Miner's George Cross to be sold at auction
14 minutes ago
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Tim Dale
BBC News, Yorkshire
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Noonans
Charles Smith was originally awarded an Edward Medal, which was later replaced with a George Cross
A George Cross awarded to a mineworker for his gallantry in rescuing a man trapped underground at a colliery is to be sold at auction.
Charles Smith was honoured for helping to save Charles Liversedge when he was buried following a roof collapse at Askern Main Colliery, near Doncaster, on 3 January 1940.
He was first awarded a bronze Edward Medal, but was invited to exchange it for a George Cross when the medal was discontinued in 1971.
The medal is being sold by a private collector in an auction at Noonans Mayfair on 14 May, where it is expected to fetch between £8,000 and £10,000.
Oliver Pepys, auctioneer and medal specialist for Noonans, said only 319 miners recieved the original Edward Medal in bronze between 1907 and 1971.
"Smith was one of just 30 miners who had received the Edward Medal in bronze to exchange his medal for the George Cross, making it a much rarer award," he said.
Noonans
Charles Smith went on to service in Burma during World War Two before returning to the coal industry until his retirement
Mr Smith was born in Wigan, in1908 before becoming a miner at the age of 12.
It was while he was employed at Askern Main Colliery that the roof fall took place in the Warren House Seam, trapping Charles Liversedge.
According to the London Gazette: "He was extricated some three hours later, without having suffered serious injury, through the gallantry displayed, in conditions of the greatest risk, by a rescue party."
Mr Smith was presented with his medal by King George VI at Buckingham Palace on 2 July 1940.
The miner later entered the military and served in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, during World War Two.
Hr went on to work at Stargate Colliery, in Ryton-on-Tyne, County Durham, from 1945 to 1961 where he averted another disaster in 1953 when he spotted a frayed cable on a mine shaft lift just as the lift, full of miners, was about to be lowered.
The lift was emptied and the cable repaired.
In a letter from the Colliery's Consultative Committee, the secretary thanked him for the "manner in which averted a disastrous occurrence".
Having elected to exchange his Edward Medal for the George Cross, he was invested with it by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace on 18 July, 1972, and subsequently received the Silver Jubilee Medal in 1977.
He died at Blaydon, County Durham, on 25 October, 1987.
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The Guardian
a few seconds ago
- The Guardian
‘A yorkshire pudding like a dishcloth': how did British pub food get so grim?
It was supposed to be a special occasion: an extended family get-together for Sunday lunch at a country pub. The setting was promising: a traditional establishment recently redecorated; outside terrace by the river; plenty of customers. The menu was also promising: a giant sheet of paper like a medieval charter, with glowing descriptions of how they aged their beef and sourced their produce locally. The food, though, was awful. The starters were assorted deep-fried pellets of unidentifiable organic matter; the meat was cold and colourless, the gravy watery, the roast potatoes soggy and the yorkshire pudding chewy as a dishcloth. It was very difficult to believe all of this had been freshly prepared in the kitchen that day. It felt more like reheated leftovers – for £30 a head. You may, like me, have had this experience – and the lower-budget equivalent, the pub menu that consists of 700 variations of pie or burger, all of which arrive at the table via the freezer and the microwave, molten hot and almost glowing. With chips. How did pub food get so grim? We like to think the bad old days of British cuisine, the days when it was a national embarrassment, are far behind us, that the 1990s and 2000s ushered in a wave of quality gastropubs and that the shires are bursting with talented chefs cooking local produce from scratch. In some cases, that is true, but more broadly – in my view, at least – pub food in the UK is on the decline. 'You're definitely not alone,' says Katie Mather, a drinks writer and pub culture blogger. 'There is evidence to support your hypothesis.' Ray Bailey, one half of the bloggers Boak & Bailey and a co-author of 20th Century Pub, also agrees. 'Pub food has quietly been on the decline for a few years now, both in terms of quality and availability. There was a golden period during which you could rely on being able to get a solid meal for a reasonable price, but now many pubs have closed their kitchens or outsourced food to fast food popups.' Pubs have never had it so hard, you could argue. They face significant and often inexorably increasing costs: rent; staffing (partly as a result of the recent national insurance contribution increases); energy (to heat and chill food and people); alcohol (duty on a bottle of 14.5% red wine has risen by nearly £1 in the past two years); and food (one chef tells me beef has gone up 50% in the past eight months). This comes on top of Covid recovery and the cost of living crisis. According to the British Beer and Pub Association, 15,000 pubs have closed in the past 25 years. There are still roughly 45,000 left, but the UK is losing about six pubs a week. 