I picked up this lovely piece of Valor advertising at Newark this year, thanks to a tip off from Ross. I've reunited it with a NOS Valor 51 and displayed it as instructed. I haven't placed this in the reference section as there's already one there.
Stoves like this are pretty rare here in the states. I see all these beautiful stoves on this site and I never see them here. Am I seeing the ad correctly that they're advertising using the stove on a small skiff? Interesting. Not the most stable platform for operating a stove.
It looks more like a flat-bottomed punt to me, which would be very stable. But regardless, England has a long tradition of camping and cooking in skiffs- Thames camping skiffs (made famous by the novel 'Three Men in a Boat') carried a tent which could be erected over the boat for the night, along with cooking equipment which would be mostly used aboard.
I have always loved that book--it's still a really fun read, remarkably so for a book that was published in the late 1890s. But if I remember correctly--and I do--the author firmly condemns brass pressure stoves, which he says always ooze fuel and make everything taste or smell of kerosene. He thought alcohol stoves were vastly superior.
Although now that I think about it, the book was so popular that Jerome K. Jerome's opinion of kerosene stoves had to have been well-known to Valor's advertising department. I'm guessing that their choice to depict a kerosene stove on a punt was a deliberate thumb in the eye to the doubters.
'Three Men in a Boat' of 1889 pre-dates the paraffin pressure stove, so it's wick stoves to which the author is referring, which are definitely smellier in use, and have all the same inevitable spillages when filling. But the irony, as discussed in the thread linked previous, is that the lads also took a lantern along, which was more likely a paraffin lantern than a candle model...
Ah! I stand corrected. Only after I had posted did it occur to me that the dates might not work out. My memory was that the book was written in about 1898, when pressure stoves would have been available, although perhaps not yet widely used. As a former journalist, I should have known enough to fact check myself! On the other hand, Jerome himself didn't worry too much about facts, as is the privilege of the humorist. Although the book was based on an actual river trip, but Jerome admitted that Montmorency, the memorable dog, was entirely fictional. Still, a really entertaining read.
