Crowds thrilled to see county’s industrial gems
THE richness of Gloucestershire’s past industrial diversity was displayed to the delight of all at the recent vintage and country extravaganza staged on the sweltering first weekend of this month at South Cerney airfield.
Wondering if the traffic might be on the heavy side, we left early. But so did everyone else, so we sat at a snail’s crawl in a continuous gridlock of traffic from Cirencester to the showground. It took two and a half hours to cover the five miles.
However, all good things are worth queuing for, as the old saying goes, and once at the Second World War aerodrome much was discovered to please the eye and ear.
The nostrils, too, if you stood down breeze from one of the many iron leviathan traction engines and like the whiff of anthracite.
One of the joys of such events is that they attract enthusiasts. Where else do you have the opportunity to eavesdrop on a group of men (and it always is men) in oily overalls debating whether the Lister Auto Truck (built in Dursley) had the edge on the Cotton Sturdy (built in Gloucester)?
Both three-wheelers were designed to transport this and that around factories.
But from the conversation I overheard, it seems that the Sturdy was a tad more unstable if overloaded while operating on a pitched floor. Something to bear in mind.
Cotton was known primarily for building lightweight motorbikes at its works in Quay Street, Gloucester, and the thriving owners’ club had a stand at the South Cerney show that attracted a good deal of interest.
So did the Stroud Vintage Transport and Engine Club, where umpteen examples of county-made R A Lister oil engines were on display. These were built to power all manner of machines, such as generators, threshers, pumps and butter churns.
Once Lister’s built an oil engine it stayed built. Many of the examples on display were chugging away as happily the weekend before last as they did on the day they first fired up, in many cases a century ago or more ago. They never wear out.
Longevity was also a feature of Cheltenham Caravans, built in a factory at the foot of Leckhampton Hill until the firm ceased to be in the early 1970s.
There were a couple of the firm’s models, a Stag and an Antelope, at South Cerney.
Although the sun was shining brightly and the sky was an uninterrupted blue this August, the historic caravan stand brought back childhood memories of holidays spent sitting in one, playing rummy and peering out of the steamed up window to see if it had stopped raining. Which it usually hadn’t.
You might think that the generation brought up on Sonic the Hedgehog and Grand Theft Auto would find a vintage fun fair less than overwhelming. But not a bit of it.
The big wheel, roundabouts, dodgems and swingboats spurred a look of awe and wonder on young faces. And even if you’re into what’s trending now in the R&b/hip-hop chart, you can still find a late Victorian steam-powered fairground organ belting out ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’ strangely alluring.
One of the best known manufacturers of fairground rides in the past was Thomas Walker’s of Tewkesbury, and the galloping horses roundabout at the show looked like one of the firm’s products, though I couldn’t be sure.
Taking pride of place on the Historic Lawnmower stand was a Budding patented machine, invented, of course, by Stroud’s famous son, Edwin Beard Budding.
Gleaming lorries in liveries of once well-known local haulage firms processed in cavalcade, as did buses from the time when a conductor took your money, gave you a ticket, rang the bell and shouted “Move along the aisle please”.
Somebody once said nostalgia’s not what it used to be. But at South Cerney on that recent hot day in the sunshine, it was.