Sunny day in Spittal...forge finished
Entry posted by IanLister
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It’s lunchtime, June 21st, 1960. Eric Sparrow and Alan Cole, proprietors of Sparrow and Cole, Iron Founders, Blacksmiths, Toolmakers and Boilermakers Ltd, have gone for lunch to the Harrow, a local pub on Dock Road in Tweedmouth.
Their yard, at the Upper Forge overlooking the Berwick – Spittal ex NER branchline, is quiet for the first time in a few hours. Let's have a look round while they're out:
Inside, they have been repairing a fairly small boiler which has been in use for 60 years or so operating pumps at Scremerston Colliery; it’s on its last legs but the colliery, a small family run business, is not doing too well and cannot afford a new one. Most of the businesses around here are locally owned and run; it’s a delightful backwater of cottage industry and local enterprise even in 1960, and in many ways unique in the rapidly changing modern world of industrial Britain. How long it will survive who knows, but the local railway will do its best to support these hardworking Northern folk.
Out in the yard, Eric and Alan have been sorting through some of their stock odds and ends. They’ve just received a new order to make 400 assorted picks, shovels etc for the contractors developing Kielder Forest and Dam, and there’ll be some serious reorganising of stuff to do; they’re not the tidiest as you can see.
There’s also a job to be done on the old hoist Alan’s dad built many years ago; it’s lifted many a boiler onto farmcarts, trailers and flatbed trucks over the years. Rural North Northumberland was at the forefront of small-scale steam power on farms, limeworks, quarries and coalmines for a long time, and a lot of Sparrow and Cole’s stationary steam power is still working, though with many a wheeze, splutter and hiss by now. The hoist has been creaking a bit of late, a bit like Alan and Eric, but they’ll get it sorted, just like everything else.
Eric’s finishing early this afternoon; his wife has been staying up the river with friends in Hawick for a few days with the kids, and he’s meeting them at Spittal Station just down the hill. they’re due on the 4.45pm arrival from St Boswells, 3 Gresley 51ft suburbans and Eric’s favourite local loco, the V1. He likes his trains, does Eric. He might even leave a little early, and watch the J72 shunting Spittal Yard and the fish quay. If Alan doesn't mind that is........maybe Eric'll buy him another pint. That should do the trick.
What the two of them don’t realise is that they’re being spied on by Seagullcam:
Excuse my ramblings; I'm starting to believe all this stuff
Ian
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6
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