what does the bottom end look like?
Rotavating the garden yesterday, and apart from the usual bits of broken china, I found a few interesting objects (including a Browning M2 machine gun shell casing), a couple of which I have no idea what they are.
One's large, the others are smaller, but the construction is the same - a ceramic-like outer with a bore containing what looks like a graphite rod. There's a touch of copper corrosion visible of the end of the larger item, and with graphite being a conductor, leads me to believe they are electrical components of some type.
Everything I'm pulling out of the ground is 1940's / 1950's, so assume these are of the same vintage, whatever they are.
what does the bottom end look like?
Anything like this?
https://maas.museum/inside-the-colle...s-its-secrets/
"A man of little significance"
Batteries! Yes, I think that's it! It very closely resembles the ones shown in that link. I'm sure that the circumstances of these being in my garden aren't any more exciting than someone 70 years ago throwing their old torch batteries away carelessly, but there's a local story of a B-17 crashing while on a training flight, and I did find that shell casing... More excavations required!
Is it ticking?
Sadly no B-17, but this week as revealed quite a few bottle from the 50's, a .303 rifle casing, a road cats eye, broken farm implements and lots of now-identified old-style batteries. The bottles are fun, with a couple from long-gone local breweries, Brylcreem, Veno's "Lightning" cough cure, Owbridge's "Lung Tonic" and lots of nicely styled ones that contained meat paste! Oh, and a mystery feature that's possibly the remains of a long-lost outside toilet!
That looks like a waste holding pit for the house. In urban areas interwar you would have had these collectingvthe foul, and they would have been pumped out typically once per year.