Dungeness query

[bécasse]

i suspect that the station was never permanently manned. It was served by New Romney trains diverting along the branch and then returning to the junction in each direction. A porter dropped off the train going towards New Romney and then picked up again on its return journey could have done everything necessary at the station; at a guess the porter's actual base would have been Lydd where there would certainly have been more work.

 

I have evaluated the gentlemen's arrangements at a number of sites with basic facilities as provided here. If a tank was provided at all it would have been a small one to provide a limited supply of stored rain water to a tap*, otherwise rain water collected via the guttering flushed the urine channel directly draining into a soakaway. The closet would have been an earth closet or just possibly an ash closet (using ash supplied from Ashford perhaps).

 

* However I have seen no photographic evidence for the presence of such a tap here so there was most probably no tank and no tap.

[Wickham Green too]

Eden Park was built a year or so earlier than Dungeness ......... though the main building is obviously much bigger it's built on an embankment so is was* of timber construction without any obvious concrete footings - the gents DID have a concrete base, though : - 

 

* it's clad in UPVC now - but doesn't look a lot different

 

29/5/82 = Centenary Day

[roythebus1]

On 08/07/2024 at 15:42, Not Jeremy said:

Thank you for all your responses, some good thoughts. I'd seen the picture showing the back wall, but  hadn't really clocked the absence of flues. I think my money is on there being two chimney pipes on the "rearward curve" of the roof, perhaps the internal dividing wall was built the "other way around", I think that's what I will assume happened.

 

Of course there must have been a downpipe for all that guttering too, I'm guessing on the rear Appledore corner of the building for that. Then vents from the soil pipe(s)?, could have exited in the open air gents area I guess, they couldn't have been earth closets.

 

Then could the stoves be paraffin heaters, surely not?

 

My grandmother had one of those, could explain a lot....

 

Boom boom boom blue, Esso Blue!

There's very little earth at Dungeness, it's all shingle.

[bécasse]

13 hours ago, roythebus1 said:

There's very little earth at Dungeness, it's all shingle.

I do realise that, Roy, which is why I suggested that ash might have been used instead since either would have to be brought to site. The important issue is that there wouldn't have been a water closet.

[Wickham Green too]

15 hours ago, roythebus1 said:

There's very little earth at Dungeness, it's all shingle.

Could they - somehow - have used that as a filter bed, flushed twice a day by the tide ??!?

[roythebus1]

26 minutes ago, Wickham Green too said:

Could they - somehow - have used that as a filter bed, flushed twice a day by the tide ??!?

Not quite, the tide never goes that high! well not since about 1360 AD. :)

 

[GrumpyPenguin]

2 hours ago, roythebus1 said:

Not quite, the tide never goes that high! well not since about 1360 AD. :)

 

Well that blows away the tree huggers point about ocean levels rising because of ******** (insert current reason of your choice) - they are simply returning to the levels they were without human interference.

[Wickham Green too]

3 hours ago, roythebus1 said:

Not quite, the tide never goes that high! well not since about 1360 AD. :)

I was postulating that a pit might have been dug into the ballast shingle so the tide didn't actually have to overtop the beach !

[roythebus1]

2 hours ago, Wickham Green too said:

I was postulating that a pit might have been dug into the ballast shingle so the tide didn't actually have to overtop the beach !

It works its way up from below...

[Wickham Green too]

... and then back down through the filter bed.

[Tom Burnham]

The late Roger Kidner wrote that the original station at Bromley North was widely considered the worst on the South Eastern Railway, but only by people who had never visited Dungeness.

[Not Jeremy]

On 09/07/2024 at 13:30, bécasse said:

i suspect that the station was never permanently manned. It was served by New Romney trains diverting along the branch and then returning to the junction in each direction. A porter dropped off the train going towards New Romney and then picked up again on its return journey could have done everything necessary at the station; at a guess the porter's actual base would have been Lydd where there would certainly have been more work.

 

I have evaluated the gentlemen's arrangements at a number of sites with basic facilities as provided here. If a tank was provided at all it would have been a small one to provide a limited supply of stored rain water to a tap*, otherwise rain water collected via the guttering flushed the urine channel directly draining into a soakaway. The closet would have been an earth closet or just possibly an ash closet (using ash supplied from Ashford perhaps).

 

* However I have seen no photographic evidence for the presence of such a tap here so there was most probably no tank and no tap.

