COAL HOLE DESIGNS

Taranaki Daily News, 23 July 1929, Page 9

COAL HOLE DESIGNS

DOCTOR’S QUAINT HOBBY.

MANY SKETCHES MADE.

One of the most curious of hobbies must be that of collecting the designs of London coal-shoot covers, which was practised by 90-year-old Dr. Shephard Taylor, of Edgefield, Melton Constable, Norfolk.

Over sixty years ago as a young medical student in London, Dr. Taylor was impressed by the infinite variety and beauty of the coal-shoot covers in the pavement on which thousands of persons walk daily without giving them a • second thought. He discovered and sketched over 150 different varieties, which have now been placed on record in a booklet named •‘Opercula,” published by “The Iron-, monger.”

Opercula is the more euphonious name selected by Dr. Taylor for his coal-plates, and, according to the dictionary meaning, it is “a cover or lid; the plate over the entrance of a shell.” “The coal-hole opercula,” writes Dr. Taylor, “were all sketched by me in the year 1863 when a medical student at King’s College Hospital, London, when that institution was in Portugal Street, in the vicinity of the Strand.

“I was a lodger, at the time, in Argyle Street, near King’s Cross, in which district my attention was first drawn to the great variety of devices on the opercula, and I determined to try and reproduce them on paper.” “My eyes got so accustomed to the work that I could immediately recognise the smallest difference between any two opercula, without comparing one with the other, and I might have added to my series had I remained longer in London.” Dr. Taylor, who was in Berlin during the Franco-German war, w T as formerly medical officer of health for Cromer.