Castle Aching

[Hroth]

9 minutes ago, webbcompound said:

Are you sure you want everyone on here to know about this? And if so shouldn't you have waited till after the evening watershed?

 

I'm sure RaR meant it in the broadest possible terms only...

 

On the other hand, its a pity the old News of the Screws folded, it'd make a spiffing 144pt headline on the front page!

 

 

[Donw]

Swinging was another of those terms that got changed to be something different.  'Gay' being the classic one.  around 60/61 I was the junior member in the Scouts. Our patrol was picked to take part in a camping competition. Part of it involved cooking a full roast dinner on a camp fire.  IObviously a normal oven was not available but one of those large square biscuit tins was used with a fire built under it . The roast chicken was beautifully cooked except a few bits were burnt whee they had touched the side. The team leader made us eat the burnt bits before the judges got to us. He said they check the waste bins for any discarded bits. He was a good team leader except he couldn't read a map very well got us lost getting to the site

Don

[drmditch]

13 hours ago, runs as required said:

A couple of years later we were working in Malta - training ex RN Dockyard workers as civil engineering draughtsmen, which was great fun.
But the food in Malta was abysmal - totally British NAAFI - just one half-hearted Italian restaurant on the whole island:  the "Bologna" in Valletta, and spaghetti only sold, along with 'alphabet pasta', in half size Heinz tins.

 Very sad. One would like to think the RN would have known better.

Just one more example, perhaps, of the sometimes inadvertent damage done by colonialism.

 

As you say, no railway content, but I wonder how much damage was done to local cuisine and gastronomy by the 'commercial creep' enabled by railways?

[Andy Hayter]

It is a good question drmditch but it worked both ways.

Would we have known about Aylesbury ducks, Eccles cakes, Kendal Mintcake to name but 3?

[Nearholmer]

Double-edged sword: more variety in the diet, better year-round availability, and better food-hygiene; destruction of local markets and traditional foodstuffs, gradual build-up of sugar and salt intake.
 

My gut-feel(!) is that the positives were felt most in urban areas, and the negatives most in rural areas.

 

Now we seem to have what might be called polarised food, with some people eating the most varied and interesting diet in the history of humanity, but a significant proportion eating a truly awful diet based almost entirely on over-processed rubbish.

 

 

[runs as required]

1 hour ago, drmditch said:

 Very sad. One would like to think the RN would have known better.

Just one more example, perhaps, of the sometimes inadvertent damage done by colonialism.

Malta's extreme sacrifice in 1942/3 was forgotten by Britain even before the war was over.  

Dom Mintoff came back from his Rhodes Scholarship in Oxford in 1944, after  close association with Labour's policy makers, confident he would be responsible for post-war reconstruction within a Malta with UK County status -( exactly the same as the Isle of Wight!)  

Atlee and Bevin quickly dropped that notion after their '45 election victory; Mintoff never again trusted Britain.

[Compound2632]

Perfidious Albion - was ever thus.

[Hroth]

15 hours ago, Donw said:

Swinging was another of those terms that got changed to be something different.  'Gay' being the classic one.

 

Even up to the early 70s, "Gay" could be used in its former sense without too much sniggering.  Our family did the Warwickshire Ring* in 1974, just after the Queen Mum opened the Upper Avon.  There was a hire boat company that operated from Tewkesbury called... Gay Cruisers.

 

Yep.

 

You could buy a badge from their shop with the slogan "We are ALL Gay Cruisers"

 

 

* A Canal/River route involving the Lower and Upper Avon Navigations and the Lower Stratford-Upon-Avon Canal.  Having written "Warwickshire Ring", it strikes me that it could refer to a cycle of operas based on the rustic works of Shakespeare.

Quote

Which bit are we sniggering at?

See what I mean?    Lets say that by 1974, Larry Grayson was quite popular on TV...

 

 

Edited June 23, 2020 by Hroth

[brack]

 

3 minutes ago, Hroth said:

Our family did the Warwickshire Ring in 1974

Which bit are we sniggering at?

[Compound2632]

And there was me thinking it was a morris dance.

[Regularity]

2 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

Perfidious Albion - was ever thus.

You could be lying, of course...

[Nearholmer]

This tends to be the salon of the knowledgeable when it comes to turn of the century railways, so .......

 

If you look at "new work" that was going on either side of 1900, you will come across Joseph T Firbank as contractor for almost every railway that you can think of. Every one of the c1900 Light Railways promoted by the LSWR, which are my current bug, were built by his firm for instance.

 

Now, detailed obits and biogs of his father Joseph (without a T) Firbank are easy to find, but can I find anything really useful about J T? Nope.

 

Even Grace's Guide is confusing, saying that he left railway work on the death of his father (1886), which clearly isn't quite right, unless it means that he left all the practical stuff to his underlings, or sold the firm with his name still on it. It is easy to find pictures of his wife, a fair bit about one of his son's who became a foppish sort of poet/author, and that he was knighted in 1902 (same NYH List as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), but about the business? Nuffink! There is a hint in the biog of his son that there may have been a financial disaster in 1907, which seems odd given that follows hot on the heels of vast numbers of contracts, and he died in slightly reduced circumstances in 1910.

