Category Archives: history

around home, history, UK, vehicles

Beaulieu Museums

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Happily for me, the National Motor Museum is a short way down the road from home in the New Forest at Beaulieu.  With rain on the forecast, I set aside the afternoon to go & check it out.  It turns out that there is not just a large car museum to look at.  But that didn’t stop me spending most of my time in there.  There’s many notable cars to gaze at, including quite a few that have set land speed records at various times – Sunbeam & Bluebird come to mind.  Slightly less speedy cars, but more recognisable these days, include Mr Bean’s Mini, Arthur Weasley’s flying Ford Anglia & the Trotters’ van.

There are strange looking contraptions from the late 1800s, cars that really are just carriages without horse & an engine bunged in the bottom somewhere, a ‘Blower’ Bentley (that’s for you Geoff), all manner of Rolls Royces & so on.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

The museum building must be going on forty years now – strangely it has a monorail running through the top of it. Said monorail looks like it was once transport for henchman in a Roger Moore Bond flick. Outside of the main building there’s a small Bond car exhibit – most interesting there is the submarine Lotus Espirit from The Spy Who Loved Me. Also of note is that AMC that performed the spiral jump in The Man with the Golden Gun. Apparently there’s a much bigger display of Bond cars planned. I’ll have to come back & make use of my free entry for a year. Nearby is the World of Top Gear & the Enormodrome filled with cars from various challenges that have featured on the show. But that deserves another photo post for those who may actually be able to identify them.

Further through the extensive grounds & Victorian gardens is a small exhibit detailing the role Beaulieu Estate played in housing SOE operatives during WWII. Being on the south coast of the country, this whole area has a lot of war history – more of which I’m sure I’ll discover in the months to come. Just past this is Palace House which is the ancestral house of the Lords of the Estate & still the home of Lord & Lady Montagu. Parts of it were originally the gatehouse of the nearby abbey, but it was extended in the nineteenth century. A small part of it is open to visitors & mostly filled with portraits. All the captions were written in the first person by the current lord of the estate – they were much more personal & easier to read.

Just around the corner are the remains of the Cistercian Beaulieu Abbey that didn’t survive the Dissolution after three hundred years of existence. The refectory still serves as the parish church of Beaulieu; there’s a big exhibit on the life of the monks, but by then it was getting dark & damper & I’d had enough of looking at old things & wandered back out through the grounds.

around home, history, UK

Chislehurst Caves

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They’re not actually caves, but old chalk mines underneath the nearby suburb of Chislehurst. We’d been meaning to visit for a while, as I’m leaving to go south for work this weekend I was pleased when Trish reminded me that we hadn’t been yet. I’m not sure what exactly I was expecting, perhaps just a few big caves with stalactites & stalagmites. But it was a huge network, 22 miles worth, of mostly-short interconnected tunnels – pretty low & skinny in places – with a very interesting history. The network was divided in to three sections – Druid, Roman & Saxon – named after those that had allegedly dug each section.

As it was mid-week, our guided tour was only four strong. Our knowledgeable guide, with a wonderfully warped sense of humour, gave us a couple of hurricane lamps & off we went descending to about 40 metres below the surface. The most famous part of the caves’ history is its use as a WWII air-raid shelter for local families. There were up to 15,000 sleeping in triple-bunks; some families had to stay there for years as their houses had been destroyed. There were facilities (kitchens & bathrooms) on the surface. Underground there is a still consecrated chapel (just one birth & christening underground – the unfortunately named Cavena) & as well as the remains of the hospital. The network of tunnels is incredibly stable & there were no collapses. It was incredible wandering around thinking of the thousands trying to get a good night’s sleep in such cramped & damp conditions.

It was strange wandering around a tourist attraction that had absolutely no electric lighting, but our guide knew his way & soon had us completely disoriented by all the tiny side tunnels that interconnected. We saw a few altars that were allegedly used by the Druids for animal sacrifice & then we spent a fair amount of time by one discussing how often there might have been human sacrifices there. It was at this time that we were herded in to a small alcove, the guide took our lamps & we closed our eyes as he wandered off down the tunnel counting down from ten. The echo in the place was just fantastic, it went on & on (on & on, on & on, on & on…). When the counting was over, we opened our eyes & the darkness was incredible. I kept waiting for my eyes to adjust, but there was no hope of that with absolutely no light around. In the meantime, our guide had given an almighty whack to an old steel water tank – if the speech echo was loud & prolonged, this was another level completely. We were pleased to get our lamps back.

