The Tin Whistle

How we discovered an old tin whistle…

The old outside toilet belonging to the cottage ‘next door’ as we still call it, was only demolished, along with the adjoining pig sty in 2007, to make way for a woodstore. 

Another small building originally attached to Cyril’s cottage was a bread oven and chimney. This was demolished in 1974 as a preliminary to building works.

The old loo was brick built, with a tiled roof, a green wooden door, cobbled floor, whitewashed walls and with the regulation wooden seat and box. Inside I found a candle holder like the ones in nursery rhymes, and – a tin whistle!

OK, some people read the paper whilst communing with their bowels, others apparently, play the tin whistle. Is this an old Shropshire custom or what? Toulouse Lautrec said that ‘man was at his most contemplative whilst sitting on the toilet’, but musical? Was it just Cyril, or did all the family play?

Whether they were musical or not is unanswerable but one thing is certain, they kept pigs, killed them, and stored them inside the house buried in saltpetre, which has impregnated the wall next to the fire place. They also hung things from the beams. Game, chickens, rabbits, and sides of pork amongst other things no doubt. The hooks are still there.