 

I think that all makes a deal of sense, it was hardly a centre of population, there were no parcels handling facilities, and there doesn't look to gave been much gardening at the station either(!) so there wouldn't be much to do when there was no train in residence. Perhaps the stoves were removed early on? 

 

But on your lavatorial point, if it was as you describe then what was the function of the very evident ventilation pipe pictured and mentioned above? I don't think it can have been a chimney pipe for any heating or stove, given its position against the gents and the fact that it ran into the ground, as evidenced by the vertical groove in the concrete.

 

I think that the gutters must have discharged into a tank in or near the gents, although I can't see evidence of this in any of the pictures. My reasoning is that it is an obvious thing to do, but also there is no downpipe visible anywhere else on the building - I think the photographs show all the wall faces sufficiently to prove this to be the case. Therefore I am concluding gutters feeding a tank arrangement for flushing purposes.

 

Quite an interesting little place!

 

 

[bécasse]

It wasn't uncommon for ventilation pipes to be provided for earth/ash closets. Their presence in photos, together with the lack of any loco water tank, is often a certain clue to their provision. Remember, at the period when the station was built the majority of country dwellers (and a good few town dwellers too) would have had them at home.

[roythebus1]

Remember the main idea of Dungeness was to develop another Channel Port, mooted by the SER. As is obvious, nothing came of it.

 

Somewhere around I had the book of the New Romney and Dungeness branches.

[Not Jeremy]

Thank you very much to everyone for their contributions, I now know more about earth closets and Dungeness than I did before, brilliant. I mocked the building up in my scale but couldn't come to terms with its proportions in my model setting, it was a very tall small building!

 

 

Instead, I am using the same floor plan as Dungeness but applied to an existing part built model of Midford, which is another place that means quite a lot to me.

 

The model was made in wood by my good friend Dave Easto back in 2012, he has given me permission to rearrange it...

 

 

It suits the location at Devoran Quay very nicely....

 

 

I will keep the mock up though, I have vague ideas of a bleak Southern Cameo with a lighthouse and small station building....

 

Simon

[Nearholmer]

I vote in favour of oil stoves. I reckon everything, which wasn’t much, at Dungeness was oil lit, and heated by oil and driftwood, possibly until the 1960s, certainly until the 1930s.

 

 

‘Petroleum’ didn’t then mean ‘petrol’ as we know it now, BTW, it was pretty much a catch-all term for mineral oils of various kinds, and in fact I think even now it formally means ‘crude oil’, and there were tight laws about using and storing very low flashpoint oils, prompted by people putting crazily volatile stuff in lamps and blowing their houses sky-high, so these stoves probably got fed with mineral lighting oil (expensive, but fairly clean-burning), or something close to what we’d now call paraffin.

 

 

Edited August 14 by Nearholmer

[Wickham Green too]

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

...  everything, which wasn’t much, at Dungeness was oil lit, ...

... yet, surprisingly, "Dungeness became the first lighthouse to have permanent use of electricity installed. Michael Faraday, Scientific Adviser to Trinity House, chose the site. Two carbon arc lamps (one as a standby) were surrounded by a sixth-order Chance Brothers optic (the smallest size optic). The oil lamps and reflectors were retained in case of failure. Holmes magneto-electric machines previously trialled at South Foreland Lighthouse were installed at the tower’s base alongside steam engines. 

The new electric light came into use in June 1862. However, the new system was short-lived, proving too expensive to run. Shipowners complained that the new light was unreliable, sometimes dazzling. By October 1875, it had reverted to the multi-wick oil lamps." ( from https://lighthouseaccommodation.co.uk/listings/dungeness-lighthouse/#:~:text=horizontal white band.-,The first use of electricity,Trinity House%2C chose the site. )

[Nearholmer]

Brilliant!

 

Sometimes.

 

 

[Wickham Green too]

Yep - currently for 5 seconds of every 30 seconds !

[kevinlms]

11 hours ago, Wickham Green too said:

Yep - currently for 5 seconds of every 30 seconds !

Like indicators (not German cars), they're working, not working!

[Clive Mortimore]

On 10/07/2024 at 14:29, GrumpyPenguin said:

Well that blows away the tree huggers point about ocean levels rising because of ******** (insert current reason of your choice) - they are simply returning to the levels they were without human interference.

Romney Marsh and the (England's only) desert at Dungeness didn't need man's interference. That part of Kent's coast line is the result of the sea dumping millions of tons of shingle on the top of millions of tons of shingle it had already dumped over many years. A few miles down the coast the sea regularly takes lumps of chalk off the cliffs at Folkstone and Dover.

