I was fortunate enough recently to visit one of York's most historic houses in the inestimable company of Dr Dav Smith. Whilst Dav assessed timber beams using laser beams, I showed off my hidden shallows by fixating upon the building's 20th Century features. Two in particular caught my eye:
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| 1) A wall-mounted contraption |
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| 2) some cryptic door-frame graffiti. |
This evening, after literally minutes of online research, I can reveal the remarkable stories behind these fascinating items.
1) Disappointingly, despite my hopes that - with the product name shown in the photo below - it was some kind of boiler (hopefully endorsed by Glenn Close), this device turned out to be a state-of-the-art sanitary-product incinerator from the early 1970s.
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| BUNNIE+ |
I even found an advert in an early 1970s medical products brochure extolling its amazing virtues:
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| This is a mini-incinerator - a wall mounted miracle called the Bunnie-plus. |
2) was much more satisfying, though, as I was able to date the graffiti incredibly precisely. Numbered as they were from 20 to 1, I presumed the words had to mark some sort of countdown. And with names such as Queen, Dana, and Mud, my mind immediately turned to mid-70s pop music. Was it the Top 20 from a particular week in the decade?
After searching the UK Singles Charts archive for Queen, Dana, and Mud, I was delighted to discover it was! The incompleted, abbreviated, slightly illegible scrawls were a record of the UK hit parade from over half-a-century ago: the week of February 23rd to March 1st 1975!
My only real concern with this priceless example of household archaeology is that the number 1 spot on the list appears to be occupied by RUBBISH (probably meant to be spoken in the voice of Geoffrey Boycott). The UK Number 1 single at the end of February 1975 was this:
The tenants of this building clearly didn't know a classic pop song when they heard one!
Nonetheless, I now demand that all this information be incorporated into the next upgrade of the city's online archaeological portal. After all, who doesn't want to enjoy York Historic Environment Record: 20 Smash Hits?
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