Open Writing

During the early years of the 1940s the BBC broadcast a weekly programme called ‘The Old Town Hall’. It was a variety show, one of several transmitted during those times, all with the same motive, to turn people’s thoughts away from the war’s progress -- which wasn’t very uplifting for the home front -- and thereby giving them something else to think about, morale boosters.

One of the regular spots in that particular programme was a sketch centred around the character of a night watchman and his experiences as he mounted guard over the universal ‘hole in the road’. Ebenezer was the fictitious person’s name, whose opening phrase was, “One night as I was sitting round my old fire bucket….” and from there the scene would develop. The expression, delivered by the actor in a rasping sing-song voice, caught the nation’s imagination, being repeated and imitated time after time whilst the programme ran.

The character portrayed by Ebenezer represented a regular sight in those distant times. Road repair, the laying of new pipes and cables for public services or repair of existing ones, each with its inconvenient cavity, were as much in evidence then as they are today. Accompanying the holes and trenches of that period was the night watchman, complete with hut, brazier and all-important stock of coke, fuel for the ever-present traditional fire, summer and winter.

Hazard warning lamps of the day were red lensed, paraffin fuelled, complete with hook for suspension as required, and it fell to the watchman to keep these in a serviceable condition, fuel reservoirs filled and wicks trimmed, whilst on gale-infested nights to ensure the flames were not extinguished as they populated the edges of hole or trench. In such boisterous conditions the coke-filled brazier glowed bright and hot. Then many a kipper, sausage or bacon rasher was grilled on a shovel placed over the firey mass.

Eventually progress decreed the warning lights become battery operated, which meant a minimum of maintenance, they being impervious to adverse weather whilst producing an eye-catching intermittent flashing signal, all of which contributed towards making the watchman’s duties obsolete. Thus he disappeared from amongst roadside society. Goodbye, Ebenezer and Co.

One other regularly seen figure from my youth was the ‘gas man’ or ‘penny slot man’, who, in my experience, was short in stature, wore a gas company peaked cap and carried his bag of pennies over his shoulder. The money, which he had removed from household gas meters, was held in a doctor’s styled soft leather bag, so that when draped over his shoulder the copper contents fell to either end of the bag, giving it a pannier or saddlebag appearance. I also remember seeing the pennies being counted out on the counter of the local Co-op. Presumably they were welcome there.

The penny slot gas meter was a permanent fixture in many houses during bygone times, yet for some unknown reason not in ours. So there was no sudden plunge into darkness signalling the meter’s demand for replenishment of penny or pennies. Some householders, like the wise virgins, had sufficient foresight to prepare for such an event, keeping a store of pennies to hand, along with a taper to light one’s way to the meter, which was situated either at the top of the cellar steps, in the cellar or in some obscure place around the house.

Whereas today we change an electric light bulb when it expires, then in the times of gaslight it was an incandescent mantle which required replacing.

Mantles were dome shaped, fragile structures in the main, attached to porcelain rings which were fixed to the underside of a gas bracket, either singly, in pairs or fours, or one which stood vertically and resembled a small banana, a model characteristic for bedrooms. In the extreme, mantles might be dispensed with, again in bedrooms, where one could at times see the wavering glow of a gas jet spurting from a wall bracket in blowtorch fashion.

Whilst gas played an important part in the domestic structure, it was coal that for many years ruled as king in the homes of the masses, with the open fire as centre of household attraction, the focal point around which to gather. To gather and to gaze, to watch in fascination as the flames danced and flickered, to contemplate the glowing coals and see amongst them the pictures of people, many of them familiar, or scenes which were also readily identifiable.

The fire in the grate was a living entity, a part of the family, a member, as it were, to be tended and fed, one to which we held out our hands, welcoming the warmth and comfort which it radiated. Yet, for reasons unnecessary to mention, that heart-warming fount of cheer had to go, to yield to its mean relative coal gas and eventually natural gas.

Gas, then as now, had become an integral part of a home with not only fires but ovens, rings, single and double, pokers and irons. The flow with its characteristic smell had many uses, including the desperate measure of suicide.

At one period of time market stalls were illuminated by large white naphtha fuelled lamps, which hissed and spluttered as their circle of mantles glowed beneath inverted glass bowls. At dusk one might see these portable forms of illumination being distributed to stallholders from a barrow on which the lamps hung in two rows, one on either side. Today it is electric bulbs which festoon the stalls.

Meanwhile attempts to lighten the gloom were made by street lamps. These cast small yellow splashes of light along pavements and footpaths, pools of illumination created when that now long-gone lamplighter dutifully ignited those indispensable gas mantles ensconced within clear glass cabinets. Each evening, whichever the season and whatever the weather, the lamplighter, long pole tipped with a small blue flame resting on his shoulder, tramped from standard to standard. Come the morning and the process was reversed, the lamps being extinguished as daylight paled the gas mantle’s glow.

Like the night watchman by the roadside and the penny slot man, the ‘Old Lamplighter’, as a song of the day referred to him, has gone on his way, victim to progress, in his case an invention and introduction of the clockwork time switch. A mechanism which controlled the gas supply according to the setting of a clock installed within the lamp’s casket. Come daylight and the clock setting would disconnect the fuel supply, causing the light to be extinguished.

As young boys we would congregate around one particular lamp post, where we quickly learned that as the hour of lamp ignition approached, then if we were to boot the lamp standard, the vibration created would either jerk the clock into action or cause the pilot flame to spurt. I’m not sure what did occur exactly, but the result would be that the lamp ignited, and we could enjoy illuminated play.

The introduction of modern devices then meant a removal from society’s workforce of three established characters and their transference to the ageing memories of those who still remember them.