Hooptedoodle #210 revisited - More about Jim and Ike and the Cowhouse

Back in February I wrote about when my Great-Grandmother left her farmer husband, and moved with her sons, Ike and Jim, into Liverpool, where they ran a dairy in Toxteth. The story is well known in our family, but the details have become a little hazy - one thing that has always irked me a bit is that I never knew where the dairy was.

As discussed in February, these little local dairies were important in poor districts of the cities - for one thing, we must remember, it was not a good idea to drink the water in those days - milk or beer or boiled tea, but never water!

Without wishing to become one of those dreadful genealogist people who bore you to death at parties, I bought some inexpensive DVD scans of old Liverpool street directories, and I very quickly scored a bull - or maybe a cow? I found Great-Grandma Ellen listed as a "Cowkeeper" in the 1900 directory, at an address which is given as 32 David Street and 2 Grace Street - which is simply explained by the fact that it was on the corner of David and Grace Streets, in Liverpool 8, and there were entrances in both streets.

I found some street views on Google Maps - David Street is still there - at least the North side including No.32 is still there.

32 David Street is the terracotta-coloured building with the modern shutter door. That
would have been the typical wooden gates, where the delivery carts and the
cows came and went. A quick study of the photo shows a lot of change in the
building frontage.

...now we are round the corner in Grace Street - there was obviously a door (the
shop door for the dairy?)  in the wall in a former time, and the back of the archway
is still visible, albeit bricked up, in the rear wall

My estimate of 1895 for their arrival in the city looks pretty close - in the 1894 directory, the business is listed as belonging to one George William Hollingsbee. In the 1911 directory, the next one I have later than 1900, the dairy has passed on to a Mr Stephen Robinson. Ellen died in 1910, aged 71, and her son Ike (my grandfather) was married with a young family by then, and he is listed as resident at 21 Cockburn Street. Ike, you understand, was the original owner of the watch which featured in Saturday's post.

I now know for a fact that you will run screaming if you see me at a party, but I have to say I'm pretty pleased, tracking down the old dairy without leaving my chair. Virtual reality, anyone?

***** Late Edit *****

This a fairly recent photo of the old Toxteth Reservoir mentioned in the Comments - definitely an odd thing to come across in the city streets. I recall that I was scared of it as a small child - in later life, for years, I wasn't sure if I had imagined it or if such a place existed! The dreadful problems with cholera epidemics in the 19th Century required radical solutions to get better water into the houses - this was one - pipelines bringing fresh water from well outside the city (Lake Vyrnwy, in North Wales, in particular) was another.

Hooptedoodle #239 - A Bit More Family History, and a Small Coincidence

Today I started on the mammoth task of sorting out my mother’s house prior to selling it. This is not so bad as it might have been, since she and my dad moved to Scotland only 15 years ago, and the ground has been recently disturbed, so to speak.

In the box room is an absolute horror of an old cupboard, which contained a pile of accumulated junk belonging to my late father – art materials, tools and a bewildering assortment of ironmongery, and spares for things that most people wouldn’t have thought of owning in the first place. In there I found my grandfather’s old watch, which I haven’t seen since I was eleven. I know I was eleven because I had just started at the grammar school when it was given to me. I regret to say that I took it to school, dropped it on the stone floor of the basement cloakroom and broke the glass. The watch was taken back into safe-keeping, apparently repaired, and I never saw it again until today.

My granddad was a foreman in the electrical workshops at Liverpool Docks, and as such he used to go to work each day (on his bicycle, by the way) wearing a suit with a waistcoat, and a bowler hat. A bowler hat was the mark of the foreman. On his waistcoat he sported chains for his two watches (he was a bit flash, my granddad). One of the watch chains had a little silver match-case, with original wax Lucifer matches in it (lost years ago). This is the other one.

