Cliff had me write this cute little fluff piece about the local donkey sanctuary for their fiftieth anniversary, and to write it I had to do significant reflection on an iconic local landmark. No, not the donkey sanctuary itself (though I do go there a bunch; I’m actually one of just a few season pass holders). A certain place known as ‘Ole Stink. Well, for pretty much my whole life its proper name has been “The Gribley Museum Of Working Life,” but all of the old fogies still call it ‘Ole Stink so it has just stuck. A bit like the whole Twitter/X situation, I guess.
I cannot even begin to explain to you the profound weirdness of this place.
So, before all the garden centres and the tearoom and all the quaint little tourist things became the main industry in Gribley it was only this grotty old rendering plant that put our town on the map. A rendering plant, if you’re unaware, is an awful place where agricultural animal waste (carcasses, fallen stock, any old dead or even still alive animal) are boiled down into glue, soap, dog food, and “military strength gravy” (heard that term several times during my research. Still have no idea what it means). Pretty much every man of working age was put to work there (go round the retirement homes in Gribley and at least ⅔ of the guys you talk to will be ex-stinkers), and for some reason it’s a huge source of nostalgia.
Well, the need for all these gross products just sort of dwindled over the years (I guess we’ve since found cleaner sources for soap and glue and such), and the place stopped formal operations in 1988. But since it was just this huge piece of local pride, the building was converted into a museum (the aforementioned Gribley Museum of Working Life) to amuse and horrify visiting school children for generations to come.
I think I was eight or nine when I went for the first time. I remember us pulling up in our little school bus to this huge, grey monstrosity of a building and smelling the overwhelming stink. And the place was several years closed at this point, so this was just residual stink. No idea how bad it must’ve been in its heyday. And they got us out, all standing in crocodile formation holding hands with our trip buddies, and led us through this… Hall of horrors.
The glue boiling vat. The hall of meathooks. Huge printed diagrams of how they broke down different types of livestock and what their body parts are used for. There were a couple of kids who sobbed that day. And, once we got to the interactive “What’s That Smell?” exhibit, one who vomited as well. When I got home from the trip I cried to my mum that I never ever wanted to go there again.
But of course, I did. A couple years later.
I think they did listen to some of the criticism. The second time round it was a lot more science-focussed; more about the chemical reactions involved in the making of the products instead of… Well… Instead of the guts and gore. And of course Lollipop the donkey passed away in ‘97 so a big thing was made out of converting parts of the museum into a memorial. They had a whole bunch of her old prosthetics on display (including the first set, which were made of repurposed table legs) which was interesting, and one of the grimmer areas was removed entirely and converted into a little gift shop that sold Lollipop merch. I still have my little Lollipop stuffy that I got that day (she still sits on my bed). But yeah, the glue boiling vat and the hall of meathooks was still very much present. So was the smell.
I did pop back there to write the article, but that was more about talking to the curators in their office than looking at their current crop of exhibits. Can confirm the whole place still stinks, though.
Actually, I do have one more ‘Ole Stink story, but you’ve gotta keep it on the down low ‘cause Cliff banned me from writing about it in the article. If you’re here from the Gazette, well, keep your mouth zipped in the comments section please!
Well… When my mum was a child, her dad (my grandfather) was a stinker. It wasn’t a job that paid very well at all, so they were quite poor, and the nature of the job meant that… Well… The stink just sort of rubbed off on the whole family.
My mother was so used to it that she stopped noticing, but the kids at school were absolutely horrid to her about it. And there was this one girl in particular, the daughter of one of the more prominent Grinton families I think, who just bullied her relentlessly. Pulled her hair. Pushed her over all the time. Took mouldy food from the bin and put it in her school dinner because “it was what poor old stinkers like you [her] deserve.”
This girl was always boasting about how well-off her family was, and how they’d gotten a pony for her. Pretty Pansy was its name. Never shut up about it apparently.
And this is actually lowkey awful, but…
One day this girl comes into school all tearful. My mum goes up to her and asks her what’s wrong, and she says something about how they’d had a bit of financial trouble, and that her father had to sell Pretty Pansy. She was sad about it, but her father promised that Pansy was going to go to a lovely farm where he had lots and lots of space to run around, and that she mustn’t be too sad.
Well, that day when my mother got home from school, her father was sitting there with a really smug expression on his face. “You’ll never guess what I had on the slab today,” he says. And you can imagine.
Awful, right? But once it got out at school that girl never bullied my mum again, so… Swings and roundabouts.
So yeah. Life in a small town can be pretty crazy sometimes. But I wouldn’t change it for anything.