Transcript: Mr Eddie Saunders remembers a blacksmith's workshop in Liverpool

Description

Mr Eddie Saunders was born in 1903 and was [media]interviewed in 1986 for the 'Looking Back at Liverpool: An Oral History of the Liverpool Region 1900 to 1960.' He remembers the unexplained disappearance of a building wall in Liverpool on a site that once housed a blacksmith's workshop.

Transcript

EDDIE: In the Liverpool paper there was a bit of an article about when they built the ANZ Bank, or when they put additions onto it, there was a brick wall they built and it disappeared. They couldn't understand why it disappeared, and I know where it disappeared into.

INTERVIEWER: Where did it go?

EDDIE: There was an old well there. On the back side of the blacksmith's shop [where the bank building now was] was a tyreing fire where they used to heat the tyres to put on the wheels [of carts], you know, they'd rebuild the wheels, or put new spokes in, or all sorts of things, and fix the wheel up.

And when they heated the tyres up they had to cool them down, and they had a well there. A big lump of a well too. And they used to put a bucket on a rope, throw the bucket down in the water, drag it out and go around the tyre and cool it down so it wouldn't burn the [wooden] wheel. That's where the wall disappeared [into the well]. The bank couldn't understand it. I could've told them but I wasn't going up to the bank to tell them that. [1]

References

Catherine Johnson (ed). Looking Back at Liverpool: An Oral History of the Liverpool Region 1900–1960 (Liverpool: Liverpool City Council, 1986). http://mylibrary.liverpool.nsw.gov.au/Electronicbooks/Lookingbackatliverpoolanoralhistory-1900-1960.pdf

Notes