Yes, this is the one I had, if only briefly. It's good to see it again. It is a Swiss-made military style watch imported by Morath Brothers, of Liverpool. I believe the case is of gunmetal, with nice brass detailing. I would guess it dates from about 1910 or thereabout – it still works beautifully, I can tell you. The chain is silver, and the attached coin is a very worn silver Queen Victoria fourpenny piece dating from 1838 (is that a groat, then?).

I don’t imagine it is especially valuable in cash terms – I might have a look later. What I did was find out a little about Morath Brothers. It seems their shop was at 71 Dale Street, Liverpool, and they specialised in imported clocks (especially cuckoo clocks) and watches. Typically, the pocket watches were made by Omega or Zenith. The Moraths originally came from the Black Forest area of Germany, and Fedele Morath was listed as having a business at the Dale Street address in 1848. I don’t know how long they survived, but I know for a fact they were certainly open in the late 1950s. I know this because, I now discover, their shop was right next door to the old Top Hat record bar, which opened in 1957, and where my Auntie Barbara was manageress until she went to work for NEMS and then Beaver Radio, in Whitechapel. Some of my very earliest dalliances with popular music were in the pegboard listening booths at the back of the Top Hat – Buddy Holly, Duane Eddy and all that exotic American stuff. Great, actually. My aunt must have been one of the most patient women on the planet, since my cousin and I used to hang around the shop during school holidays, and we never actually bought anything.

The Top Hat was locally famous for having record-signing days when big name stars (well, quite big) would sign autographs and so on – there were queues right down the street, sometimes.

I was interested to see these old photos online – if only to prove that it really did happen.

Queues waiting to meet Frankie Vaughan at the Top Hat, circa 1958 - note
Morath Bros next door at no. 71

And here's Frankie himself signing autographs for the fans - he was a bit of a
star, but I think he only came from Granby Street, which was not very international...

...other celebrities included the Texan recording artist, Mitchell Torok (no - me neither)
 - note here that he is signing 78rpm discs!...

  

...and Lonnie Donegan

This remarkable picture, borrowed without permission from "A Liverpool
Picture Book", compares the Frankie Vaughan queue scene with the
current state of the site. The jewellers' has disappeared, and the rest
of the block lies empty. By the mid 1960s, the Top Hat had evolved into
a branch of Radiospares (the Leeds-based hobby-electronics store) and may
have later been a joke shop. Urban decay, you see.

1809 Spaniards – Regimiento de La Coroña – got there eventually

The Mojo Breakers - painted at last - just waiting for flags. Mostly NapoleoN 
figures - some Falcata and some conversions in the command

I checked some dates – I painted up some test figures for a couple of regiments, including this one, in September last year. At that time (unusually for me) I had been progressing well with figure painting, and my Spanish army was coming along nicely, but it was becoming obvious that I would have to cope with increased exposure to Real Life for a while, so I was attempting to plan what to do next. What I did next was to paint up the command figures for two 2-battalion regiments (pics appeared here in Oct ’15), and ship off the massed fusileros to a painting service I’ve used before.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, my philosophy with these paint shops is that they do a so-so job, requiring a fair amount of correction and retouching, but if they are cheap enough then the time saved is worth the cost – even comprehensive retouching is invariably quicker and easier than painting from scratch.

Well, maybe not invariably. In this case, I sent the figures away with uniform artwork and a couple of painted samples, which is the normally the best way of ensuring an effective job. They were a long time at the painting service, and I started to get worried when the customary progress photos did not come back by email. When I chased the batch up, they simply returned them, painted to what I regarded as a very disappointing standard, and with a few breakages to add insult. One of the regiments was a fairly straightforward job to sort out, and they duly took their place in the line (well, the box file) within a week or so. The other – 2 battalions of La Coroña – was just a mess. I started tinkering around, to find matches for the paint shades, and to work out how much effort was needed to sort out the facings and piping. To be quite honest, it would have taken me a couple of weeks of evenings to make a really nice job of them, but instead I went into a major sulk. La Coroña  are my only Spanish regiment to wear the older 1802 regulation uniform (which is very smart, though a bastard to paint), and I was upset out of all sensible proportion that they had gone so wrong.