 

Anyone know more? Is the silence in the record a veil drawn over an embarrassment?

[Compound2632]

It's Buddenbrooks. Joseph Firbank, born the son of a miner in Bishop Auckland, working down the pit by the age of seven. In his early twenties, he'd managed to start contracting in a small way and came to George Stephenson's notice. He got more contracts on the young Midland Railway, gradually building up his firm. Stephenson said of him that he's never known a man like him for a good bit of tunneling. He was doing well enough to have his children educated; Thomas Firbank took over the firm on his father's death but also entered politics, becoming a Tory MP and in due course being knighted. One of his sons, Ronald Firbank, after Uppingham and Cambridge became a novelist of the decadent school - homosexuality and conversion to Roman Catholicism being among his sins against the bourgeois expectations of his father. He died young and abroad.

 

So the father and son are the interesting ones - the man in the middle was neither on the way up nor the way down. As you say, probably he was not involved in the day-to-day running of the firm.

Edited June 23, 2020 by Compound2632

[drmditch]

On 22/06/2020 at 19:30, Regularity said:

You could be lying, of course...

You remind me of a lovely Douglas Adams line, about a small asteroid inhabited by one old man who repeatedly claimed that nothing was true -

But was later discovered to be lying.

[Adam88]

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

This tends to be the salon of the knowledgeable when it comes to turn of the century railways, so .......

 

If you look at "new work" that was going on either side of 1900, you will come across Joseph T Firbank as contractor for almost every railway that you can think of. Every one of the c1900 Light Railways promoted by the LSWR, which are my current bug, were built by his firm for instance.

 

Now, detailed obits and biogs of his father Joseph (without a T) Firbank are easy to find, but can I find anything really useful about J T? Nope.

 

Even Grace's Guide is confusing, saying that he left railway work on the death of his father (1886), which clearly isn't quite right, unless it means that he left all the practical stuff to his underlings, or sold the firm with his name still on it. It is easy to find pictures of his wife, a fair bit about one of his son's who became a foppish sort of poet/author, and that he was knighted in 1902 (same NYH List as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), but about the business? Nuffink! There is a hint in the biog of his son that there may have been a financial disaster in 1907, which seems odd given that follows hot on the heels of vast numbers of contracts, and he died in slightly reduced circumstances in 1910.

 

Anyone know more? Is the silence in the record a veil drawn over an embarrassment?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Firbank

 

It would appear that Thomas Firbank was one of JTF's grandsons.  I first read his book 'I Bought a Mountain' when I was a similar age to the author's at the time he wrote it.  It was never clear how anyone of normal means could afford to buy an estate as large as Dyffryn Mymbwr at such a young age even at the depressed land prices in 1930.  Being a descendant of a wealthy Victorian contractor could explain where his money might have come from.  However, this doesn't answer the original question, it is just an interesting rabbit hole.

 

 

[Edwardian]

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

one of his son's who became a foppish sort of poet/author,

 

Ronald. Went to my alma mater.

[Nearholmer]

Didn't get a degree though.

 

Unless you mean school. If you delve, he wasn't there long, less than a year with periods home unwell.

 

 

Edited June 23, 2020 by Nearholmer

[Compound2632]

28 minutes ago, Adam88 said:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Firbank

 

It would appear that Thomas Firbank was one of JTF's grandsons.  I first read his book 'I Bought a Mountain' when I was a similar age to the author's at the time he wrote it.  It was never clear how anyone of normal means could afford to buy an estate as large as Dyffryn Mymbwr at such a young age even at the depressed land prices in 1930.  Being a descendant of a wealthy Victorian contractor could explain where his money might have come from.  However, this doesn't answer the original question, it is just an interesting rabbit hole.

 

 

 

This Firbank is a different one again, nephew it would seem to the aesthete Ronald. 

[Nearholmer]

45 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

It's Buddenbrooks

 It is, isn't it?!

 

J T seems to have had competent assistants, judging by what can be found through Grace's Guide, chaps with solid railway civil engineering backgrounds, so I wonder what did go wrong in 1907. Or, maybe it had been going wrong for a while, with the family living above the earnings of the firm, or did the contracts suddenly dry-up for some reason?

[Compound2632]

6 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

J T seems to have had competent assistants, judging by what can be found through Grace's Guide, chaps with solid railway civil engineering backgrounds, so I wonder what did go wrong in 1907. Or, maybe it had been going wrong for a while, with the family living above the earnings of the firm, or did the contracts suddenly dry-up for some reason?

 

There just wasn't that much in the way of major new works after the Great Western's Edwardian bout of cut-offs? Rather like NBL etc. suddenly hitting the wall with the transition from steam to diesel.

Edited June 23, 2020 by Compound2632

[Nearholmer]

That could be it. Big contracts drying-up, series of light railway contracts that didn't really amount to much, ever-thinning income stream, loss of seat as MP, son (Hubert) off to Canada looking for contracts there ........... but, Ronald seems to have swanned around Europe on his inheritance, and the younger Thomas probably inherited a sum when his grandmother died in 1924*, so it presumably wasn't a complete financial disaster.

 

*He bought the farm in 1931, aged 21, which sounds like the age for "coming into an inheritance", paying £5000, which inflates to about £350k today, about right for a slightly tumbledown hill farm in hard times.

Edited June 23, 2020 by Nearholmer

[Adam88]

Is there a parallel with the Stevensons - several generations of engineers building lighthouses and then they throw up a novelist?

[Edwardian]

5 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

 

Jwhat did go wrong in 1907. 

 

Ronald converted to RC. In some families of the day, that might have been a shock!

[Nick Holliday]

11 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

This tends to be the salon of the knowledgeable when it comes to turn of the century railways, so .......

 

If you look at "new work" that was going on either side of 1900, you will come across Joseph T Firbank as contractor for almost every railway that you can think of. Every one of the c1900 Light Railways promoted by the LSWR, which are my current bug, were built by his firm for instance.

 

Now, detailed obits and biogs of his father Joseph (without a T) Firbank are easy to find, but can I find anything really useful about J T? Nope.

 

Even Grace's Guide is confusing, saying that he left railway work on the death of his father (1886), which clearly isn't quite right, unless it means that he left all the practical stuff to his underlings, or sold the firm with his name still on it. It is easy to find pictures of his wife, a fair bit about one of his son's who became a foppish sort of poet/author, and that he was knighted in 1902 (same NYH List as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), but about the business? Nuffink! There is a hint in the biog of his son that there may have been a financial disaster in 1907, which seems odd given that follows hot on the heels of vast numbers of contracts, and he died in slightly reduced circumstances in 1910.

 

Anyone know more? Is the silence in the record a veil drawn over an embarrassment?

I wonder if there are clues in the following? Taken from an excellent resource on the Industrial Locomotive Society website, this extract shows the finalconstracts of J T Firbank

It seems to show that work was drying up, and after 1902 there were no substantial contracts on their books, apart from the two I have highlighted. The LSWR project seems to have been unduly prolonged - seven years for seven miles seems painfully slow progress.  Were there problems with this contract? The other major works were at Fishguard Harbour, which probably absorbed most of the companies resources, and if it, or the LSWR scheme, had been financially disastrous, could this have lead to the company's downfall. Many of their locos seem to have been put on the market circa 1907, such as this snippet from the Industrial Railway Society shows:-pet

 

[Nearholmer]

Thanks Nick, that is really helpful.

 

The LSWR contracts over the 1900-1907 period are what got me into this, and I think that summary from the ILS may obscure some subtleties.

 

At this period the LSWR was doing a fair bit of light railway work, a lot of it for/with the military;

 

- Netley Hospital branch;

- Basingstoke and Alton;

- Bentley and Bordon; 

- Grateley, Amesbury & Military Camp (i.e. Bulford);

- Other sections where the LSWR built lines for the military on military property.

The Amesbury- Grateley mileage given in ILS is wrong, because the dates cover the whole of the light and military work in the area, which was a lot more - likely the mileage is for the base contract, the rest being extensions of contract or variations to contract. [Wikipedia says that the line beyond Amesbury to Bulford was built by "the LSWR's own staff", but I'm sure that isn't correct.]

 

I’m not sure about Netley, but the rest were J T Firbank contracts, JTF acting as sub-contractor to the LSWR where the work was on military land, and the implication is that JTF had effectively become an extended arm of the LSWR. 
 

It would be interesting to see the minute books, because such arrangements can go several ways: genuinely mutually beneficial; the contractor leeches the railway; the railway squeezes the contractor dry and kills them off; or, corruption strikes and the staff on both sides collude to rip both companies off. A huge amount depends upon the commercial, as opposed to engineering, nous of the railway‘s and contractor’s engineers.
 

The LSWR’s engineer was A W Szlumper who was mega smart, and I wonder if he administered so tightly that he ran Firbank’s profits down to a trickle.

 

JTF were also doing other light railway work at the same time, I think, under the direction of both H F Stephens (Paddock Wood) and A C Pain (Lyme Regis) as well as elsewhere. Did they do the Vale of Rheidol for Szlumper’s brother by any chance??

 

The Park Royal contract is also interesting, because that was quite a big generating station for the GWR. How big it was for JTF depends on whether they secured only ground-works, or also the brick and steel structures. If the latter, a golden opportunity to get the price wrong, to bid too low, because it was outside the normal run of their work.

 

All a waste of my brain cells, but, hey ho!

 

Kevin

 

 

 

Edited June 24, 2020 by Nearholmer