 

Where I live on the Lincolnshire marshes, not the Fens but north of the Wolds, was tidal a couple of hundred years ago. It isn't today because of the build up of material the sea has shifted form somewhere else, just like at Dungeness. As were are only just above sea level we are at high risk of flooding according to the environment agency. Last time the village flooded, and not as far inland as the tide use to come, was 1953. When I lived in Essex the people of Canvey Island still talked about the same flood.  Thankfully we are protected by natural sand dunes and a large expanse of salt marsh in front of them.

[Nearholmer]

So noticeable is the way shingle gets dumped by the sea at Dungeness that a standard school geography trip for those of us who grew up

in West Kent and East Sussex was to that very place, plus Cliff End, where the Wealden sandstone meets the sea at Fairlight, a few miles to the west. We got “erosion”, “ “wave-cut benches”, “long-shore drift”, all that stuff.

 

Its left such an impression that I like to go back along there on cycling trips when down that way, as I was a couple of weeks ago.

 

Dungeness, remains of fisherman’s tramway shortly after dawn.

 

 

Looking along from near Rye Harbour to Fairlight:

 

 

The whole history of that coastline, changing river courses, changing sea levels, human interventions of multiple kinds, it’s fascinating.

 

 

Edited August 15 by Nearholmer

[Artless Bodger]

On 14/08/2024 at 17:57, Nearholmer said:

I vote in favour of oil stoves. I reckon everything, which wasn’t much, at Dungeness was oil lit, and heated by oil and driftwood, possibly until the 1960s, certainly until the 1930s.

 

 

‘Petroleum’ didn’t then mean ‘petrol’ as we know it now, BTW, it was pretty much a catch-all term for mineral oils of various kinds, and in fact I think even now it formally means ‘crude oil’, and there were tight laws about using and storing very low flashpoint oils, prompted by people putting crazily volatile stuff in lamps and blowing their houses sky-high, so these stoves probably got fed with mineral lighting oil (expensive, but fairly clean-burning), or something close to what we’d now call paraffin.

 

 

We had a paraffin heater when I was a child, it was used in the hallway in winter to provide a little heat to the upstairs rooms (the only heat otherwise was from coke fires in the back and occasionally in the front room fireplaces). I cannot remember the make (it will occur to me when I'm in the shower I'm sure). They were quite common I think because when visiting Grandad we'd sometimes take the paraffin can up the Tonbridge Road to a garage and fill it with 1 gallon, measured out by filling a glass container on top of the pump. I know my brother and I were always admonished not to play around in the hall when the stove was lit in case we bumped it.

 

Later we had something similar to heat the greenhouse.

 

Before mineral oils (and most early oil well drilling was for lamp oil I think, e.g. in Pennsylvania), I have seen colza oil (rape seed oil) mentioned as used, mainly for lamps, e.g. flare lamps used to examine railway locos at night.

[GrumpyPenguin]

5 minutes ago, Artless Bodger said:

We had a paraffin heater when I was a child, it was used in the hallway in winter to provide a little heat to the upstairs rooms (the only heat otherwise was from coke fires in the back and occasionally in the front room fireplaces). I cannot remember the make (it will occur to me when I'm in the shower I'm sure). They were quite common I think because when visiting Grandad we'd sometimes take the paraffin can up the Tonbridge Road to a garage and fill it with 1 gallon, measured out by filling a glass container on top of the pump. I know my brother and I were always admonished not to play around in the hall when the stove was lit in case we bumped it.

 

Later we had something similar to heat the greenhouse.

 

Before mineral oils (and most early oil well drilling was for lamp oil I think, e.g. in Pennsylvania), I have seen colza oil (rape seed oil) mentioned as used, mainly for lamps, e.g. flare lamps used to examine railway locos at night.

Was it one of these (made by/called Alladin).

[Artless Bodger]

2 minutes ago, GrumpyPenguin said:

Was it one of these (made by/called Alladin).

Thanks, the name rings a bell, however ours was a rectangular sheet metal box with a louvred, lift out front panel with a small window in it to see if the burner was alight, it had inset hand grips in the top of the sides (or external handles, you could lift it and carry it readily). Inside was a separate rectangular tank with a float gauge and filler cap, the burner assembly centrally and a removable chimney with small window. The one in your photo looks like you could boil a kettle on it too if you wanted?