Cob and Chalk
[VIII]
Cob and Chalk
Of Cob I know little by actual experiment. It is fully dealt with in the body of this work, and readers will find that it is a kind of mud or clay concrete reinforced with straw. It is therefore totally and absolutely different from Pisé. One is wet, the other dry.
All that need be said about chalk is said by the author of the present book.
[IX]
A Postscript
In the body of this work mention is made of a very successful experiment in Pisé de terre made by the officials of a Rhodesian mining company; the outcome, I am proud to think, of my pre-war advocacy of Pisé in The Spectator. No sooner had my introduction been finished than there came by way of postscript an exceedingly interesting series of photographs, sent to me by Mr. Pickstone, a gentleman very well known in South Africa for his fruit gardens, his peaches, and his apricots. On the strength of what he had read in The Spectator, Mr. Pickstone lately undertook to build a station building and station-master’s house for the railway station at Simondium in the Drakenstein Valley, a place which during the summer is noted for its great heat. In the January number of the South African Railways and Harbours Magazine, Mr. Pickstone gives a detailed account of his bold and successful experiment and illustrates it by a reproduction of some of his photographs. Here is his own account of what he did.
Pisé—a South African Lead
“It must have been about eighteen months ago that the railway administration decided to promote Simondium Siding to the dignity of a station. As a siding, it had always been a busy place in the fruit season, during which time a permanent checker had for some years been kept quite busy, his accommodation being a couple of small tin shanties, and he had been accustomed to board out where he could. Now we were to have a ‘pukka’ station-master and, presumably, suitable premises. The department quickly got to work and the station-master’s house arrived. It was what one might call a second-hand, or even a third- or fourth-hand one, consisting of the inevitable sheets of galvanised iron and the ever-essential Oregon and Swedish timber. Our new station-master also shortly afterwards arrived, and turned out to be a married man with a wife and four children. The station-master was not a grouser, but during the hot summer—and it is terribly hot in the Drakenstein Valley during that time of the year—he complained to me that it was almost impossible to hold on, owing to the conditions under which he and his family had to live. It was just about this time that I saw in The Spectator a series of articles strongly advocating ‘Pisé de terre’ construction for buildings of all kinds; especially was it recommended as a war-time expedient for rapid and economical construction for barracks and hospitals, and, indeed, it was strongly recommended by Mr. St. Loe Strachey, the editor, for all sorts of general building and military purposes. It is a curious fact, which many readers could verify, that frequently one lives one’s life under certain conditions, and in reality remains absolutely blind to their presence and potentialities. Here was I, living in a country where some of the most beautiful old homesteads are on the principle of the ‘Pisé de terre’ construction, and a large proportion of the older farm buildings in this district also built of similar material, with the additional pleasing accompaniment of beautiful beams, ceilings and floors made of colonial pine—one may advisedly add, the despised colonial pine. Some of these buildings have stood the wear and use of close on a century, and are still an object of joy to those privileged to have an eye to see. Here lived I, as I say, blind to its potentialities for to-day, although it had been clearly appreciated and carried out with the most charming and solid results by our great-grandfathers in the old slave-labour days.”
