Physician, Heal Thyself

Being quite tall, our kitchen work surfaces are a little on the low side for comfort. We would have preferred them to be higher, but they are against the long side of the kitchen which is nearly all window, so they couldn’t be. Recently, Mrs. D. has been experiencing twinges in her back, aggravated by chopping vegetables and other jobs. “Is there something we could put on the surface to raise them up a bit?” I asked. A bit later we found this raised chopping board from Ikea (their image).  

Her back is now much better. 

There you go! If you require advice about such issues, you should ask the husband of an occupational therapist. 

Ashby Decoy

Family history research takes you along unexpected paths. In tracing ancestors, and their siblings, and their siblings’ children, I have come across many strange, puzzling, and fascinating things, such as old names for diseases, like phthisis, and the names of medical conditions now rare, such as erisepylis. 

One distant relative was Joshua Blackburn, whose parents’ gravestone in Swinefleet churchyard records that he died in 1872 aged 24. Following this up, I found he left a three-year-old daughter who lived until 1967. She was 97, yet her father died at 24. The chance of life. 

But it was the name of the place of his death that caught my attention: Ashby Decoy. What and where was that? You frequently see the name on maps, such as in Decoy Farm. 

A typical duck decoy pipe, showing screens, hoops, nets, and working dog

Fortunately, it is easier to look these things up than ever before. The word decoy is of Dutch origin. Decoys were a method of catching wildfowl. They consisted of a large pond with up to five long curving channels known as pipes running off in different directions. Flocks of ducks or other fowl flying overhead would land on the pond and be encouraged to swim along one of the pipes. The pipes were covered by hoops and netting, and gradually narrowed towards the end where the nets were dropped and the fowl caught. As ducks tend to follow foxes so they can watch where they are, dogs were used to encourage them to the pipe end. Food, whistles, and tame ducks could also be used. The reason for the choice of pipes was to allow catchers to stay downwind of the prey. Fowl caught in decoys were free of lead gun pellets. Evil. The poor ducks. They had been flying free. 

Ashby Decoy, two miles east of the River Trent, to the south-west of what is now Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, was in the nineteenth century one of the most successful decoys in the country, catching over 6,000 ducks in some years. One day, 248 were caught. The ducks were mainly mallard and teal, with occasional shovellers, wideon, and pintails, and a handful of the rare gadwalls and gangeneys. It had a two-acre lake in ten-acres of woodland, and four pipes. It is now the site of a golf club for which the lake provides irrigation. 

The site of Ashby Decoy, now a golf club (map and satellite image)

The whole region, including Goole, Thorne, and Crowle Moors, abounded in wildfowl of all kinds until the land was drained in the 1630s by re-coursing the River Don, leaving many small lakes around which ducks and geese bred. There were also many decoys. The last avocet nest in Britain was found in the area in 1840 (although they re-established themselves around the Wash in the 1940). Blacktoft Sands nature reserve is now here at the mouth of the Trent. 

As for Joshua Blackburn, I never got round to researching him much further. Did he die by accident or of disease? You cannot spend £10 on every death certificate that might be of interest. [See addendum at end].

Did he actually live at the Decoy? It was common for hired men to live at the farms where they worked, with board and lodgings provided as part of their wages. My dad used to go to Haldenby Hall farm at Amcotts, across the Trent from Ashby Decoy, where there was a large bell that had once been used to call workers to a room with a long table where they ate their meals. 

It seemed likely that the 1871 census would provide some of the answers, but my subs have expired. Purely to round off this post, I bought that entry only. It turns out that Joshua Blackburn was not a wildfowler or live or work at the Decoy at all. He was a farmer of 63 acres of warp land to the west of the Decoy. But he sent me off on an interesting diversion back to the days when most in the area made their living from the land.

Addendum: I am informed that the Hull Daily Mail of 26th October, 1872, reports that he was killed when a large shed he had recently built collapsed on him. 

Historic decoy near Widnes in Cheshire

Ten Years

I started this blog on 11th August, 2014, which means it has been going ten years as of today. The idea was to write a kind of autobiography covering how life has changed in England since I was little. 

The changes are many. After the war we still had ration books, bombed buildings, gas lights in the street, and Prefab houses. Later, in Leeds in the 1970s, my job took me to banks, building societies, manufacturers, merchants, shops, publishing and entertainment concerns, and businesses of all kinds that packed the city and further afield. Nearly all have gone. You could take evening classes in almost anything, and there were four or five cinemas in the city centre. The Leeds trams were no more, but sometimes I had to use the trolley buses in Bradford. 

I then went late to university, which led to a new career near the edge of the computer revolution, and saw change as it took place. I suppose I played a small part in it. I also came late to having a family, which has been great fun. I wanted to write it all down. 

There were few readers at first, but when I began to comment more on other blogs a few years ago, and chanced upon this friendly community, things began to pick up a bit. 

