The location is easy (if a bit grainy, sorry!) They're not your usual soldiers, but if you could get the "when" it might
help the "who"...
But what is that striped kiosk for do you suppose?
Edit It may help to know that "Black Jack" accompanied them on their Expedition.
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The Royal Windsor Forum |
Mystery soldiers - who, when and where?
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 Hazel Austin |
Mystery soldiers - who, when and where? |
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Posts: 133 (18-Apr-2009 11:41 AM) |
Last Edited By: Hazel Austin 18-Apr-2009 04:54 PM.
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Hazel Austin |
Over There... | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Posts: 135 (18-Apr-2009 10:56 PM) |
This picture is lighter, so it is easier to see where it was taken. But we still don't know what that striped kiosk was for. |
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spranglebolt |
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Posts: 31 (19-Apr-2009 12:29 PM) |
There appears to be a man standing in the doorway. Do you think he was hoping to sell tickets for a boat trip?Could be Mr Salter!
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Hazel Austin |
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Posts: 136 (19-Apr-2009 02:57 PM) |
There're too many smartypants on this forum!! Of course - I never thought of Mr. Salter. That's a
really likely suggestion - we'd have to look and see if there was one on the other side of the bridge, because presumably they mounted the boats there too?
I'm presuming it's the road that goes down to the Donkey House, but am open to suggestions. Can't think what the big buildings are at the end,
look like a farm - but where would they farm, there's just the railway line and the Home Park down there, isn't there? Maybe something to do with the
boats - except that there's no slip for getting them out of the water. Well, it's certainly not a printers and stationers.. |
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thamesweb |
Hole in the road?? | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Posts: 1695 (19-Apr-2009 03:31 PM) |
Interesting picture. Thanks for posting. I assume they have arrived by the Southern Railway at the Riverside station. It is extremely useful to have this
picture as a reference for dating other views of the area. I can see that the gateway in the far distance is open, showing that it was in use, probably as the
access to the coal yard where several coalmen collected their supplies for street by street delivery from their carts, quite possibly still horse-drawn, at
least in some cases.
As for the striped tent, my guess it is protecting a hole in the road! Probably not ticket sales as - for a long time, even today I think - Salters had a small shop adjacent to the steamer mooring. I must say I do not know when they first opened it, but there is a good chance it was in use at that time. I am pleased to see that Salters have taken the time and trouble to record their companies history here. Mr Salter must have been in Oxford I suspect, overseeing matters at head office. Over the bridge would have been, and continues to be, the opposition so to speak, with Arthur Jacobs for one offering trips up the river. These trips were short, as they are today, and always went upstream because a downstream trip would have encountered a delay at Romney rather soon into the voyage. Not a problem for a Salters boat as they were on the longer trips to Kingston and elsewhere. |
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Pat Larkin |
Stripey tent... | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Posts: 530 (19-Apr-2009 06:40 PM) |
Page 1 on the 'Thames Steamers and Passenger Boats' link, shows two b&w photos of this same area, (where the troops are walking), it also picks out
the 'stripey tent', so, somehow, I have a feeling that it isn't a 'hole in the road' job, thamesweb. One of the photos is marked up as
being '1947', not sure about the date of the other, it looks at bit earlier to me......? Might the answer be found in the Council's archives of
road repairs, and before Bob or sprangle say anything - perhaps 'someone should look into it'...
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Hazel Austin |
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Posts: 141 (19-Apr-2009 06:50 PM) |
I wonder if I am remembering correctly that horses and carts delivered coal to my gran into the forties? I'll see if I can check, although I'm sure
someone else will know. Pat posted about another coal and coke yard - in the railyard, opposite the gasworks. I don't remember seeing horses in there, but
if anyone knows, Pat will.
