Cars.

I took the photos above - click on any one to see a larger version - last Sunday afternoon, not long after I published last week's Blog update. The event was the inaugural Bexleyheath Classic Car Show, which was held in the pedestrianised area of Bexleyheath Broadway. It featured forty classic cars, along with a number of military vehicles, and even a yellow American school bus. Bearing in mind the event had not been very well publicised (a common issue with Bexley Council), there was a very strong turnout of local people. There were a number of American cars and trucks from the 50's and 60's, as well as motor bikes and the black Ferrari Portofino shown in the photo above. The most valuable car in the show was the red 1964 Aston Martin DB5 best known as the James Bond car, which I was told was insured for £600,000! The show was a great success, and I hope that it will become a regular annual event - more on this later. What do you think? Comments to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com. 

We have just passed the 110th anniversary of the start of the First World War. What has had almost no coverage is the positive things that came out of the first truly modern war. Sadly, large scale conflict seems to have a stimulus to science and technology – and not just in finding new and yet more devastating ways to kill people. A chap called Doctor Harold Gillies – a New Zealand born surgeon, who earned the title of “The father of plastic surgery” pioneered reconstructive surgery on wounded soldiers who had been injured in the trenches, and who had a remarkable local connection. Harold Gillies initially opened a small unit in the Cambridge Hospital at Aldershot which had beds for two hundred injured men. He pioneered the use of skin grafting – a technique he adapted from one first used by Professor Hippolyte – Morestin in France, he employed dental reconstruction techniques invented by Charles Valadier, coupled with the use of X-Rays, and photographs to detail the injuries of his patients; he was also fastidious about cleanliness and the use of antiseptics (a very important point, as antibiotics were yet to be discovered, and deaths from sepsis or blood poisoning were still common). Gillies also came up with the simple but effective policy of ensuring that all patients were attached to a luggage label listing their injuries, and where the injured soldier needed to be sent for treatment – many of the men were unable to speak through injury, or otherwise rendered unconscious. Once the Battle of the Somme took place, the two hundred bed unit in Aldershot was drastically overcrowded – at one point there were ten patients for every bed. A new home needed to be found for the plastic surgery unit, and one was found at Queen’s Hospital at Sidcup (what is nowadays Queen Mary’s).  The unit took up much of the hospital, and it was conveniently close to the Royal Artillery barracks at Woolwich, where a small number of patients were located during their convalescence. Doctor Gillies was an interesting man – on top of being a very early pioneer of plastic surgery, he was a great golfer, a professional standard violin player, rowed in a winning team for Cambridge University in the boat race, and created a comedic alter – ego called Doctor Scroggy which he used to entertain his patients. He would walk around the wards of Queen’s Hospital at night, dispensing champagne and oysters to the injured soldiers, despite the strict ban on alcohol within the hospital grounds. He encouraged the recovering men to perform theatrical productions and shorter skits, which often involved the recuperating soldiers dressing in drag. Gillies was aware of the emotional as well as physical trauma he was treating – and his solution was to make recovery fun. His influence was such that later, in the Second World War, he was able to rebuild the burned faces and hands of airmen, alongside his better known cousin, Archibald Mcindoe, whose disfigured pilot patients later formed The Guinea Pig Club. Harold Gillies also performed the first gender reassignment operations, and became a leader in the field of sex change surgery. He was ahead of his time in so many ways, and much of his work first undertaken at Sidcup has been used as the foundation for modern reconstructive surgery.

Erith and Lower Belvedere were the subject of severe traffic disruption on Monday, Tuesday and to a lesser extent Wednesday of last week; there was a serious fire in ADM Oils refinery in Church Manorway. The part of West Street adjacent to St. John the Baptist Church, and much of Bronze Age Way were closed to traffic, and houses close to the site of the fire were evacuated. The official London Fire Brigade press release reads:- "The incident involved a corkscrew conveyor belt which was alight. There are no reports of any injuries. Crews worked alongside other agencies, including the site operator, to deploy specialist equipment in order to reduce the conveyor belt to the building's ambient temperature. The location of the corkscrew was difficult to access, which limited the response of crews. This was a protracted incident and crews have worked from the 16 to 18 September to bring it under control. A safety cordon was put in place as crews responded. On 17 September this was reduced from its initial 500 metres to 200 metres. The A2016 Bronze Age Way has reopened to traffic, having previously been closed for public safety. A number of nearby businesses on the industrial site were required to shut as we responded. Some homes were evacuated on Monday but residents have been able to return to their homes. The Brigade was first called at 0950 on 16 September about the fire, and the incident was under control by 1112 on 18 September. Crews from Erith, Plumstead, Greenwich and surrounding fire stations have been in attendance. The cause of this fire is not yet known". ADM Oils is the largest manufacturer of edible oils in Europe. If you have bought a supermarket ready meal in the UK, the oil used to cook it will have come from ADM Oils in Erith. It is also one of the largest local employers, with around 1,200 workers, many of whom live in the local area. It originally started up in 1908, when it was known as Erith Oil Works – the business then was similar to now; they crush and process all kinds of seeds, to extract their natural oils, which are used in foodstuffs, cooking oils and animal feeds. The seeds, then as now are brought upriver in large bulk freighter ships. The distinctive huge concrete silos that are still present on the ADM site were constructed in 1916, where they were some of the earliest surviving examples of reinforced concrete construction in the UK. They were constructed by Danish structural engineering company Christiani and Neilsen, who invented reinforced concrete construction techniques. ADM Oils featured on the BBC News website back in April 2022. You can read the story by clicking here. 

