The Time Has Come The Old Man Said To Think of Many Things, Of Rubber Spouts and Donkey Stones and Dolly Blue and Possers - By Ronnie ‘The Yorkshire Traveller’ Bray

The Time Has Come
The Old Man Said To Think of Many Things,
Of Rubber Spouts and Donkey Stones and Dolly Blue and Possers
By Ronnie ‘The Yorkshire Traveller’ Bray

Although we didn’t have a rubber spout on our teapot, many people did.  They were available at Woolworth’s and ironmongers and were cheaper that buying a whole new teapot after the spout was broken off the family’s brewer.  Never having had to have a replacement spout, I have no first hand facts of how spouts came to be broken off teapots in the first place, but I will hazard guesses that include their use as ersatz projectiles when things went awry in the domestic circle, being dropped by clumsy hands due either to old age and tremors or arthritis on the part of the handler, or too much Bentley and Shaw’s Town Ales on the part of a late night reveller who believed that the night-cap he needed was a brew of Co-op Tea.  There could be other equally satisfactory explanations, but I will leave them to your recollection.

The spouts I recall were red rubber of the same hue as the orangey-red gas piping that ran from a gas spigot against a wall to a cast iron gas ring balanced precariously on a place that was not designed to hold one, or else to the majestic rear end of a coal gas heated substantial piece of Victorian engineering that constituted the period’s last word in smoothing irons.  How it was that Victorian inventiveness did not contrive to formulate and build a gas-operated vacuum cleaner remains a mystery.  It would not have been to difficult to arrange a small steam engine or turbine inside a suitably robust and fireproof steel body that heated a cylinder of water heated by the coal gas generated at the gasworks at the bottom of Fitzwilliam Street.  Perhaps the Victorian imagination has been overstated.

We did have a teapot, and it was a large one, such that befits a lodging house and one that could travel all the way around the dining table when eight jolly lodgers were seated on their wooden chairs and supping industrial strength Pekoe Tips from pint pots that were the standard vessels of my childhood.  However, it kept its spout from the time it was fired in one of Longton’s kilns to the day it was retired in the mid-fifties of the nineteen hundreds.  A suitable large kettle was kept singing on the hob to refresh the pot when nearly all the tea was gone and the tea leaves awaited their resurrection by more hot water.  As to the final resting place of these mammoth vessels, I stand helpless and unable to answer.

Perhaps there is a place where odd socks, odd gloves, lost cheques, letters, and mementoes go to keep company with lost friends, lost love, lost passions, lost hopes, broken dreams and teapots with broken spouts go to await better days or, dare we hope, restoration in better times.  In the meantime we must content ourselves with whatever it is that qualifies as the equivalent of a replacement teapot spout, and hope that, whatever it is, it serves at least as well as the red rubber nose that made the old pots look cheerful despite their imperfections.


Then there is the almost disappeared Donkey Stone.  I say almost because it should not be doubted that some of the surviving corner stores in Northern England probably still have a wooden box or two stored deep in their neglected cellars, and some day they will come to light.

Donkey Stone was a trade name given to a scouring block by Edward Read & Son of Manchester, although other companies made similar stones on machines used in Roman times called Donkey Mills.  A mixture of powdered stone, cement powder, bleach powder and water.  These were ground up into a stiff paste and moulded into rectangular blocks a bench, that was cut into smaller stones usually five inches long, three inches wide and about an inch thick.  They resembled small bricks and were then laid out on drying shelves until they hardened off.  They were light, easy to break, and could be one of several colours with white and a pale yellow being the most popular.

Scouring stones were originally used to clean the grease off stone steps in the textile mills, but clever housewives used them, for decorating their front steps and windowsills after their weekly washing.  It was a matter of domestic pride for poor working people to keep the outside of their homes clean and to decorate their clean steps and sills by rubbing the scouring stones along the edges of the steps, and some would mark little triangular patterns at the angles of the stonework.  In many circumstances, it was the sole means available to the poor to assert their independence and individuality.  Once their individual marking patterns were established, they rarely changed from generation to generation.

Rag and bone men in their horses and carts would hand them out for a generous donation of old rags or clothes, but corner shops sold them cheaply enough.

The death knell for donkey stones was rung in during the nineteen-fifties and sixties as the textile communities followed giant mills into extinction, forcing the dissolution of neighbourhoods and friendships that had endured for more than one hundred years.  New houses, maisonettes, and tower blocks to which the communities were scattered were too impersonal to perpetuate the art form of Donkey Stoning.  The last scouring stone factory to close was Eli Whalley’s Lion Stone factory in Ashton-under-Lyne, that had produced them for more than ninety years.

Donkey Stone gave communities with little of intrinsic beauty built into them a noble beauty of defiance that was the only artistic impression in which most of the women could engage.  Thus, its passing means more than the loss of pretty bright patterns springing out of the grimy streets of a mill town’s working class quarter, from a people used to being pushed under, denigrated, underpaid, undernourished, and under appreciated.

Unlike ancient cave paintings of ancient times, and the more durable expressions of the oppressed sprayed in subways and on the walls of abandoned buildings, the Donkey Stone artists will soon be forgotten unless we take active steps to remember them.  And, if they are forgotten, their indomitable spirit that stood up against the pollution and noxious chimney fumes that poisoned their lives and rotted their curtains and consigned them to early graves, will also be dimmed and, in time, forgotten.