I didn't know the riverboat firms shared the river in that way - presumably newcomers were frozen out? Your hole in the road idea for the striped kiosk - given what you say about the booking office for the riverboats - is disappointingly likely. I had rather set my heart on it being an opportunistic fortune-telling gypsy. In that top picture, I so admire the Windsorian reserve of that little old lady sitting on the bench in the middle of the Americans, ignoring them.The whole town was probably abuzz with these yankee soldiers walking through it and she sits there, possibly asleep. Perhaps she just wasn't interested in chewing gum or nylons... (yes, I know they hadn't been.....) Edit: Incidentally, I had a job cropping the top picture and did it in an old Publisher. I then had a bigger job converting the image to a "static" non-editing state for saving/posting. It kept reverting. I imagine I need new software. Anybody with more experience of this got any suggestions, please?
Last Edited By: Hazel Austin
19-Apr-2009 07:01 PM.
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thamesweb |
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Posts: 1697 (19-Apr-2009 08:43 PM) |
...an opportunistic fortune-telling gypsy... 
I feel a competition coming on... What's her name? As for the hole in the road, you may recall that a long time ago every hole had to be guarded by a live night watchman to (H & S afficianados will be pleased to hear) prevent people, perhaps even horses, donkeys and drunks, from falling into said hole. The Albert Bridge had a suitably watchable hole from 1914 to 1927 when the bridge was rebuilt. More about Albert Bridge here. You could actually see through the hole to the river beneath! If you are really into holes ... sorry ... you will enjoy an exhibit at Amberley Museum, Sussex where a hole complete with a watchman on a stool and his brazier is on display to one side of one of the roads around the museum site. Well, there was the last time I went there, they might have finished with the hole by now... no, silly! How about the gas man. Didn't he work under a candy stripe tent? |
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thamesweb |
Nope, not a hole in the road... | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Posts: 1700 (20-Apr-2009 08:08 AM) |
 This little tent crops up in several postcard views, even in one dated 1888 but which I can't use here for the moment as the card owner has yet to give his permission. I can only assume that it was to do with ticket collection from passengers perhaps. It certainly moves about a bit! |
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Hazel Austin |
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Posts: 142 (20-Apr-2009 11:28 AM) |
My instant thought is that this is Tea Leaves Dora of Windlesora, whose particular speciality was that for an extra piece of silver she would dig a hole in the
road for you. It was reputed that it was Dora who started the notorious Striped Tent Wars of the 19th century, when street fights would break out in Windsor
at the drop of a crystal ball between longstanding fortune-telling pitch-holders and the belligerent pipelayers from the nearby expanding Gas Works. The
gasworkers soon learned to pitch their striped tents wherever they could and claim squatters rights. The problem with this was that the gypsies would predict
where this might happen, and get there first. This gave rise, it is said, to the tradition which lasted until modern times - and explains why so often one
sees striped tents with no apparent activity going on around them, except for roadworkers well skilled in the art of hole-watching carrying on what we locals
call The Albert Bridge Phenomenon.
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Pat Larkin |
Pipe-layer | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Posts: 531 (20-Apr-2009 03:21 PM) |
Just thought I'd throw this bit of info in....Tony's Granddad, Charlie Wheatley, late of Bridgewater Terrace, was a pipe-layer. He and his twin sons,
Lionel and Ralph, who joined him in his pipe-laying trade, found work in the North of England. The flu epidemic struck down thousands of people and one of
these was Ralph. He contracted flu, and soon died. He was buried in the North of England as the family hadn't the means to bring his body back. Another
sad, but true, story of Windsor people, many years ago. Whether or not Granddad Wheatley used a stripey tent, is unknown.
Have found on researching this 'flu, that it was 'pandemic', not epidemic. It happened in 1918.
Last Edited By: Pat Larkin
20-Apr-2009 03:41 PM.
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Hazel Austin |
Ralph Wheatley | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Posts: 144 (20-Apr-2009 04:35 PM) |
Bad enough to lose a son, but to have to bury him in a strange place where you could seldom visit must have been worse.
