With the news that Oakhurst Cottage will soon be re-opening it is perhaps timely that we can re-publish the excellent talk by Norman Gravestock – Curator of Oakhurst Cottage of the National Trust. Norman gave an illustrated talk at the Hambledon Heritage Society AGM back in 2015. The audio recording of Norman’s presentation is here, as well as a text copy. This has been added to the Heritage Society’s Hambledon Oral History Project archive.

Transcription of Norman’s presentation:

What I’ve done over the years and I’ve got together a whole lot of notes, which I’ve put together to make me a story that I can talk to the people at Oakhurst. Now what you’ve got to bear in mind that these people have come from a long way. They’ve come from Australia, New Zealand and what have you. And if I get it wrong, don’t say a word because they’ll go back, sit round. in the campfire in the outback telling them what I told them and no one will know the difference. But we’ve got people here who know far more about it than I do. So I don’t want them to say to me that’s wrong because it probably is. But most of it, I’m absolutely certain it’s not wrong.

Okay, now let’s go back to the beginning. We know very little about Oakhurst. We do know the experts tell us it was built between 1550 and 1600. And what I like to tell the customers that it was probably there when the Armada arrived, Who knows their history, okay? I’m sure it was there when the Armada came, but it was just four walls in a roof. It may have been a primitive type of dwelling, it may have been a barn, we don’t know. But early time in the 1600s, someone came along and converted it. And we’ll talk about that later because that’s another interesting series. So let’s go back now, the first date we actually have for Oakhurst is 1844. And this was the tithe census, which tells us that William Noldart and his family were living there. They must have liked it because they were still there in the census of 1851 and the census of 1861.

And they were tenants of George Kettle who lived in John May’s house when it was just one house and not two. And George Kettle, his father William Kettle, he farmed Hydestile Farm, which was 125 acres. Interestingly, way back in 1968, Mary Parker set about gathering information from old people in the village and she asked them to write their memoirs. And one of the people she spoke to was a Mr. Redhead and he lived at Great House, I’m sure he lived there and he wrote about Great House. And what he said – that at one time two brothers lived at Great House and they were the the Kettle brothers. Now this is obviously one of these is the father of George Kettle and these kettle brothers had fought at Waterloo. And what he said, that the Duke of Wellington came to Great H.ouse to visit them. If that’s the case, they must have been a long way up the ladder. I don’t know. On the other hand, if it was a story, you think what a feather in the cap that would’ve been for the locals when they’re in the pub, wouldn’t it? You know, we’ve had a visit from the Duke. Go down well, wouldn’t it? So anyway, he also said that Darwin spent some time there. And what we do know that who was a chap that wrote Alice in Wonderland? Lewis Carroll – Yeah, okay. He came there and we know that he came there because the old lady who used to get bounced about on his knee was still alive when Mary was writing her memoirs there. We’re very fortunate that we have some very old records in our archives. We don’t know where they came from, but we think they came from Great House.

Tne that particularly interest me, these are a list of various items in labour over a period from 1850 to 1854. And these are for one-off payments that the farmer made to these chaps that did these one-off jobs for him. They weren’t employees of his and our William Noldart crops up in this group. So I suspect that he had a big farm and he had his own staff because he never mentions ploughing and he never mentions dairy work and only twice mentions sheep and shepherding. So I think he had his own staff dealing with those. But when he found extra jobs to do, there was a pool of labour in the village that included our man William Noldart and he would get them in to do these jobs. And it starts, for instance, this list starts on the 26th of October, 1850. Now it says R Mitchell, George Boxall, Matthew Young, H Edwards, and Jonathan Noldart who was a nephew of Noldart in Oakhurst. And these chaps worked for 11 days and they were paid 16 shillings and 6 pence. So that tells you that average wage was one and six a day. Not a lot was it? Except for poor old Jonathon Noldart who must have been a young man because he worked for 11 days and he got 11 shillings. But there were two people, Thomas Pickett and Thomas Hammond, they worked for 11 and a half days and they got one pound, one shilling. So were they using horses or doing something a bit more complicated than their basic labourers? But anyway, that gives you an idea of what these chaps did and the sort of money they got.

