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Most of the content in the following report was taken from
information supplied in “Synopses & Mini Biographies” for SERIAC 2011.
Andy Fish drove eleven of us in the Community Bus to Brighton on Saturday 16th April
for the annual SERIAC Conference which this year was hosted by SIAS [Sussex
Industrial Archaeology Society] and held in the Chichester Lecture Theatre, University of Sussex.
Leaving Chandler's Ford at approximately 7.15 am we
arrived in plenty of time to locate the campus, unload the display boards,
registration, and most importantly, coffee and biscuits. The Conference started promptly at 10.00 am with a short introduction by Sir
Frederick Sowrey, President of SIAS.
The first talk of the day was given by Ian Gledhill of
Volk's Electric Railway Association on Magnus Volk & his Amazing
Railways. Ian began his career
as a railway engineer, designing extensions to the London Underground but then
chose an alternative career in theatre stage management, as a director, set
designer and actor. However his interest in railways never left him, and when
in 1995 the Volk's Electric Railway Association was set up to support the
world's oldest electric railway lan was a founder member, and has been the
Association's Chairman for the last 13 years.
As such he has undertaken extensive research into the history of the
line and regularly gives lectures on the subject, and he is often to be found
driving the trains as a volunteer. Brighton-born
Magnus Volk was a true pioneer of all things electrical, inventing numerous
electrical gadgets whose descendants can still be found in use today. However,
even he would have been surprised to learn, when he created Britain's first electric railway back in
1883 that it would still be running 128 years later. Having begun as something of a novelty
demonstration line, Volk's Electric Railway on Brighton seafront is now recognized as the
oldest working electric railway in the world, but it wasn't the only line built
in the town by its creator. The Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Railway
was surely the most astonishing railway line ever built, and a fascinating
(albeit short lived) product of the inventiveness, which Magnus Volk was to
display for the whole of his life.
The second talk
of the day was given by John King of Croydon Airport Society on London's Airports – The Inter War
Years. John has a
particular interest in airports in the inter-war years and has written and
lectured on the subject over many years. He has been a long term supporter of
SERIAC and gave a talk on airports in 1987.
Following a career working for
railway and airline companies he has spent his retirement researching into the
history of aviation in the UK and Ireland.
He is organizer and editor of the British Aviation Preservation Council
"Stopping the Rot" conferences. John's talk was the same one that he
gave to the HIAS meeting on April 4th and has already been reported under past
meetings.
The morning
session ended with Colin Mitchell of the Mills Archive Trust on The Mills
Archive as a Research Resource for the South East. Colin kindly replaced Ron Cookson who
is Chairman of the Mills Archive Trust, but was unavailable. Colin is a retired electrical/electronics
engineer who has been a volunteer at the Mills Archive for the past seven
years. He is not a mills expert but is
an industrial heritage enthusiast who leads the Wokingham University of the Third Age (U3A) industrial
heritage group and has tutored several USA summer schools on heritage subjects.
The Mills
Archive is helping to save the memories and offers enthusiasts a unique source
of information on windmills, watermills, materials, techniques and mills
people. The information has been collected by enthusiasts over many years and
without the Mills Archive, it could have been thrown into a landfill site or
locked away in an inaccessible archive.
The Mills Archive is approaching the end of its first decade. In that time it's volunteers have brought
together nearly fifty major collections comprising more than a million items,
of which only 3% have been catalogued.
These include some 25,000 scanned images and more than 7,000 reference
items. These are catalogued and stored safely and securely but remain
accessible to researchers who can search the Archive using the Internet, view
most images on line and visit the Archive's premises in Reading to exam the
items themselves. For more information
see millsarchive.com and millsarchivetrust.org.
The Archive (visits by appointment) is to be found at Watlington House, 44 Watlington St,
Reading RG1 4RJ.
By this time is
was 12.30 and we adjourned for lunch which was a short walk away in the Library
Restaurant. For those who had ordered
lunch there was a choice of lasagne or for the vegetarians, mousakka, both
served with salad, a dessert and some fruit plus tea or coffee, which for the
amount we paid, £8.00, was very good value.
It was a lovely day, so those who had sandwiches were able to eat them
outside. During the break there was a
chance to look round the various stands, catch up with people not seen since
the previous Conference, or just sit in the sunshine.
