Posted by Peter Ceresole on April 01, 2011 at 13:53:25 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: Iron Railing posted by Tom Napier on April 01, 2011 at 12:23:30:
during WWII all the more solid and formal iron railings round parks and gardens were cut down for scrap, leaving only ugly stumps.
I remember those stumps well; born at the end of '39, by the time I was aware of such things, I thought that all railings were stumps.
The last laugh is that the quality of the railings as scrap was so low that most of them were just cut down and stored- and caused much indignation decades later, when they were discovered, unused. But the value was really moral; it was royal parks and the well to do who had railings, and cutting them down was a visible token of sharing the sacrifices of war.
The equivalent phrase used in the present economic crisis is 'we're all in this together'. Equally false, of course.