Imperial, Not Imperialist...

 

 

OK, a couple of things - well, maybe three - tonight: I've been moving my Dad's frankly insane collection of Model Engineer magazines down to the studio for collation and storage over the past couple of days. I should sell them, but I still can't bear to let this little bit of my history go yet, and there's so much good information stored within the thousands of pages, spanning several decades, from the Forties through to the Eighties. The issue pictured on the left is older than me, by over a year. Its cover photograph of youths being taught metalworking evokes fond memories of my early schooling in such skills over a decade later; the sole difference being that my school's workshops were much more modern than the one in the picture. However, the activities shown were just the same at my school, back in 1960s Birmingham as in the featured 1953 school in Barking: we were fortunate enough, however, to have a pukka forge to learn hot metal bashing from Mr. Betts, affectionately known as "Dickie"; one of those inspirational teachers whose tuition sticks with you for life.

The other issue featured is from around eighteen months later, and its cover carries a photograph of the Snowdon Mountain Railway: one of our local attractions that features high on the tick-lists of most visitors. Whatever one's view of building such a thing to the top of one's nation's highest peak - I doubt it would be considered kosher these days, and probably quite rightly - it remains an astounding feat of Victorian engineering, and is still unique in this archipelago. Three-thousand, one hundred & thirty-nine feet of ascent over a distance of four miles, fifty-four chains - I'll get to those in a minute - and at its steepest, the gradient rising to 1:5.5, this double-rack & pinion railroad was built in less than sixteen months, the material supply logistics covered mostly by animal transport, and opened on Easter Monday 6th. April 1896. It still runs some of its original locomotives to this day.

As to the 'chains' mentioned in the distance the road traverses, I refer of course to the old system of so-called 'Imperial' measures. N.B., also that the magazines are priced in the old duodecimal system of pounds, shillings and pence; the earlier issue priced at 9d. (pence), and the newer at 1/- (shilling). The two if purchased together at those prices would be 1/9d: one shilling and ninepence, or approximately 8.75p in today's money, conversion rates notwithstanding. Getting back to the aforementioned chains, any cricket fan worth their salt will know that a chain is the old unit of measure for the length of a cricket pitch or wicket: 22 yards, or 20.1168 meters in metric. So, starting from the beginning: twelve inches to a foot, three feet to a yard, twenty-two yards to a chain, ten chains to a furlong, eight furlongs to a mile. Put it another way, 1,760 yards, 5,280 feet or 63,360 inches to the mile. Simple.