Chirk Castle - Aged Oak

There grewe an aged tree on the greene,

A goodly Oake sometime had it bene,

With armes full strong and largely displayd,

But of their leaues they were disarayde:

The bodie bigge, and mightely pight,

Throughly rooted, and of wonderous hight:

Whilome had bene the king of the field,

And mochell mast to the husband did yielde,

 

And with his nuts larded many swine.

But now the gray mosse marred his rine,

His bared boughs were beaten with stormes,

His toppe was bald, and wasted with wormes, 

His honor decayed, his braunches sere.

Edmund Spenser, 1597: The Shepheardes Calendar - Februarie.

Bush Mechanics

Based in London's Shepherds Bush for the first four years of the company’s life, Bush Radio was founded in 1932. The DAC90 was introduced in 1946 and marketed as a second set for households, much as smaller televisions are marketed today. Early sets had a cloth speaker grille, changed to expanded wire mesh in 1948.

The DAC90A, pictured, was released in 1950, with production continuing until 1955. Both the 90 and the 90A were also available in off-white urea formaldehyde. It’s a chunky design, 11 inches wide, nine inches high, and seven inches deep. Classic 1950s.

(Lower photograph by Esther Bubley)

Wrested Back from Nature

Wrest Park, in Bedfordshire, is a secret garden on a monumental scale. The estate was home to the de Greys from the thirteenth century right through to 1917. The Manor House, completed in 1839, was designed in the eighteenth-century French style, by Thomas de Grey.

There were an immense 92 acres of formal gardens, inspired by those of Versailles, enclosed within seemingly endless walls, cornered by pavilions (top). Over the decades since 1917 the gardens have largely been lost. English Heritage gained control of the site in 2006, and in 2010 commenced a twenty year restoration programme.

In the garden, the initial focus is on the Rose, American and Italian gardens, the French parterre, and restoration of the miles of paths. There are also an orangery and a pavilion associated with a bowling green. For now, other than at weekends, all that can be seen is a vast, tantalising, enclosing wall.

Jukebox Jive

Justus P. Sjöberg left Sweden for America, aged just 16, in 1887. In 1902 he formed J.P. Seeburg Co., an Anglicised form of his name, to make automated pianos. The company’s first jukebox, the eight-disc Audiophone, arrived in 1928. A decade later Seeburg, making use of translucent plastic panels, released the Symphonola, the first illuminated jukebox.

The Select-O-Matic, introduced in 1949, was revolutionary. It provided for the selection of 100 tracks from 50 records; and the 1950 Model B (this example owned and beautifully restored by Andi Blount) was the first jukebox to play 45rpm records (“singles”). One play for a nickel (5¢), two for a dime (10¢), and six for a quarter (25¢).

Hawarden, Flintshire

William Ewart Gladstone, four-time Prime Minister, was a voracious reader, and collected books from his childhood. Whilst at Christ Church, Oxford, from which he took a double first in Classics and Mathematics, and another first in History, his collection grew apace.

Gladstone’s collection ultimately consisted of 32,000 volumes, of which the Grand Old Man read an incredible 22,000, a book a day, every day, for 60 years. In 1889 a pair of corrugated iron rooms, known as the Tin Tabernacle, was erected to house the library for public use – there is a famous photograph of Gladstone moving books from Hawarden Castle the half mile to their new home, using a wheelbarrow.

When Gladstone died in 1898 a public subscription funded the building in which the residential library is now housed, designed by John Douglas, and opened in 1902. The collection has grown to over 250,000 books, largely theology, history, philosophy, classics and literature.

The library, in front of which is the Gladstone Monument, intended for Dublin but refused by that city’s council, centres the village of Hawarden. For the bad is the House of Correction of the mid-eighteenth century (third photograph); for the good, Hawarden Park, entered via heavy wooden gates.

An Ekco of Lost Style

Ekco, E(ric) K(irkham) Cole Ltd, manufacturer of radio and television sets, was founded in 1926. Its Bakelite cabinets were pressed by AEG, in Germany, but high import duties introduced in 1931 encouraged Ekco to invest in its own presses, under AEG control, at its Southend-on-Sea factory. To counter any notion that Bakelite cases were a poor substitute for wooden ones, Ekco had these designed by leading Art Deco and International Style architects.

These included Wells Coates (Isokon building, Hampstead) and Serge Chermayeff (De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea). The Ekco AC (alternating current) 85 of 1934 is said to have been designed in-house, but was either by, or heavily influenced by, Coates. It was available in mottled brown, as in this example, black and chromium, and a very rare ivory (just one known). Options were an AC/DC version (AD85), a battery version (B85) and a wooden stand. Art Deco radio at its best, enough to inspire extravagantly fast behaviour.

