Notes & Queries response: What are the best defunct products and overlooked innovations?
image generated by Craiyon The massive hull of The Nore Croft was fashioned from half-metre-thick glass that had been clouded with aqueous salt, rendering it opaque. It was named after a ramshackle navigational marker, formerly a small cottage, that once occupied a brackish peninsula at the mouth of the Thames Estuary. The heaped rubble of the smallholding, around which sheep had once grazed, with strands of green seaweed straggling their fleeces, was commonly lit as a beacon during inclement weather. By the end of 1918, it had been swamped by rising tide levels: “Displaced by the bodies of those fighting men whose lives were claimed by the sea,” according to Rose Kirtley – the writer of a hugely-popular, but now largely forgotten, volume of self-penned meditational verse, titled Tea Breaths: Poems for Secretaries . I have, on my desk in front of me, copies of the notes for an unwritten autobiography that were made by the architect of The Nore Croft – one Leonard Shapland. He recalls t...