On the 31st of March, this is an interesting one, William Buss of Buss’s Cottage?. Would it be him? He planted 3,100 chestnut. Now these were not chestnut, these were saplings. And I was walking on Hydon Ball the other day and there’s some stands of chestnuts up there, which are years old. And I wonder if William Buss planted those. I was reading a book just recently from the library and there was a forester who had written these experiences through the years and he said he was called upon to plant chestnuts on a big estate. And he said what they did, they had a very long ball of string and they tied at intervals feathers. And he would stretch his a on the grain and where the feathers were, where the feathers were, that’s where they planted their chestnuts.

So I dunno, William Buss, he planted 3100 chestnut and he earned one pound, six and tuppence ha’penny. Now our farmer was very good at ha’pennys. Ha’pennys keep on cropping up, and I’ve tried all manner of ways to work here. He could arrive at that, but it doesn’t happen. But anyway, let’s move on.

22nd of April, 1851. This is where William Noldart comes into his own William Noldart, William Denyer and John Enticknap. They tied 17 loads and 24 trusses of straw. Now these loads must have been wagon loads. They got eight shillings in a ha’penny. Now how do you share a ha’penny between three grown men? But this farmer could always arrive at a ha’penny. He didn’t give very much away. I’m quite sure enough. Okay, we move on, here we go.

26th of April, and this is an interesting one he received from Mr. Masseys – eight bushel of red clover seed, four bushel of tree foil, two bushels of white clover seed and 11 bushels, three gallons of bets. Now does anyone remember when you bought things by the gallon? No one remembers when before Flambards Way, when Brighton Road came right down into the High Street beside the Sun Hotel, right opposite was Platt’s corn merchant. No one remembers where the steps from Platt’s shop came out onto the pavement. And if you wanted to get your push chair range, you had to get two wheels off the pavement. I remember going in there with my father many, many years ago and he bought half a gallon of seed potatoes and they’d come, came out in a round wooden container. When the, when the container was full up, that was your half a gallon. And that’s how they used to sell them. So that’s what they were doing. Unlike the old imperial measurements.

He also bought six pounds of Swedes and he bought 20 pounds of turnips. So he must have been growing turnips for sheep. Do you think? I’m not a farmer, but I suspect they were for sheep. Now on the 10th of May, this is interesting, he pays Sarah Hammond for 10 days. Maria Boxall for 10 and a half days, and Mary Earl for 10 and a half days. Now these girls are clearly schoolgirls, they aren’t very big. And poor little Maria Boxall who works for 10 and a half days gets five and thruppence. So she’s being paid six pence a day. And then what was he doing with these little girls? Okay, silly question. Okay? I think that you think these little school girls with their small hands, wouldn’t they be ideal for broadcasting the clover seed? You didn’t want a big hairy farm worker did you? So you can imagine these little girls are going up in line with their trays of seed all keeping in line, spreading their seed. They do this for 10 and a half days. So you go by on Monday morning and look over the hedge. They’re, they’re spreading seed. You go back the next Monday morning and they’re still spreading seed. Do you think their arms ached? And what did these girls talk about? They had no television to talk about, no radio, no top of the pops. And they spent 10 and a half days. And the big one, the oldest one, Mary Earl, she got seven shillings. Sarah Hammond got six and eight pence and poor Maria got five and thruppence. And we read later on in another list that the farmer says that he sowed these seeds on 62 acres of land. So he had a big farm. I’m sure that farm in those days was much bigger.

Anyway, so lurking in the hedgerows of the sparrows, now have we all heard about the sparrows. As soon as I finished the sparrows are out and they’re in amongst the seeds. But the farm has got the answer to that. He gets in Richard Furlonger. Now Richard Furlonger, he’s a man that killed things and I think he was probably one of the family of butchers in Chidingfold. Anyone remember Furlonger in Chidingfold? Well this is a long time ago maybe the, I think he was probably the same family, but Richard Furlonger killed things. So he came along and he killed 600 sparrows, which he sends in a bill for four shillings. It clearly didn’t work because just afterwards he sends in another bill for killing 1800 sparrows. So in total this chap killed 2,400 sparrows. So you wonder why you never see a sparrow in the hedgerow now. Blame Richard Furlong.