Little Chef, the UK's Diner

Little Chef was started in 1958 by Sam Alper, sculptor and printmaking enthusiast, viticulturalist, and, like Airstream's Wally Byam, designer and booster of caravans. The first Little Chef was in Reading, Berkshire, modelled on diners seen by Alper in the USA. The chain ultimately grew to over 430 outlets. It passed through numerous hands, and by the mid-1970s was synonymous with dire food and terrible service; one stopped only if there really was no choice.

Chef Heston Blumenthal proved to be the company's saviour, introducing in 2009 both a new menu and a refit, starting with the outlet in Popham, Hampshire. The brand's mascot, Fat Charlie, was slimmed down, as was the chain, to about 115 outlets. That outside Shrewsbury is one of a dozen so far refurbished in line with Blumenthal's designs. Not quite an American diner, but a good UK simulacrum.

Llyn Clywedog

Clywedog Dam, high above Llanidloes, was built between 1964 and 1967 to regulate the flow of water in the upper reaches of the River Severn. At the time of completion it was the tallest mass concrete buttress dam in Britain, standing an impressive 235 feet high.









752 feet long, the dam, which has a convex form facing upriver, retains 11,000 million gallons of water. The reservoir is six miles long, 212 feet deep at maximum fill, and has a surface area of 615 acres.

In support of the dam, 15 miles of road were constructed or relaid; two new bridges were built; and a subsidiary dam, the 40 foot high earthen-cored and stone-faced Bwlch y Gle, was constructed to prevent the reservoir spilling around the sides of Bryn y Fan hill.

Bryntail Mine, Powys

At the foot of Clywedog Dam are the remains of Bryntail mine, one of many in the area that started out with the winning of lead ore and, over time, moved onto the extraction of barytes. There were three principal shafts here, Murray, Western, and Gundry.

Most of the extant buildings are associated with Gundry Shaft, and are clearly but unobtrusively labelled, enabling one to easily follow the processes that would have been operated.

There are two waterwheel pits, extensive remains of the leats that would have fed water to these (top), a couple of cottages, stone-built ore bins, and numerous settling tanks, constructed from massive stone slabs bolted together (middle).

The Idle Buildings of St Idloes

Llanidloes is the first town on the River Severn, named for St Idloes, to whom the parish church is dedicated. A market charter was granted in 1289, but the town is at least four centuries older.  

There are a number of fine buildings, notably the Market Hall, but the town was famous for its surrounding lead and silver mines. The Llanidloes and Newtown Railway built a grand station here in 1864. When the L&NR was incorporated into Cambrian Railways, the line linked through to Cardiff, and was used extensively to move metal ores.

The end came in 1962 as part of the cuts recommended by Dr Richard Beeching. A number of railway buildings remain, a few now in use as the workshops and warehouses of a furniture upholstery business.

Eden Minns

Eden Minns, an architect by training, designed furniture for Gordon Russell Ltd, of Broadway, Worcestershire. Between 1936 and 1939 he worked for Richard Russell of London, designing cabinets for Murphy, with whom he later took up the position of Head of Cabinet Design. The AD94 of 1940, its housing designed by Minns, was Murphy's first Bakelite cabinet, pressed by De La Rue, of banknote fame. 

Because this AC/DC superheterodyne table set was produced during WWII, it did not have long wave tuning. In 1945, when Droitwich's long wave transmissions were reinstated, the set was reissued as the SAD94S, with medium and short waves, and the SAD94L, with medium and long waves (photographed prior to cleaning). It cost £12 15s 0d, plus purchase tax, in excess of £450 at 2012 prices, a major purchase at a time when disposable income was so much less.

Inside Outside Broadcasting

Steve Harris, erstwhile TV lighting director and owner of On The Air, a glorious source of vintage technology in Hawarden, Flintshire, has a mammoth project on his hands. Combining all the challenges of classic commercial vehicles and complex and extensive electronics, North 3 was one of the BBC's nine colour mobile control rooms.

It's a 1969 Albion Clydesdale, with Leyland diesel, coachwork by Bonallack of Basildon, and interior by Pye. Six of the CMCRs carried EMI cameras, and three, including CMCR9, Pye-badged Philips cameras (a means to satisfy the letter of the BBC's policy at the time of buying British).  

Originally based in London, it was swapped with an EMI-equipped unit from Birmingham, to provide for consistency of kit at each outside broadcast centre, and ultimately moved to Manchester, when it became North 3. Decommissioned in 1982, it underwent various vicissitudes before being rescued by Steve, whose work on it, detailed at On The Air, provides eloquent practical definitions of  "skilled," "extensive" and "patient."

