TheSignalEngineer

Certainly less than Baz paid for his afternoon tea in London

Even that changed. Following the last change of ownership production of certain lines was moved from Bournville to Poland whilst some alterations were made. Brummies could instantly tell the difference. I understand that new dedicated production lines, two for Dairy Milk and one each for Roses and Heroes, have been installed. The Research Department kitchen remains at Bournville and is responsible for all recipes. Just to make Bear salivate a bit more, where I was born and l later lived for 18 years you got the smell of Cadburys when the wind was in the East. Nearly everyone in my class at primary school had at least one relative who worked there, (ID Card for the factory shop), followed by at least five of my fellow pupils. An older friend who was the son of the vicar at our parish church was a senior manager at Cadburys head office. Must have been on a good whack as he had a house in Birmingham and a flat in central London at the time. I often saw him on the first up train on Monday morning in the early 1970s.

I think that Christian Kunzle followed very much a Swiss model for his products. He started up in Birmingham by Snow Hill station in 1902, soon expanding to the factory, shop and restaurant at Five Ways. This was at the City end of the 'Posh' area of Edgbaston where many of the wealthy factory owners chose to live, so very convenient for them to take afternoon tea or send the staff to make purchases. A trip to Kunzles in the city centre was a highly prized treat for any local child. I was fortunate in having family working there I got a regular supply delivered to our home when they visited. Christian Kunzle felt indebted to the citizens of his adopted home and became President of the Birmingham Childrens Hospital. He gave free use of part of a chateau he inherited in Davos and sent many sick children and their parent there for holidays. The grounds of his home in Birmingham were given to the city and are still used as a recreation ground. A part of my history where the taste lingers on despite the considerable number of intervening years.

These were the shop counter display boxes my Great Uncle used to deliverto shops and restaurants around the country. 38 - Advert - Showboat ny Kunzle by Bradford Timeline, on Flickr

I take it that @polybear didn't experience the Showboat. It was a child's delight and probably a dentist and dietician's nightmare, much loved in Birmingham tea shops and elsewhere in the 1960s. Christian Kunzle came over from Davos at the age of 17 and worked for his Uncle's pastry business in Oxford before becoming a chef at the Houses of Parliament. He then started restaurants in Birmingham and the surrounding area and set up a confectionery and chocolaitier factory to supply them and other people around the country. He made quality chocolates with a high cocoa content. The business was carried on for a while by the family after his death in 1954 but eventually after various mergers it ended up in the hands of Lyons. The cakes in question were originally marketed under the name of Super Fancies and became widespread around 1960 with the move to a new factory at Garretts Green. It was around this time that the name was changed to Showboat. They consisted of a hard chocolate cup which then had a layer of cake similar to LDC in the bottom covered with buttercream then piped decoration and a small sweet to top it. They were hand made, 40 women working on the production line. My Great Aunt, elder sister of the driver in the earlier post was one of they and she would bring round a bag of 'seconds' from the factory shop to my Grandad's house most weekends. At the start of the line there was a large vat that held about 15 tons of liquid chocolate feeding two ancient moulding machines. After the last takeover Lyons moved production to one of their other factories and when production resumed they tried to cut costs by reducing the cocoa content of the chocolate and changing other ingredients. Sadly they weren't the same and the public stopped buying so production ceased. Waitrose did try to reintroduce them a few years later but they couldn't reproduce the original magic formula. https://images.app.goo.gl/T4cjCiUPBoggQDP99

The nearest you will get to that up here is one belonging to the a member of a model boat club who sails it on the Peak Forest Canal. He doesn't seem to bring it out when the member with the operational model U-Boat is around.

I've looked a bit deeper and I think it was a C type built 1933-37, so I would guess it's the 1937 Coronation.

Thanks, I thought it might be, now to find more info about them.

Now Mr Bear, I'll see your KnicKnacks and raise you a Kunzle's Showboat, or would if Lyons hadn't wrecked them after the takeover. For those who weren't there in body (and mind) in the 1960s I will explain later. I've also got a question about a van from a photo I found in my Dad's collection. The man on the left was my Great Uncle. Either side of war service he was a delivery driver for a the Birmingham company C. Kunzle who owned restaurants and made cakes. I'm trying to work out what the type of van was and the event for which it was decorated. Possibly the 1937 Coronation although it may have been later.

Likewise, no MTB trip today. May do the week shop instead after present bit of wall painting finished.

Hope you get the bike fixed soon. We had motor faults clocking up on my wife's Trek MTB after a couple of hundred miles. It turned out that a cable had been trapped during the original assembly and riding had caused it to go low resistance between cores leading to a current overload on the battery. Trek just sent a new motor unit and wiring loom to the shop to be fitted, no problems since.

The last pannier tanks, other than some stored ones, left OOC in March 1965. Passenger steam working out of Paddington had ended in 1964.