I suppose then, as nowadays, you had to go where the work (and the money) was. And it's not all that odd to think that you might not have the means to bring a loved one home. For centuries there were road tolls, and I believe you used to have to pay for crossing county boundaries if you were travelling with a dead person. In the sixties I worked in Windsor with a Welsh girl. Very Welsh, and very homesick. She hated England. One day we talked about her going back to Wales and she said that if she died in England we weren't to pay any English taxes, and we were to prop her up in the back of the car and drive her home. We all laughed but she was absolutely serious. I don't want to be all boring about what is a sad human story, but I'd already found and saved this toll charge list - I was amazed at the enormous hike in price for a corpse (note the adjective)...that was a lot of money then. I imagine not a lot of poor people got back home to be buried.
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thamesweb |
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Posts: 1703 (20-Apr-2009 08:30 PM) |
Given that £20 a year was sufficient for a comfortable life in early Victorian times (from memory) the charge for crossing the bridge with a corpse is around a
week's money. Worth looking into why such a huge charge was made. Obviously to discourage such traffic, but for what reason? Superstition could play a part
in those days but given that commercial rates were a fraction of the charge for a corpse, I am intrigued.
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Hazel Austin |
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Posts: 146 (20-Apr-2009 09:40 PM) |
I do wish that interesting avenues of pursuit did not keep rearing their heads...no, I don't really. Tolls, tollhouses and the people that ran them are
fascinating...I first became intrigued when I took a class to the Chiltern Open Air Museum (think that's its name, it's a bit like St. Fagans near
Cardiff but much, much smaller) where there was the tiniest pinkwashed hexagonal toll cottage and garden, maintained as it would have been, the right plants in
the garden, etc. A whole family lived there but it was hard to believe. This is another thing to add to my lookup list and possibly worth a thread to itself -
I know there was obviously a tollman on the Slough to Windsor road at one time, and there was undoubtedly one on all the roads out - Datchet? Maidenhead? The
one Legoland is on that goes out to the Squirrel? Not to mention the material I'm sure I've seen on here about tolls on the bridge itself... The
superstitious angle is pretty tempting too...
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Hazel Austin |
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Posts: 148 (21-Apr-2009 10:48 PM) |
Be intrigued no longer. As you said, in the past there was much superstition about corpses, including apparently the belief that any part
of the countryside, even someone's private land, over which a corpse was carried automatically became a public right of way. In remote areas, dead
bodies often had to be moved many miles to the nearest church, sometimes along narrow or steep paths. For this reason, bodies were frequently carried by
bearers rather than horse-drawn vehicles, and often coffins weren't used - so the bodies had to be carried in large slings then buried in shrouds. Routes
regularly used for this purpose became known as Corpse Ways or Corpse Roads, and over the years these developed into an "accepted" tradition, so
that horse-drawn vehicles would carry the burden at least some of the way - if the ground was suitable. Superstitions about death meant that if a funeral
procession took another route because of snow or floods, then bad luck would come to the mourners and the dead would never rest in peace. Similarly, it was
considered not done or even unlucky to obstruct the path of a corpse, so funeral processions always tried to follow the traditional corpse routes, however
difficult they might be. Another superstition said that if a body was carried across a ploughed field, the field would never produce a very successful crop
while even today, some believe that a corpse should always be carried out of the house feet first, and always through the front door, or that the body should
always travel sunwise, and some funerals would make a circuit around a church before entering. It was also thought unlucky for a corpse to cross a
bridge, or alternatively for the corpse to cross a bridge twice in its journey. The superstitions affected toll roads and toll bridges too, some believing that
if a corpse passed through a toll, then the owners would never again be allowed to make a charge. Even if it was considered unlucky to obstruct a
funeral procession, there are stories of battles between the staff of landowners and mourning families trying to carry bodies over private land and, of course,
there were also tales of funerals attempting to pass over private land deliberately to establish a right of way. In the past, however, most landowners and
farmers were sensitive enough to permit a funeral procession to cross their land in an emergency - even at the risk of local people using it as a public
route. The fact is that there is no legal ruling to support this belief and yet, over the centuries, the notion persisted. (Corpse routes, however, are not
quite the same thing as churchways. In some cases, access to the parish church was across private land, often owned by the local estate or perhaps by a farmer,
and permission was given for churchgoers to cross this land but only to gain access to the church. Such a route was not necessarily a right of way,
however, chiefly because it was restricted to parishioners and churchgoers. Some attempts to reclassify such churchways as rights of way have failed.
