He had made little beam engines which would have delighted James Watt and still delighted those who are fascinated by such things he had made little jet engines which would have delighted Frank Whittle. He was a considerable horologist in his time he had made many clocks with motions of antiquarian interest and had written full directions for constructing them, always in the Miniature Mechanic. All his life he had made models, little steam engines, little petrol engines, little speedboats, little locomotives, little Diesels.

Here he made models, and here he wrote about them weekly for the Miniature Mechanic, a magazine with a considerable circulation in the lower ranks of industry and with a growing popularity amongst eccentric doctors, stockbrokers, and bank managers who just liked engineering but didn’t know much about it. In the basement they had adapted what had once been the scullery as a small spare bedroom the whole of the rest had been taken by Keith as his own domain. On the ground floor they had a bedroom in the front, the living room and kitchen at the rear overlooking the garden, and a bathroom at the side. When, after a few years, it became evident that that was not to be, they had separated the two top floors from the remainder of the house and let them off as what the agents called a maisonette, retaining the ground floor and the basement for themselves. They contemplated quite a family so that they would need quite a house, the upper rooms for nurseries and children’s rooms and playrooms while the garden would be a nice place for the pram. It was, of course, the first house that Katie or Keith had ever owned, and they were very proud of it. That was soon after he moved down from Glasgow to the London area to work as a toolroom fitter with Stone and Collinson Ltd., who made subcontract parts for aeroplanes at Perivale. He had bought it when he married Katie in the middle of the Second War. Most of the big old houses have been split up into two or three flats, as Keith Stewart had converted No. The years have not dealt kindly with West Ealing the farms are now far away. It was built in the spacious days of 1880 when West Ealing stood on the edge of the country farmlands and was a place to which Indian Civilians retired after their years of service, but it was built of a particularly ugly yellow brick, now toned to a drab grey, at a period when English suburban architecture was going through a bad patch.

56 is an unusual house and a peculiarly ugly one, a detached house standing in a row but in a fairly spacious garden, four storeys high if you include the basement, a tall, thin slip of a house. West Ealing is a suburb to the west of London, and Keith Stewart lives there in the lower part of No.

Trustee from the toolroom