Trolley 17

Another M&S trolley, picked up in Epsom High Street, from roughly where ASK now is, the place that used to be 'The Old Bank' and before that really was a bank. It might even have had a proper bank manager.

The pub that used to get rid of people such as ourselves at around 2000 on a Friday by gradually turning the music up. I suppose that even then, this being maybe 15 years ago, we were far too old to be in a pub which sported chaps in black suits guarding the doors.

The pub which once had Morley's three volume biography of Gladstone, quietly on a shelf at the back and which I dare say the barmaid would have let me carry off had I slipped her a fiver. I think I may have subsequently borrowed the book from the Treasury Library, shortly before they auctioned off pretty much all of their older stock, some of it quite interesting for those of us with a bit of time to spare. Needed the space for internet terminals and has gone the way, I imagine, of most workplace libraries. But the Royal Astronomical Society still had a rather fancy one last time I visited and the Royal Institute still had one rather more recently, just before Christmas, but not in such a fancy room, at least not the bit of it I came across. There one could look at, for example, bound copies of  'Nature' from the 1920's. Both, I dare say, barely used these days, but they can't bring themselves to break them up.

PS: google tells me that the biography was a best seller which made the author getting of for £15,000 and as much again for the subject's family. A lot of money in 1900 or so.