A Hard Days Work...

Another hard day at work over.  
I say 'hard' but much of that was due to being asleep when I arrived just before ten.  It was incredibly difficult to waken this morning and coffee did not help.  Only when the cleaner man was leaving and stopped to chat did the adrenalin kick in.  Had he not stopped I may well have drifted into stupor and fallen under the desk.
However as we spoke a lad did arrive asking for information re maps.  This was more interesting than the exhibition.  The trouble with maps I find is that once I begin looking at them I cannot stop.  For some reason pouring over an old map from fifty or so years ago is really interesting.  I just did it now to ensure Old Maps had the map I thought he was looking for and I almost forgot myself again.  So much has change since 1961, the basic layout is similar but so many changes within that have occurred.  Change is not always good but it is inevitable.  Last time I looked at my old part of Edinburgh on Google Maps I was shocked to see the changes, some things have been there for years and have disappeared!  Other things remain the same but that is not always a good thing.  

Then followed an hour, or so it seemed like, with a woman wishing to talk about her dead relative.  He was one who fell during the Great War and this lass was supposed to arrive several months ago but chose not to.  Today she turned up unannounced for a chat re the letters and material concerning her forebear.  As the curator was elsewhere I was with her for a while and made clear I wanted all she had, but of course the curator decides whether we can or cannot hold such as this.  Once the two chatted for ten minutes, well about thirty as she can talk this lass, she can talk, it was decided she ought to discuss with the Records office and the Regimental Museum what they thought about it all.  Naturally I told her lies re the record office mice, the museums lack of care and that WE ought to have this stuff, especially me.  However after discussion she has arranged meetings with the others and I strongly suspect the material, letters, stories, medals, etc, will be with us soon.  I hope so or the curator will hear about this.
By the time all this had finished it was time to go home.  Such a hard life...

 

Adverts, Census, Maps and Research

BTSport featured an appalling mushy advert the other day featuring a black girl and her mother preparing for her wedding.  The items required, the dress, the weeping mother all were used to sell whatever the product was.  Sadly I had my head over a bucket while watching this but did manage to note that as mum (no dad I notice was this an attack on the descendants of those West Indian men who live in London) as mum walked daughter down the aisle and presented her there the camera changed position to reveal the husband, a handsome white male!  
Have you noticed that in the UK adverts may feature black males with white wives or white males with black girls but never do we see two blacks together, why is this?  An advert for some food product some years ago featured a very happy black family and ran for a while, and I have a faint memory of an Asian family of some sort featuring also but these are rare.  I know that nobody uses gays to sell products because this stops people buying the product but surely black couples do not have the same effect do they?  

     
I had a great deal of research to do this weekend, it wasn't really a great deal but I kept putting it off and now it requires some work before Tuesday, and I have done little.  One reason was the census!  You see on ancestry it is possible to look at the census returns for the town since 1841.  Therefore numpty here began to search these, downloading lots of them for research later, in the hope of finding people who lived in this building in times past.  Naturally it failed!  
For a start the numbers either do not run as now or they do not exist at all.  This is not unusual as many houses then had names, however most people rented their homes and numbers are seen on some of the census returns, it is that these numbers are 'odd' numbers and today the numbers are 'even' numbers on this side of the street.  I wonder if some cooncil worker in the big office would have details of these?  I must ask around the people that know these things, if the do know these things that is.  
On the latest census returns the numbers go up to 96, with is interesting as I look for 98 next door.  However that does not appear and 92 - 96 does not fit with the housing as it stands just now, some building work has been undergone I note from old maps but in what way does this affect the numbers.  The next number I come to is helpfully 110, which does not exist any longer having long since become a Sainsburys petrol station.  No help to me in any way.
The older census either has no or odd numbers or is somewhat mixed up in the way it lists the homes.  Names are given which sometimes helps, 'Baptist Minister indicates the Manse that once stood up the road (Knocked down by the Luftwaffe in 1941), and 'Mount House Lodge' also indicates a house on the maps from 1875, the oldest available.  

The other problem I find is the need to check 'Old Maps' when doing this as I get involved in the maps.  It is invariably interesting to note the changes, not always noticeable at first, between the town today and how it was laid out in the past.  Obviously maps do not indicate the lack of pavements, unmade or 'rough' roads, or the state of the buildings marked on the maps, then we have to seek out old photographs to compare with what the maps reveal.  Luckily I was too lazy to start searching through photographs yesterday or today.  However just looking at the first map I bought when I came to this town twenty one years ago, then around 30,000 persons, and noting how it has grown with housing estates filling in what once was fields and offering some 40,000 persons to annoy me today.  Each week small corners are filled in and a block raised her and there to really annoy the postman who is expected to deliver there but allowed no more time in doing so.    
All in all the time spent perusing a map, and an ageing won at that, is never wasted in my view.  There is always old industrial sites to note, now housing though I suspect many living there have little idea of what lies in the ground beneath them, old railway lines, buildings that were there soon after the Normans built them and remain solid still, public houses that once filled with men from the industry and are now blocks for those 'over fifty' and oak trees that stood for several hundred years in the middle of the road that have been sacrificed for the motor car, so many interesting changes.
Of course I may just be weird...

