White horse on a green hill
A sign of human life
Visible from afar
White horse on a hillside near Westbury seen from a train window
Drawn on a hill
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Reflected in Devon
A fleeting glimpse
In a train window pane:
The wide world passes us by
Totnes railway station
Journey
Rails of solid steel extend
From place to place
Past countryside we speed
Fire plug
The first time I encountered the term ‘fire plug’ was when I was researching the life of my great grandfather Franz Ginsberg, who died in 1936. As an 18 year old, he went from his home in the German Empire to the South African town of King Williams Town in 1880. By 1885, he had established a factory for making matches. Such factories are full of raw materials that are prone to catching fire. As his business grew, so did his need for a reliable water supply for dealing with fires.
Water in the Eastern Cape was expensive in the late 19th century. Franz had to apply to the town council for permission to increase the supply of water to his factory. He also needed permission to install more fire plugs. In my published biography of my great grandfather, I wrote:
“Almost a decade later, in 1898, Franz and his brother-in-law Mr Siegfried Salomon (who married Franz’s sister Ida and was a Town Councillor for a while) both applied to the Town Council to have ‘fireplugs’ placed on their premises. This was allowed on condition that the applicants paid the expense of placing them there; and that they would be liable to other charges including a fine of £25 if they used the water from these for any purpose other than the extinction of fire.”
Recently, I visited Windsor Castle, where I saw several signs such as is shown in the illustration to this blog article. They indicate the locations of fire plugs in the castle. Had I not seen the term ‘fire plug’ before while writing about my ancestor, I might not have noticed these small old-fashioned signs.
So, what, you might be wondering, is or was a fire plug? The modern term for them is ‘fire hydrant’. The fire plugs, which were precursors of fire hydrants were simply holes made in the water mains pipe, which were blocked with a plug. The plug could be removed when water was required to extinguish fires.
I suspect that you are by now asking yourself if Franz ever had to make use of the plugs he had requested. Well, he did occasionally:
“In February 1893, the Cape Mercury newspaper published a long article about Franz’s match factory. It begins with a spark of humour:
‘In December last an unusual illumination made a “King” industry more widely known than before. A fire broke out in, and consumed the drying shed at Messrs. Ginsberg & Co.’s Lucifer Match Factory, which is situated in Victoria Street. The loss was not great, but the advertisement was extensive – and cheap – for it was gratuitous.’”
If you want to know more about my ancestor who went to South Africa in search of prosperity and later became a senator in that country, please read:
“Soap to Senate: A German Jew at the dawn of apartheid”
by Adam Yamey.
It is available from: lulu.com, Amazon, bookdepository.com and Kindle
The weight of words
Waiting for a train
Training with a weight:
Sounds same, but meanings differ
When two words have the same spelling or same pronunciation, they are called ‘homonyms’
Foreign exchange
A chance encounter in the former Yugoslavia has stuck in my memory
Sometime in 1975, I travelled from Peć (now in Kosovo) to Titograd (now in Montenegro) by bus. I chose to take the route that went via the wild and difficult Ĉakor Pass that traverses the mountain range shared by northern Albania and Montenegro, where I was heading. We reached the highest point on the pass after driving around a seemingly endless series of tight hairpin bends, and stopped there to give the driver a break.
While I was wandering around the treeless, grassy summit, admiring the views into the valley into which we would be descending, a grubby little boy approached me. He said something to me in a language, which I did not recognise as being Serbo-Croat. It was probably Albanian. Somehow, he made it clear to me that he wanted foreign coins. I thought that he was either a beggar, or more likely, just a curious youngster pleased to have chanced upon a foreigner. I gave him a few British coins, and then he rummaged around in his pocket. After a moment, he handed me a few Yugoslav Dinar coins, and left. He was no beggar, after all, but simply a young fellow with a well-developed sense of fairness.
After leaving the Ĉakor, we wound through the mountains to Andrijevica, a small Montenegrin town, which was enshrouded in rain and mist. Then, we descended gradually via a series of deep wooded canyons towards Titograd. All I saw of the town on that occasion was its bus station.
Picture shows view from the summit of the Ĉakor Pass
Geometry
Lines parallel
Meeting at infinity
Only in your mind’s eye
Gandhi, Lenin, Stalin
Non-violent Gandhi
Beside three leading men
Who faced fate with force
This mantle-piece at Shaw Corner, the home of George Bernard Shaw at Ayot St Lawence in Hertfordshire, bears the portraits of (from left to right) Mahatma Gandhi, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Vladimir Lenin, and Josef Stalin. Shaw met all of these men.
A young explorer
When I was a child, our local Underground station was Golders Green on the Edgware branch of the Northern Line. It was the first station on the stretch of the line, which remains open air, above ground, between Golders Green and Edgware. As a small child, I yearned to know what lay beyond Golders Green, where we always disembarked, but my parents did not share my yearning.
Long ago in the 1960s, the trains bound for Edgware stopped at Golders Green on a stretch of line that ran between two platforms. The doors would open on both sides of the train. The platform on the left side of the train gave easy access to the centre of Golders Green and its large bus terminus. The right side, which we always used, led to an entrance that was on the way to Hampstead Garden Suburb, where our family home was located.
One day, my father and I arrived at Golders Green after having spent some time in central London. As usual, we waited alongside a door on the right side of the train when we stopped in the station. Unusually, the doors on the right side of the train did not open, but those on the left did. By the time we realised that the right side doors were not going to open, the doors on the left side had closed, and we were beginning to travel beyond Golders Green above ground to Brent, the next station. My father was not happy, but I was delighted to be travelling along a stretch of the line that I had always wanted to see.
Since that time, I have always been excited at the prospect of travelling to the ends of the London Underground lines. Yesterday, I travelled to Watford, the terminus of one branch of the Metropolitan Line, and enjoyed it as much as I would have done when aged about ten!
Writing on the wall
Fading letters on a wall:
Memories evoked
Of times long ago
Picture taken in the midst of the area of London where the annual Notting Hill Carnival takes place