Hawarden Mill

Just outside the walls of Hawarden Park, Flintshire - once the home of William Ewart Gladstone, Grand Old Man of British politics - a public footpath runs along the top of the remains of a mill pond dam. This was fed by Broughton Brook, which runs under the footpath.

Released via sluice gates, the dammed water was channelled through a wooden trough to power the overshot wheel of Hawarden Mill, built in 1767 for Sir John Glynne. The corn mill was abandoned by the 1940s. Although the buildings have largely collapsed, the waterwheel survives, and the principal drive and gears, and some grinding stones, still lie scattered about.

Pneu Beginnings

Benjamin Franklin Goodrich, having failed to make a success of The Hudson Rubber Company, of New York, founded the BF Goodrich Company in Akron, Ohio. This was the first American tyre producer, beating by two years the 1898 foundation of the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, also of Akron, and named for Charles Goodyear, discoverer of vulcanization. Goodrich tyres were fitted to the first car to cross the USA, and to Lindbergh’s Spirit of St Louis, the first plane to be flown solo and non-stop across the Atlantic.

In 1911 Goodrich founded a French operation, with a factory at Colombes, in the north-west suburbs of Paris. Colombes was adopted as a brand. In 1945 a head office was set up in the Avenue Kléber, and the name changed to Kléber-Colombes. K-C continued Goodrich’s list of firsts by introducing the first tubeless tyre, in 1951. The brand was reduced to Kléber in 1968, and the company sold to Michelin in 1988.

Beggar Thy Neighbour

The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act stipulated that no able-bodied person was to be relieved by the Poor Law authorities except as the inmate of a workhouse, supposedly to reduce vagrancy; and that workhouse conditions were to be deliberately harsh, supposedly to discourage indigence.

Each parish, or union of small parishes, was to build a workhouse. That at Llanfyllin, for 250 paupers, was built in 1838, to a design by Thomas Penson, co-pupil with Thomas Telford of the famous bridge builder, Thomas Harrison. Grade II Listed, it is now in the hands of a local charity and provides the backdrop for an annual music festival.

Rime, no Reason ...

... beyond it being beautiful on this ivy (Hedera helix).

Horsepower: Sufficient

The engine in the Phantom I, launched in 1925, this one nestling in its Cambridge garage, gives physical expression to the traditional response of Rolls-Royce to questions about horsepower: "Sufficient." With pushrod overhead valves, and two banks of three cylinders each, this giant straight-six 7.7 litre drives through a rubberised fabric coupling to the clutch, monumental four speed crash gearbox, and hefty torque tube.

Uphill in particular, it is quite capable of outpacing many a modern car, not least because one can, from the driver's seat, manually adjust the richness of the fuel mixture. A governor provides an early form of cruise-control. It apparently stops well, with servo-assisted brakes all round, and drives beautifully, semi-elliptic springs to the front and cantilever springs to the rear. This car, chassis 63AL, restored over the last 20 years, originally belonged to Sir Ernest Wills, the tobacco magnate.

Fab Prefabs

Herbert Austin built his car factory at Longbridge, Birmingham, in 1905. Initial production was 120 cars per year, but within a decade production had soared to 1,500 cars per year. The plant expanded accordingly, but when during WWI it was turned over to the manufacture of tanks and planes, it grew by a factor of ten.

To accommodate his workers close to the factory, in 1917 Austin bought land from Hawkesley Farm and, from Michigan, 500 prefabricated red cedar houses. One of the ships carrying the consignment was sunk on the crossing from the USA. The surviving prefabs, each 20' 6" wide and 35' 3" deep, were erected in a horseshoe pattern around a central spine, with brick semi-detached houses at intervals to act as firebreaks.

The whole estate, numbering 250 houses, was completed in just eleven months, and mature trees planted along the roads. The prefabs housed seven Austin workers each, and the brick semis twelve each. Originally licensed for just five years, now a conservation area, the estate is redolent of a different era.

The Biarritz of Wales

Aberystwyth is quite a remote town. Cambrian Railways reached it in the 1860s, when it underwent a typical Victorian boom. There's a fine promenade, with the Aberystwyth Electric Cliff Railway (the UK's longest funicular railway) up Constitution Hill at one end, and the harbour at the other.

Otherwise, though, and despite having once been promoted as the Welsh Biarritz, Aber is rather down at heel. It is not a town of impressive sweeps, but has a number of interesting corners and details. Every bench along the promenade boasts curling snakes, and those within the castle stylised sphinxes.

The Royal Pier was one of Eugenius Birch's, opened in 1865 at an original length of 794 feet. Just 299 feet still stand, rather a sorry sight. Many modern pier operators seem to have an unerring ability to ruin the little that remains. Nostalgia is not what it used to be.