Now this is interesting, a farmer who watches his ha’pennys, what does he do when Richard Furlong turns up with a couple of sacks full of dead sparrows and said there’s 1800 sparrows in there. I bet he wanted them counted. He wasn’t gonna take Fulongers word for that. And I think someone had to count these sparrows. Probably put them in piles of 10 or something. But anyway, that’s what they did with the poor old sparrows and that’s why they’re not there anymore. Richard Furlong, he was a man of many talents. He was a man, he was a butcher from Chid. We think he killed pigs for one and six months. He killed two pigs for the, the farmer for three shillings. He supplied the meat for the harvest supper and he thatched roofs and he killed rats and he thatched the hay ricks. So there’s no end to his talents. And I’d rather think he may have been the man who’s not named, but he sheared 194 sheep and he was paid one pound 19 shillings. So if I’m not a farmer, but if he sheared 194 sheep, they would all had lambs presumably. So somewhere up here around here, probably on Ginger’s golf course in those days, there were 400 sheep. So this chap had a big farm, didn’t he? But we don’t get much mention of them. But anyway, there we go.

We move on 1852. William Noldart again, James Earl and William Denyer. They rinsed 3,100 quarter hundred weights of bark. That’s a lot of bark if you add that up, it comes to nearly 90 tons. And I imagine what must have happened, they, funnily enough, I had a book again, this chap who was writing about forestry in this book I was reading, he used to strip bark off trees. Now Steve’s stolen my thunder name because he’s got it all on the file down there. But I was gonna tell you that they, they stripped the bark off in the spring and these foresters would knock a bit of bark off and I dunno how they could tell, but they could tell if the sap was rising and when it’s rising, that’s the time to strip the bark off. And this forester said they would cut a ring around the bark at the base of the tree and climb up as high as they could and cut another ring and then using a special tool, and I can’t remember the name, but you will know it’s a long iron thing, and they, they get this bark off and it comes off easily. This is all gonna be clean bark, isn’t it? When they cut the tree down, all the branches are gonna get in the Hambledon clay, isn’t it? So you can imagine, the fella comes out from the tan yards in Godalming and he says to the farmer, look, I’ll buy your bark, but I’m not having it all covered in mud cuz I’m not buying mud, I’m buying bark. So the farmer says, okay, I’ll get some of the lads in and they’ll rinse it. So William Noldart and his two buddies, they get to work and they rinse nearly 90 tons of bark. They are paid two pounds, one and eight pence ha’penny. Another ha’penny. And you might ask where this bark is going. Well, in 1850, 1860, you probably know there’s some large tan yards in Godalming.

There was the oak bark tan yard that stood immediately in front of the new railway station. And people used to say that the porters never bothered to shout Godalming when the train arrived because everybody knew they’d got there by the smell. And then there was another big tan yard which later became Pullman’s. That was Sargassum’s mill or Westbrook mill. And that’s what where those photographs down there I think were taken. And then there was another big mill in Meadrow, where the Manor hotel is all along their opposite Broadwater Lake was the Meadrow Tan Yard. And that was a big one. It had 600 tip pits for fleshing and tanning – 600 pits. And it also had a bark store capable of holding 1,600 tons of bark. Now where did all this bark come from? I mean our William Noldart’s 39 tons is not gonna go very far, is it? So I’d be interested to know where the bark came from. And we’re talking now of oak bark. But interesting, it was said that in the 1850s, Godalming was a bigger industrial town than Guidlford.

Another interesting purchase that our man made, he bought five and a half tons of guano. Imagine the trip that that’s made. It’s come from South America and these are in one and a quarter, a hundred white bags and it’s come from all the way from South America in a big old sailing ship, not the Cutty Sark but a commercial ship, which goes much slower, makes its way up the Thames and there it unloads and the the guano is transferred to a barge on the, the Wey navigation. Now they can’t get those boats onto the, the river onto the Thames. So I, they must have taken it in carts or I dunno how they did it. Steve might know. But they would load these barges up and they would plod along with a horse, take ’em about three days and they arrive at the wharf. And they’ve got five and a half tons of this stuff, which is settled down into the hold of the barge. And it’s a job to get out if you are a bargeman. And then it’s all loaded up and the farmer makes two journeys to the wharf to collect his guano. Be interested to know, I’m not an expert. How many horses did he need to pull? Two or three tons of guano. And which way did he go? I don’t think he’d go up Brighton Road, I think he’d go the long way round Milford, would you? And he’d have to go down Anchor Hill because interestingly just after that he buys two skids and those skids, they cost him seven shillings, two skids and skids are what you put under the wagon wheels when you’re going downhill to stop the wagon running away. So do you think he wore them out carting the guano to Hambledon? I don’t know, but these things crop up anyway.

