A vintage bottle surfaces

 

It may have been the light from a sunny day at the beach because a glint of something caught my eye and made me pay attention. Glass. I stooped to look closer and picked up a bottle.

Had it been just discarded or washed up? It looked as if it had been buried, brown caked-on sand around its neck, still stoppered.

I could feel the embossment on the body and dusting it down could read the details:

REGISTERED. WJ. BRIGGS. BELFAST and signed WJ.Briggs. But what did it contain?

Holding it up to the light I peered inside hoping to find a roll of paper - a message in a bottle maybe. No such luck, it was quite empty. No hint of or even a trace of whatever liquid it once contained. One thing was sure, it was a glass bottle, dulled by abrasion but clearly vintage.

This would-be beachcomber wanted to learn as much as possible about it.

Questions surfaced. Why was the bottle here? How come? What was nearby? Who left it, an adult or a child? Does the Briggs company still exist? Where was it?

Standing on a shoreline answers to those questions would not be immediately forthcoming and so I took a picture - the one above and returned the bottle to its finding place, tucked in safely so that it wouldn’t cause injury to a child or animal. I’ve used online reverse image searches before and figured that using that technique when I got home might satisfy some of my curiosities. Sharing the picture later, a close family member with a specialist interest in old glass and object biographies berated my decision, “Oh you should have brought it home for me!!!” followed not long after with we’ll have to go back and get it. Well, we could do. More on that later.

The reverse image search, turned up loads of stuff. Who knew? Bottles like this one are indeed vintage. Some even attract good prices on online sales sites. My find appeared to be in better condition than several others I viewed. Helpfully some of the online vendors had done their own research and provided supporting details for their sale items. The Briggs family it transpires were manufacturers of aerated waters and were based in Belfast’s Pine Street from the mid-1880s to the early 1900s. The business appears to have developed through the family line and changed name in the 1970s. My bottle appears to date back to around 1910.

That’s something. How has it managed to survive intact for over 100 years? I think of the history through which it has endured; the bubbled memories of lifetimes though which it has remained hidden.

How has it surfaced? Lara Maiklem in her wonderful book, A Field Guide to Larking (Bloomsbury, 2021) explains in a section titled, The Best Time To Beachlark, that high winds and rough seas can cause movements of sand and drag up hidden objects from the sea floor. We have had plenty of storms and rough seas over the past year so that indeed could be the reason the bottle has found a new hiding place.

Could I recover it? I think so. You see poor substitute as it was for the vintage bottle the photo has at least a modern attribute. Geotagging. When I took the picture on my phone I hadn’t realised it added other data such as latitude and longtitude. So when I click on the information button that accompanies the photo it pulls up a map of where the image was taken.

Spot on! Yes, that’s exactly the place. So next time there I’ll go beachlarking, phone in hand and hope that it’s still there. I would hate to see it on an online auction site.

And I’m also thinking that I’ll bring my own well-stoppered bottle with a note inside to cast on an outgoing tide.

On the proximity of trains

A railway line runs close to the rear of our home. Local and express trains including the hourly ones serving the Belfast/Dublin route hurtle past every fifteen minutes and apart from the occasional sustained warning blast of an air horn we don’t pay them much attention. Visitors to our home are taken aback: “Does that noise not bother you?” It doesn’t. It is simply part of the soundscape of where we live; something we are used to.

Our paternal family has close connection with the railway. Granda Christy was a driver on a steam locomotive for the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) which also operated in Northern Ireland. A story is told of him stopping his engine on the Antrim Coast as he felt that the sound coming back to him from up ahead was not quite right. His intuitive experience was correct, boulders had fallen unto the track. Catastrophe avoided. A close call.

Christy TRACEY with his steam locomotive. Photo source unknown.

Exterior sounds are one type of resonance and those inside another. When travelling by train, I love that rhythmic, clickety-clack of the wheels and that steely, acidic squeal of the rails. I often find myself internally reciting one of my all-time favourite poems, the wonderful, Night Mail by W.H. Auden which was composed to accompany a film documentary of the same name. Consider this opening verse

This is the night mail crossing the border
Bringing the cheque and the postal order
Letters from the rich, letters from the poor
The shop at the corner, the girl next door

Say it with that clickety-clack and you get that lovely onomatopoeic sound of the train wheels. Why not stop reading this now and go look it up?

Go on, there’ll be another train of thought in a minute …

Back to where we live. We have a train station nearby and two level crossings, one for pedestrians only and another for people and vehicles. Protecting the traveller clearly figures in the minds of railway managers as there are several safety notices on display. And at the station you are instructed to stand well behind the platforms vivid yellow line.

All those warnings. Best not to get too close.

Those warnings were nowhere in evidence late last year when our travels took us to Vietnam. Among many cities we visited Hanoi and near our hotel was the aptly named Train Street. Apparently it is the place to visit to experience the regular and close encounter of a huge passenger train. Thousands of people turn up. The odd barrier, no yellow lines and few if any warning lights. Instead tiny businesses of bars, restaurants and shops ply their trade within inches of the passing trains. Merchants can be seen walking across the tracks, serving their customers and sometimes pulling back tables and chairs that maybe, just maybe are a little too close. While the train is still far enough away people place bottle caps on the tracks. These are recovered flattened to wafer thin after the train has passed over them.

This short video captures the sense of proximity and let’s face it, danger.

Train Street. Quite an experience. A thousand miles away from our day-to-day living.

Try to cross while our local level-crossing barrier is closed could open you up to a hefty fine.

Railway buffet services here aren’t about to serve platform drinks shaken and stirred by huge passing locomotives. And that’s as it should be. Leave that up close rail stuff to the railway staff.

I’ll still enjoy the trains going by, listening out for those long-carriage Belfast/Dublin ones and think about who is going where. I’m sure I’ll also think back to Hanoi and Train Street.

And with each blare of the modern day air horns I know I’ll remember my grandfather, translating those klaxon sounds to mental whistle blasts from the age of steam.