[Chris Going]

OK. While Bruce does his oral history search you can do quite a lot with this without spending shed loads of money.

The first thing to do is get a bit of ground truth, which involves an imagery search via ‘Heritage England’ in Swindon. (Tel 01973 414600). Ask them for an ‘all scales all dates’ search and give them a NGR pinpoint. You’ll get a list of sorties and dates and photo quality assessments in a week or two. The first tranche of imagery you need to look at is the survey photography of 1945-55. This is the period of ‘Operation review’ (there are two spellings but this is the one I use, which was a concerted effort to create photo mosaics of the UK). There were two scales of imagery taken. One was at 1:27,500 which is far too small to do much. The next is the 10,000 scale cover, and I am sure Oldham was surveyed at this scale. The original negatives are long gone (Nitrate stock), but first generation prints will survive in Swindon. You may need to look at the original prints, so be prepared for that.

Now, you give us one or more locations of sorts –the yard of your father in law’s former boss (for some years it seems) and the ‘work shed’ behind which it ‘ended up’ in the ‘mid fifties’ I assume this was the place where your father worked, rather than a shed he owned elsewhere. Don’t divulge these locations over the net, yet. But make sure they are covered in your Swindon search.

Now, the landfill issue. ‘It ended up in landfill under the roundabout at the end of the A627M near Oldham's Football ground’ Hmmm. Bruce’s local history people will be useful here, but get aerial imagery in stereo, so you can have some decent image analysis (I know one of two people which can help out) so you can find out a bit more.

The reason is that the landfill was at all sensibly run they will have had zones and areas where dumping occurred (particularly as there are several water courses nearby, I see), and if you can explore precisely where dumping was being done between (say) 1955 an 1965, you might stand a chance of finding out where it might lie; always assuming its not now a housing estate or a Business park.

Oh yes, you’ll also need a decent cartographic background. Go to the National Library of Scotland, website, which has put an absolute trove of maps online. Ensure you have England in your search boy, search Oldham, and up with come various maps, of which Lancashire 6 inch (10,560) XCVII NW is your best bet (surveyed 1938, pub 1947). When you get your photographs (1200 dpi scans), you can put them into a GIS and start work.

I note you ‘never liked’ your ex father in law. Do you think it’s just possible he was winding you up……?

Have fun with this one

ChrisG