter was running the place on his own. He said he had a job he needed help with, but I think he just wanted company.

The shop he was managing was a pawnbrokers shop on Holdenhurst Road in Bournemouth, Tusons and Sons. It stood at the end of a terrace of shops. The three orbs symbol of the pawnbroker, was hung out on an iron bracket from the front upper wall, but the entrance for pawning possessions was at the side of the building. The shop front was a jewellers, the more respectable side of the business.

 

“In Britain in the late 19th century and early 20th century, there were nearly as many pawnbrokers as public houses, lending money on anything from bed linen and cutlery to father’s ‘Sunday best’ suit.

Hanging over the lives of the poor was the fear of the workhouse. They would do anything to avoid it, even if it meant pawning their belongings to gain some cash temporarily. Clothes, shoes and even wedding rings would be pawned to be redeemed later if the owner’s circumstances improved.

“Half a pound of tuppenny rice,

Half a pound of treacle,

That’s the way the money goes,

Pop goes the weasel!”

This song from around 1850 is reputedly about pawning (“popping”) a coat or “weasel” (from the rhyming slang “weasel and stoat”) in order to get money to buy simple foodstuffs.

Pawnbrokers were easily identified by their signs of three golden balls, a symbol of St Nicholas who, according to legend, had saved three young girls from destitution by loaning them each a bag of gold so they could get married.

So how does pawning work? An item is taken to the pawnbroker who lends an amount of money to the owner of the object. The item is held by the pawnbroker for a certain length of time. If the owner returns within the agreed time limit and pays back the money lent plus an agreed amount of interest, the item is returned. If the loan is not paid within the time period, the pawned item will be offered for sale by the pawnbroker” (The Pawnbroker by Ben Johnson in Historic-uk.com)

That side entrance for pawning possessions accessed a lobby in which there were three doors with frosted glass panels in them, each of which accessed a timber lined booth which faced the shop staff, but which were private from each other, preserving privacy for each customer.

The shop wasn’t far from where I lived so I cycled there and found somewhere out of the way to park and lock my bike before taking off my cycle clips and going in by the jewellery shop entrance where Peter greeted me as he concluded business with a customer. He looked every bit the professional shop keeper, round clean shaven face, prematurely receding hair, shiny forehead, jacket shirt and tie. He bubbled enthusiasm. I can’t quite remember what he bubbled about, but everything for him was something to get excited about. The more excited he was the higher, and quicker went his voice, so that it was usually a bit squeaky, which not surprisingly caused him to be a little self conscious, so when the telephone rang in the shop, and he was in the middle of an excited conversation with me, he would put the phone handset to his ear and adopt a lower voice register from deep within his chest. The change was endearing. He was putting his customer facing voice on.

When an opportunity arose he took me up to the loft where he said he needed my help. I wasn’t at all sure what this was all about, in fact I was a bit suspicious, but I went along with it. We went up a set of carpeted stairs to first floor offices, then up another flight of stairs. These were much steeper and not carpeted. The attic room that these took us to was full of rows of shelving, slatted pine, shelf upon shelf, row upon row. Some of these were filled with leather shoes laced together in pairs, with a numbered chit of paper attached. Others were piled with packages wrapped in brown paper and fastened with string, also with a chit attached. These were men’s suits, essential clothing for church, weddings and funerals, and at that time expensive to replace.

Peter left me there with instructions as to what was expected of me and on hearing the bell from below informing him that a customer had entered the shop, hurried back down the steps.

There was a window with a wooden sill at which I could sit while I waited. The stairs down which Peter had just gone wound around a boxed-in lift mechanism called a dumb waiter. A shaft ran from the ground floor shop up to this attic room in which the larger pawned items were stored. A wooden box could be raised and lowered between the two floors by a rope and pulley mechanism in the shaft. When the moving box arrived at top or bottom of the shaft a brass bell was automatically struck, and cupboard doors provided access to it, both in the attic, and downstairs in the shop.

I was to await the call of the bell at the top of the dumb waiter.

I could hear the pulley turn and the box rumbling in the lift as Peter pulled on the rope downstairs to bring the box to me. When it arrived with me, the bell that hung beside the door rang. I opened the door, took the chit that Peter had placed in there and, looking along the shelves in the room, found the clothing or shoes that the customer had pawned, placed them in the box in the lift, and lowered it to the ground floor, using the pulley system. Then I took the chit and attached it, by spearing, to a long steel spike which was hanging next to the lift cupboard. There were five of these spikes, they must have been two feet long each, and they were stuffed with chits. There must have been hundreds of pawn chits on each spike. I was just amazed to think how many pawn transactions this row of hanging spikes represented.