Once you start looking, unlucky superstitions about death and lurid tales of haunted toll gates are not too hard to find - so it's easy to see why toll charges on bridges - or anywhere else a corpse was being transported - were prohibitively high. Even as I was growing up I can remember the grown-ups having various traditions about the dead person - or the funeral procession. The obvious one is men taking their hats off as the hearse passed out of respect , but there were other things they said or did too, but I can't remember them. (Turning round and muttering something?) The Victorians of course were fascinated with Death and it is not unlikely that some may have shared the bridge-crossing superstitions. (Were corpse tolls as high in 1843, I wonder?) I must just mention that as well as many other sources, some of the superstitions mentioned above I found referred to on the site of an author, William Parker aka Nicholas Rhea who as well as writing "constable" mysteries also wrote the Yorkshire-based Heartbeat. Clearly the old superstitions lasted longest in the really rural areas such as those in which his stories were set, but it appears they were also shared in more sophisticated urban areas such as Windsor...
Last Edited By: Hazel Austin
21-Apr-2009 11:12 PM.
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Hazel Austin |
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Posts: 149 (21-Apr-2009 11:38 PM) |
And to prove the point, this article was written two centuries after the 1743 toll for corpses - in 1955 in the Oxford Mail - about the village of Iffley,
which is some two miles outside the City.
"TOLL DISLIKED "I think all Iffley people resent having to pay a toll to cross the bridge, but it dates back to the year 1200 when Ralph the bridgekeeper was granted the right to levy a toll. This right was later acquired by Lincoln College who let it off to the keeper of the little sweetshop where they take the money. The owner of that shop is Mr. Gibbs who keeps the post office. Tens of thousands of people pass over the toll bridge in the course of the year and everyone has to pay 1d return. Some years ago they built a free ferry bridge at Donnington, but that is some way up the water. There is a curious tradition about this toll gate. They say that if ever a corpse is carried through, the toll will be broken for ever and it will become a right of way. When someone tried to do this a little time ago the tollkeeper refused to let the funeral party through and they had to take the corpse across the water by ferry. As far as I can remember there was a court case about it." Wonder what the court case decided? |
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Hazel Austin |
Coal yard by Donkey House 1880's | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Posts: 158 (25-Apr-2009 06:47 PM) |
This is a riverside view of the coalyard (?) by the Donkey House at the
other end of the promenade from the soldiers. It is from the stereoscopic views thread elsewhere on the forum. My magnifying glass can't, but someone may
be able to make out the name of the coalyard owners. It can, however, read Victoria Street's favourite brewery on the Donkey House frontage!
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Pat Larkin |
'Coal yard' | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Posts: 539 (25-Apr-2009 08:15 PM) |
Maybe it's 'Chamberlain', Hazel?
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BobB |
Coal merchant | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Posts: 163 (25-Apr-2009 09:13 PM) |
Good evening Ladies
Above the name,T.Chamberlain is what looks like Arthur Moyse.He is in the 1871 and 1881 census as Coal merchant's clerk.In 1891 as Coal Merchant. Above the Burge sign,I think it reads, The King's.?????????
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25-Apr-2009 09:17 PM.
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Pat Larkin |
ARMS!!! | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Posts: 541 (26-Apr-2009 08:45 AM) |
Hi Bob, and 'good morning', I think it was originally The King's Arms, aka The Donkey House, then I've just read it's now known as a wine
bar, possibly called 'The Wine Bar', but I'd have to go back and take another look, and, as I'm off walking on the seafront, it'll have to
wait - unless Hazel can clarify it...
P.S. Why did we call it The Donkey House?
Last Edited By: Pat Larkin
30-Apr-2009 07:46 AM.
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thamesweb |
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Posts: 1727 (30-Apr-2009 03:29 PM) |
It was the Donkey House as donkeys were housed in the coal yard, I guess. They could have pulled coal trucks to make up trains.
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I did a long reply to your No. 67, then lost the posting, so will go back and do
again later.
