More Thanet snow pictures and another chain of non-food or clothing shops go, bit of a ramble

Back in the day when I was can loosely be called a mechanic, before I advanced to becoming a shop assistant, one of the things I used to have to obtain were electronic components. From the mid 1970s we had a shop in Chatham Street called CTS which sold these. Then along came Maplins and CTS closed, so when there are issues:

“Marvin trudged on down the corridor, still moaning. "...and then of course I've got this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left hand side..."

"No?" said Arthur grimly as he walked along beside him. "Really?"

"Oh yes," said Marvin, "I mean I've asked for them to be replaced but no one ever listens."

"I can imagine.”

Diodes will now have to be bought online.

What went wrong is that diodes are cheaper online, but the problem is that this is cutting into our lives, no shops, no – try before you buy; no social interaction.

Here in the bookshop we don’t have the same issue as for the most part the books are cheaper than they can be bought online and in all honesty, if the weren’t, well there would be no bookshop.

My own take is that the ultimate problem will be with manufacturers, on the basis that if you can’t look at something before you buy it, well in some cases you just won’t buy it. So it may be that in some cases manufacturers will consider subsidising actual shops; difficult!

On the snow front I posted up the following on some Facebook groups this morning.

I am afraid to say that children in the Weatherly Drive area of Broadstairs have been misusing the snow and have been building a snowman I am very concerned that all attempts to rename it a snowperson have failed. Google have Weatherly, Broadstairs and most worryingly of all snowperson underlined in red, I tried snowwoman and on the commencement of the centenary of female emancipation, is this good enough?

This is partly tongue in cheek, but partly not as having been disabled when I was a child I have been on the receiving end of discrimination and up to a point I have some accessibility issues. Speaking for a moment as a mechanic of sorts who started using a computer a long time ago, there doesn’t seem to me to be any reason why large organisations can’t write a simple script into their spellchecking programs that make words ending in men or man accept person, woman and so on.

Anyway here are today’s snow pictures.

Next a few historic pictures of Ramsgate      

On the accessibility front I am once again stressing the importance of keeping your technology up to date especially your smartphone and your cloud integration, both in terms of saving you the hassle of plugging one thing into another, but mainly to protect your precious photos and documents.

It is also very important to make sure that you have configured backup and location settings for phones and tablets, in case they get lost, stolen or damaged.

What really makes this issue so important is that things that existed before mobile technology are being removed or not replaced or repaired. 

A simple example of this is that once upon a time if you woke up in hospital there used to be headphones by the bed enabling you to listen to Gardener's Question Time while you came to terms whith your situation, now you you are likely to be offered a charger and a wifi code and you will note there are no headphones, knob on the wall, it's all gone, like the bathing machines you need to buy a swimming costume.

 You really can't swim in your nighty or the nud as depicted in this picture of The bathing place at Ramsgate in 1788

For those who read yesterday’s post and followed the link http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/FredrickRogers/ I have dug out the rest of the photos, here is the link http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/fr/

So some historic pictures of snow in Margate next

Snow. Sea Bathing Hosp. 1906.

Interesting to see a tram encountering the wrong type of snow

 Droit House Snowbound 1956

 and another one Thanet Car 24. Trouble with Wire +1923 or perhaps not the snow but the wire or the snow on the wire

Lifeboat Memorial In Snow 1922

February 10 years ago in Thanet and some thoughts on historic buildings.

Do you recognise what's going on in this Ramsgate photo?

Here is the link to the rest of the pictures of this event http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/cafe/index.htm

Of course now the building has been rebuilt so it basically looks the same, it looks like it was built in the 1870s but in fact it wasn't. Does this make any difference?

One small part of Marina Esplanade frontage tht looks the same as it did 100 years ago

I suppose the biggest change is Olympia aka Merrie England aka Pleasurama

Progress is a peculiar thing

 You wouldn't catch me in one of those new fangled swimming costumes, give me a bathing machine any day.

 I posted this picture 10 years ago, but does anyone read the accompanying text?  Here it is

Grange Road Mill An early mill stood at Ramsgate in 1719. Then, in 1819-43, as evidenced by the early Ordnance Map, there were two standing. One of them must have disappeared many years ago, for the 1858-72 map does not show it and there was no sign of it in 1905 although remaining mill was still there, by 1930 the body of the remaining mill was completely gone and the wreckage of the base alone remained. This base was then being used as a motor garage. Its “black-timbered walls are smothered with advertisement posters. Grimy mechanics grapple with cars in its bowels.” To quote William Coles Finch the notable antiquary and mill historian.