The evenings are now noticeably drawing in and it is pretty much dark by 8pm. The temperature is still pretty reasonable, but this won’t be the case for very much longer. There comes a time in the year where I reach what I like to call the “Tweed Retirement Point (TRP)” this is when it becomes too cold to just wear a tweed sports jacket when out and about. This is my personal signifier for the true onset of winter, and it does tend to be somewhat variable. I think that the annual retrieving of heavier overcoats from the wardrobe is one of the things I least look forward to in the course of the annual cycle, but one that unfortunately cannot be avoided, just like the first appearance of a pale and scrawny, bare chested youth seems to signify the beginning of spring in Erith. It won't be very long before the trouble makers are happily ensconced back in their darkened and noxiously smelly bedrooms, playing their X-Boxes and awaiting the Spring.

Last week I wrote about two very different Bexleyheath businesses that had recently gone bust; in the article I also mentioned that the Body Shop outlet in Bexleyheath Broadway Shopping Centre closed down some time ago, and that its unit was laying empty. That has now changed. A shop called Manipurity has now opened - it sells crystals, dream catchers and various other New Age related stuff. The shop has relocated from its original unit at the front of the Broadway Centre, facing the pedestrianised area of Bexleyheath Broadway, and has moved inside to the former Body Shop unit. I wish the owners of the newly opened shop well, though I do wonder if their products may prove a little too niche for Bexleyheath. No doubt time will tell. Comments to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.

The London Evening Standard, known for its free distribution and coverage of London news, politics, and culture, has been a staple for commuters and residents alike. Its closure signifies the ongoing shift towards online news consumption and the difficulties faced by print publications in maintaining readership and advertising revenue. The paper's history dates back to 1827, and it has witnessed and reported on countless significant events in London's history. Its closure leaves a void in the city's media landscape, particularly for those who rely on its free and accessible format. While the print edition will cease, the Evening Standard's online presence will continue, offering news and content to its digital audience. This transition reflects the broader trend in the media industry, as publications adapt to changing reader habits and seek sustainable business models. While the loss of the print edition is mourned by many, the Evening Standard's legacy and contribution to London's media landscape will not be forgotten. Its online presence will continue to provide news and information to Londoners. It will continue to live as a website, with a once a week print edition, the London Standard, but as of last Thursday, the daily evening print edition is no more. 

The Basic computer programming language has just celebrated its sixtieth birthday. Whilst not the first computer language designed to be used by non – professional programmers (Cobol and Fortran could both claim that title) it was the language that gained massive popularity in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s when it started to be taught in secondary schools and further education colleges, first on Commodore Pet and Research Machines 380Z computers, and slightly later on the massively popular and ubiquitous in education BBC Micro. Kids of the time, myself included, also had early 8 – bit home computers, and learned to program them by a mixture of trial and error, and by laboriously copying game Basic source code by hand from magazines such as Computer and Video Games. One soon learned to save the input code on a very regular basis, as having the computer crash after spending three hours typing in code was a quick way to learn the benefits of a backup. Basic was relatively easy to learn, though different computers often employed slightly different versions, usually to accommodate special features that they had, which meant one could not expect a Basic program from say a Sinclair ZX Spectrum to work on a Commodore 64 without some fairly extensive rewrites to the code. One thing basic did allow you to do which cannot be done with modern high level programming languages is it enabled you to read and write data to areas of the computers’ memory which would normally not be permitted. The PEEK command enabled a programmer to see the value that was stored at a specific memory location, and the POKE command enabled you to write a value into a specified memory location. This might sound pretty dull and boring, but in reality it enabled you to get the computer to do all sorts of things that it was really not meant to. For example, there was a hardware design bug in the chip which controlled the video display in the very early versions of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The bug meant that the clock rate of the chip (how many instructions it could obey per second) could be radically altered by inputting a certain numerical value to a very specific address in the video memory. The increase in the clock rate caused the chip to suddenly heat up, to the point where it would begin to melt the rubber keys and thin plastic case of the Spectrum. Once this trick was discovered, there were numerous little oiks around the country who would go into Boots or Rumbelows (remember them?) and type in a short program to the Spectrums on display. The program had a FOR: NEXT loop in it, which acted as a timer to allow the perpetrator to make a stealthy exit. At the end of the loop, the POKE which over clocked the video chip would be executed. About ten minutes later, the shops’ fire alarm would sound as smoke poured out of the hapless Spectrum. Oh how we laughed. Not that I would ever condone this kind of behaviour of course (apologies to Boots in Bexleyheath Broadway Shopping Centre) – nowadays shops are covered by CCTV, and in any case this direct control of a computer via software is just not possible. Nowadays the operating system and firmware act as a barrier to such tricks.

The end video this week is some footage of the aforementioned Bexleyheath Classic Car Show, which I feel makes for interesting viewing. Comments as always to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.