Grimly Curmudgeon wrote:
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the
drugs began to take hold. I remember Stephen Gower
saying something like:

A friend wonders what this device is, found in an alcove in a corridor of his
workplace: http://www.michaelhowe.org/images/IMAG0003.jpg

He's pretty sure that pipework isn't actually connected to the gas, and he's
not in the maintenance department, so this is pure curiosity!

Could be for anything.
Perhaps there was a need at one time for a large heated container of
water /soup /tar /who knows.

you folks are just too young.

That's simply an upside down COAL gas ring (I reckon) that probably used
to simply heat a kettle and keep the tea warm.


Before central heating you didn't want to get up and go to the freezing
cold kitchen and crack the ice on the milk bottle and come back to the
one room you could afford to heat, (to the point where undervest,
shirt, v-necked waistcoat pullover, a rug over your knees and a jacket
and blanket round your shoulders and fingerless gloves could just about
avoid hypothermia*). So a little gas ring by the Radio, listening to
Hancock's Half Hour, and some Tetley tea bags, and milk in a jug, with
plenty of sugar lumps, made the evening survivable.

*it was known as dying of cold then, and a lot of people did.