Toxic skulduggery and pottles and lippies

THERE was all sorts of toxic skulduggery going on in a village between Catterick and Leeming Bar. Under the headline “malicious proceedings”, the D&S Times’ sister paper, the Ripon and Richmond Chronicle, reported: “A good deal of excitement prevails in the village of Kirkby Fleetham owing to a recent frivolous prosecution of a little boy, who was cautioned by the bench and fined 6d.

“This excitement has been greatly increased by the circumstance of four fine hens belonging to the father of this little boy being poisoned on the night of November 1, and on the following night some clothes, hanging on his garden hedge, being maliciously injured.”

The paper said that cats, dogs and foxes were frequently found poisoned in the area, “but when the poultry, straying in a neighbours garden at this barren season, are poisoned, the people are alarmed, more especially when they remember that only two years ago, several geese were found dead and, on being analyzed, were proven to have eaten arsenic with their food”.

100 years ago, November 13, 1915

BEDALE Rural Council was discussing the future of the town’s isolation hospital, which the council paid the North Riding Rural Nursing Association £459 11s to provide nurses for. There had been 30 patients in the previous year, staying on average 42 days. Each case needed four nurses.

“The chairman said the cost of the hospital was a very large sum,” said the D&S Times.

The chairman was the spendidly-named Sir Henry Monson de la Poer Beresford Peirse, the fourth baronet who lived in Bedale Hall (now owned by the council). His family had been intimately connected with Bedale since they bought the hall in 1638, and Sir Henry’s initials can still be seen looking down from three houses on the green: “H18M94P”, they say.

Perhaps Sir Henry had a point when complaining that the nurses fees were “exceedingly high” – according to the Bank of England Inflation Calculator, £460 in 1915 is worth more than £42,000 today.

The D&S continued: “Of course, (Sir Henry thought) typhoid was a very horrible and nasty complaint. Patients so far as food was concerned cost nothing, as they were not allowed to eat anything. They had to be starved the first fortnight, there was nothing given but milk.

“In nine cases out of ten, patients could be perfectly well managed at home if there was a good nurse to look after the case.

“He wanted to pay for a nurse or two to attend cases at home and to use the isolation hospital only for an epidemic.”

Another member of the council agreed that the cost of the hospital was “monstrous”, and it was agreed that the hospital committee should be asked to look at mothballing the hospital and nursing patients with a few drops of milk in the comfort of their own homes.

Can anyone tell us where Bedale isolation hospital was?

50 years ago, November 13, 1965

SPECTATOR railed that he was no longer able to buy a pre-packed 3½lb bag of salt in Darlington – only a 3lb bag was available, and so he had had to go to the trouble of weighing out and bagging up 3½lbs of loose salt.

Spectator, who was clearly expecting a bad winter, discovered this outrage was being forced upon shopkeepers by new legislation which “sought to bring uniformity to packaging and reduce the possibility of fraudulent packaging”. As he investigated further, he found that he was only able to buy "two, four, six, eight, ten 12 or 14 ounces of butter, but not an odd number of ounces”.

He then explained why he wanted this quantity of salt. He wrote: "3½lb might seem an odd amount to a generation which is being conditioned into the American way of leaving out stones in giving weights. The 3½lb, or quarter stone, was at one time the weight of a loaf of bread – a thick slice across one of those loaves was almost a meal – though most people preferred the half quartern loaf of 1¾lb. That got devalued during rationing to 1½lb and has a never regained its old status.”

He concluded: “The stone, it may be said, is going the way of the peck, the bushel, the pottle and the lippie.”

Everyone knows that Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, and that four pecks make a bushel. But a pottle is half-a-gallon, and a lippie is either the weight of colouring a woman applies to her lips in her lifetime, or it is a quarter of a peck.