My last emails to the painter, expressing my disappointment, are dated the end of November last year, when I put the figures away in a plastic box – all mounted on the official painting bottletops and everything – and left them to fester for a while. A week or so later, my mother was admitted to hospital for the first of a series of episodes which has severely limited my hobby time. We got a reprieve from March to August, but otherwise this has not been a good year for a lot of reasons, and figure painting is well down the list of priorities that didn’t make progress this year.

So – no hard luck stories – I simply got timed out on the Coroña boys, and they have sat like an itching sore in the plastic box for best part of a year. I could have done much better, but I managed to find more pressing things to do and – I have to admit it – my spirit was rather damaged by the episode with the painter. One thing for sure, this is the last time I learn that particular lesson…

Time passed. I was pleased with the things I did with ECW sieges, but the Spanish infantry stayed very definitely in the Sulk Box – I felt worse and worse about them. My mum has now been back in hospital for a month and – paradoxically – this has helped, since it has broken my spare time down into definite times and fairly short sessions. Almost out of spite, I dug out La Coroña, and over a week or so I have finally got them finished to a standard that I am happy with. It was fiddly, and it took a lot of coffee and Chopin and Stan Getz and Bill Evans and the Yellowjackets to get the job done, but it’s done.

Yes!

The 1st Battalion - almost all my 1809 line infantry are in the better-known white
1805 uniform. I think the 1802 uniform, as illustrated here, was very attractive
- all regiments were the same, and the look was permanently tainted by
association with the despised Godoy. It is correct, I understand, that La Coroña
were one of the units still in the 1802 kit at the Battle of Ucles (1809),
so here they are, just to add a bit of variety to the army.

2nd Battalion

They do not have their flags yet – I believe I have already printed the flags, so they will be in the folder somewhere. I’m not worried about that for the moment – the main point is that I have defeated the mojo-breakers. I’m back on track, and am feeling a lot better about painting.

I have plenty more Spaniards to paint - I also have a couple of units farmed out to friends who have kindly offered to do some painting for me, so I expect to make better progress now – even if things crop up to delay me, I know I can get the job done when I am ready. These things are important, it seems.

I was going to put up a short list of things which I have to paint next, but when I started thinking about it I found my enthusiasm starting to waver, so I’ll just stack the plastic boxes in order, and work through them. Stand by with the coffee and the CDs.

In passing, my thanks to Stryker for invaluable guidance on paints, and on the technique for painting buttons with a cocktail stick (a potential sanity-saver), and to Arlen de Vries for spiritual support and occasional Dutch jokes.

Hooptedoodle #238 - Juvenile Delinquency in Eastern Scotland

Mother Nature right in your face - I'm delighted to see the adolescent Roe Deer bucks starting to practise their rutting fights, but do they have to do it in our garden?

Also, if they are going to do it, could they please take a bit more time over it, and choose a morning when we have a window open, so we can get better pictures? This fight was a bit unfair, since one of the participants hasn't got his horns yet. No-one was hurt.

Things are getting a bit serious - the other morning we had eleven young deer in the garden. They appear to be very fond of our lupins.

[Photos by courtesy of Mme La Contesse Foy.]

Hooptedoodle #237 - Scammers - some good news at last

A few weeks ago, while I was at my mother’s home, waiting for an ambulance to take her into hospital, the phone rang. I was expecting a situation update anyway, so I answered it very quickly. On the other end was a very cheerful gentleman – almost certainly from the Indian subcontinent – who was obviously sitting in a large room full of other busy callers. He told me his name was Ronald (is Ronald a common name in Kolkata?) and that he was calling from the Windows Help Team.

Normally I would just have put the phone down and practised my deep breathing for a few moments, but that was not a good day, so, Ronald, if you ever read this, I apologise for my language, and I sincerely hope you did not attempt to follow my instructions on what you could do with yourself. Nothing personal, mate.

