Gas Lit Houses

I guess I am older than you jacq10. When I was a child with a naked flame in my attic bedroom there was not really much official health and safety.

Grandetante, thanks for filling in a gap in my knowledge. Of course, the Loch Awe power scheme would have affected the Kyles of Bute.

Thanks Alexa I had forgotten about Tilley lamps. We also headed north for the holidays and I now vividly remember my uncle used to spend a lot of time "trimming the wick" of the Tilley lamps at the kitchen table. My aunt used to bake great scones on the black range. I remember the small living room being really hot and the rest of the house freezing. We weren't allowed candles in the bedroom but had great fun with torches!!

My aunt had gas lights in the 1950s.
We lived in Wales from 1973 to 1994 and attended a little church which had gas lighting.

oh yes the gas lights in caravans, forgot allabout that

You sound like a young witch Gonegirl. A good beginning for a story.

I can remember homes in the Scottish Highlands that only had oil lamps prior to the building of the hydro-electric plant at Loch Awe in the 1960s.

We had electricity, outside Glasgow, but burnt Welsh anthracite in the Raeburn and coal in the fireplaces.

Oops! I sound like an old witch now!

"Solid fuel stove"! I had one of those in my caravan - the first place I owned after coming out of bedsits. Me and my black pussycat loved that little stove.

It wasn't" the dark ages" for me. The first home my husband and I had was a much loved caravan on a RAF caravan site. It had calor gas for lighting and cooking and a solid fuel stove for heating.

When Mum and Dad first married and I was born we lived with my maternal grandmother. She has the range cooker in the back kitchen,kettle always on the heat and the side ovens for cooking etc. She eventually got a gas cooker for the scullery,don’t remember gas lights but we did have lamps upstairs and an outside loo full of spiders. We moved to a new council house when I was 4 with electricity but still had open fires and no heating up stairs. Caravan holidays even in the late 50s always had gas lights, Dad used to get very cross if he touched the mantle with the match and broke it. Sounds like the dark ages now.

The small Highland hotel my parent took me to each summer had not even gas. It had |Tilly lamps and candles. I took a chamber stick candle to my bedroom in the attic.

I do. The boarding school went to was in a 19th century mansion which had not been modernised at all. Prefects could all use tapers lit from the open fires, and light the lights taking due care of the flimsy mantles.
The bathrooms would be museum pieces if they still existed.

We had gas light in our hall and up the stairs when I was a child living in a Victorian house. It was very spooky as it cast large shadows! It has always reminded me of Robert Louis Stevenson's Shadow March!

I was born in the 1930's so remember gas lighting quite
vividly. And I was told I used to stare at these lights a lot.
My auntie who lived in the countryside had her only toilet in a shed in the garden. It was just a plank with a hole in it.
I loved her, but hated having to use that toilet.

I like 'From a Railway Carriage'. I used to read it to my children, two of whom are big fans of some kinds of poetry.

‘I was the giant great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill
And sees before him, dale and plain.,
The pleasant land of counterpane.’

Maybelle, the house ou looked at could have been my grans. She had gas lights and a well along with a tap for drinking water.

In the 80's we use to go and stay in a remote cottage in central Wales, that not only had gas lights but not road or lane to get to it. So you had to hike about mile up a steep hill carrying everything you needed. Great fun in the dark.

The poems being quoted are from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses. I immediately thought of them when gas lamps were mentioned, too.

I grew up in a gas-lit house and used to run down the road to buy mantles when the last one broke

The mantles were lovely and silky until you fitted them round the bracket and lit them, then they went very stiff and fragile.

Our last house still had the gas lamps (not working, though) in the bedrooms. It was the 1970s so we removed them, along with the bedroom fireplaces. Of course, now they'd be valued original features but back then it was all about gaining space and streamlining everything.

We had them in our touring caravan and I really liked them

Yes, my gran had gas wall lights, can remember the bed recess in the main room and being in the bed there. Have exterior photos of the cottage, but now sadly demolished.

My parents bought the house next door to my grandparents' house in 1952 and they had mains electricity put on. My grandparents always used the gas lights and I don't recall if they ever had electricity connected.

They were small Victorian terraced houses in a Surrey village.

In our village a couple of years ago, the shop that had been run by 2 elderly spinster sisters was sold when one of them died and the other went into long term care. When the shop was cleared out, ready for putting up for sale, a large box of Aladdin gas mantles was found, all priced up at 5d!

holidays holidayed.

My older brother and I had torches, Pifco torches which were shaped somewhat like a hip flask without the dinge in one side.
The top was black metal and slid from side to side when pushed to allow the bulb to shine through the different convex glass colours set into it.
The centre one was clear the red glass on the right and green on the left.
We used to shine the green light under our chins to look ghostly.
We also holidays in bungalows in N. Wales which had both gas and oil lamps. The bungalows were named Deeside and Danescourt.
Dad would trim the lamps every evening then we'd play ludo, snakes and ladders and the Old Maid card game before Ovaltine and bed.