I was only sitting in the loft like that the one time, but I visited regularly on Saturday mornings after that. On one occasion when the shop wasn’t busy Peter showed me the basement. Down there he pointed at a door that had been sealed off, with timbers round the jambs and lintel, firmly attached to prevent anyone from going in. He said that he wanted to open it up to see what was in there, but the boss wouldn’t let him.

At about this time, Peter was applying for and getting a promotion to the headquarters of the same company he worked at here, in London. I had also heard that I would be starting an apprenticeship in London, and it happened that we would both be setting off for these separate adventures at the same time.

As the time that we would be moving from Bournemouth to London came Peter still wanted to get inside the blocked up room in the basement. He also still knew that his boss would object if he broke into it, but he didn’t care. With me at his side one Saturday morning he took a hammer and a crowbar, levering off the battens around the door frame that secured it shut and battered down the door.

I don’t know what we were expecting, a body, a space stuffed full with old things, something, anything!

When we got in there we found it almost empty, a small dark dank room. A little light came in, but not much, from glass ceiling bricks in the floor of the forecourt above, in front of the shop. It looked quite empty until we adjusted our eyes to the gloom. The walls and ceiling were plastered, there was skirting board all around the floor, and for something that had hardly seen the light of day for over fourty years it was all quite clean, considering.

The floor seemed to be a kind of concrete and was mainly bare except for a row of objects neatly placed upon it alongside the right hand wall. There weren’t many things so their placement didn’t seem random.

 

The largest item standing out in the little collection was a typewriter, and it was of a design that I had never seen before. It had a roller upon which the typing paper was trapped for stamping each letter, and a pyramid of hammers each side of the focus point where each letter was typed onto the paper. It was made by a company called Oliver.

The Oliver typewriter featured two towers of typebars that struck down onto the platen, allowing the writing to remain visible at all times, which was a novelty when it was introduced for sale. This design allowed Oliver typewriters to be marketed and branded as “The Standard Visible Writer” from 1893 to 1928.

Next to the typewriter was a neat pile of items. Atop the pile was a stack of half a dozen newspapers including copies of the Bournemouth Daily Echo, the Daily Telegraph, Titbits, and the Pawnbrokers Gazette. In layer two below the newspapers was a cardboard box that had been opened out and neatly flattened. This was about the size of a shoe box, and had printing and designs on all its surfaces, but the contents cannot have been that arresting as I do not recall what they were.

The bottom layer of this pile of placed time capsule items was a sheet metal pawnbrokers sign. A large sheet of heavy sheet iron with a layer of white ceramic material coating it on both sides. A black printed inscription over both surfaces read “Cash Advanced, Offices”. Alongside that was a silhouette image of a hand with a single extended finger directed down to a corner of the sheet, and a simplified image of the three balls pawnbrokers symbol completed the sign. There was a nasty cracked space in the ceramic skin on the metal sheet. It looked as if someone had hurled a brick at it.

The condition of the newspapers varied considerably. The dates on them were all from 1922, and the Daily Telegraph was robust, and retained much of its white paper colour. The Echo and Titbits just about survived but the Pawnbrokers Gazette was thin, fragile, and heavily discoloured.

I wrote to the British Museum, asking them to tell me how to preserve a newspaper like this, and they replied with a detailed description of the glue and tissue paper that I would need and how I might apply them.

The typewriter from the locked room went home with me, it was very heavy so it would have been walked on the rack at the back of my bike.

I was a squirrel, storing up all sorts of treasures for their perceived value. Peter rather encouraged that, passing on to me various bits that looked like they needed a home, like a clock that didn’t work, for example.

One day he handed me a cast iron acanthus leaf that he had acquired. What he thought I might do with that I’m not sure. He had been serving in the shop on a particularly windy day when an irate gentleman had stormed in with steam coming out of his ears, because this fragment of heavy iron had been dislodged from its place on the pawnbrokers symbol hanging out in front of the shop, and fallen onto his car bonnet, causing some damage to his car.

Peter gave the gentleman both barrels back, telling him that the forecourt was private property and that he had parked there without permission, and at his own risk.

I don’t think Peter ever actually said that the business of pawnbroking was doomed, that there were now other ways of dealing with short term financial embarrassment, but we knew it. This shop had seen better days and we knew that in the current atmosphere of clearing away the past, its days were numbered.

I think the last thing that he placed in my reverential keeping was the bell that was fixed at the top of the dumb waiter. It was little brass bell, green with verdigris, attached to a long curved strip of rusty spring steel. This was the Bell that rang when the lift in the shafts reached the doors in the attic to wake the boy in attendance there.

Me?

Jeffery Nicholls