Do You Remember This?

[Caran]

You push the damper in
You pull the damper out
And the smoke goes up the chimney just the same?

[gness]

No? What is it, Caran?

[jennyjoan]

yes your central heating

[Mamyalynne]

The damper hung down above the flames and moving the damper sent the heat to the back boiler in an open fire.

[Mamyalynne]

[Caran]

Thank you Mamya I was just looking for that.
This came up on the Rick Stein Cornwall programme. It's connected to Tintagel and a strange very old railway train.

[Mamyalynne]

Ah, well the damper would work in the same way on a train to send the heat to the water tank much as it did in the home.

[Buenchico]

That's a very twee version of the song, Mamya. I prefer this one ;-)

[Buenchico]

My mother always said that whoever wrote that song had never visited our house where, irrespective of the position of the damper, most of the smoke from our coal fire ended up in our living room!

[Caran]

I know that feeling Chris. We had a coal fired range with a damper, it was always very temperamental. In out shake it about!

[ABerrant]

The 'strange very old railway train' was Trevithick's steam-driven road locomotive, the Puffing Devil.

[Buenchico]

The back boiler in our house was totally unusable, so bath night always involved my mother filling up bucket after bucket of hot water from the 'copper' in the kitchen and carrying it through to the bathroom (which, fortunately, was also on the ground floor).

[Buenchico]

That's a beautiful, if somewhat impractical, machine, ABerrant!

Move the slider to 1 min 20 sec to see it in action: