Tankerman

A perfect example of the above comment. I, with my family, stayed with an Italian family for two weeks in the early 1980's as a thank you for looking after their son so well when he boarded with us on an exchange visit. We were talking to them about their other sons and they very proudly mentioned that one of them was an electrical engineer, on asking what the other son did we were told, in a somewhat offhand manner, oh he's a doctor. Regarding the lack of training/trained engineers/electricians etc., this stems from the 1970's, when the big unions told the Labour government to introduce a law requiring all apprentices/trainees to be paid a minimum of 50% of the tradesman's wage. This was totally uneconomic and the old apprenticeship training system disappeared within a few years. I served a full five year apprenticeship under the old system and, allowing for the time it took for me to gain a through knowledge of the work and the cost of my classroom training, it was at least part way into the fourth year before the company saw any return on their investment in training me.

They are both 15 inch guns, one was first mounted on HMS Resolution and then on HMS Roberts, which was as you say a monitor. The other was mounted on HMS Ramillies. The service life of a 15 inch gun was about 335 full charges, a full charge being four bags of cordite weighing about one cwt. each. The barrels were lined with flat copper wire and the rifling groves were cut into that. There is a fascinating video, computer generated, available on you tube showing the sequence of loading and the firing of a twin 15 inch gun turret. When I was serving my apprenticeship at Falmouth docks in the 1960's quite a number of the tradesmen and helpers were ex RN who served through WWII. Being very interested in the 20th century history of the RN I learnt a lot from them. I also learnt a lot from a great uncle, by marriage, who joined the RN as a boy entrant of 14 in 1896 and retired after 22 years service in 1922.

I'm almost certain that it is Newcastle as I seem to remember reading, a long time ago now, that Vickers at Newcastle were the main large calibre gun manufacturers.

I too found this on You Tube. The guns appear to be battleship guns of either 12", 13.5" or 15" calibre (bore diameter). It's not widely known that gun barrels for the RN dreadnought battleship building programme actually took longer to produce than the time it took to build the ship. Spare barrels were produced and stored to reduce the time taken when a ship was refitted. Another little known fact is that the turrets and 15" guns and fitted to HMS Vanguard, laid down in 1940, but not completed until 1946, were built for the Courageous and Glorious during WWI. They were removed and stored when they were converted to aircraft carriers in the 1920's.

I did have a quick look at it and thought that it was just the one photo of a brake van.

So were mine. father from Falmouth, mother from Penryn which is also where I was born and one of my uncles lived at Perranwell. IIRC Nancegollen was enlarged before WWII and extended during it. Are you modelling after it was altered?

Re item 3. My memory for things seen is not too bad for many years ago, but don't ask me what happened yesterday. I am pretty certain that the Toad brake vans on the Falmouth branch were lettered Truro with R U underneath and Not In Common Use below that by 1956. I was 10 and regularly visited Penryn station on a Saturday to watch the local goods being shunted from when I was 8 years old. The reason being that I asked one of the station staff the meaning of R U between those ages. I've said vans because, although I was unaware of it at the time, in addition to the Falmouth branch, both the Newham (Truro goods) and Newquay (via Chacewater) local goods trains were also worked from Truro. If anyone either knows, or can suggest a site that I can visit to find out the running numbers of the Truro based brake vans, I would be grateful. Incidentally I can also remember BR standard, ex LMS vans and ex SR vans appearing in the Saturday empty goods working returning to Truro from Falmouth at Penryn.

Sometimes the Angels look down upon us. Western King was the first Western I ever saw and as a bonus I was hauled to Paddington by it that night. I bought a SYP maroon Western from Kernow Models last year with the intention of fitting Western King nameplates to it; not knowing about the experimental rotary wiper. The very recent update to this thread alerted me to this and I have just ordered one from Cheltenham Models

At one time a bigger Climax was available at Carn Brea near Redruth, with the added bonus that after 1945 it was also possible to obtain a Climax fettling grip there as well.

Bit different for me, sailing around the Caribbean and the east coasts of North and South America while been paid for doing it.

Not pedantic, just a life long need to know the answer to trivial questions.

I had completely forgotten that. I've looked it up and it was changed in 1965.

It that case it was almost certainly a special visit as, IIRC, our exhibition was always held over the August Bank Holiday weekend to ensure we had enough people to run it and get the highest number of visitors.

Your mentioning visiting FMC brought back a lot of happy memories. I was a member of FMC between 1960 and 1968, after which I visited when on leave from the Merchant Navy until I moved away in 1968. If your visits were in the August of those years, then your visit was almost certainly when the annual exhibition was being held. We were lucky because at that time we had the use of a large shed accessed by a door from Arwenack Avenue in which there was a permanent oval layout. The main station was laid out like Totnes with the platform lines on loops from the main lines and a branch line coming off one of the loops to a branch terminus over the hidden sidings on the other side. I always volunteered to work the branch terminus as I enjoyed shunting the goods trains and chatting to the visitors.

Did you ever do the trip from Prince of Wales pier up the Fal to Smugglers Cottage or Malpas? The destination varied with the state of the tide.

Not a booked service, but sometimes seen at Truro in the late 1950's and early 1960's, were a pair of Class 22's hauling a failed/dead Class 41/42/43 westbound. I never saw this formation heading east, presumably because the booked Warship hadn't had time to fail. Double headed Class 22's, presumably replacing a Warship, in both directions, were not uncommon.

They could be Jewish, if so it is a factual notice.

Nothing. It's just that we grew up before computers were omnipresent.

It has been said that old riveters never die, but you have to join to find out why.

Someone who is in a position to know has told me that the Evergreen boxes are indeed arranged so that other companies boxes are hidden, but this is only done for the maiden voyage.

I used to visit it quite a few years ago and, just as with some other places which have dropped part of their full name, I became convinced that the full name of the place was Slough of Despond.

I don't know if it's album cover or his first name that's the joke, as in the days of my youth Quim was a slang term for a part of the female anatomy.

Growing up on a farm near Stithians, pronounced Stidians, in the 1950's I developed quite a strong Cornish accent, which is still obvious but not as pronounced. In my first year at the grammar school in Falmouth I was told by the French teacher that I would have difficulty in speaking French for just that reason.

If there was any hard rock mining in that area then the connection would be obvious. A lot of Cornish miners left Cornwall for foreign parts in the 1880/90's when the Cornish mines closed. There was saying in Cornwall that if you went down a deep hole in the ground anywhere in the world you would find a Cornishman at the bottom.

The possible problem with Trerise is that, in west Cornwall at least, it would be pronounced Trerice not Tre-rise.