One of the more complex local history books I was working on then was Ramsgate All Change the one about Ramsgate railways

The most serious mishap which occurred on the railway at Ramsgate for over twenty years took place at the Ramsgate Town Station on a Tuesday afternoon, when an approaching train dashed into a stationary brake van standing at the end of one of the platforms precipitating the van across the platform and through the main entrance to the station premises.

As a direct result of the accident a portion of the station premises was wrecked, and ten persons complained of having received injuries. The Ramsgate Town Station (as was also the case at the Harbour Station) is a terminus, and the pull-up of trains had to be gauged within a few yards by the drivers of trains.The train which caused the trouble was the London train, which left Margate at 1.55 and was due at Ramsgate at 2.09. It was stated that the driver became acquainted with the fact that there was something wrong with the brake before the train arrived at the station, but he was quite unable to bring up, and the consequences were serious. When the engine drawing the train arrived at Ramsgate there was an empty brake van standing at the end of the platform and just inside the station doors. Buffers of a very heavy type were at the end of the line. The engine plunged into the van with a terrible crash, sending the van forward against the buffers, which were carried away like matchwood, and the van itself was hurled through the doorway of the station buildings. Brickwork and woodwork were sent flying, and the force of the impact caused a cloud of dust to rise from the debris for a few moments obscuring the whole of the surroundings. It was not known for a few moments how many people were under the broken woodwork and ironwork. A railway employee residing a mile away from the scene heard the noise of the crash and thought it came from vessels firing near Margate.

The star photo of hat month though was this one 

 Because of the accompanying text about the photo, here is the link to it http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/FredrickRogers/

Or perhaps these

  It says back then

I am still working on David Richards new book “Ramsgate All Change” about the railways in Ramsgate, I hope to have it out next week, what I lack however is any pictures of the construction of the main line railway tunnel to Ramsgate Sands Station, or any contemporary newspaper articles about it, any help with this would be much appreciated. Anyway here is another snippet from the book to share with you all.

BUILDING THE RAILWAY VIADUCT OVER MARGATE ROAD

In sinking the foundations of the piers of the viaduct across the Margate Road, in four out of the five, the engineers discovered after they had commenced that they were faced with problems. In the case of the first pier, they had not gone down far when to their amazement they discovered a disused chalk pit, which at some remote date had been loosely filled with ashes and rubbish and forgotten. That had to be cleared out and properly filled. On the next pier they discovered a relic of the First World War, a huge dug-out. That had to be explored and filled. Next, an old sewer, which they had to bridge, and when they imagined their difficulties overcome, they dug down to a water main, which also had to be bridged.

Or it could be This is a rather unusual photograph of Sackett’s Stone Masons in Church Hill Ramsgate that some of you may not have seen before, one wonders what a health and safety inspector would have to say about it nowadays.

A quiet day in the bookshop today, so here is the link to the work the books that went out that is http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/the-dark-knight-in-bookshop.html

Finally some pictures of the snow in Ellington Park in 1971

Snow in Ramsgate this morning

Picture should enlarge if you click on it or tap it.

I will do another blog post later today but I thought that I had better get this picture up before it melted.

The Joy of Edwardian Coloured Postcards of Thanet, some thoughts on something or another once I have thought them

 Not a particularly hard day at work today on account of the weather I would imagine, just a few people having fairly long book briowses

This is where West Cliff Hall aka Ramsgate Motor Museum is, but before it was built and opened in 1914 when WW1 broke out.

This the Granville before the end was destroyed in WW2

This one after the Pavilion aka Wetherspoons was built in 1903

 Whoops I am not so good on Margate as this one says 1921 on the postmark, so not strictly speaking Edwardian, George V but not Georgian.

 Ah where was I? Oh yes dealing with my ignorance about Margate, Margate blogger Disabled Don sent me this link which leads to an article saying roughly that antiquarian booksellers are better off with technology.

 I should stress here that I am not an antiquarian bookseller but a general secondhand bookseller who is very much focused on trying to maintain a physical bookshop while using technology to attract people to the bookshop rather than selling books online.

 Hence posting pictures of the books we put out each day and pictures of all the books on the shelves in the bookshop  

 I have a sneak suspicion that while readers may read great authors fairly carefully anything that I wrote online would either be ignored or skimmed over, however pictures are a different matter.

 The text on this 1905 card of Margate, posted in Cambridge is interesting I suppose now Cambridge is much more or a tourist attraction than Margate

I may add to this one if I think more