I’ve become a bit detached from phone scammers now – I wouldn’t say I have forgotten them, but we now have a wonderful in-house phone system here which filters out and blocks problem calls so successfully that we have had none for many months – and it used to be a major issue for us, as featured in my previous rants on the subject (see here). At one time, things got so bad that I got a little obsessed with this evil industry, and I even managed to get hold of some names and (unbelievably) Facebook profiles for some of the individuals behind it. Not that I could (or would) do anything about it – just to have a look at the enemy.

These call-centres are often more sophisticated than they sound, and employ good quality
technology - there is a lot of money in this so-called industry

If a scammer cold-calls, of course, the only sensible action is to put the phone down on him, and don’t respond. Occasionally, I admit, I did attempt to be clever, but it was always a waste of time and effort - the callers have heard it all before. My only minor success (debatable) came on another occasion when I was at my mum’s, and, since I had a few minutes, I played along a little. I told the caller that he had got through to a day-centre run by the Church of Latter Day Escapologists, and that we had no computer here. In fact, I told him, we at the CLDE do not believe in technology, so we do not have a telephone, either. Undaunted, he launched into his spiel. When it was obviously my turn to speak, I kept silent for a while. He asked me was I still there, and I asked him, was he a religious man? Yes, he said, he was. And does your mother know what you do for a living, I asked – he hung up. It would be nice to believe that I scored a hit, but I know in my heart that he was either bored or else needed to get on with meeting his quota.

OK, Foy – so why have you dragged this old stuff out of the archives? Do you, perchance, have some kind of point to make?

Well, in fact, maybe I have. I am delighted to learn that the police in Thane, near Mumbai, the chief financial centre in India, have arrested a great many people who were involved in a phone scam which targeted individuals who were on lists of US tax defaulters – at its peak, this scam has been making $150,000 a day. The local police are now working with the FBI, we are told, to progress this through the courts.

Hallelujah.

This may be a false dawn, or a damp squib, or any kind of inappropriate metaphor you wish to suggest – it may come to nothing at all. On the other hand, the mere fact that the Indian police are prepared to get involved in this kind of initiative is a reason to be just a little hopeful – the general view in the past has been that the police and the telecom companies in India have been liberally bunged with backhanders to stop them interfering. A more active role would be a great start.

Interesting press photo of a group arrested in India in connection with a different
phone-based scam - seems to confirm my general feeling that you should never trust
people who wear rectangular eye-shades.

I promise I shall not get obsessed again, but I really do see this kind of scam activity as especially vicious and heartless, and any small steps towards stopping it are most welcome. Having some evidence that at least the Indian police now regard it as a crime is certainly very pleasing.

The BBC news story about this can be found here.

If the link doesn’t work for you, please email me with your credit card details, including the 3-digit security code, and my helpdesk people will be in touch.

Hooptedoodle #236 - Run Around Screaming until You Die

Probably as a result of being a bit under par (British euphemism for “knackered”) I have been suffering for a couple of days with what I believe is termed a gumboil. Not a lot of fun – very painful. Never had one before – my chief recollection of gumboils is of people in comic strip cartoons with distended jaws, usually supported by some kind of crude sling, tied with a knot on top of the head. Extreme gumboils would have drawn lines radiating from them, to indicate the sort of pain which could be felt at some distance. A gumboil, I understand, is like a dental abscess – the chief difference is that it usually doesn’t come from a rotten tooth, it stems from a gum infection.

I’ll spare you the grim details, but I have had an interesting couple of nights before I could get a dental appointment – the roof of my mouth swelled to an astonishing size and shape, and everything hurt – my jaws, my tongue, my nose, my sinuses, my left eye, my head – and my neck became very stiff and I had difficulty swallowing. The one small comfort in all this was that I discovered (once again? – can’t remember) that Nurofen tablets will not only reduce the pain, but also reduce the inflammation and the swelling quite dramatically – but we are speaking here of fairly small calibrations of discomfort, and there is a strict limit to how many Nurofens you can pop in a day.

