Danny42C
"Your post #4959 - Danny recalls some small memories of Quarters life."
Your recollections of the temperamental coke boiler in your MQ in Germany brought back memories of a similar beast that lurked in the cellar of our MQ in Moenchengladbach.
It was coke fuelled and when I first started using it, getting it to work properly was a problem and I very sensibly relied on the knowledge of our neighbours. Major problem was not to let the furnace get too hot, if it did so the coke turned into a solid mass of clinker and as a result went out. There was nothing worse than Mrs WT calling me on a cold winter’s day that there the boiler had gone out.
The only way to start it again was with a supply of old crumpled up newspapers, wood kindling and a degree of patience. Eventually with practice it was easy enough, but one had to keep an eye on the flue doors to make sure it didn’t burn too hot. It kept the house beautifully warm in the winter and the German’s, with typical Teutonic thoroughness, even ensured there was a radiator in the garage — ideal for the very early morning cold starts, straight into a warm car – lovely! I returned to the UK in the summer of 1975, just as we were informed that the coke-fired boilers were to be replaced by automatic gas-fired ones — too late for me, but my successor must have been very happy.
As regards your frog in the laundry room — you must have had a similar quarter, as ours too had steps into it from the back garden as can be seen to the left of the open French Door in the photo below.
Last I heard from German friends who lived in the area was that these quarters had been handed back to the Germans and had been sold on the open market with the new buyers doing modern conversions.
Living in the British military married quarter patch not far from the centre of town in Moenchengladbach was very handy, especially if you were a football fan as Borussia Moenchengladbach’s Bökelberg stadium was about three-hundred yards away. The army major who was our next-door neighbour was HQ BAOR’s liaison with the German football authorities and he always had a supply of free tickets for MG’s home games. On home match days it was chaos in the area with fans parking their cars all over the place, pavements included as seen below outside our house.
