[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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