Once upon a time, when I was 11, Ian Buckley told us that his brother was off school with a gumboil – the reason this was memorable is that Ian explained the treatment – you had to have a tooth removed (which in those days involved being put to sleep with gas – nitrous oxide?) – the only alternative was to stick a needle in the boil, but Ian claimed that there was a very good chance that the patient would then run around screaming until he died. Even at 11 we could see that this didn’t quite ring true, but it had that wonderful gothic whiff of crazed authenticity which schoolboys love, and so I stored away this fact: never prick a gumboil, or you will die horribly and very entertainingly. I stored it along with other well-known folk tales, such as how a disturbed swan will break your arm, and how there is no possibly way of avoiding injury if you run with scissors.

Today I eventually got a dental appointment. The dentist confirmed that it was a gumboil, and that he would have to lance it with a scalpel and drain it. No anaesthetic was possible, I was told, because a needle would simply push the infection deeper into the tissues. The procedure would be very unpleasant, but there was no alternative.

Right.

Clearly it would be unmanly to actually whimper, but my heart sank like a stone, and I very nearly asked – in an exaggeratedly careless manner, of course - whether I would run around screaming until death. Managed not to do that – sometimes we have to be secretly pleased that we do not disgrace ourselves more than necessary.

In fact it was almost disappointing. I wouldn’t recommend it as a way of spending a Tuesday morning, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected, and I didn’t scream a bit. Of course, I feel very much better as a result of the procedure – I believe I can stop the painkillers, and I am now on a course of horse-sized antibiotic pills for 5 days (no alcohol, I was warned, or I would become very ill indeed – perhaps that is where the screaming comes in?), and with luck things should calm down. I shall make a point of getting a proper static-bike programme organised for the winter, and I shall make sure I get my oranges, and every day I shall be fitter, and better and wiser.

One final ramble in this tale. I took my prescription for the horse-pills to a rather old-fashioned little pharmacy in Haddington. Had to wait 15 minutes for them to be ready, so went for a quick coffee next door and then browsed around the pharmacy. Well now. They had retro aftershaves on sale – things I haven’t seen or thought about for years. There was Brut (aaargh!), Joop and a few others. I had a good chuckle to see some old friends, but suddenly things became more serious, and I found that my heart was set on buying a bottle of Old Spice Original, which I swear I have not used since I was 17 – at which time, I recall, I used to shave a couple of times a month. I was the height of sophistication in those days, naturally.

So I purchased a bottle. I’m quite pleased to have it, though I have not smelt it yet. Maybe I’ll have to get a vintage corduroy jacket to go with it. No - let’s just stop there. I'm pretty sure that at 17 I was even creepier than I am now.

ECW Rules - documentation update for new version 2.65

Having received a comment from Paul about the rules, and a couple of email enquiries, I've updated the documentation on Google Docs. If you follow the link at top right for "My Own CCN-based ECW Rules", you'll get to the placeholder post which should now link to the new version. The changes are to the Rules Booklet and the QRS, and they bring it up to Ver.2.65, dated yesterday.

The changes reflect some previously-undocumented tweaks which I have been using, plus some typo-fixes, plus a few changes which are a result of my discussions with Peter Brekelmans about his 30YW variant.

Specific mods in the game include some amendments to Battling Back in Melee Combat, corrections to the Terrain Effects, and Light Artillery (by which I mean frame-guns and similar tactical, mobile pieces) now appears on the field only as attachments to units of Foot - light guns cannot be deployed as standalone units. Also, losses of artillery units no longer count for Victory Banners.

As ever, I think I've tested the links - if they don't work, or you are still getting the old versions, please let me know - many thanks.

I hope that some semi-formal documentation should also appear soon for the ECW siege game which I tested a few months ago - I'm a bit busy elsewhere at present, but it's in the pipeline!