At times during the last two-and-a-half years I thought I would not see this day. I was as good as told it, but I am still here. The next milestones are more fruits of the garden, my birthday, and then Christmas. And then we will be into 2025 and hopefully it all comes round again. Or will it? That sounds gloomy, I know, but it is what it is, and that is all there is to it. 

It does not get easier, as my comment and response rates are beginning to show. The list of what I can no longer do, am not allowed to do, or would be stupid to try, is depressingly long. My reading difficulties make blogging slow and difficult, and I have thought of giving up, but it is one of the things that keeps me going, and I still have posts to write. I enjoy the exchange of humour, ideas, and opinions, reading what others have posted, and writing creatively. I am amazed others read it. Thank you so much, everyone. 

The White Stool

I keep this stool in the greenhouse. It is a bit too narrow to be stable when you stand on it, so I use it mainly to sit on. The greenhouse is a lovely bright warm place to sit on your own for an hour or two, not talk to anybody, and do absolutely nothing. 

The stool is very old, at least a hundred years I would guess, possibly more. It came from my mother’s parents and might have been made by her father or an earlier relative. The legs are fixed by nice tight mortice and tenon joints. Rough and ready, but not many could knock up something like that now. 

I painted it white as a child in 1964 or 1965 when I developed a craze for painting things. Well, it’s better than gawping at a screen all day as they do now. Weren’t we lucky to be able to play with tools and messy and dirty things in untidy sheds, rather than having to live in the empty, pristine houses and gardens that seem to be fashionable now. 

We used to use it as a cricket wicket. Here it is with my eight-year-old brother in 1964 in front of the coal house. He has his eyes tight shut. I said his bowling was so rubbish I could hit it with my eyes closed, and proved it. He said that mine was no better, and had to prove it too.

The R100

New Month Old Post: first posted 10th July 2016.

In his autobiography, Slide Rule, the author Nevil Shute (1899-1960), a man of his time with attitudes to match, remembered working as an engineer on the R100 airship during its construction at Howden in Yorkshire in the nineteen-twenties. Much of the workforce consisted of local lads and girls trained to carry out riveting and other tasks high up in the ribs and spines of the airship skeleton. Of them he writes:

The lads were what one would expect, straight from the plough, but the girls were an eye-opener. They were brutish and uncouth, filthy in appearance and in habits ... these girls straight off the farms were the lowest types that I have ever seen in England, and incredibly foul-mouthed ... we had to employ a welfare worker to look after them because promiscuous intercourse was going on merrily in every dark corner ... as the job approached completion ... we were able to get rid of the most jungly types. 

Jungly types? That is my maternal grandma you are talking about, Nevil, and her friends and cousins. They never had the chance to be privately educated and scrape through Oxford with a bad degree. While your evenings and weekends were spent dancing, playing badminton, flying aeroplanes and writing novels, they were toiling away tending crops and animals from their damp and dingy dwellings. Better check your privilege. 

And, how come the lads were “salt-of-the-earth, vital rustic types”, while their sisters were “jungly beyond vulgarity”? How was it different from when you were in the army? 

The language of the men was no novelty to me, of course, and I could out-swear most of them, but their attitude to women was shocking... 

Workers at Howden, high up in the ribs and spines of the R100 skeleton.

Both my parents had memories of the R100. My mother’s mother worked there for a short time, and had a small, airship-shaped piece of duralumin silver metal, around an inch and a half long (4cm) and flat on one side. It was from a batch of airship brooches unfinished when they ran out of metal. She gave me it as a toy and it became an imaginary submarine. 

My dad remembered going to see the R100 in its construction shed at Howden. His dad borrowed the Model T van from work to drive there across the newly opened Boothferry Bridge. He said that the river was swollen by floodwater. Looking up in the shed, the airship was so big my dad could not see it. At 700 feet long (220m) and 130 feet in diameter (40m), it was around the size of two rows of twenty-five terraced houses with front gardens and a road between. He thought he was looking up at the roof.

The R100 in its construction shed at Howden
with one of the control gondolas hanging from the airship
which my dad thought was the roof.

The R100 squeezed out of its shed and left for Cardington in Bedfordshire in December, 1929. It was one of two airships built in competition to explore the possibility of commercial flights to Canada, India, and Australia, then still too far for aeroplanes to carry heavy loads. The other was the R101 built at Cardington. 

No more large airships were built in Britain. The R100, the better of the two, made a successful flight to Canada and back in 1930, crossing the Atlantic in three days. Rather than admit defeat, the R101 team attempted a premature flight to India, but the airship hit the ground and caught fire in France in October, 1930, with the loss of 48 lives. The airship project was abandoned and the R100 broken up for scrap. Large airships were built later in other countries, such as the Hindenburg in Germany, but these also ended in disaster. They were filled with hydrogen. 

The R100 over Montreal, August, 1930.