CURIOSITIES:I DON'T KNOW HOW it got there. I just looked up and there it was. My brother-in-law Tom, who shares the office, says that's the thing about working in dusty attics. Oddities materialise like that. There's certainly a hint of Descartes about attics for someone like me writing a column like this. I looked therefore it was.
The object of our attention was a long wooden stick with a somewhat discoloured copper funnel at one end. A brass nameplate on the funnel bore the following words: "The British Vacuum Washer Co - The Swiftsure" followed by "Patent No 10999/15" and the address, "Duke St, Liverpool".
"So it's a hoover," said Tom uncertainly.
I went online. The only site that could supply the answer was a chat forum called "CR4 - The Engineer's Place for News and Discussion". Under the useful heading, "What's my thing?", was a blurred image of the aforesaid copper funnel with a teasing note attached, inviting mugs like me to guess its purpose.
Some answers were courageous. The cone of a cream separator? A ventilated candle-snuffer? Others were rather more creative. The Tin Man's hat from The Wizard of Oz? A type of flugelhorn outlawed because its sound was so piercing? One pyromaniac wondered was it "a gas burner head for weeding small plots by burning?"
The Swiftsure was, in fact, a washing posser, the must-have household gadget of the Edwardian Age. It was invented - or at least patented - by a subsidiary of the British Vacuum Company, founded by Hubert Cecil Booth in 1901. Booth is one of many people credited with inventing the first vacuum cleaner. (His petrol-driven pump was an elaborate cocktail involving a horse, a carriage and a hosepipe. It was all the rage until Hoovers' "bag-on-stick" arrived in 1907).
The luckless scrubbers for whose hands the Swiftsure copper posser was ultimately destined called this gadget a "Dolly Washer". Its purpose was simply "to poss" or mix clothes around while they were being washed, a role now taken on by the grrrrrunh, grrrrrrunh noise-making part of the contemporary washing machine. It ran on one woman-power, with the user heaving up and down on the handle, making sure it was vertical at all times, and the posser itself pounding into a wooden tub of soapy water and dirty clothes. One would be ill-advised to get into an arm wrestle with a woman skilled in the art of twisting a "Dolly-Washer".
At any rate, at least I have a birthday present for my brother-in-law. An antique loo-roll holder, no less. After all, it was almost certainly him who left it by my desk in the first place.