1 Nov 2015

And Then, Glow Baby, Glow….

Further to yesterdays post and the bit about old folk having a rudimentary grasp of the concept of winter equalling cold and the comment by the good Caratacus, I'd humbly like to link to this post relating to hot water bottles. Time passes and it now appears that old post has one dead link.

However, when I went back I realised I hadn't completed the set of pictures in relation to basic winter bed warming in days of yore as there was one more device that came into use during the fifties and sixties.

That item was, of course, the world renowned, well loved Glow Baby and thus I can now complete the set of pictures from the earlier post thusly;

        images_thumb[2]  hot_water_bottle250_thumb[2]  $_1

The first two pictures are hot water bottles and the last picture is the Glow Baby, okay?

The one I remember was spherical but the idea was the same; bob a sixty watt lamp in him, push him under the bed covers – none of your fancy duvets in pre-smartphone days, just a mattress sheet, another sheet a blanket, two if you were well-off and an eiderdown – usually pretty thin as you only had one that was used for all seasons - plug him in – this required an electrickery socket in your bedroom, not always a given back in the day, or a rather long wandering lead – and leave him on for an hour or so. The longer the warmer. Unplug and remove prior to boarding the bed.

You know what? It worked. And why not? You remember how much heat a sixty watt lamp used to pump out before they were outlawed during the great bulb purges of a few years ago?

Can you imagine the seven shades of red fit all the regulators and health and safety Timidadians would throw if you tried to get a Glow Baby to market today?
"You do what now? You stick a sixty watt lightbulb under the bed covers, switch it on and leave it? Are you nuts?"

With a little further searching it seems I did mention the Glow Baby in another post back when.

Lastly, but not leastly, this is how Hiawatha, whilst sitting by the shores of Gitche Gumee, prepared for winter;

HE killed the noble Mudjokivis.
Of the skin he made him mittens,
Made them with the fur side inside,
Made them with the skin side outside.
He, to get the warm side inside,
Put the inside skin side outside;
He, to get the cold side outside,
Put the warm side fur side inside.
That ’s why he put the fur side inside,
Why he put the skin side outside,
Why he turned them inside outside.

Thank you all for sharing your valuable time with me but now please don your headphones and click along here to enter your own Personal Universe and relax for a while.

Quote;  Teilhard De Chardin.

"It doesn't matter if the water is cold or warm if you're going to have to wade through it anyway."

4 comments:

Caratacus said...

The aunt I mentioned earlier had one of those stone water bottles ... but had lost the stopper some years previously. My younger brother once came scampering excitedly from the garden holding aloft a stone stopper COMPLETE WITH RUBBER SEAL and we fantasised briefly of the warm beds we would enjoy that evening. Unfortunately it apparently had its origins atop a bottle of R Whites lemonade and was entirely useless ref. the stone water bottle. We went to bed that night nursing a particular misery ...

Ripper said...

Mac, I'm sure you know that my last comment was my own spin on this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo

Sorry. I just couldn't help myself.

Seriously though, I never saw the Glow Baby, I have heard of them but never saw one. We lived in my grandmothers old terraced house which had no electricity or hot water. The lighting was gas, and the only source of hot water was a wall mounted gas boiler over the sink. We had one of the stone water bottles. It was a warm house though, heated from a black leaded range in the living room. We had a constant supply of coal because my father was a coal miner and got a coal allowance. Entertainment came from mostly ourselves but there was a Rediffusion valved radio which ran from a large battery that my father used to take to the garage up the road to get charged.

Mac said...

Caratacus,
The picture your story conjured up almost had me weeping tears of sadness. Almost. However, I gave my head a shake and the picture your story conjured up had me weeping tears of mirth. Man, was that stopper a show stopper or wot? Sorry Sir.

Mac said...

Ripper,
Yup, I knew where your comment came from. A classic.
When we think back, compared to today, things sure were different. But where we downhearted? No. Why? That was all we knew and we all just went about our business and fun. Families, neighbourhoods and communities were deffinately ‘tight’ back in the day compared to today though.