Things that time forgot.

[vinteuil]

International Stores.

.

Home & Colonial.

Timothy Whites

MacFisheries

Barkers

Pontings

Derry & Toms

Marshall & Snelgrove

Peter Robinson's

Waring & Gillow

Bourne & Hollingsworth

Gamages

Gorringe's

[ahinton]

Gamages

That always sounded to me like what a ventriloquist would seek in Court when suing.

[Globaltruth]

.

Derry & Toms

we used to have a female tortoiseshell cat called Derry...think the idea originally came from HH Munro though

[mangerton]

I remember the chemistry labs at school - bunsen burners at regular intervals on the benches, interspersed quite openly with rows of bottles of sulphuric, hydrochloric and nitric acid with glass stoppers and goodness knows what else. The bit I liked best was testing things with other things to see what they were - I was quite good at that (we're talking physics-with-chemistry O level here, which I scraped through). Occasionally someone would do something witty like dissolve someone else's pen.....Nowadays you see items about science classrooms on the news in which the children are all wearing safety glasses - imagine!

Quite. You didn't mention mercury, which fascinated us in the palms of our hands. When I think of some of the things we did in the labs at school, it's a wonder the human race has survived.

Except, it isn't. We took care, and used common sense. Just as we did when out playing.

Remind me to tell you some time about how two of us - under the supervision of the head of physics - constructed a helium-neon laser.

[Richard Tarleton]

Quite. You didn't mention mercury, which fascinated us in the palms of our hands. When I think of some of the things we did in the labs at school, it's a wonder the human race has survived.

Except, it isn't. We took care, and used common sense. Just as we did when out playing.

Indeed.

I remember our O level physics master demonstrating the properties of liquid nitrogen, chucking it about with gay abandon. I remember he filled a matchbox with mercury, stood a pencil in it and froze it with nitrogen, creating a sort of mercury hammer. He caused several loud bangs which rocked the building, to the annoyance of the history master upstairs.

[vinteuil]

we used to have a female tortoiseshell cat called Derry...think the idea originally came from HH Munro though

"There is my lady kitten at home, for instance; I've called it Derry."
"Suggests nothing to my imagination but protracted sieges and religious animosities. Of course, I don't know your kitten - "
"Oh, you're silly. It's a sweet name, and it answers to it - when it wants to. Then, if there any unseemly noises in the night, they can be explained succintly : Derry and Toms."

[ Reginald on the Academy 1904]

[cloughie]

we used to have a female tortoiseshell cat called Derry...think the idea originally came from HH Munro though

Probably named because kept jumping up on the table so
Hey down, ho down
Derry, Derry down!

[Nick Armstrong]

MacFisheries

Oh blimey yes - caught my bus home every day from outside MacFisheries in the Market Square Nottingham for years!

There's a very detailed site dedicated to old branches of MacFisheries: http://www.macfisheries.co.uk/page3.htm

Even that logo based on the saltire is evocative...

(I just learnt that the big Waterstones on the corner of Notting Hill Gate and Kensington Church Street used to be a MacFisheries...)

Gamages

Indeed - always wished I'd known it, rather than the bland 'BT HQ' that replaced it in the 70s. The change clearly visible on this double-photo, taken 90 years apart from the same spot facing West at Holborn Circus: on the right, this side of the unaltered Prudential building - in 1920, the series of ramshackle buildings that made up Gamages, and in 2009, its replacement. (On the left is Sainsbury's HQ, on the site of the former Mirror building, itself on the site of Wallis's department store, visible in the 1920 picture and presumably Gamages' - or Gamage's ? - direct rival, which suffered a direct hit in 1941)

[Gamages] always sounded to me like what a ventriloquist would seek in Court when suing.

Well, it's very much the legal end of Holborn - I spent 10 years working on Fetter Lane, directly opposite: this is the view I'd have had going home, had I taken a job there in 1914 as opposed to 1994:




..... and so plenty of gottles of geer are consumed thereabouts...






.

[Roslynmuse]

We had a chemistry teacher who had lost part of a finger when he sent a small piece of sodium shooting across water... ...but he continued to do so for years afterwards.

Marbles - definitely 'ollies' on the other side of the Mersey too.

[Pulcinella]

We had a chemistry teacher who had lost part of a finger when he sent a small piece of sodium shooting across water... ...but he continued to do so for years afterwards.

Marbles - definitely 'ollies' on the other side of the Mersey too.

What? He lost parts of other fingers too?

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I remember the chemistry labs at school - bunsen burners at regular intervals on the benches, interspersed quite openly with rows of bottles of sulphuric, hydrochloric and nitric acid with glass stoppers and goodness knows what else. The bit I liked best was testing things with other things to see what they were - I was quite good at that (we're talking physics-with-chemistry O level here, which I scraped through). Occasionally someone would do something witty like dissolve someone else's pen.....Nowadays you see items about science classrooms on the news in which the children are all wearing safety glasses - imagine!

My chemistry set included a paraffin burner with an asbestos wick sitting in asbestos wool .

[ahinton]

My chemistry set included a paraffin burner with an asbestos wick sitting in asbestos wool .

But mercifully you're still alive to tell that tale!

It seems to me that a majority of 776 posts have illustrated, as much as anything else, that time's memory lapses have largely turned out to be rather a good thing...

[Pulcinella]

And there was always the Kipp's apparatus in the fume cupboard: but naturally you didn't close the cupboard well enough and the stinking hydrogen sulphide got out into the lab!

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2007/November/ClassicKitKippsApparatus.asp

[ahinton]

And there was always the Kipp's apparatus in the fume cupboard: but naturally you didn't close the cupboard well enough and the stinking hydrogen sulphide got out into the lab!

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Is...sApparatus.asp

Eggistentialism at school?

[Pulcinella]

Sulphur!

It's now called sulfur, so previous post should have said hydrogen sulfide.