But another interesting thing, very quickly, they spread this guano. Now the farmer was in the generous frame of mind because two weeks later he paid six pence for half a gallon of beer for spreading guano. So these fellas had said to the farmer, it’s horrible dusty stuff, it must be. It’s flying everywhere and these fellas can’t breathe. So he spends six pence on half a gallon of beer. They spread five and a half tons of the stuff. So they must have got one sip each. I don’t know. Anyway, we could go on rabbiting on about this for a long time. There’s quite a lot of stuff.

So let’s go back to the period before 1844. You’ll all know that Chidingfold was the center of the glass making in this country for many years. As early as 1226. There is a deed in Westminster Abbey granting 20 acres of land between Hambledon and Chiddingfold to one Laurentio Vitrario. And he was a glass maker of distinction. And it’s recorded in Westminster Abbey that he was the man that made most of the glass for Westminster Hall, the Palace of Westminster and St. Stevens. And that was way back in 1226. They continued making glass. There’s another interesting thing here. There was a map of England in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence dated 1556. And in the county of Surrey there are only two places marked. One is Guildford and one is Chiddingfold. So it must have been fairly famous in its day. Glass making continued until the early 1600’s and it began to decline because the King forbid the use of charcoal in the furnaces. But it didn’t really matter because we were beginning nay to come into the iron industry and this was a much bigger affair.

I’ve got another interesting bit. There was a chap Gene Currier, he was a glass maker. He came from Antwerp and he set up a furnace in in Dunsfold somewhere. They used to think it was a Dunsfold in Sydney Woods, the furnace in Sydney wood, the big one. Now after they’ve done some archeology, they think maybe that wasn’t his furnace. So I’ve put forward Mary Carro’s furnace because no one who worked owned that one. So from now on, Mary, Jean Currier from Antwerp, he’s the man.

Okay, good. Okay, now let’s move on then. In 1870, production of Iron, well it had, the production hadn’t started, but they were starting building furnaces to make iron in the Weald. It spread from Kent, they were making, well the Romans were making iron in Kent and it spread all the way through 1400’s, it was very busy then in Kent, then it got up into Sussex and then finally it came into Surrey all through the wealdland clay. And in 1570, and this is where 1570, these people, we needed to make furnaces, there was an awful lot of work involved, and this is I suspect is where our man who lived in Oakhurst made his money, and where the other people in round about that built cottages because I suspect that people were now in a position to build themselves houses and to do this, they needed land. And I suspect the various lords of the manor were sharing in the prosperity. Well we know they were. And they were prepared to sell off pieces of wasteland of about half to a third of an acre, known as manorial waste to allow people to build houses on.

And we’ve got a very fortunate here Hambledon because we have a perfect example of one of these and it’s complete with all its original documents. And this is William Shafto, who was a bricklayer from Chiddingfold. And in 1625 he negotiated with the Lord of the Manor who granted him a lease on a piece of wasteland for a thousand years at a rent of a shilling a year. In 1632, he’s back again. And William obtained a second lease still for a thousand years, still at a shilling a year, but this time for the same piece of land with a house on it and that is Shafto’s. And we’ve got the documents to prove that. So this chap William Shafto was bricklayer and he was making enough money to build a house. And the chap that I suspect who could afford to buy Oakhurst and convert it into what we see today was another one of these artisans or tradesmen who was plying his trade in the iron industry. Because you needed an awful lot of skilled men to build these furnaces and a lot of iron work. I suspect if the paperwork ever came to light, you’d find that Philpots, Jill’s house was built in exactly the same way. That’s built on manorial waste probably in the same way.

