OK, I said I'd post some finds out of my diggings at Broadway. The last few days I've been washing, laying out and trying to fit some of the bits together. All different so far !
The origin of the porcelain is not the ditch where the bottles were (mostly) found, but the embankment opposite the goods shed at Broadway. The top and sides of the embankment are covered in a one foot thick layer of locomotive ash. As we were loading this manually into our trusty little dumper, we noticed little bits of white porcelain appear in the black ash. Eventually, one appeared with a GWR crest on it. Wow! What is this then? From then on, our eyes were peeled for other pieces of china, and eventually we had a hat full.
On Wednesday I returned for another go. Having picked up all the bits off the surface, I dug over the ground with a pickaxe and picked up a lot more. It is this second lot that has delayed my posting about the finds.
To get the ball rolling, this image:
We know that it's a half pint milk bottle from Job's dairy, in an old design. There is quite a lot of information about Job's on the net, but my question is, with the nearest dairy in Didcot, how did it get to a pile of ash in Broadway? Also, how long was this design of bottle in use? The ash layer is principally in the area of the westernmost siding (it's quadruple track outside the goods shed) and with the other bits we've been finding there, a1930's theme seems to be emerging.
Second question - what was this? Most of the scraps of porcelain were GWR, but not this one. It looks like the rim of a cup or similar. The first letter can just me made out as a 'B' - is that Bristol? Surely not Bristol and Exeter ?
Any ideas?
4 comments:
why was there loco ash at Broaadway when the nearest sheds would have been Malvern Road or Stratford and Tyseley?
I worked at a dairy in Gloucester as a Saturday job in the 1960's. I remember seeing milk bottles going through our washer that were from all over the place.
Glass bottles last a long time, as has this one, so could have travelled all over the place during its lifetime of use.
Terry
The loco ash was used to reinforce and pack the siding space (fourth track) opposite the goods shed. There is quite a lot of it there, and it would have come from somewhere else. When I have posted the other artefacts I have found in the ash, we can get a better idea of the clues that point towards where the ash might have come from.
The ex-Didcot milk bottle may have come to the site in the lunch pack of a member of traincrew? Surely, trainmen would have travelled from many different locations, and Didcot's not all that far away?
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