ISSUE 16 – FEBRUARY/MARCH 2017 – FREE
Ludlow’s Mr Inventer: Douglas Buchanan Fiction: Return of Drat the Dredger Expensive Mistakes How our town’s other half lived Beaujolais Run Destroyer Class: HMS Ludlow Reviewed: Yalta game Grand National winner: Forbra
“When we first knew Douglas, one of the major inventions on his mind, other than the tantalising-sounding underwater bike, was knife-proof armour that he was developing for the Metropolitan Police.” I MOVED to Ludlow in 1991 because my mum had met a man called Douglas at a party. Douglas (a short, wirey Glaswegian with bushy eyebrows and a loud laugh) announced that it was love at first sight and, after six months of driving back and forth over the hills from Wolverhampton, my mum made the leap and we moved in with him to a three-bedroom cottage at the top of Titterstone Clee Hill ... above the aptly named village of Bedlam. Douglas said that he chose the house because it had a stream and a waterfall in the garden, and glorious views – he’d decided to buy before he even went inside. For all the years that he lived there, he spent his leisure time at the weekends cutting the grass of
the two acres of land on either side of the stream, often at ridiculously steep angles, or tinkering with the (overwhelmed) lawn mower and humming to himself. It made a reasonable substitute for the work that was his obsession and his life. ‘Was it love at first sight for you too?’ I asked my mother. She didn’t look too convinced, but she said she thought he was fun, and that the night they met he’d told her about an underwater bike that he had invented, which was certainly an original chat up line. Many of the readers will know about Douglas Buchanan (an inventor and designer) who was a colourful character in Ludlow for the last 30 years, working from various workshops he rented around town.
He was often making a splash with his latest invention, including things like boots for dogs, which he sold to the prison services and, later, the Queen; knife-proof armour, developed for the scientific department of the Metropolitan police; and a radically new golf club that conformed with the rules of golf but was so new and different that golfers, a conservative bunch, just wouldn’t buy it. An easy and fun subject for journalists with a spot to fill, he was regularly in the local papers and could be seen around and about buying machine parts and tools in Morris Bufton’s, petrol for the lawnmower at the garages, or collecting our regular Friday night takeaway from the Wonder House on Old Street.
– www.ludlowledger.co.uk –
Douglas was born in Glasgow, grandson of the architect Joseph Boyd, who designed the city cinemas in the 1930s, and son of Sir John Buchanan, who was part of the fabrication team for the wooden Mosquito plane that was so pivotal in World War II. He admitted to rifling (as a child) through his father’s desk and helping himself to negatives of photos that documented the development of the Mosquito because, cut up, they made good flights for arrows; he also got into trouble with the Glasgow tram company for getting his model planes stuck in their cables. After training as an engineer, and a stint at art school, he went off to become
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