Now we know that in 1570, Lord Montague, he upset the commoners in Hambledon because they complained at the court leats that he was cutting the trees down on the common. Now he didn’t own the common, he’s obviously done a deal with the Lord of a manor, here’s the man. And I suspected originally that he was cutting the trees down to make charcoal, but I don’t think he was. In 1570 I think these were big mature trees and he needed the timber. They needed a lot of timber because when they’ve built these furnaces, which are made of brick – a job for Mr. Shafto. The furnace is a big round pot and around that is a big square of brick work and they’re 15 to 20 feet high and they hold them together with a very big timber frame to stop them breaking under the weight of the charge. And to charge them, you have to have a timber ramp that starts at ground level and you wheel all your iron ore and your charcoal to the top of the ramp and you pour it into the top of the furnace. So you need a lot of timber to build a ramp. So in 1570, Lord Montague, he’s upset the commoners okay? In 1570 he claims an iron furnace at Imbhams, Chiddingfold. In 1574, he claims an iron mine in Hambledon. In other words, he’s leased or rented a large track of land, probably down through the Hurst and across the Brickyard, somewhere down there to dig for iron ore. And he did the same thing down in Cowdray Park. He was, to my mind, he was a Richard Branson of Hambledon. He was everywhere buying and selling and doing deals. He’s down in Cowdray and he’s got a grant on the large piece of land down there. And two of the conditions on this grant was that he returned the land into the condition that he found it. And he wasn’t to dig pits deeper than 29 feet. Now it’s on record that they went as deep as 39 feet. You imagine how much clay they moved down in the hust to get to the iron ore. There must have been a great deal of iron ore down there when they got there, or it wouldn’t have been worth their while digging these great pits. So let’s think about it. Lord Montague, he’s set up an iron furnace, he’s done a deal with the Lord of the manor to cut the trees down for wood. He’s done another deal to get iron ore and now he’s gotta get charcoal. Now, in that time in Surrey there were 300 timber merchants buying and selling timber.

And I suspect the timber was being brought in from a long way away because the people that ran these furnaces wouldn’t take charcoal that had traveled more than three miles. There’s a very good example of this on North end, furnace staying at Fernhurst’s. And it was run by a couple. The man died and his wife continued to run the furnace and she ordered a load of coals, which is what they called the charcoal. And when these coals arrived, she said to one of the wagon drivers, where have you come from? And this chap didn’t realize, he told her where he’d come from and he’d traveled more than three miles and she sent him back. She wouldn’t have the charcoal because she said if it traveled in these oxcarts over the roads that we had, it’s all broken up. And what they needed in their furnaces was bits of charcoal, not like your barbecue, bits of charcoal as big as my arm and as thick as my arm.

And she didn’t want powder so she sent it away. So I imagine they were cutting timbering from miles away, but they must have been bringing it to this area to turn it into charcoal. So can you imagine what it was like in the 1600’s and the early 1700s? There must have been charcoal and the noise from these furnaces because when they, you, you imagine, let’s start with the furnace. He’s making a furnace, Lord Montague. So he’s got first to find someone with a stream and then he dams a stream and they build a big pond and they get brick layers and people in to build the retaining walls and the sluice gates. And then below that he builds his water wheel and it’s a big water wheel and it’s got the leats running to it to make the wheel go round. And after that there’s a long shaft which operates two big bellows and there’s a bellows maker in Haslemere who died in 1630 odd. And he’s still buried there. He was a bellows maker.

So someone’s making bellows and these things have gotta run day and night. And coming out the other end, because these furnaces are famous, they’re making guns, we’ll have to bore the guns. So we talk about that in a minute. Anyway, Shafto’s built the furnace. The carpenter, maybe the man who lived in Oakhurst, has built all the timber work. Someone’s making charcoal and they’re gonna make a lot of charcoal. And then they have a brick store on site to store the charcoal because A: they want to keep it dry and B: they can’t risk it catching fire. So it’s gotta be covered. And meanwhile, this whole army of men all down here through the Hurst and they’re digging great pits to get it the iron ore, which is called iron carbonite. And when it comes out, it’s a yellowy color and it’s a stone big as my fist, the bit I saw, and it’s quite flaky. And they’d leave it in piles in the woods and it would oxidize and become iron oxide. And that was the stuff that got poured into the top of the furnace.

So Lord Montague couldn’t do all this. So this is when the Yawden family come on the scene and the Yawden. Family were iron masters. They came from West Sussex. The father built himself a very big house at Blackdown. And his son ran the furnace at Imbhams and he had a contract to make guns. And what they do when they get this furnace going, they’ve spent most of the summer digging iron ore. And the iron ore is then carted to the site and the the charcoal is all brought and stored on site and then they light the furnace. And that when they light it, they called that a campaign and the water will starts turning, the bellows start blowing and they’re gonna run this continuously for months.

