Friday 17 January 1947
Sport & Country
SHOW SITE
Land near Cheltenham has been chosen for the Bath and West and Southern Counties Society’s Show in May. The erection of buildings has already begun.
BRITISH PEAT
Dutch workers
Two hundred and fifty acres of peat which has lain under bracken for the past 100 years near Astley Moss, Lancs., is being worked by Dutch experts.
BERLIN
The first shipment of a total of 2,000 head of cattle to be sent from Ireland to feed the people of Berlin has arrived.
Up and down the land
The paper says the country is not happy under a Government that tries to direct every move, and that the quarrel is not the taking of the coal mines but laws made with too little thought for the hardship they cause. It complains that the best market-garden land is turned into airfields and that parks are taken for housing while more open space is sought, and it would rather see a wheat price that ends talk of subsidies, and parish and rural councils left to build in local materials, keep the rivers clean, and run a village laundry and cold store.
Mr H. L. Kenward
Mr H. L. Kenward, president of the Tyre Manufacturers Conference and a director of the Dunlop Rubber Company, was awarded a knighthood in the New Year’s Honours List. A new book on the company’s wartime history is reviewed in the same issue.
Mr Percy Lister
Mr Percy Lister, chairman and managing director of R. A. Lister and Co. Ltd and chairman of Blackstone and Company Ltd, Stamford, received a knighthood in the New Year’s Honours. During the war he was a managing director of the United Kingdom Commercial Corporation and travelled extensively.
VANISHING SHORTLY
One of London’s market gardens, at London Road, Mitcham, where large crops of mustard-and-cress are grown, will disappear because the Minister of Health has approved a compulsory purchase order on the land for a housing site.
Blessing the Plough
The ceremony, revived through the wartime link between the Young Farmers’ Clubs and the Church, and illustrated on the front page, was held at Chichester Cathedral. A service compiled by the Revd. Couper was conducted by the Bishop, with members of the West Sussex County Federation of Young Farmers’ Clubs, and Lord Leconfield, Mrs Kilian Konig, Sir William Gavin, Mr James Turner and Sir Merrik Burrell among those present.
Dunlop in War and Peace
Sir Ronald Storrs’s new book says rubber, and the Dunlop organisation, were in service everywhere in the war, from self-sealing aeroplane fuel-tank coverings, developed after three-quarters of losses were put down to punctured tanks, to tyres, swim-suits for frogmen and decoy tanks. It mentions Mr Churchill’s Dunlopillo mattress, and a repair service for farm workers’ rubber boots.
Game Research
I.C.I. has reopened its Game Service Station at Burgate Manor, Fordingbridge, Hampshire, with a 4,000-acre experimental estate at West Park, Damerham. Before the war it was I.C.I. Game Researches; during the war it destroyed vermin for food production, and it now stresses keepering, vermin destruction and building up stocks of game.
GIRL STUDENTS
Bicton Farm Institute, between Exmouth and Sidmouth, once the home of the Clinton family, has been turned into a college with lecture-rooms, class-rooms, studies and dormitories. There are 119 rooms.
DEVON N.F.U.
A photograph at Exeter shows, left to right, Mr A. Porter, secretary of the Devon N.F.U., Mr J. K. Knowles, general secretary of the N.F.U., and Mr J. Crooke and Mr G. W. Symons, newly elected chairman and vice-chairman of the Devon branch.
POPULAR EXHIBIT
“Miner’s Kitchen”, designed by Edna Moseley, A.R.I.B.A., drew more attention than any other room in the Furnished Rooms section of the Britain Can Make It exhibition.
NOT TOO OLD
Frederick Butchers, of Horsmonden, Kent, is 83 and has worked on the same farm for 73 years. He has no intention of retiring yet.
SOUTHDOWN RAM
The ram is used on the flock of 70 ewes owned by Harold B. Paynter Ltd, Manor Farm, Knotting, Bedfordshire. The flock won the Southdown Sheep Society’s Flock Competition for 1946, and the Miller Hallet Cup, with 195 points out of 200.
Mr G. T. Williams
Mr G. T. Williams, of Newport, has been elected chairman of the Shropshire County N.F.U.
Saturday 8 March 1947
The Sphere
HOW THEY BRING THE COAL TO LONDON
The colliers which supply the gas works and the power stations
The fuel crisis has shown up the Thames “flat-iron” colliers that supply the gasworks and power stations, most from the Tyne and Humber and some from South Wales, including the Wandsworth and District Gas Company’s ships, which pass seventeen bridges: the diesel Mitcham carries 2,700 tons, with masts and funnel lowered for the bridges between Limehouse and Wandsworth, the Wandle of 1909 carries 1,250 tons, and the screw collier John Bowes of 1852 carries 600 tons. In ten days, 241 ships carried 505,000 tons from the Tyne and Humber; the pictures also show the Wimbledon in the North Sea, the Wandle discharging at Wandsworth, and Fulham power station, where 3,000 tons of coal a day were needed and power cuts saved 30 per cent of fuel.
