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Historic Gas Times%u2022 Issue 95 %u2022 June 2018 %u2022pagepage22Hoylake 1918Hoylake and West Kirby are attractive neighbouring communities on the North West corner of the Wirral peninsular, entirely residential in character. From about 1880 they were served by the Hoylake & West Kirby Gas & Water Company, which was bought out by the Urban District Council in about 1926. The Council immediately got Wests to build them a complete continuous vertical retort house, the tallest building in town (besides church steeples), if not the most handsome. This installation lasted until the works closed in 1954, replaced by gas from Birkenhead and Wallasey.The local paper, the %u2018Deeside Advertiser%u2019, had a column headed %u2018By the Way%u2019 for the smaller snippets and, on 18th October 1918, this column led with the single sentence:- %u201cThe coloured men from the West Coast of Africa, now frequently seen in Hoylake thoroughfares, are stokers from the gas works%u201d.The city of Liverpool, where many Hoylake men made their money, was a great port where men from Africa and Asia were an everyday sight. But not in quiet Hoylake or West Kirby. Apparently the Gas Company had found an answer to shortage of workers caused by military recruitment, especially now with compulsory National Service. The authorities were reluctant to allow exemptions, especially for manual workers.Men and women from all over the Empire served in the Great War. However, one does not hear of systematic recruitment of manual workers from overseas to fill gas works vacancies. Hoylake was still using stop-ended horizontal retorts, charging and discharging them was hard, unpleasant work. Cleaning the producer firebars was worse. Many women and older men were tackling some heavy work in the Gas Industry but there were limits.Was Hoylake gas works unique in this venture, and how was it organised? The Minute Books of the Gas Company are not known to survive. It may be significant that ship owners and agents were among local residents, and quite capable of organising the recruitment of teams of men from another continent, should Government approve.JBH(Thanks to Victoria Doran of Hoylake Museum for drawing attention to the press cutting).It%u2019s a relatively rare event but a new book on manufactured gas history has just been published. The book which has focused on the gas industry in Massachusetts was written by Allen Hatheway and Tom Speight, both experienced practitioners in the investigation of former gasworks or as they like to call them in the USA, Manufactured Gas Plants (MGPs). The book which has taken the authors five-years to complete is the first state-level history of the gas industry to be published in the US. The front cover of the book shown on page 3, has a photograph of the Springfield gasworks. The unusual building behind with four chimneys, was the local power plant, it gained fame from featuring in the Dr Suess book, the Lorax, Dr Seuss was a native of Springfield.The authors have undertaken an exhaustive study of the manufactured gas industry in Massachusetts, one of the US states which adopted manufactured gas industry in Massachusetts from the 1820s through to the 1950s. It usefully lists the chronology of events which occurred in the development of the gas industry in this state and highlights Manufactured Gas Plant Remediation: A Case StudyIn our previous issue the front page Barrage Balloon photo was %u201csaid to have been taken in Liverpool%u201d. Bob Davie, a fellowmember of the Merseyside Industrial Heritage Society, has precisely identified the location as Shiel Park, Liverpool, looking due east. In fact, the buildings still stand, with minor changes. The camera location is now under a modern housing development.Bob made good use of Google Street, Google Maps and the 1927 edition of the 1/2,500 County Series map. I have known this area from childhood, yet failed to locate the photo. Apart from the loss of parkland, also lost since the photo was taken are the trams; one of which is partly visible at the right margin.JBHHGT 94 - Balloon Photo