[Stoves] Charcoal burning in stoves

neiltm at uwclub.net neiltm at uwclub.net
Sun Dec 31 05:36:06 CST 2017


On 31 Dec 2017 at 14:26, Michael N Trevor wrote:

> Char coal burning irons have been common here since the Japanese time
> before WWII.
> As a boy my m other use solide cast iron one simply heated on a wood
> stove

Yes, my Great Aunt who lived without electricity in rural Shropshire used 
a Primus stove to heat her flat irons.  They can always be found in junk 
shops, and the design in the wikihow link looks familiar too.

> of fire. They were used to iron the bed before sleep in sub zero weather
> in
> between the served as door stops.
> 

That's what we use one for!  I stopped someone chucking an old well worn 
copper warming pan in the scrap metal skip at our local tip, polished it 
up at home and tried it out with left over char from a winter outdoor 
fire.  I imagined great risk of singeing the sheets, so kept it moving 
well, but I needn't have worried as much, as even an appreciable volume 
of char will cool quite rapidly with the air excluded by the lid.  It 
worked well to take the chill off, and made obvious sense as a use of the 
embers at the end of the evening fire, and going up to bed.  But did they 
then use the resultant char for anything?  Before coal and the railways 
delivering it in the 19th century, rural communities were reliant on wood 
for all their cooking and heating.

We looked at a house for sale in a village in Shropshire that had 
actually been an old blacksmith's forge, and much to our astonishment the 
owner had kept the forge intact just as her grandfather had left it when 
he died in the 1970s.  Her family had lived there for 300 years, and she 
was selling up because of divorce.  Such is modern life.  But what was no 
less interesting was the 'Quillet' of wood which came with the house, and 
was assigned to all the older houses in the village - vertical strips of 
wood covering a steep hillside overlooking the valley in which the 
village was situated.  Looking at old maps there had been a track that 
ran diagonally from the valley floor right up to the top of the far 
corner of the wood, but this disappeared from later maps congruent with 
the time of the coming of the railways and the availability of coal.  The 
owners earlier blacksmithing ancestors must have extracted wood from 
their 'Quillet' like the other households from theirs, but the 
blacksmith's need for char one can imagine might have got his neighbours 
giving, bartering or selling theirs for his forge, but I've never found a 
history of such a village economy, but would be interested to learn of 
sources if anyone knows.

If anyone is interested in visualising this, the village is Chapel Lawn 
to the north of Clun in Shropshire, England, and the wood is to the east 
of the village, still owned in strips by the home owners, but mostly no 
longer marked out, and only foot access over a style where once clearly 
there had been a track where horses and carts would have drawn wood out.  
Apart from some hazel coppicing on the field edge there was little sign 
of any modern management of the deciduous wood, consisting mostly of oak. 
All the old maps, plus modern photos are online.

> https://www.wikihow.com/Use-a-Charcoal-Iron

I just love the incongruity of the 'dumbed down' approach that begins 
with 

"1  Gather your materials. First, you need to get all of the following 
materials together:

    A piece of clothing to iron, such as jeans or a t-shirt"


Definitely a case of 'if you need to be told this - do not try this at 
home'!  The thought of ironing white linen with an open sided container 
of glowing char is to weep for the frustration this must have caused, but 
testimony to a level of skill and acceptance of struggle no longer 
required for modern life, that it was even possible.  The paraffin 
pressure iron must have seemed an amazing boon after that!  Apart from 
for weddings and funerals, the electric iron in our house is rarely used!

Neil Taylor








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