Will you make yourself a scouring stone, revive their ancient craft, and draw your own pretty lines delicately around your stoops and window sills so that another small glory is not lost to a careless world, and so that a proud but suffering people are not forgotten quite?

No, young man, Dolly Blue is not a Country singer.  Perhaps you are thinking of Dolly Parton?  Dolly Blue was a small pouch of washing day product added to the soapy water to make whites appear whiter than white.  Actually, an Oxydol washing detergent television jingle declared boldly:

O – X – Y – D – O – L
Makes whites whiter than white;
Makes colours sparkling bright.
White without bleaching,
That’s what we are preaching.
There’s nothing like Oxydol!


I never did discover what whiter than white looked like, and I doubt that anyone else did either.  Still, a little encouragement on washing day never did anyone any harm.  I don’t recall seeing bleach among the clouds of steam that took overt the scullery on Mondays, although Lanry was a common item in the kitchens of my friends.  However, I do remember Dolly bags, as the Dolly Blue containers were called.  The cotton bag enclosing the contents was tied around a short wooden stick with a thread and the stick was shaped, so that an enterprising father could ink a little face on the cheese head at the top of the stick to amuse young children.

When it was time to blue the wash, the whole thing was tossed into the copper or washing tub to release its magic powers and whiten the wash.  The advert read: “Out of the blue comes the whitest wash!”  It seemed to me to be a contradiction in terms – I had not then learned about oxymorons – but such things as these were then the stuff of life and in the hands of those that knew what they were doing and why.  When the stick was recovered, the face had vanished.  Perhaps they too will gather at the place where lost things end up.

Perhaps the saddest of all is the passing of the posser.  Possers had domes, usually made of copper, often intricately moulded with several layers and a series of eyeletted holes around the place where the possing pole was inserted into the posser head.  This was thrust into the laundry tub to force water and its soapy suds through the clothes to loosen the dirt.  The more vigour applied to this task the cleaner the clothes became and the sudsier the water grew.  The washing machine presaged the passing of the posser, but they were such attractive items that the world is a poorer place because of the passing of possers.

Washing days were probably the busiest day of the week for the housewife, especially when the housewife was really the maid-of-all-work in a lodging house, as was my mother.  For Louie, Monday was a day best viewed from Tuesday when all that remained to do was the ironing, folding, and the running up and down four flights of stairs to place the laundered clothes on each of the lodger'’ beds, in addition to those that belonged to her family.

Cleaning out the fire grate was a less burdensome task because it could be done without moving, provided that arthritis had not claimed your knees.  Laundry, on the other hand, required pulling out the laundry vats, filling them with piggins of hot water carried from the Creda electric geyser, a job that required fifteen or more trips from the sink to the vat rack, and this was followed by grating bars of household fairy soap into the water, sorting and adding the clothes, possing them vigorously until they were ‘done’ rinsing them in clean hot water to which the Dolly Blue was added, then the vat rack was trundled to the magnificent cast iron and wooden mangle to be grumbled through huge wooden rollers to extract as much water as possible.  I was sometimes assigned to turn the big red handwheel.  It was fun but eventually fatiguing, after which it stopped being fun.

There is a strangeness comes into a life when familiar things become less familiar and disappear, one by one, in a silence that makes their going hardly noticeable.  Someone said that the only constant was change.  I don’t know whether that is true in every case, but I do know that it is true in many.  But whatever the arithmetic of change might be, it is certain that the richness of past years that was there in the bits and pieces that made up the merry jigsaw puzzles of our lives, leaves us poorer in some sense with their passing, and yet something of their cheerful comfortable natures is recoverable when we set our minds to remembering them, even for no better reason than recalling past familiars lends to our fading years something of our young life with its vigour, its sense of adventure, and rekindles, briefly, our then unbroken dreams, our then not quite dashed hopes, and whatever warmth and affection we enjoyed amidst such foolish things as rubber spouts, scouring stones, dolly bags, and possers.

Now I remember.  It was Heraclitus that said, “The only constant is change.”  This wise man also said, “You cannot step twice into the same river; for other waters are continually flowing in.”  If he meant that what is there when we look at it this second, is of a different order in the next second because time changes everything, then perhaps he provided the key about what is suddenly dear to us in age that we hardly cared for in our infancy and youth.

I would only disagree with him in the matter of the love that we have for each other, for true love’s only change is to love deeper than before, to care more fondly, and to protect more urgently and vitally.  Love that does not change, or that diminishes for vacuous reasons, out of mistrust, imaginary offences, or that can be laid aside as if it never was, is not and never was true.  Such malleable affection has more in common with red rubber teapot spouts than with a loving heart, and though it brings pain to the deprived, it was ever doomed to fail at some point in time.

Rubber spouts perish, Donkey Stones wear down to nothing, Dolly Bags dissolve and mice chew away their sticks, and possers – even the most beautifully crafted of them, get trodden on, misshapen, and are eventually cast aside.  Only True Love remains imperishable, unalloyed, firm, its currency never failing but growing constantly to enlarge the soul.  When all the world’s best and least treasures are no more, only True Love remains, eternal and indestructible, and nothing can betray it. 

Copyright © 2011 – Ronnie Bray
All Rights Reserved