Horse Manure

Horse Manure

Another bite sized chunk of Blantyre History

Well Margaret.
It would seem that we have to wait until you have the book on ‘Old Blantyre’ so that I can fully do justice to the grandeur of the village. As I type this I can still smell the dung in the streets from the many horse’s and cairt’s we had back then. Which gets me back to the Robertson’s Ginger Works, now there was a company that had a lot of horses, plus the Co-op, and the Rag and Bone men, who just picked up all the junk of any value that you wanted to throw out and they in return give you a few pence for whatever. Between them and others there was a lot of horses around in the streets.

As a boy my dad (a miner) had a vegetable garden and quite often he would come home from work or a walk and send me or one of my brothers out to shovel up the dung from the horses for his garden. This in it’s self was not uncommon. You could go out there and run into a few more kids all out there looking for the residue for their dad’s garden and remember I told earlier that we did in them there days run around in our bare feet, so you can imagine the state we were in. This is reality I are writing about here, I mean we are talking DUNG!. There was an instance of human excrement involved. This was all that was available through the war years, but I wont get into that.
I do hope it does not offend. I shall try and refrain from any other descriptions of this nature but in so doing I do feel it takes away from the everyday life as it was lived then.

~~~

Continuing the conversation between Thomas Dunsmuir Hartman in Chicago (known as TDH or Drapadew) and Margaret in Queensland Australia on TalkingScot.

~~~

Site Designed & Maintained by:
“In Pursuit of Excellence”

Copyright © Symbol Internet Marketing 2003 – 2023