• 'Heffers' - by Paul Fry
• 'A Basket of Pigeons' - by Paul Fry

'Heffers'

One incident, which is on one or the other videos of the S&D was about the heffers.
"A porter at Priory Road station came to work with a brand new pair of hobnailed boots of which he was very proud. But an amusing thing happened later in the day when a local farmer brought to the station for despatch by passenger train, several very young heifers all done up properly in sacks for the journey. They were tethered to suitable rainwater pipes waiting to be loaded into the train. When it was time for the heifers to be loaded, the porter undid one of them and was leading it along the platform, when suddenly it took off at high speed up the station yard with the porter being towed along unable to get a grip with his hobnailed boots. To the amusement of all watching he was taken up the yard and out into Priory Road before he could bring the heifer to a stop".

Paul Fry.

'A Basket of Pigeons'

When I was working at Priory Road station it certainly was the duty for station staff to handle the baskets of pigeons that either came in or were being despatched to other stations.

When the pigeons had been released on arrival the date and time of release would be entered on the return label for the fanciers information. And the basket sent back to the sender. Some fanciers requested to know what the weather conditions were on release.

This reminds me of a lovely thing that happened one day when a local fancier cycled about three miles into the station from an outlying village, came to the office and paid the going rate for the carriage, and then departed the three miles home on his bike. However there was a new young porter on duty, who seeing the basket of birds on the platform waiting to go off on the next train promptly carried the basket out into the station yard and released the birds, duly filling in the required details on the label.

The first thing we in the office knew that all was not well was when later in the afternoon the fancier cycled the three miles back to the station with the pigeons again. He was not in a happy mood as these were the same birds he had cycled in with earlier. When he arrived home he found his birds back in their loft. They had returned home before him, proving that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

Paul Fry.

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