'Pub food used to be the moneymaker, but with the rising price of literally everything, it really isn't as cheap to do that any more,' says Mather. 'For a long time, business owners have been able to hide the effects from customers to a certain degree; they've been able to cut corners in kind of invisible ways. But it's become so difficult to deal with.' Pubs have had it hard for a long time, says Brian Hannon, a co-founder of the London-based restaurant group Super 8, which includes Brat, Kiln and Smoking Goat. Previously, he worked for 18 years in the pub sector. The shake-up began with the beer orders in 1989. In an attempt to improve competition, the government limited the number of tied pubs a brewery could own to 2,000. At the time, 75% of UK pubs were controlled by six breweries (Bass, for example, had to sell nearly 5,000 of its 7,000 pubs) and 95% of their revenue came from drinks. This change created conditions for new pub chains and independents to flourish. By the time the beer orders were revoked, in 2003, the industry had been transformed. Habits were changing, too. By the 2000s, we had what Hannon calls the three Fs: 'Food, females and fenestration.' Pubs opened up literally and socially, while food revenues made up for declining drinks sales. It was the era of new chains, such as All Bar One, and the original gastropubs, such as the Eagle in Clerkenwell, London. Pub food became a route to culinary acclaim and celebrity. In 2001, the Stagg Inn in Herefordshire became the first pub to receive a Michelin star. The Hand and Flowers, Tom Kerridge's pub in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, has two stars. This era didn't last long, though. 'I refuse to use the word gastropub, because I don't think it means anything any more,' says Oisín Rogers, the head chef at the Devonshire, one of London's hottest pubs. 'Gastropubs in the 90s and the 2000s were always chef or mom-and-pop operations where you'd have a single freeholder or leaseholder who was in the kitchen all the time, cooking from scratch, making really delicious things in a place they were really proud of. And that was copied by the [pub chains]. They'd say: 'Look, this is a gastropub. It's the same colour and the menu looks a bit similar,' but actually you're getting a far inferior product.' The Good Food Guide stopped using the term 'gastropub' in 2011. These days, you are more likely to see the word in supermarkets: Marks & Spencer has a 'Gastropub' range of ready meals created by Kerridge. Hannon breaks down today's pub food landscape into three brackets. At one end are those putting a premium on quality food and targeting customers willing to pay for it. At the other end are the big chain pubs, operating on the basis of low cost and high margins. 'The lower the price, the more likely it's been bought in and not been cooked by a chef,' Hannon says. However, he adds: 'The chains will apply their skill set and their muscle to actually get not-bad food produced well.' In the perilous middle ground, smaller chains and independent pubs try to present a gastropub-looking menu for minimum outlay and maximum profit, which, in this climate, necessitates compromises – and may well explain my unsatisfactory Sunday roast. (On closer inspection, the pub in question turned out to be part of a group, offering very similar menus across several sites, which suggests some degree of centralisation.) 'What often happens is the guy who's running the pub has a spreadsheet that's been sent down saying: 'This is where you get your beef, this is where you get your yorkshire pudding, here's the instructions on how to do it,'' says Rogers. 'And they've followed the instructions, maybe not completely correctly, and ended up with an inferior product on the plate.' Hannon says: 'The people in the middle are making no money out of producing food because, number one, the cost of employing a chef is really high and, number two, it's hard to actually get the staff, especially given that pubs are often out in the countryside. And then the economics of running those have been really challenged. So what they're now doing is de-skilling their food.' A pub menu will never say: 'We don't actually make this food ourselves.' But more and more pubs are quietly outsourcing some or all of their cooking. 'We've heard stories of pub kitchens serving microwavable supermarket ready meals because they're cheap, last for ever in the freezer and have incredibly high mark-up,' says Bailey. Even big names have been caught out. In 2009, Gordon Ramsay was found to have been serving food prepared at a central kitchen in three of his London gastropubs, presenting it as 'freshly made', at considerably inflated prices. One indicator of this trend is the growth of external catering firms. Visit the website of Brakes, the market leader, and you will find more than 9,000 products: everything from fresh, raw ingredients to frozen pub grub – 20 formed cod fillets in batter for £1.69 each, yorkshire puddings for 35p each. They do 66 kinds of chip, says Paul Hulyer, Brakes' head of hospitality customer marketing. He doesn't provide exact figures on how their pub business is doing, but he says: 'We've sustained very good, healthy volumes in the sector.' Having worked for pub chains himself, Hulyer knows how the pressures have grown. 