I think the grille on the Base Toys one came into general use around 1963/4.

Morris Commercial FG?

My thoughts are that if illness gets too much to cope with I'm sure a bottle of single malt with the medication would help matter along. Even more effective would be a bottle of the 72% Poitìn that my son gets over in Ireland.

Most were at least clever enough to realise that I had been around long enough to have put in, maintained and designed alterations to the old systems that needed to be modified or interfaced to. In one instance a particular early computerised system of which only one existed was preventing any alterations at one signal box until I announced that the machine originally used to produce thd EPROMS was sitting in our office, and for a small fee I would get a man who knew how it worked to see if it could be resurrected. It turned out that it could be, and one of our clever people modified the program to run on Windows. We were provided with a set of the data records to assess the extent of the alteration and soon realised that they didn't match the installed infrastructure. Mods done were missing and stuff included had never been installed. For a slightly larger fee we arranged to clone the existing EPROMs to provide a set of spares and a copy of the as installed data. Our company bean counters were a bit twitchy that I was following a couple of little jobs, but I won them over when I told them that there was a big contract in the offing and we would be specified as sub-contractor for the mods to the electronics. The client was being backed by the TOC and local authority and would not quibble much if I said it could cost up to £0.5m and we came in with a price a bit lower. The contract got done and overall from me first being asked about it we made a margin of about 30% on our part.

I was lucky to get a job I liked and until privvy-tization it was generally enjoyable. Yes there were hard times but a brew and a bit of railway humour usually got us through those. It all changed with the Failtrack blow-ins. Mostly no knowledge other than how to work out what quantity of concrete had been poured or bricks laid. I got grief from them until I commented that my savings were bigger than my mortgage and my pension would keep me comfortable for longer than I was likely to live so when I stopped liking the job I would be off. They were mostly very nice to me after that.

One of the most effective pain killing concoctions ever devised was the “Brompton Cocktail”. My MiL was given that by her GP to ease her way through her last hours when terminally ill.

A lot of readily available old preparations seem to have disappeared in recent years. I suppose it is due to either risks associated or potential misuse. My mother was secretary to a group of doctors about 60 years ago. I had a sports injury that was giving me pain so one of them produced a small bottle of dark liquid and administered about 10ml of it. He said now lie down as soon as possible. I fell asleep a short while later and slept until next morning. When I spoke to him a while later he explained that it was a mixture he learned when training. He spent time working in what would now be called A&E by the London docks then shortly after qualifying he joined the Army Medical Corps and was sent to the Dardanelles. He said it was very useful for putting wounded men to sleep when treating them. I think it contained enough Class A substances per pint to finish a large horse.

I find it amazing how women can turn any member of their gender into the 'enemy' with such ease. 'Nuff said on that subject. Yesterday was a bit of a non-event. I had a bit of a reaction from Saturday's jab, much more than with the first two. Fortunately the effects wore off as the day progressed but the planned painting was postponed until today. The other planned action was an early trip for some photographing of moving machinery at Sheepsrear but it was decided that the inclement weather at the time would make the effort futile and not fun. In the event it gave some time for sorting old photos and recording some details of them in a more easily identifiable form. Enough for now, I have a ceiling to paint. I may be back later.

But you have to commit to living in Wolverhampton for 25 years to qualify.

My experience with domestic machines is the same. We have a hand-held Dyson which is rubbish. For carpets we use a German? machine named Fakir I think. We have a Henry which is a bit long in the tooth now but is still working fine, used for hard floors and dirty jobs like cleaning out the car after an MTB trip. Once upon a time we had a Bissell machine for carpet shampooing but it was pretty damned useless as it took longer to set up and clean out afterwards than it did to do the job. It had an electronics failure and ended up at the dump. I much prefer the old Vax wet and dry. Simple, not much to go wrong, easy to set up and clean afterwards. When it comes to cooking some of the modern machines with 15 different programmes are a pain to use. We have one but it doesn't get much wear. The weapon of choice for everyday use is a Lacanche range cooker. They are hand built at a factory that has been around for over 200 years. When we moved it into our present house it took two of us to lift the carcase with the doors and all to top ironwork removed. The cooker hood for it has an extraction rate of 720 cubic metres per hour on full speed, twice the power of those available from the big orange shed, and needs a six inch diameter vent pipe to cope with it.

Another hole in the pincushion that doubles for my upper left arm. Just about to walk back home then think after lunch I may take a trip to New Mills where it is advertised that some old boys will be playing with their toys in public today.

Another Cornish anomaly is that 9700-9710 are shown as permitted between Liskeard and Looe in the Plymouth freight WTT in 1957.

I was the designer / design engineer for all jobs at Leamington from the Coventry line singling, Fosse Road abolition, various signal renewals and track circuiting to Fenny Compton up to the preparation of the existing lineside signalling for interfacing with the SSI.