Study

Once the hordes of kids and mums and grandparents and kids had passed by allowing me a few moments to myself I spent time relaxing by looking at an old map.  Being of twisted mentality I find comparing the view of the old map to the present very interesting.  
The map I was looking at, not the one pictured above, was first drawn in 1887, revised in 1919 and again in 1921.  Considerable changes have taken place since then and it is riveting to one such as I to see how things change.  For a start many street names make sense, farms that once stood in prominent positions, allowing cows to wander along the roads, have long since been replaced by 1950's housing development.  These today offer good homes to many even though some are often raided by the drug seeking police.  Good homes do not, in spite of quasi socialist idealism change people, only Jesus can do that and it is far from easy as you know.  Most folks are satisfied however, especially those who bought them cheap from grasping Thatcher!
Once busy industry takes up a huge amount of space in this map, now also replaced by housing of one sort or another.  Thousands of men and during the two wars thousands of women worked happily for these companies, companies which cared for their workers in a manner far ahead of their time.  Had mine owners and major industry treated workers as well in the past two hundred years much strife would have been avoided and the far left may never have existed in the UK.  Now all have gone, foreign imports after WW2 brought much of this to an end and only a smattering of such a long industry remains spread far and wide.
Also noticeable are the marked public houses, the vast majority now closed, the many churches most of which remain in place, and public buildings once of great importance now masquerading as Chinese restaurants or other purposes.  
In a great many peoples eyes the town has gone downhill, 'it aint what it was,' is the cry from a great many of a certain age, the idea being that life back then was better.  However if you suggest dumping their mobile phones, computers, fancy televisions, central heating, big cars and vast amount of clobber that fills the house they all change their minds.  Of course looking at photographs of the past many also claim that 'life was better then, much slower and less hassle,' however this is untrue.  While slower that meant working longer hours, often slogging hard for those hours, doffing caps to the upper class, having no NHS, no sick pay, no unemployment benefit but a great deal of unemployment, hassle from bosses and smart folks, and a great many problems similar to today's.  
Many people pictured in those photographs can be heard saying 'It was better in the old days...'
Right, go find a map!

  

Old Maps

Am I the only one who finds old maps fascinating? Shown here is a map of the South of Scotland, concentrating on Edinburgh and the Firth of Forth, but the date is difficult to establish. At 3/- a copy, (that's three shillings to young folks, OK, that's 15 pence to you very young folks), and 'cloth bound,' it was designed for those rich enough to possess a motor car which enabled the middle classes to join the toffs driving around the country. Such driving became popular in the 1920's and with cars (That's 'automobiles' to those in North America) being so expensive the working classes, who often drove lorries and vans for employment, could never hope to obtain a car of their own. Indeed in was only in the late fifties and early sixties that car ownership really became a possibility.

I love looking at such maps and pondering their date, and indeed the owners over the years. It is stupidly interesting to look at a map of the district from days of yore and compare them to the present day. For no good reason I can be excited by the residue of ancient pathways, buildings and workplaces that no longer exist in a manner that I cannot repeat for the buildings of today. Why this should be I cannot say, but there it is! There is of course a demand for these maps, they sell on E-Bay and online shops, and mine arrived via a local boot sale. I may peruse E-bay for a few days and hope for a windfall, or a couple of pounds anyway. 

I still do not understand the interest, but I enjoy perusing old maps. There was a badly made programme which featured one eccentric chap, brolly and all, wandering about following ancient maps and those who travelled on long gone roads. Had the programme been better made, and avoided his overacting and the cameraman's love of shaky camera and blurred picture,  it could have been very entertaining. All around us are ancient pathways that are still used today, In fact outside my window lies 'Stane Street,' so called after the Roman army used their technological expertise on it, although it must have existed for a long time before this, possibly some thousand or more years at that, as a thin winding track through the heavily wooded land. Roman roads themselves are often made from previous tracks, but our incomers military needs meant they just straightened out the bends and climbed straight over the hills! Today such roads traces can be see on Google Maps quite easily.

In Edinburgh a wander through Davidson's Mains leads to the public park at the end of the street. Few realise that the road ahead was once a busy drovers road and sheep and cattle would be brought from west and indeed from over the Forth in Fife along this ancient track. As kids we discovered a bit beyond the park an old bothy once used by such men as a night shelter. I wonder if it was allowed to remain when the expensive middle class houses were built in the sixties? It is knowing this that it is possible to trace the route once used by generation, on foot, bringing cattle to market from far away. History is on our doorstep. Thousands have passed this way before, although they probably drove a bit slower when oxen were pulling their carts!

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