So it was most important, someone’s watching that day and night and they’ve calculated that it took 50 people to operate a furnace. And there was another big furnace. The biggest furnace was on the corner of the common at Thursley behind where the caravans are. The pond is still there. And that was one of the biggest ones round here. And that also made cannon. And there was another brother who set up on Witley common two great hammers. And these were tilt hammers. They again were operated by be a bellows operating a furnace, but it wasn’t a furnace for melting. This was a big hearth for heating the iron. If they didn’t make cannons, they made cells. They randomly what they did once a day, they broached the bottom of the furnace and the iron ore would run out into a mould. If you were making a cannon, it ran into the mould for the cannon. But if you were just making pig iron, it ran out into rectangle of blocks of iron. And these blocks were then taken to the great hammers at Witley Park where they had to be hammered and hammered and hammered, get red hot hammered, red hot hammered. And this drives the carbon out of it. And in time you finish up the maleable iron, you can then make plough shears anything out of maleable iron the blacksmith can use it. And that’s what they were doing. And the chap that had the hammer mills on Witley Common, he arranged with the lord of the manor to let his workers build cottages on the wasteland, on the edge of the common. He didn’t say how many, but he also made an arrangement that they could dig 10,000 turfs a year to use as fuel and they could also build lime kilns. And well this is a bit I like and on the clause that locals were to be given first choice before foreigners. Do you like that? Because a foreigner in those days, he probably only came from Guildford.

But it was a very, very busy industry. If you can think, there were two poets actually who wrote about these furnaces in Hambledon. One chap commented on the furnaces at night lighting the sky up. He said, you could see from miles the red glow from these furnaces because they’re going like a blow lamp its blowing at the top of these things. And the chap that was writing about Witley Common, he said that the noise from the hammers were consistent day and night. You could hear these hammers pounding all the while they were working. So you didn’t get much sleep round here in those days.

And there were lots of foreigners that got, cuz a lot of people came in to work on these iron works. There couldn’t have been enough labour locally I don’t think, to do that. So they had to bring people in. Take your imagination with you because wherever you look in Hambledon, you just look over the fence and you imagine three little girls in lace boots, probably aprons they would’ve had bonnets on because it was May, and they’re all walking along in a row doing this. You just imagine. And wherever you went, there were lots and lots of people working. You get lists here. And these chaps were working in these fields for days. And the harrowing and things that went on. Nowadays, you see this great thing appear up behind the church and I’m waiting for it. It’s up there at night, I’m waiting for it to play a tune, an ET to arrive because it whizzes up and down with all the lights on. And when you get out there in the morning, it’s all gone. Everything’s gone. So, you know, it’s a different time, isn’t it?

But take your, take your imagination, walk through the hust, and the next time you walk down to Waltons Brickyard, look at all these depressions. You’re not on a battlefield. It’s not the Somme. I know it looks like the Somme, but you imagine those chaps digging, going down anything up to 30 feet in the clay and they’re digging clay and they would dig this stuff out, get the iron ore out, and then they’d dig another pit and backfill the first one. But there must have been a lot of iron ore down there for these furnaces to churn a ton of iron a day. It was big business, wasn’t it?

What another thing I didn’t, didn’t tell you. The guns, the people in Surrey were, were the best gun cannon makers here apparently. And there’s in the Privy Council, it was brought up in the Privy Council that the French, those foreigners again, were trying to get Surrey gun makers to go to France to set up gun making because the Surrey men were, had a, a secret they didn’t share. How to make moulds for cannon. Now how do you make a mould for a canon? These fellas had a method of doing it that the French wanted to get hold of. Unfortunately they didn’t tell them, but so they were molding guns of all shapes and sizes and they made a lot of guns. You think how many guns there were on the ships. And if you read the record of Trafalgar, there’s a chap, Bouvois, he’s just written about the Battle of Trafalgar. He reckoned that the Victory fired four thousand cannon bulls in four hours. I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration, really. Those fellas would’ve been working like madman. But anyway, I think they, they probably only fired half that number.

But no one’s ever told me who do they make a cannonball? You know, they made guns and they obviously had the method because when they’d moulded these guns, they put them on a jig. And the Admiralty, they tried making guns moulded with the bore in them. And the admiralty didn’t want that. I suspect you could find blow holes in the things and they were dangerous. I don’t know. They insisted that the bores were bored properly. So you had a boring machine beside your furnace. How did they get this set up to bore down the middle of a cannon and get it so it didn’t come out the side or, or whatever. I dunno. So they were very clever, these fellas and these gun makers in, Surrey. Were the best. Very good at guns. So we’ve got lot, we can boast about aren’t we?

Anyway, I’m finished now folks.