Ending on a cliff-hanger...
QUESTION About 20 years ago, a hotel in Scarborough fell into the sea. Is it true that guests were staying there at the time it fell?
Holbeck Hall Hotel was a four-star hotel in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. It was built as a home for charles Anderson-Smith, a steam trawler owner, in 1883.
It was constructed in a mock-Tudor style, with rose gardens and stunning lawns laid out between it and the edge of the cliff. In 1930 it became a hotel and was owned by the Turner family from 1980.
While the cliffs around Scarborough had been slowly eroding over the years, Holbeck Hall’s 1993 demise is thought to have been caused by a different geological process; wet spring weather, after a series of dry, fissure-creating summers, saturated the ground with water.
The cliffs were comprised of glacial till (sandy, silty clay), and water acted as a lubricant, causing the entire cliff to slide away.
The first signs of movement were seen six weeks before the main failure, when cracks developed in the surface of footpaths on the cliffs. These were filled to stop ingress of water to the cliff. but when the cracks reopened, shortly before the main failure, the council closed the cliff paths below the hotel.
The hotel was not considered to be in any danger because it was situated 60-70m from the cliff edge.
However, on June 3, cracks began to appear in the hotel lawn. At 6am on June 4, a guest saw that a large chunk of the garden, up to 50m, had disappeared.
The hotel was evacuated and the landslide continued to develop, culminating in the collapse of the east wing by the evening of June 5. Any part of the hotel that was still intact was immediately demolished.
In total, one million tonnes of glacial till slid into the sea.
In 1997, the owners attempted to sue Scarborough borough council for damages, alleging that as owners of the shoreline they had not taken any practical measures at all to prevent the landslip.
The claim was rejected on the grounds that the council was not liable for the causes of the landslide itself. Arran Cartwright, Hartlepool, Durham.
QUESTION During a phone call in the wartime-based film Housewife 49, mention was made that ‘the pips have gone’. Could this be possible? As a GPO telephonist in the Fifties and Sixties I didn’t think ‘pips’ had been introduced as early as the Forties.
THE General Post office had administered the telephone service since 1912, later becoming the Post office Telephones and eventually british Telecom. long-distance phone calls between cities were called trunk calls and required an operator to connect them. These calls needed to be timed so that the cost of the call could be charged to the person (the subscriber) initiating it.
Your correspondent will recall a device on her switchboard called a chargeable time clock (cTc) which monitored the duration of a timed call in tenths of a minute.
This had two number ‘wheels’ showing the call duration up to 9.9 minutes. every three minutes, the device sent three ‘pips’ of 900hz tone to the subscriber as a reminder that the call was being charged.
The cTc had been introduced in the mid-1930s to supersede the chargeable time indicators (cTI). These registered call durations on a strip of lamps on the switchboard, and required more expensive and bulky equipment set apart from the switchboards. The cTI also delivered the three pips to the subscriber.
With the rollout of subscriber trunk dialling (STD) in the Sixties, this facility disappeared, as the subscribers became responsible for setting up and controlling a long-distance call, resulting in the diminishing of switchboards and operators. Gordon Tyler, Market Deeping, Lincs.
QUESTION On a London street the other day, I noticed the extraordinarily high percentage of German-made cars. What is the proportion of these on our roads?
IN 2014, AXA car Insurance published its car brand census, an analysis of 30 million vehicle registrations between 1994 and 2013. It showed a significant change in the make-up of Uk road vehicles.
Since 1994, the number of licensed cars in Great britain has increased by 35 per cent from 21 million to 35 million in 2013.
In 1994, ‘home’ brands such as Vauxhall and Rover accounted for 31.5 per cent of cars on Uk roads; 6.685 million compared with just 9.4 per cent (two million) from Germany, the fifth most popular country of origin after the Uk, U.S. (26.3 per cent), France (11.8 per cent) and Japan (11.4 per cent).
by 2011, German-origin cars had become the most common on Uk roads, and by 2013, they accounted for 21.2 per cent, (7.4 million) of the cars on Uk roads.
German firms making great strides into the Uk market include bMW (up from 440,000 cars in 1994 to 1.4 million in 2013), Mercedes-benz (250,000 to 1.1 million), Audi (210,000 to 1.1 million) and Volkswagen (one million to 2.4 million).
As of 2013, the top five were Germany 21.2 per cent, Uk 18.7 per cent, Japan 17.2 per cent, U.S. 15.8 per cent, France 14.7 per cent.
one noteable success is the influx of South korean brands such as kia and Hyundai. In 1994, South korean marques accounted for just 0.41 per cent of cars on Uk roads. This figure doubled by 1997, tripled by 1999 and by the end of 2013 had increased nine-fold to 3.6 per cent.
This meant that the number of South korean cars on Uk roads increased from 87,000 in 1994 to more than one million (1,051,158 to be precise) by the end of 2013.
exactly what a ‘british’ car is has become harder to define because of takeovers, mergers and factory moves. Rolls-Royce and bentley were once british icons but are now owned by German parent companies.
For the research, AXA matched brands with their country of origin. So, because a land Rover was originally a british brand and was still perceived as such, it was logged as a british brand despite its current Indian ownership. So the Uk figure could be considered somewhat inflated.
conversely, the German figure might be under-represented; the czech Republic is shown as increasing its market share threefold, from 0.5 per cent to 1.7 per cent, largely due to the success of Skoda, a subsidiary of the German Volkswagen Group.
T. M. Gray, Wolverhampton.