Trangias past... by Ellie, Erin and Georgina

Happy New Year! Our three young archivists are currently embarking on their January Mocks - we wish them the very best of luck with their endeavours! They will be back soon, but before they broke up for Christmas, Georgina, Ellie and Erin put together this post on some strange gold things they found....

Trangias past... by Ellie, Erin and Georgina

Just before Christmas, we discovered a small mystery bag in the Maynard Archives. At first glance, within it was nothing more than a collection of small gold pots. 

Upon further inspection, we found strange symbols imprinted on the lids of these gold pots and the word ‘Trangia’. We suspected that past students used these on Ten Tors and Duke of Edinburgh expeditions – but they were so different to the bulkier trangias that we use today, that we were interested to find out more.

Some basic research online revealed exactly what the strange gold pots were: Trangia spirit burners with screw caps. There were inscriptions on the inside of the trangias written in Swedish, and there was ‘ACHTUNG HEIß’ written on the top, which means ‘Warning Hot’ in German. This further proved that they were definitely old trangias, but we still did not know exactly when Maynard Girls used them in the past.  

  

To try to find an answer to this question, we looked through some old photo albums in the Archive to find pictures of the old trangias in use. We specifically looked in Ten Tors albums because that was when they were most likely to have been in use. Despite spending two lunch time sessions looking through half a dozen hefty albums, we could not find any old photographs of this particular Trangia model. 

 

 Not our trangias....

As far back as the early 1980s, all the trangias in the photographs were of the bulkier version, which are still used today. We can totally understand the change. The small screw cap model is much more of a fuss to get going, as they require alcohol to ignite (see here for a YouTube video of someone trying to light one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYhjiS1aR1I )

The new trangias are also a lot bigger (and consequently much more stable) and although they are more of an inconvenience to carry they provide much more heat and you can fit much larger saucepans on it – and as any Ten Tor participant will tell you: food is fuel.  

• Did you use this type of Trangia when at the Maynard? If so, when? And where? 

As always any ideas are always welcome via our comments or email.