Sketchbook Continued

 Only four since my last post. They are -

Oyster Seller

You know, today we tend to think of oysters as a delicacy you might order in a fancy restaurant. They're certainly not an everyday food of the poor. Yet if you were to go back to Victoria/Edwardian times, that's exactly what they were. Oysters were cheaper than red meat and the railways meant that they could be transported in huge numbers to the rapidly expanding cities. This depicts a street seller.

Post man and van collection c. 1920

Royal mail vans are still a common sight throughout the UK. Not vans like this one though. The very first Royal Mail vehicle was a converted steam traction engine. Along with many other British institutions, the Royal Mail's use of motorised vehicles greatly increased in the period between the two world wars.

Street Violinist

I was drawn to this scene, even though it is modern compared with most of the other drawings in the new sketchbook. The violinist seems to be playing i frot of a museum or a public gallery.

Puffing Billy

Yes, back to railways again. This is Puffing Billy and it is the world's oldest surviving steam Locomotive. The world's first ever steam locomotive was Richard Trevithick's Penydarren locomotive of 1804. This was made ten years later for Wylam Colliery in Northumberland, to haul wagons to the docks. It's sister locomotive, Wylam Dilly, was made just after and is actually the world's second oldest surviving steam locomotive. By modern standards Billy and Dilly were inefficient, but they worked for over forty years, and certainly influenced another Northumberland colliery engineer called George Stephenson, who was building his own first colliery locomotives at the same time as Wylam Colliery chief engineer William Hedley. In 1856 Billy was put on display in the London Patent Office, which later became The Science Museum, where it can be seen today. Dilly is on display in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Puffing Billy may possibly be where the phrase, going like Billy-o is derived from.