Making ends meet


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There could be a phone box topic started

 

2 hours ago, Cliff Ton said:

You'd be lucky to find one these days

 

P1060251.jpg

 

Rog

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Yes, trips to the cobblers as a boy and watching my shoes being repaired, then polished on the leather belt driven buffing machine. Borrowing my uncle's hobbing iron and nailing Blakeys (sp) into the

Done my bit too........Ounce of Yeast  Mrs Williams ? Pound of Dried Peas.......Mrs Griffiths ? Half pound of Tub Butter......Mrs Carling ? Qtr of Potted Meat..........Mrs Robinson ?

Even during the fifties things were still pretty tight.  I remember going to the individual shops with me mam.  My dad got called back into the navy because of the Korean war.  So my mam worked aftern

I've seen them around in that kind of location and, although I've never needed to use one,  you can't tell if they're actually working or if they're just in someone's garden as an ornament.

 

There must be instances of someone going to make a call, only to find the box full of flowers and someone's personal belongings.

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Ha, ha, Rog. We've had the shed one, we're currently swamped with the castle topic. Now the phone box one is gathering pace.

Where's the greenhouse one ? Then perhaps we can move on to coal bunkers. 

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Our house in Nottingham had a brick built coal shed which was at the end of a path in the garden.  A greenhouse was built on to the side of it.  I've just remembered the distinctive smell when dad was growing tomatoes in the greenhouse.  He tied up the tomato plants as they grew taller on to string hanging from the roof of the greenhouse.  One of philmayfield' s relatives delivered our coal (but I didn't know that then!)

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Well my plastic bunker at the side of the house is full of pallet blocks, and the other one beside the greenhouse is full of hardwood off cuts from my son in law who is a director of a furniture manufacturing company.

Also, at the other side of the greenhouse is several bags of logs that my nephew gave me.

I can elaborate but.....Zzzzzzzzz  :sleeping:

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34 minutes ago, loppylugs said:

We had a nice concrete coal bunker when we lived in the Wimpy house off Stockhill Lane.  Right outside the kitchen door it was.  Nice and handy.;)

Me too at my first house in Awsworth, same location as well, right outside the back door

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6 minutes ago, FLY2 said:

Well my plastic bunker at the side of the house is full of pallet blocks, and the other one beside the greenhouse is full of hardwood off cuts from my son in law who is a director of a furniture manufacturing company.

Also, at the other side of the greenhouse is several bags of logs that my nephew gave me.

I can elaborate but.....Zzzzzzzzz  :sleeping:

All you need now is an environment destroying log burner!         :rolleyes:

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Yeahhhhhhh . I had one in my cottage at Saxondale. It was a Morso Squirrel. Brilliant !  

Again, I could elaborate how I built the fireplace and installed it, but.   :flyswat:

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No Brew, not the Big House, I lived in the village half a mile away !

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According to the perverted logic of the time.. our pre war designed Council house didn't have a coal bunker.  There was a hatch half way down the side wall through which coal could be delivered by the bagfull into a 'coal hole' which was accessed via the kitchen.  That didn't last long.  There was another little space accessed by a door at the back of the house and intended as a 'tool shed' type place.

My Dad put boards into that space to hold back the coal and they could be progressively removed as coal stocks depleted.  Didn't happen often though as we had NCB 'Concessionary' coal.

Coal was mostly delivered in bags, but sometimes just dumped in the road.  We all mucked in to 'bucket' it into the coal hole.

The internal 'Coal Hole was converted to take assorted domestic stuff like Ironing boards and other assorted clutter..  And a small but beautifully formed shed was installed in the garden.

 

We didn't live in a Castle though..

 

 

 

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Col, reading your post reminded me that my mum always referred to our coal shed as 'the coal hole'.  I haven't thought about/remembered that for over 60 years!  

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We had a coal cellar with a cast iron grate in the back yard. When the coal was running low we scraped the slack off the cellar floor to keep the fire embers burning. Coke from Basford Gas Works was cheaper than coal and I used to take an old pram down there and get it filled for half a crown. Coke was difficult to make a fire with but it was OK for topping up a coal fire. Another 'eaking out' trick was to have a second or even a third 'mash' of tea using tho old leaves in the teapot. 

Just thinking about our back yard which was behind a hosiery factory - there was an iron fire escape in the shared area. At the bottom of the fire escape stairs there was a high steel gate with a huge rusty padlock securing it. In the event of a fire there was no way that the gate could be opened by escapees. 

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Often the coal came in enormous lumps which you had to attack with a hammer to break it into useable pieces. This of course produced lots of dust and slack. My uncle was our coal merchant but he could only sell what was available from Gedling colliery.

