When we moved into our house twenty-three years ago it had no central heating. There was a coal-fired boiler in the kitchen that the elderly couple we were buying from kept going all the time. Of course as soon as we moved in it went out. The only device that could get it started again was a gas poker. I explained to this to the gas engineer we had working in the house yesterday. Nice bloke, in his thirties, I should think. "What's a gas poker?" he asked.
I explained it was a device such as you might use for poking the fire but if you connected it to the gas mains and applied a match to it flames would shoot out of holes in the side. Then you pushed it under the fuel on the fire until it got a glow going. That's a gas poker, I said.
He gulped and handed me a safety leaflet.
6 comments:
I wonder if he's ever seen anyone holding a newspaper across the front of an open fire in order to make it draw?
I had an eccentric great-aunt who used to do just that. She generally used the News of The World to "draw" the fire after she'd emptied half a bag of sugar over it first.
Lighting cigarettes off the ring of an electric cooker...
my Gran had a half-range cooker with side oven in which she used to dry grapefruit skins from breakfast to use as fire lighters elsewhere in the house. And yes she had a gas poker as well. When she was out the room my brother and I would have sword fight with it and the normal poker.
Newspaper - check, sugar - check. As a boy I was inculcated into the process of lighting a piece of rolled up newspaper from the weedy pilot light and then sticking it further back into the boiler to fire it in order to heat the water for my bath. If you timed it right you could make the initial flare up shoot out of the little hole in the front across the room with a satisfying bang. I must have been about six. Some years later when it went out and we couldn't relight it a white-faced engineer locked it off with security tags before pleading with us to get it replaced immediately.
I can remember my grandma having a gas poker to light the coal fire in the lounge.
Isn't it a bit strange that a gas feed was installed next to the coal fire though? For the sake of a few quid, they could have had a gas fire!
Having said that though, in grandmas case, they had a coal allowance due to grandad being an ex-miner.
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