Category: News

TREK CART

It was great to see the Scout trek cart back in use outside the Church Hall advertising the recently held Village Show.

When we reformed the village scout group back in the mid 1970s we had nothing. There was nothing around belonging to any previous group so we hunted down anything we considered could be of use to running the group. One day while in a Barry wood yard I spied an old red painted fire cart, probably used to carry fire hoses, sand buckets, pumps etc to the scene of any outbreak of fire helping to contain the blaze while awaiting the arrival of professionals. The cart was no longer in use. A discussion with the owner resulted in the village scout troop possessing a trek cart; minor repairs were completed and a fresh coat of paint was applied. It was a much loved item when I was a scout.

Around our annual camp sites the cart proved extremely useful for moving tents and boxes etc. One year some of the scouts pulled the trek cart from the village out to New Wallace farm with their camping gear for a weekend camp. Around the village we used it as a mobile cooking platform when we went around selling freshly baked Welsh Cakes in aid of a Red Nose day appeal. Wonderful to see it back in use.

Ian

SPRING FORWARD, FALL BACK

On the 29th of this month many of us will bask in the joy of knowing that the clocks go back at 2a.m. and we get an extra hour in bed. The idea has been around a long time and so has the controversy over its benefits or otherwise.

The idea of aligning waking hours to daylight hours is usually credited to the American Benjamin Franklin who first proposed the idea in 1784. Franklin was dismayed by the wasting of daylight hours and so proposed a way in which everyone would benefit from getting up as soon as it was light enough. He published that old proverb ‘early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.’ In a satirical letter to the editor of The Journal of Paris, Franklin suggested that waking up earlier in the summer would economise on candle usage; and calculated considerable savings. He proposed, tongue-in-cheek, taxing window shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public at sunrise by ringing church bells and firing cannons!

British Summer Time, also known as Daylight Saving Time, was the brainchild of a builder from Kent called William Willett. On his way back from riding his horse in Petts Wood in 1905, he noticed many of the blinds and curtains in the neighbouring houses were still drawn, even though it was light. This led him to consider the idea of adapting the time to better fit daylight hours. It seems Willett had an ulterior motive for his suggestion. He was an avid golfer who disliked cutting short his round at dusk.

Willett’s proposal, which he published in 1907, was to advance the clock during the summer months. His original proposal was for the clocks to be put forward by 80 minutes in total, in four steps of 20 minutes each Sunday at 2am during April and turned back in the same way in September. He argued that this would mean longer daylight hours for recreation, improving health and also saving the country money in lighting costs. Liberal Party MP Robert Pearce introduced the first Daylight Saving Bill to the House of Commons on 12 February 1908 but it failed to become law.

The idea resurfaced during World War One when the need to conserve coal made the suggestion of daylight saving more pertinent. The Summer Time Act was finally passed in the UK on 17th May 1916. Backed by press advertisements, the clocks went forward one hour on the following Sunday, 21st May. To return to GMT on 1st October 1916, people were advised to put their clocks forward by 11 hours rather than turning the hands back an hour, as in those days this would break the mechanism.

Sadly William Willett died of the flu in 1915 aged 58 and didn’t live to see his ideas become law. Fittingly though, there is a memorial sundial in Petts Wood, set permanently to Daylight Saving Time, in his honour. His ideas still form the basis of the system we use today. Advocates for it claim the lighter summer mornings save energy, reduce traffic accidents and get people out leading to them becoming more active with associated health benefits. Critics claim darker winter mornings are more dangerous for children going to school and mean farmers working longer hours before daylight.

Whichever side of the argument you favour, the fact remains that we need to make a note to put our clocks back at 2a.m. on October 29th. Nowadays of course our mobile phones, computers and laptops do not need reminding of this momentous event

RIGHTS OF WAY

If you, like me, occasionally criticise government for focus on the short term then we should all respond to the VoG Council’s request for comments (by November 30th) on the plan that will direct their work on Rights of Way over the next ten years. Responsibilities for maintenance of the legal record of public Rights of Way might suggest the council’s role is passive but the VoG clearly recognises the benefits offered by rights extending over nearly 600 Km of paths, bridleways and restricted byways with their proactive plans including “The Great Glamorgan Way” and upgrade of some paths to bridleways.

Copies of the Draft ROWIP, in Welsh and in English, are available from reception at the Civic Office, Holton Road, Barry and local libraries. Searching for ROWIP on the VoG website enables you to download a copy or read-online. This opportunity to contribute your views is too valuable to be missed.

Kenneth Hansen

SAMUEL MORSE

Samuel Finley Breeze Morse was born in Charlestown, Mass. on 27th April 1791. He was not a scientist – he was a professional artist. Educated at Phillip’s Academy at Andover, he graduated from Yale in 1810 and he lived in England from 1811 to 1815, exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1813. He spent the next ten years as an itinerant artist with a particular interest in portraiture. He returned to America in 1832 having been appointed Professor of Painting and Sculpture at the University of the City of New York. It was on this homeward voyage that he overheard a shipboard discussion on electromagnets. This was the seed out of which the electric telegraph grew. Morse is remembered for his Code, still used, and less for the invention that enabled it to be used, probably since landline telegraphy eventually gave way to wireless telegraphy.

The first message sent by the electric telegraph was “What hath God wrought”, from the Supreme Court Room in the Capitol to the railway depot at Baltimore on May 24th 1844. For his 80th birthday in 1871 a statue was unveiled in Central Park on June 10th, with two thousand telegraphists present. Morse was not, but was that evening at the Academy of Music for an emotional acclamation of his work.

Although most people nowadays would think of Morse code being used for long-distance radiotelegraphy, the land-line telegraph was standard until about 1880 for short-distance metropolitan communication. Over longer distances the telegraph tended to follow the line of the railways because there were no difficulties over rights-of-way. The lines were mostly overhead, since the problems of insulating underground lines proved insuperable for many years – indeed the development of the original line was hampered owing to this problem.
The telegraph, of course, came to be important for the military, being used first at Varna during the Crimean War in 1854. It was widely used in the American Civil War, where rapid deployment techniques for land-lines were developed; the Spanish-American War found the first use of telegraphy for newspaper correspondents (1898). The first military use for radio telegraphy was during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 – 5.