'One of the things I've noticed is more pubs want to try to do some cooking,' he says. 'When I worked in kitchens, everything was cooked from scratch, you had 12 people in the kitchen, whereas now, with all the increasing costs, you've got to do similar with four or five people. How do you do that? Well, you take some of the prep out. That's what we help to do.' For example, Brakes sells a whole beef brisket, Hulyer explains. 'We've done the seven-, eight-hour cook so you've not had to. And [the pub kitchen] would take it, defrost it and portion it. And then they would say: 'Right, I'm going to flavour this with …' and they would personalise it.' If they don't want to do even that, Brakes also offers a range of sauces. Brakes is scrupulous about food standards and responsible sourcing, of course, but it has little control over what goes on in the kitchens it supplies (assuming anything is going on beyond setting a timer on a microwave) or how their products appear on menus. The language can often be wilfully obscure, with terms such as 'homemade' and 'freshly prepared' covering a multitude of sins, says Rogers. 'Some of the big chains will say they do aged beef, for example, which doesn't mean dry aged; it just means it's been kept in a vacuum bag.' There are also dodgy supply chains, he says, such as what has been called 'long-range chicken', 'where you buy chicken that was bred in Vietnam, packed in Singapore, injected with fillers in the Netherlands and then arrived frozen to a cash-and-carry in the UK'. Everyone seems to have horror stories. 'When I worked as a waiter in a chain pub in the 1990s, the 'homemade' steak and kidney pie was assembled from a sachet of brown goop emptied into a dish with an oval of pre-made pastry popped on top,' says Bailey. The quality end of the pub food spectrum comes with its own challenges. While pub chains may operate on a profit margin of 70%, serving fresh, quality food is far less profitable, which inevitably means higher prices for customers. Mains at the Devonshire's upstairs restaurant are £20 to £40, not counting side dishes, although they do cheaper bar snacks downstairs. Sunday lunch at the Hand and Flowers will set you back £175. When that is the case, Mather asks, can we still call these places pubs? 'I would argue that they focus so much on food that now they are just restaurants.' She defines a pub as 'a place that I would feel comfortable drinking in without having a meal'. Those places do exist, she says, citing her local in Lancashire. 'They do fantastic food, but I could sit in there with pints, just reading a book. I don't feel as if I'm in the way, or taking up a table that someone else might eat at, whereas there are pubs that have gone completely the other way.' It's almost as if 'gastro' and 'pub' are going their separate ways. So how can you avoid disappointment with your pub meal? What are the warning signs? 'Because I'm in the industry, I always look at the tills,' says Rogers. 'If the tills are the corporate type, where it's the same system that's run all over the country, then I'm always suspicious.' Hannon says: 'Look at the menu: size, focus, how it is actually presented. No laminated menus, no menus that try to be Chinese, Indian and Sunday roast. Talk to the staff about where the produce is from, how long the chef has been there.' Rogers continues: 'I think one way to spot a really good, decent pub menu is that it's short. If you've got 35 main courses and 20 starters, you can be certain that most of that is in the freezer.' Look for closer to six starters, mains and desserts. 'If I go to a chain pub somewhere that I've not been to before and I look at the menu and it's like 'lasagne', then you just know that that's frozen and microwaved,' says Mather. 'The fish and chips – that's going to be frozen as well. Unless there's a good specials menu, or it's got really good local reviews, I would eat somewhere else.' There may be other solutions. In 2014, France launched a fait maison (homemade) scheme, whereby restaurants that genuinely made their food in-house could display a special logo. The scheme never caught on, but there are plans to revive it and make it mandatory. At the same time, especially in UK cities, there has been a resurgence of what might be called 'drinking pubs', where the emphasis is on the beer or wine, rather than the food: microbreweries, tap rooms and the like. There is also a growing appetite for locally owned pubs, says Mather, who just visited one in the Lake District. 'Their food was fantastic and their entire staff seemed to care a lot about the food and drink that they're serving.' Pubs were once the heart of the community and some places are successfully keeping them that way, not just with food and drink, but as gathering spaces for all manner of functions: artistic performances, family events, markets, workshops. The best boozers have always moved with the times, but also respected their hungry, cash-strapped customers – who can tolerate only so many soggy roast potatoes.
Times
33 minutes ago
- Times
Dear Julia: I'm middle-aged. Am I invisible?
