The odd story of the Swastika electric laundry vans
Discussion
I was reading a detective story the other day by the excellent Irish writer John Banville, ( who writes them under the nom-de-plume of Benjamin Black). Set in the fifties in Dublin it was rich in period detail, and at one point referred to the Swastika laundry van.
This brought back memories buried in my cranial basement of these vans and others like them as at one time there were huge numbers of them in Dublin. At the house where I grew up the milk, bread and laundry came by electric van, and I have vivid memories of the quiet whine of the milk float and the rattle of the glass bottles as it went on its way at 5am.
Anyway, back to the Swastika laundry. I never connected the symbol until now, decades later. As a child, the red vans were a common sight, and had used the swastika since 1912 when the founder was given an ornament of a cat which had the symbol and decided to use it. After darkness began to fall in Europe with the rise of Hitler he added the "founded in 1912" to distinguish his swastika. Amazingly it was used uninterrupted in Dublin until a merger sometime in the seventies. There was a remaining swastika on the laundry chimney until a visiting British general noticed it from the window of the British Embassy and asked for its removal.
It seems so utterly monstrous now to have continued to use the symbol after the war, but I never heard it even discussed when I lived in Ireland ( until 1975)
The various delivery vans looked like this:
Bread vans from Johnson Mooney and O'Brien
a very late breadvan in 1980
how we got out milk
The swastika laundry vans
This brought back memories buried in my cranial basement of these vans and others like them as at one time there were huge numbers of them in Dublin. At the house where I grew up the milk, bread and laundry came by electric van, and I have vivid memories of the quiet whine of the milk float and the rattle of the glass bottles as it went on its way at 5am.
Anyway, back to the Swastika laundry. I never connected the symbol until now, decades later. As a child, the red vans were a common sight, and had used the swastika since 1912 when the founder was given an ornament of a cat which had the symbol and decided to use it. After darkness began to fall in Europe with the rise of Hitler he added the "founded in 1912" to distinguish his swastika. Amazingly it was used uninterrupted in Dublin until a merger sometime in the seventies. There was a remaining swastika on the laundry chimney until a visiting British general noticed it from the window of the British Embassy and asked for its removal.
It seems so utterly monstrous now to have continued to use the symbol after the war, but I never heard it even discussed when I lived in Ireland ( until 1975)
The various delivery vans looked like this:
Bread vans from Johnson Mooney and O'Brien
a very late breadvan in 1980
how we got out milk
The swastika laundry vans
nicanary said:
Verdamt! Foiled at the last moment! Now ve vill hav to enter Britain via a "bed and breakfast" in Weston-super-Mare. Call ourselves Mr.Bimmler und Mr. Hilter. What? That's not a map of Weston but a map of Poland???Pip-pip old chap, ja, Bobby Moore, Bobby Charlton, toodle-oo ja......
The German plot was extensive and stealthy, they were almost invisible...
though sometimes acted suspiciously...
but nothing got past the Irish MI6 who were often cunningly disguised....
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