CRC2 is taking a holiday today, as our two principal brick layers are otherwise engaged. Back next week, promise ! We want to finish off the first half of the wall, and get going with the pea gravel and rear drain.

In the meantime, something interesting to look at:

This bottle was found  at Broadway in the ash debris that also contains a lot of GWR china. In fact I was amazed to find just one such poiece of GWR leaf edged china in front of the signal box at CRC. Thrown out of the window of an early race train?

This bottle is a Codd bottle (named after its inventor) which had an inbuilt marble that contained the pressure within it. Children often broke the empty bottle to get the marble out, as in this case. The writing is intriguing:

 GWR

Refreshment Dept.

  SWINDON.

I had no idea that the GWR produced their own mineral water, and certainly not at their principal engineering site. The china I am finding always refers to GWR hotels in Paddington. Speaking to an auction house (on another matter) recently, I heard that these bottles are quite scarce, only 5 or 6 are known. Were it in good condition, this one would fetch up to £500. Alas, ours is broken at the top, but as a museum exhibit it is still of interest, and all the writing is still there. A bit of history then.

A second bottle came out of the ditch at Broadway:

It amazes me how many quite local businesses had their own glass bottles. I have managed to puzzle together the owner of this bottle, from the few letters that remain:

F. HORNE

WINE

MERCHANTS

MORETON in MARSH

I showed the bottle round the cabin at Broadway, and immediately there was a shout of recognition - a relative of a member had actually worked in this shop.

The shop was in High Street and they had two shops in Moreton, one being a large general store. It was the sort of place that you could buy tea from a tea chest, measured out to your exact weight.

On the rear of the bottle is the manufacturers' name: Powell & Ricketts. This was a Bristol firm, of which I found the following information:

Powell and Ricketts, glassmakers:  Although the Bristol glass industry had begun to wane by the nineteenth century, the city skyline was still dominated by the sight of the glasshouses’ tall, conical, brick-built kilns. Bristol had been well-placed for the manufacture of glass because it had local access to the necessary raw materials (sand, kelp and clay) and to the coal needed to heat the kilns, mined from coal fields just outside the city. Demand for glass came from the local wine and mineral-water bottling companies as well as for building and domestic use. The last working glasshouse in Bristol was Powell and Ricketts. Henry Ricketts was a partner in Bristol’s Phoenix glasshouse from 1802 until its closure in 1851. This had been Bristol’s last glasshouse to make the high quality flint glass now known as lead crystal. Henry’s youngest son Richard joined the firm in 1845 and, after its closure, ran the Soap Boilers’ bottlehouse. This was amalgamated with the neighbouring Hoopers’ glasshouse in 1853 to form Powell, Ricketts and Filer, later Powell and Ricketts, which went into receivership in 1923.

So the latest the bottle could have been manufactured was 1923 - it's pretty old. I wonder what F. Horne sold in it?