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The Clifton's Kitchen Car

A newspaper article from 1914 proposing that soldiers should be billeted in St.Annes.

MR & MRS CLIFTON'S KITCHEN CAR

These photographs show the exterior and interior of the kitchen car which Mr. and Mrs. Clifton has obtained for relieving wounded soldiers on the battlefield. Donations were contributed in Lytham and St.Annes.

Mr. and Mrs. Clifton were engaged in similar work in Belgium, and came back in order to obtain a kitchen car. In her appeal Mrs Clifton wrote:

"I have been working in a kitchen at a. station in. Belgium, and have been strongly impressed with the necessity of giving food to the sick and wounded. It almost comforts one, when face to face with their agony, to see the pleasure that a warm unexpected cup of soup gives the men."

"Those whom I was privileged in helping arrived in open trains, many of them ill and a great number suffering from frost-bite. When we have picked up our soldiers, and seen to their wounds as well as may be, we want to give them soup or cocoa. before having them conveyed to the trains. We want at least to know that they have started their via dolorosa with something to sustain them, so we have come back to get a kitchen car."

Messrs. Barker, coachbuilders in South Audley Street, very generously gave a. "kitchen" body, leaving the cost of the chassis and engine to be. met. The chassis is worth £600, hut cost only £350. The original chassis was not up to the weight of the body, and a gentleman generously sold Messrs. Barker this far finer one for the price originally stipulated, in view of its special object.

Blackpool Times, December 1914