Water Heating
It was only about 50 miles from my Nanna and Grandad's house in Dunstable to my parents home in Abingdon.
That does not sound very far by today's typical mileages on the family shopping trip, school run or just for a jolly but if you factor into the distance that it was a regular route in the 1960's, in an underpowered Morris Minor and on dodgy Trunk and Minor roads of that era then it was actually quite an expedition.
I was just a small lad at the time and along with my, then, two sisters and baby brother (sorry Mark, you missed out on this part of the adventure by being born in the 1970's) we would make the journey regularly to visit not just my maternal grandparents but also those of my father who lived just around the corner.
That seems a strange circumstance compared to modern lifestyles but people did not flit about then as much as they do now and longstanding residence in a single location was the norm.
It tended to be a Sunday for this type of family gathering and after a full day of best behaviour us children, the four of us under the age of 9 would be irritable, tetchy and a little bit grubby from exploring what were interesting houses and the nooks and crannies to be found in such places.
Our Grandad Dick, in particular, had a joinery working area in a shed, a long narrow garden and a dog, all of which gave us ample opportunity to pick up dirt and debris.
Ahead of the return journey we would be put in our Nanna's bath, individually or collectively.
It was here that I experienced the fearsome apparatus that was the gas fired hot water heater.
I cannot recall the brand name of the appliance but if I describe its appearance and operation then I am am sure that many of my generation and earlier will recall the same trepidation and anxiety that I experienced.
It was described as a "Geyser".
Prior to the installation of natural gas and central heating into UK homes there was quite a performance to achieve what should have been the simple task of running a bath. An electric immersion connected to a copper cupola or cylinder was common. Houses relying on coal fires had back boilers to provide hot water but more rudimentary methods included having a bath tub under a hinged lid in the kitchen, a moveable tin bath in the hearthside or having to physically carry or pump boiling water to any fixed bath position, for example in an increasingly popular and desirable first floor bathroom.
The gas geyser had actually been pioneered way back in 1869 by Ewarts and later and by perhaps the best known manufacturer, Ascot.
The same principles persisted well into the 1960's and later in some older housing stock albeit with a few stylish and technical tweaks to make the appliance more appealing to the eye. A white coloured enamelled cover was a stylish finish for the modern bathroom.
For all of its crudeness a household with a gas geyser over the bath for almost instantaneous hot water was still regarded as an example of "all modern conveniences".
The procedure to fire up the geyser took some courage and a steady hand. After turning on the gas supply it would be a rush to light the burner using matches or if not available a smouldering, tight roll of newspaper that was carried through the house and upstairs being careful that embers did not fall and set alight the carpet and soft furnishings.
The burner would make a distinctive benign pop, at best, or shoot out a small explosively propelled flame if there was a larger amount of combustible gas released.
When fired up the inferno inside the casing was very visible and extremely noisy.
First opening of the thin single spout tap would often release a stream of rust amongst the hot, steamy plume of water and it was not unknown for the cascade to include a few panicky live or stiff mummified spiders.
The flow of heated water was unreliable and unpredictable and I dare say that many willy's and bodily parts will have been scorched or poached whilst bathers, of all ages, sat close to the outfall into the bath.
Many of the standard geysers lacked adequate ventilation making it necessary to either keep a window or door open (impractical in winter and for privacy) or restrict bathing to about 5 minutes so as to minimise potential exposure to deadly Carbon Monoxide fumes, an inevitable by-product of the inefficiencies of the gas burners.
Our Nanna, Nelly, was once overcome by the invisible toxic gas but survived. I have heard horror stories about fatalities amongst unaware bathers and shudder to think of the statistics for this as a cause of death over the last century.
Someone's mother lost their eyebrows when peering into the burner viewing hole at the point of the violent gas ignition.
Those who ripped out these beasts of appliances for safety reasons or just because they could afford the next best thing on the market ran the risk of exposing harmful asbestos which was packed into the metal casings or at the point of fixing to the wall.
Evolving standards and practices eventually sounded the death-knell for the gas geysers, some say long after their actual time was up.
Although my bath times in the geyser era were frightening I actually look back on them with some nostalgia.
No comments:
Post a Comment