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- Fire and brimstone - 15th January 2025
During a 23 year career with the BBC, and 41 years in journalism, (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, always noticed the buildings lived in by the crooks and corrupt officials as he ‘door-stepped’ them, and this is now underlined with new evidence about how they have evolved.
As you hammered on people’s doors, you had to do something to keep your mind occupied as you waited for a response.
Sometimes there would be no answer at all because the incumbent was hiding inside, and in those cases you would stuff a note through the letter box with a list of questions, because breaking-in was out of the question.
It may sound bizarre, but you would often then look at the building itself and muse about how key parts have evolved.
The door itself, for example, is a relatively new phenomenon.
The earliest recorded doors appear in the paintings of Egyptian tombs, which show them as single or doubles, each of a single piece of wood or stone, and were often fake or perhaps intended as doors to the afterlife.
The door on Rating Row in Beaumaris is said to be the largest single-hinged door in the world, and the oldest one in England can be found at Westminster Abbey and dates from 1050.
Then, as you stood on the door step for ages, you would look at the windows (often large), and think about how they were made.
The Romans were the first known to use glass for windows.
In England, glass became common in the windows of ordinary homes only in the early 17th century whereas windows made up of panes of flattened animal horn were used as early as the 14th century.
Modern-style floor-to-ceiling windows (and I used to see a lot of those) became possible only after industrial plate-glass-making processes were fully perfected.
The chimneys, too, of those bent officials were often interesting.
If it was a house built in the 1960s or 70s then it was a way of displaying their ill-gotten gains, and were an outside feature, but if it was more modern then it was a modest affair, and may have been totally redundant anyway with central heating. As The Economist has put it, the fire places have become “attractive period details”.
Their evolution has been different.
The birth of the modern chimney has its roots (or should I say ’embers’?!) in the move away from living in wooden round houses, where the fire was from wood or charcoal, to families being in brick or stone built homes.
Wood smoke could find its way out of the holes and gaps in wattle-and-daub houses, using the small openings of thatched roofs but coal smoke could not.
Houses were later rebuilt with chimneys to whip away the noxious gases in homes.
The ‘Great Rebuilding’ of London in the 17th century, aided by the Great Fire in 1666, turned a wood-powered city into a coal-fired one.
Much of this has only come to light now, although I would always wonder about these things as I stood on the door step waiting for a reply which might never come.
You had to do something…
The memories of Phil’s decades long award-winning career in journalism (which includes stories from ‘door-steps’) as he was gripped by the rare neurological condition, Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
Tomorrow – ‘Faulty delivery part two’, and how MPs declaring that compensation is not being paid quickly enough after the shocking Post Office (PO) scandal, while demanding the UK Government impose penalties if the process doesn’t speed up, once again highlight the central role of Wales in the enormous scandal.