Other interesting parts of note included the old ammunition store used during the first war – storage of munitions from nearby Woolwich Arsenal, it took them two years to empty after armistice. Close to this was a small concrete stage that was used for what was literally an underground music venue. Some quite big names played here in their early days – David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones & Jimi Hendrix (before he was ‘Hendrix’). From the ’50s on there was also a challenge to sleep overnight alone next to a small pool (it was mostly filled in to stop sheltering kids falling in during the war) that was supposed to be haunted. Of the 270-odd that tried, only one guy managed it. In the ’80s two employees of the Caves tried to do so, separated by a couple of caverns – they didn’t make it through the night. One guy screamed & the other found him unconscious on his bed – he was carted off to Queen Mary’s Hospital & had a badly dislocated right shoulder. I thought I’d end with a personal link. Sorry for lack of pictures, but there wasn’t much opportunity.

around home, family, history, UK

Colchester

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I played the part of bad-son this weekend past & went off up to Colchester to distract Mum from her university studies. It took me a few trains & hours to get there, but it was a nice day on Friday to stroll through the City. Another bonus of living in London – in a short time I’d strolled past St Paul’s, the Royal Exchange, Bank of England, the Lloyd’s Building & the Gherkin, all architectural masterpieces in their own way, before eventually finding Liverpool St station.

Colchester was the Romans’ first capital in England (before they moved to the more central Londinium) & is the oldest settled town in the country. Later on Friday afternoon we had a pleasant wander, checking out the Hollytrees Museum which gave a good outline of the last few centuries in Colchester, then enjoyed the late afternoon sunshine in the extensive gardens nearby, crossing the old Roman wall (also the oldest in the country) & checking out a large water-tower which could only be Victorian in its splendour.

The water-tower, Jumbo, through the old Roman wall (first century AD)

Colchester Town Hall

After a surprisingly good sleep on the floor of Mum’s room, I settled for watching the first Rugby World Cup semifinal online – Wales vs France. A game that had a lot of the occasion taken out of it by that careless & dangerous tackle. I’m not completely surprised that the French made such hard work of it, but I was disappointed that the Welsh didn’t have the nous or skill to put at least one more kick over – they missed so many penalty & drop-goal opportunities. We popped over to campus in the afternoon for Mum to get some books out of the library. Most importantly, this was my first opportunity to see & ride a Paternoster Lift – I had not know that they existed until the previous day when Mum told me about this example. Basically, it’s a continuously moving chain of small boxes (two person) that you can hop on & hop off at any floor you want (there are no doors – so watch you don’t have a go at self-amputation of an unwanted limb). All good fun – especially when you go in to the dark & over the top through the loft.

Mum about to disappear into the unknown

Late afternoon was spent in the charming little riverside village of Wivenhoe, a short bus ride away. With little winding streets, houses & shops doing their utmost to stay close to upright, plenty of small yachts & boats docked & more bright autumn sunlight slowly sinking away it was nice pottering around.

More rugby on Sunday morning with All Blacks playing very well indeed in an intense semi-final to end up utterly outplaying & dominating the Wallabies. Once again, many missed kicks – but enough went through that it was a comfortable margin in the end. I might have to find some Kiwis to watch the final with next week – shouldn’t be too hard in London. We had a good long visit to the Colchester Castle (a Norman one built on the remains of an old Roman fortification). Curiously, the castle has been a museum for eighty-odd years & a visit there is more about the museum than the castle itself. The museum mostly dealt with the Roman period of Colchester’s history & was very good. After that I endured the perils of travelling by rail in the UK during the weekend, on my way home three separate rail journeys were disrupted by that scourge – Planned Engineering Works. Great to spend the weekend with Mum – hopefully she can now not be disrupted for a little while & settle down to the study at hand.