The Conference
reconvened promptly at 1.45 pm with Peter Darley of the Camden
Railway Heritage Trust. Peter's research
on his talk The Victorian Working Horse was funded by the SERIAC
Bursary Award 2010. Peter is a
freelance civil engineer and economist who has worked in water resources
development around the world. He recently founded Camden Railway Heritage Trust
and writes and gives talks on the remarkable industrial and transport heritage
of the area in and around the former Camden Goods Depot, as well as guiding
walks over a heritage trail he created. For all its
inventiveness as regards new modes of transport, including railways, trams and
steamships, Victorian London remained at heart a horse-drawn society, and its
dependence on the horse set important limits to social and economic
development. Taking all the varied forms of horse-drawn and horseback activity
together, British society required about one horse for every 10 people in the
late Victorian period. In London there would have been some half a
million horses at the turn of the century.
Excluding most horseback activity, which was primarily for sport,
leisure and ceremony, the Victorian working horse in harness performed a
variety of duties, including carriage of goods and people, municipal services,
powering machinery, moving outsize loads and national defence. Examples of
these are taken from Camden Goods Depot, from Camden and its immediate neighbourhood,
and from further afield. The breeding of
horses and their supply to the capital city is described, together with a broad
overview of the horse world of London. This will reveal the social and
economic environment in which these horses were employed, and the
infrastructure and services required to support them.
The second talk
of the afternoon was The Kent Coalfields by Nick Kelly of
SIAS. As a child Nick lived in Kent and saw the industry at its peak.
He is a noted researcher in many aspects of industrial archaeology specialising
in extractive industries and world-wide transportation systems. On a return
visit to Kent in 2009 Nick saw the legacy of
regenerating (demolishing) the above ground workings which has led to today's
study. The discovery of
coal near Boulogne led to the probability that coal could exist under Kent. After a number of abortive
boreholes, coal was finally located at Shakespeare Cliff west of Dover in 1893. Due to a number of
financial, geological, and engineering problems coal was not commercially
produced until 1912. The First World War had a dramatic effect on the infant
industry; only four collieries would achieve sustained production. These passed to the NCB on 1st
January 1947.
Maximum production was around two million tons per annum and the mines employed
11,500 men. Apart from the NCB mines there was a short lived drift mine at
Cobham near Rochester; this worked a seam of brown
coal. The first NCB closure came in 1969
when Chislet closed. The other three collieries closed following the 1984/5
miners strike, Tilmanstone in 1986, Snowdown in 1987 and Betteshanger in 1989.
Whilst the industry is now defunct, remains in the form of disused buildings
and miner's housing survive.
We then had a
short break for tea and when we came back it was the turn of Malcolm Tucker of
GLIAS on Ice Wells fit for the Metropolis. Malcolm is a civil engineer with long
experience of historic engineering structures and industrial archaeology, in
which fields he now works as a freelance consultant. When the supply
of ice for summer catering and food preservation depended on what could be
gathered and stored in winter from lakes, ponds and canals, it remained a
luxury of the rich. Importing lake ice
from Norway was pioneered in 1822 by William
Leftwich, a London 'pastrycook'. Soon he was storing
his ice in a huge "egg-shaped" ice well, 82 feet deep, near Regent's
Park. Another of his, deepened to 100 feet in the 1840s, still exists and has
been investigated in detail by the speaker. The London Clay proved ideal for
excavating large ice wells, typically 34 feet or more in diameter and around 40
feet deep. They were mostly located close to the Regent's Canal since the ice
was imported via the Docks or gathered in cold weather from the canal itself.
Various fishmongers entered the wholesale trade, and Carlo Gatti, a café
proprietor who popularised ice cream, built his first ice well at Battlebridge Basin near King's Cross around 1857. Investment in mechanical freezing plants from
the 1870s onwards curbed the rapid growth of Norwegian ice imports, which
plummeted from a peak of 340,000 'registered' tons in 1899 to zero by 1915.
United Carlo Gatti Stevenson & Slaters Ltd. continued manufacturing ice in
3-cwt blocks until c.1980.
The Conference
ended at approximately 4.30 pm with the closing remarks made by
the Conference Organizer, Malcolm Dawes, who also informed us that SERIAC 2012 will be hosted by BIAG and is to
be held at St Bartholomew's School in Newbury on the 28th
April 2012. We stayed until about 5 pm to enable the delegates to have a
bit longer to browse the stands and make any last minute purchases, and Eleanor tells me that the amount of
publications sold was just under £50 worth.
Andy fetched the bus and after loading the display boards we all hopped
aboard and drove down to Brighton's seafront to have a look at Magnus Volk's Electric
Railway, which we had heard so much about earlier in the day. Although closed for the winter, it will re-open in time for Easter
break. We arrived back in Chandlers
Ford at about 7.45 after a most enjoyable day at the seaside.
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