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Basically you could only get large coal from collieries employing trepanners to cut the coal. Pre mechanisation when coal was won by hand, customers only wanted large coal, railways, factory boilers household coal.

The largest customer of the 60's, 70's and up to the end was the power generators, they wanted small coal which was pulverized to powder at the power stations.

 

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18 hours ago, FLY2 said:

Ha, ha, Rog. We've had the shed one, we're currently swamped with the castle topic. Now the phone box one is gathering pace.

Where's the greenhouse one ? Then perhaps we can move on to coal bunkers. 

Now look at what you've gone and started, Fly.   Lol.

 

Edited to add.  I don't think I've ever hit 'like'  so many times in one thread.  I must have a thing about coal bunkers, or maybe its March madness.  :crazy:

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14 hours ago, MargieH said:

Our house in Nottingham had a brick built coal shed which was at the end of a path in the garden.  A greenhouse was built on to the side of it.  I've just remembered the distinctive smell when dad was growing tomatoes in the greenhouse.  He tied up the tomato plants as they grew taller on to string hanging from the roof of the greenhouse.  One of philmayfield' s relatives delivered our coal (but I didn't know that then!)

Yes, that would be uncle Bob Burton who lived nearby at 4 Greys Road. His son Brian worked with him and when Bob retired Brian bought Harbys Fuels with an office on Highbury Road. He then went on to be the landlord of the Red Lion in the marketplace at Stow on the Wold.

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On 3/16/2019 at 9:37 AM, philmayfield said:

We were a bit more upmarket . It was referred to as the ‘coal place’. It was next door to the outside toilet though!

 

I had a coal place next to the outside loo when I worked and lived in Annesley. Had 19cwt of employees coal allowance delivered every five weeks and the coal place was always full to overflowing.

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Our coal storage facility was also next to the outside toilet like most in the Meadows. It was referred to as the 'coal-house'. It really did seem ridiculously huge. It was converted into a bathroom/toilet and laundry utility and the outside toilet became the new coal-house, perfectly adequate.  

 

I remember we got our coal from Tricketts on Blackstone St. A really mucky job I liked as a kid, breaking down the large pieces into cobbles with this great big hatchet and then using a riddle thing to separate the slack. I couldn't have been more than about five or six. 

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We also had a coal -house at the bottom of the garden.Ours had a coal-house one one end of the building, a shed with a wooden bench with a vice in the middle and the outside toilet on the other end. My Dad never went to the toilet, he always went to "view the roses". One of my jobs as a young lad was to count the number of bags the Coal man delivered, as was making sure the chimney sweeps brush came right out the top of the chimney.What ever happened to the bundle of wooden sticks, bound together with wire.?

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On ‎3‎/‎16‎/‎2019 at 11:36 AM, DJ360 said:

My Dad put boards into that space to hold back the coal and they could be progressively removed as coal stocks depleted.

I'd like to start by correcting those that use the term coal house, the correct Nottinghamese  is coal'us. Like DJ360 ours was directly opposite the back door and my dad put boards across the inside of the door jambs to stop the coal falling out. We too got concessionary coal so it was never empty, the only problem that the coal fire had a "back-boiler" so we had to have a fire even in the summer to heat the water.

In the early days a truck would come round and tip a ton of coal on the road outside the front gate and it was my job to barrow it round the back into the coal'us. It earned me a tanner or a bob if dad had been on O/T that week. When they changed to bags it was my job to count the number of bags delivered. Can you imagine elf and safety today coping with the fact that a man had to carry a hundredweight sack of coal on his shoulders from the street to round the back of a house hundreds of times a day?

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It probably wasn't wise long term for the blokes doing it, but then again  a hundredweight on the back isn't impossible. As with all weight lifting exercises.. 'good form' is important...

I was quite weedy as a youth (still am..) but I could do it.  And of course knowlege about things like 'repetitive strain injury' etc., wasn't so hot.

When aah wur a Coal Board apprentice, we useter 'ave whole lessons in 'Kinetic Liftiing', to reduce injury from poor lifting technique. Basic principles along the line of. 'Bend knees not back. Back straight, legs together..' etc.

When I worked on assorted building sites, but mostly on the Basford Flats site, we were often called upon to unload whole wagons of cement. It was in 56 lb bags and still warm/hot from the manufacturing process.  Carting a couple of tons of those on one shoulder or the other often resulted in pretty sore shoulder..  Not from the weight, but from the heat. Also, unloading great wagons of bricks by hand.  Rough edges, bits in your eyes etc.

 

Very character building though...  I now have a character as rough as raw bricks and as cool as cement..

 

 

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...and anyway... why did some houses have a sort of concrete shelter. just for the Bin?

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