And Now For Something Completely Different – I’ve had to choose between two different process engineering jobs last week. In the end I went for the role just out of Southampton at a good [£5K+better benefits] less as Hereford is really so much further from an airport & London & all its travel options – travel is the main motivator for being here, after all. Also, I wasn’t too keen on being told when to take three of my five weeks of annual leave a year (mandatory plant shutdowns). I feel like a bit of a wally turning down a much-better paying job from people that were really keen to employ me – but there you go. At this stage, I should be at work at the start of November – I’m looking forward to settling down to life for a while & having some money coming in so I can plan brief & not so brief trips to Europe & north Africa. The biking will be a lot flatter around Hampshire, but I might just have to build up a single-speed, come touring machine, & satisfy myself with mid-week rides in the New Forest & so on.

around home, engineering, history, London, UK

Crossness Pumping Station

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One of the few places in London that I really wanted to go to the last time I was here & didn’t get the opportunity to was the Crossness Beam Engines. As this great example of Victorian engineering is still undergoing extensive restoration work, there are very few days this year that one can go & visit & see an engine in operation. But today, as part of Open London (an annual weekend when a lot of London’s great architecture that is usually off limits to the public is opened up) the complex was open & welcoming visitors. What a lot of visitors there were – we queued patiently for about an hour just to get in. Who would have thought so many people would turn up to the site on the side of a huge sewage works in south-east London?

A brief history lesson – in the early half of the nineteenth century, rapidly expanding & industrialising London did not have a central sewage system & almost all waste from over 200000 cesspits was discharged into the Thames (“dump her in the Thames?”) system. Unfortunately, the Thames at high tide (it really is surprising just how far the tide flows up the river – well out west) had a habit of returning that sewage to where it came from. Even worse, the Thames was still the main supply of water to the city! Outbreaks of cholera & typhoid were, in hindsight, hardly surprising. Eventually, mid-century, a plan was devised & put in to action to deal with the problem. Basically, a two sewerage systems independent of each other were built on either side of the river. These used gravity to move all of the sewerage to the east of the city, where it was then discharged to the Thames. In the last four years of the 1850s, over eighty miles of brick intercepting sewers were built (using 318 million bricks!) & this is also the reason we have the Victoria & Albert Embankments today.

But the problem of preventing the sewage coming back into the city on the tide still had to be overcome. This is where the pumping stations came in – one at Crossness (south) & the other at Abbey Mills (north) were used to pump the sewage up to large reservoirs. From the reservoirs, the sewage was released on the outgoing tide. There was no treatment initially, later settling ponds were introduced & the solids were shipped out to sea & dumped there. The pumping station at Crossness had twelve boilers powering four large rotative beam engines. Each engine had two pumps attached to the beam & at peak they could move over 500 tonnes of sewage a minute. That was after a retrofit, changing the engines from single-cylinder to triple-expansion (high, intermediate & low pressure cylinders). The engines were superseded by diesel & eventually left to decay & vandalism for thirty years from the mid 1950s. I’m sure the restorers are also stoked that someone had the foresight to fill the engine area up with sand to prevent methane accumulating – they’ve had to remove a hundred tonnes just to restore the first engine.

Being built by the Victorians, the building & fittings are fantastic. But the real star is the fully restored Prince Consort engine operating under steam. The flywheel is almost nine metres in diameter & has a mass of over fifty tonnes. The beam is almost fourteen metres long & forty-seven tonnes heavy. It was surprisingly quiet as all the valves opened & closed in time to drive that massive beam up & down. It was well worth the wait to get in as one could wander around at leisure poking around not only the restored Prince Consort, but Victoria (which they are starting to restore now) & the still derelict Albert Edward & Alexandra engines. All the volunteers were friendly, knowledge & some were in period dress which added to the old time feel of the place. It was a great few hours out & I particularly enjoyed marvelling at the feat of engineering from 150 years ago & seeing the Prince Consort engine all painted up & effortlessly gliding through its cycle.

Engine house at rear, boiler house in foreground

The brickwork was exceptional all the way around

The Prince Consort’s flywheel – note the trimming on the guard rail

Looking up to the Prince Consort’s beam – flywheel connecting rod in front of pump connecting rods

Counter beam on left, top of the low & intermediate cylinders

End of the main beam looking down on top of drive cylinders

More superb Victorian detailing

Unrestored beams

Just in case there’s anyone left wondering how this thing worked

Just in case there’s anyone left wondering how this thing worked

The rest of my photos from the visit are here. I left wishing I didn’t have a gammy shoulder & was staying around here a bit longer so that I might volunteer a bit – a fantastic historical project all round.