Hard hat...

We meet some interesting folks on our way home on the train.

Standing near where we were seated was a young woman carrying a hard hat. When the person seated next to The Man vacated the seat hard hat lady sat down. I said to her, that’s not something you see a young lady with a hard hat. She laughed and told us she was working for crossrail as a geologist. Well that piques our curiosity and soon she was telling us about how she worked at the tunnel face checking that the cut face was safe and that tunnelling could continue.

I bet you see some interesting things The Man said to her, and she told us about the small fossilised shark teeth, but no dinosaur bones. She did say that they had come across some very early plague burials. They knew they were early because the skeletons were laying side by side. Later plague victim burials were nowhere near as  neatly position rather they were probably just tumbled into mass graves.

Archaeologists say 12 skeletons found beneath a building site in London could provide evidence of a Black Death burial ground.

The remains were found by teams working on Crossrail - a £15bn project to improve transport links in the capital, including at Farringdon where the bones were found.

Historical records indicate a hastily-built cemetery opened in the area in 1348 as the plague spread across the country.

Up to 50,000 people are thought to have been buried there in less than three years.

Jay Carver, lead Crossrail archaeologist, said: "This is a highly significant discovery and at the moment we are left with many questions that we hope to answer.

"We will be undertaking scientific tests on the skeletons over the coming months to establish their cause of death, whether they were plague victims from the 14th century or later London residents, how old they were and perhaps evidence of who they were.

"However at this early stage, the depth of burials, the pottery found with the skeletons and the way they have been set out, all point towards this being part of the 14th century emergency burial ground."

The skeletons were found during excavations below a road in Charterhouse Square.

They were buried in two rows and laid out in a similar formation to skeletons discovered at a Black Death burial site in Smithfield in the 1980s.

Experts at the Museum of London Archaeology will now use DNA testing and carbon dating to determine both a cause of death and a burial date.

Silvertown

I’ve been doing a a bit of background reading for the next assignment in the writing course I’m doing and wanted to share this with you.

While my grandparent weren’t directly involved with this they certainly would have known people  who were 

On 19 January 1917, in the darkest days of the Great War, a massive explosion rocked London’s East End. Shockwaves could be felt in Essex, while the blast itself was heard as far away as Southampton and Norwich. But the firestorm wasn’t caused by the sinister German Zeppelins that were making increasingly frequent appearances on London’s skyline. In fact, the roots of capital’s biggest ever explosion were much closer to home: a TNT factory in Silvertown.

From the outset, the management of the former Brunner, Mond and Co. chemical works expressed their concern about government plans to turn their plant over from the production of caustic soda to TNT for munitions. TNT is a highly unstable substance and the factory was in a crowded urban area. The Metropolitan Building Act of 1844 made it illegal to carry out ‘harmful trades’ inside the boundaries of London. But Silvertown was just outside this boundary, and its plentiful supply of labour and easy access to ports made it too good a location to overlook. In September 1915, the management caved to government pressure and the plant was soon making nine tons of TNT a day.

Sadly, the management’s concerns were founded. The explosion that ripped through the factory on that fateful Friday evening instantly destroyed part of the factory and several nearby streets. It showered molten metal across several miles, starting wild fires that could be seen as far away as Kent and Surrey.

More than 900 homes near the plant were destroyed or badly damaged in the disaster, leaving thousands of people homeless. Between 60,000 and 70,000 buildings were damaged to some extent, including a gasometer over the river in Greenwich which blew up, spewing 200,000 cubic metres of gas into the air in a massive fireball. Factories, docks and warehouses were also decimated. The eventual repair bill was around £250,000 – a staggering amount of money at the time.

Even more serious was the human cost. Seventy three people died that day. More than 400 were injured, 94 of them seriously. One man lost his wife and four children, aged between 10 and 13. The dead also included many firemen from the local station, along with dock and factory workers and children, asleep in their beds. But the death toll could have been much worse: by a stroke of luck, the explosion happened at just before 7pm, after most people had left the factory for the day and before they had gone to bed (most of the damage to homes was to the upper floors).

The precise cause of the explosion has never been found and rumours abounded of sabotage by a German spy or that the factory had been hit by a German bombing raid. The most likely explanation is much more mundane – that fire broke out in a melt-pot room and quickly spread to railway wagons where 50 tons of TNT was waiting to be moved. The inquiry found that the site was totally unsuitable and that Brunner Mond had failed to look after the welfare of its staff. The government chose not to publish the findings until the 1950s.

 

Interesting that at the beginning it says that the management were concerned about the dangers of a such a plant but were overridden by the government At the end it says that the enquiry though it confirmed the initial fears of the managers still found against them…

No justice is there

Just a few pictures...

 I went to a meeting on London today and on my way chanced upon the preparations for the of the Lord Mayors Show

A day in 'Brum'

The Man and I had a very nice Indian meal for our tea.

I had an interesting dessert made from grated carrot gently cooked in milk so that that the milk was reduced. It was pretty nice too..

This morning we walked down the road to the business stop and caught a bus into Birmingham city.

We had a wander around a very large outdoor market called the Bull Ring. I don't think I've been in such a large one before. Then we wandered through the huge mall.

Up until now we've never found any cafe that asks if we want our muffins warmed.

Not so today.

And why do you think that was it was because the cafe was called Muffin Break.

The exact same as the ones back home in New Zealand. Very nice thank you.

The girl who served us said she thought the owner was a Kiwi..

By midday the crowd in the mall was huge, seemed to us even larger than a London crowd. To give you an idea of the size of the crowd we had to queue to use the escalator. We don't even have to do that in London.

The Man and I had a quick look throughout the museum and then with the help of a map we headed towards the canal.

We spotted several rover buses and after a bit of a walk found where they were departing from. The weather held off all day until we set foot on the narrow boat and stopped as we got off.  How's that for timing.

Now that's old

Read this in one of the local papers today.

A woman who Chinese officials said was 127 years old -- although international authorities never recognised the claim -- has died, relatives said on Tuesday.

Official documents said that Luo Meizhen was born in 1885, which would make her the oldest person ever to have lived, but she died at the weekend after months of illness, her son Huang Youhe told AFP.
"She was 127 when she died, it wasn't unexpected," her grandson Huang Heyuan said.
Luo's declared birth date means she may have been the oldest person in the world when she died, ahead of Japan's Jiroemon Kimura, who records say is 116.
But Luo's claim met with little recognition internationally because China did not have a reliable birth certification system until decades after she was born.
Scepticism was further fuelled by reports of the youthfulness of her sons, one of whom she was said to have given birth to at the age of 61.
According to Guinness World Records, the oldest person ever to have lived was Jeanne Calment of France, who was 122 years and 164 days when she died in 1997.
Luo's 1885 birth date was quoted on her official residency permit and identity card, both issued in recent decades, and was confirmed by a state-sponsored research institute in 2010.
China's official Xinhua news agency ran reports of her 127th birthday celebrations on its website in October, describing her as China's oldest person.
"She was a kind person but at times had a very bad temper... she had a strong character," Huang Heyuan said.
Luo, who worked as a farmer all her life, and gave birth to five children, is survived by several great-great grandchildren in the remote village of Longhong, in China's southern province of Guangxi.
The village is part of Bama county, a poor region that officials say is home to more than 80 centenarians.
Her relatives gathered in her simply furnished brick house Tuesday to light red incense sticks in remembrance.