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Daily Mail
3 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Britain's most selfish street: Families left with fly-infested rubbish and overflowing bins due to neighbours from hell's parking
Householders are fuming after being left with fly-infested rubbish and overflowing bins due to parking chaos caused by residents from neighbouring streets. Some bins in one road in Cleethorpes, North East Lincolnshire, have not been emptied since May. Irate residents say the bin wagon can make it to the edge of the cul-de-sac. But the jobsworth driver refuses to turn into the road, saying they cannot get past vehicles parked on the corner. The bin crews not only refuse to walk down into the cul-de-sac to collect the bins but have also told residents not to wheel them to the wagon on health and safety grounds. Fearing a rat invasion, residents are taking bags of rubbish to the homes of friends and relatives so they can dispose of them in their bins. They are having to wash their plastic bottles before putting them out so they do not smell, and regularly douse their bins in fly spray. But the contents are being infested with insects and the rubbish is also attracting foxes and even badgers. Residents say parking chaos is being made worse by properties being converted into houses with multiple tenants. Residents say parking chaos is being made worse by properties being converted into houses with multiple tenants Steve Silkstone, 67, a retired miner, who has owned his house for eight years, has complained to local MPs about nearby properties being converted into HMOs. He organised a petition against the house next door being converted into bed sits which was signed by 260 people. Gesturing at his overflowing bin, he said: 'This one has been not been emptied for 12 weeks. It has not been emptied three times in a row now. 'All we can do is take the rubbish away in cars because if we leave it is going to attract vermin. 'It smells in the hot weather and there are flies in the plastic and bottles bin even though I have cleaned all the bottles out and keep spraying it with fly spray. 'I am putting my bottle and plastic into general waste because I have no more room. I have offered to wheel the bins out the road. 'But I was told we cannot do it because of health and safety. We need a residents parking scheme.' The two bedroom family house next door, which failed to sell for more than a year, has been snapped up by an absentee landlord and converted into a three double rooms upstairs and a single bedroom downstairs. He said: 'If there is just four of five tenants and they each have a car each it causes parking chaos. I am absolutely fed up with it all. 'I am dreading anyone moving into the HMO next door to me. They are going to need more bins too and where are they going to put them? 'Parking is already bad. There is a van that regularly parks in the street. The owner has got six other cars and does not even live around here.' Neighbour Leanne Cowie, 36, said: 'My bin for plastics has not been emptied since the first week in June. There are flies and rubbish everywhere. 'The foxes come in and shred it all over the street. It is disguising, especially when you pay your council tax. 'We have offered to take our bins onto the main road so they can be emptied but were told we cannot due to health and safety. 'The council have sent us all letters warning us about the parking but half the people parking here do not live around here so they did not get the letters. 'I have been having to take my recycling to my mum's house. It is ridiculous. I had to take two bags to her the other day. I am lucky she just lives across the road.' Robert Brown 74, was also concerned about houses on the street being converted into HMOs. 'Another house is being cleaned out. We are lucky with our bins because our front door faces onto a different street.' Jane Board, 70, said: 'My bin has not been emptied since May. It is a pain. They live around the corner and just dump their cars on the corner. 'It makes it impossible for the bin wagons to get around them. They want us to recycle. But a lot of the recyclables are going in general waste because I now have three months worth of recyclable waste. 'All the bin men have to do is get off their arses and walk around the corner so it can be done.' Susan Smith, 78, said: 'I sent a photo of all the parking congestion to the council ten years ago. Every time we go out we are lucky if we can get parked again. 'I have to put all my recycling in a box every three weeks and take it to my brother in law so he can put it in his bin because they not collected it.' Hayley Roberts, 52, said: 'My bin has not been emptied for weeks and I cannot recycle any more. I have lived here since 2000 and it has got worse and worse. 'There are so many more cars now than when I moved it. The council do have a smaller bin wagon. 'But they would rather just not empty our bins and send us letters about parking which are a waste of paper. It is annoying when you are paying full council tax. 'I am paying all this money to get my bins emptied and not even getting my bins emptied. The council just want to get their money and not do much for it. 'It is just worse now due to the parking because there are a lot more people renting.' Jane Revell, 53, said: 'They came on Friday or Saturday for one of my bins which was a shock because it had been waiting there for four weeks. 'I am lucky there is only two of us, It is a different story for a family of four. 'It is frustrating because sometimes the van comes almost up to the street and he does not see it as his job to wheel the rubbish out of the cul-de-sac to the wagon. 'We have offered to wheel the bins ourselves because it is not like it is a great distance but have been told "no".' Adrian White, 72, said: 'The problem is they cannot get around the corner because of the parking. It is mind boggling. 'Some of them just leave their cars in the middle of the road so the wagon cannot get down. I have to take a lot of my waste to my brother for him to put in his recycling bin. 'We have seen badgers and foxes and all sorts down here after the rubbish. Once you have badgers on your land you cannot get rid of them. They eat everything.' North East Lincolnshire Council said it had written to residents in December and would be writing to them again regarding the problem of parked vehicles on the corner of Douglas Road and Laurier Street. The council added: 'We are currently considering installation of enforceable parking restrictions on this corner to assist, but this will need to go through the legal process in the coming months. 'In the meantime, we request that residents do not park on the corner of the street on collection days so that we can access the street and collect their waste and recycling.'
