It was 7:00 a.m. on a grey Monday morning and I was one of several
thousand bicyclists heading for work at W.H. Allen’s, a British firm in Bedford
that manufactured large, electric generators. It was 1947 I was 18 and had
finally passed the qualifying exam for the Mechanical Sciences Tripos at
Cambridge University--engineering in layman’s terms. I say 'finally' because
this was my second attempt having failed Latin the first time around which, at
that time, was still a requirement for engineers. I was a 'trainee', a short-term
apprentice with twelve months before my classes started at Cambridge. I needed
to get some first-hand knowledge of the nuts and bolts of engineering before
sitting down at a desk. I had come down with polio at 16 which had partially
paralyzed my left hand and arm but it was a disability I was learning to live
with.
It was a great opportunity for a young man with little or no experience
in basic metal-working techniques but a great eagerness to learn. Everything
new was of interest to me--just the drama of pouring molten iron into sand
molds, making patterns for the molds and the smoke as the molds were scorched
by the glowing metal.
Lunch was supposed to be only a half hour but since I was being paid
fifty shillings a week (about $15) I saw no reason to hurry. Every lunch hour I
would ride my bike down to the river in Bedford and feed the swans with stale
buns from a local baker. The one thing they wouldn't eat were doughnuts and
when I saw the greasy ring surrounding each one floating in the water I
understood why.
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| Working at W.H. Allen could be dangerous |
I was living at home in Hampstead at the time and would take the bus
into London from Bedford every weekend and return Sunday night. I had a room in a lodging house nearby that catered to 'weekly boarders'
for fifty shillings a week including meals. When the landlady, a Mrs. Otis
tried serving warmed up fish and chips for breakfast the boarders rebelled and
she had to switch back to eggs, stringy bacon and toast. I found I could extend
the useful life of my bicycle battery by warming it in the oven for a few
minutes which got me as far as the factory gates. The guards gave us a cursory
looking over but inspection the other way, when leaving the factory, was much
more rigorous.
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| Simon Watts cycling to work in 1947 at W.H. Allen Industrial Company in Bedford, England |
Much of the fitting and finishing was still being done by hand. Although
I didn't realize it at the time these traditional skills, passed from father to
son over the centuries were now out of date and being replaced by large scale,
mechanized production. The requisite skills didn't disappear but had migrated
to the design and manufacture of machines. These had the advantages of being
tireless, indifferent to strikes and capable of replicating themselves.
I enjoyed the work, learning new skills using my hands aided by machines
to do the heavy work. I needed no reminder that I enjoyed a privileged position: a good education, a professional family and all the resources
of the upper middle class. As one of my fellow workers put it rather bitterly:
"It's awright for you, Sime, your bread's buttered".
W.H. Allens’ was a hazardous place for the unwary. I was only 18 and had
an 18 year old's conviction of personal invincibility. There were few safety
precautions, protective clothing was scarce and seldom used. I should have been
wearing boots to protect my feet but used down-at-heel shoes instead. After I
dropped a shoe down inside a condenser--full of small copper cooling pipes and
had to fish it out with a bent wire--I finally invested in a pair of boots.
I got on well with my co-workers in spite of the differences in accent,
social class, education and social expectations. They couldn't believe I'd had
to learn Latin to get into engineering school and even more baffled when I told
them that Latin was a 'dead' language that nobody spoke anymore. "Well,
what's the point of learning it then?" A question for which I had no
answer but had often wondered myself.
I started in the sheet metal shop where I was put to work on a
foot-operated machine that folded steel sheets. It was a noisy place, the sheet
metal shop, and I was soon noticed that most of the men, even the younger ones,
suffered from some degree of hearing loss. I had to shout at men not much older
than myself to make myself heard. Perhaps to compensate for the general background
din, sheets of metal would be thrown down on the floor or into the waste bins
against the walls. There was a pervasive (and self-defeating reluctance) to use
any form of hearing protection--the word 'Macho' was not yet current.
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| Industrial labor in the 1950s was difficult and dangerous but provided jobs for the workers. |
After a few weeks I was moved to the foundry, an ill-lit cavernous
building equipped with two traveling cranes and dominated by the roar of
gas-fired furnaces. This was the heart of the factory and there was something
primeval about melting iron and pouring the red-hot glowing metal into sand
molds. Some of the molds for turbine rotors were the size of small cars and
putting them together was a highly skilled (and paid) trade. Every surface had
to be smoothed and sealed so the molten metal didn't stick to it. My job was less
skilled--keeping the shop floor swept and the molding sand clear of debris.
It was a dangerous place for the unwary, the foundry, and one day I
learned a useful and almost fatal lesson. I was loading a hopper with cast iron
scrap to feed the furnaces. The light was dim, the widows grimy and the crane
operator in his perch three floors up could barely see what was happening on
the shop floor. He failed to notice that my right hand had got trapped by the swiveling
hopper and by the time he did I was ten feet off the floor, hanging by one arm
on my way to the melting pot.
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| Quenching steel -- to harden it.. |
This near miss made me much more safety conscious and from then on, I
watched the working habits of the men, especially the older ones, with whom I
was working.
Most of the blue-collar fraternity were paid an hourly wage plus a small
bonus for every item they produced over a certain set minimum. Anything I
produced would be added to their tally. Being a handy lad, I was quick to learn
new techniques but soon realized I had to be careful not to work too fast or
the rate for the job would be reduced. The inevitable result was everybody
worked at less than full capacity so I was no exception.
I was then moved to the wire
splicing section making slings to lift the castings--the largest of which
weighed several tons. I enjoyed the work, it was a quiet shop (after the racket
of the sheet metal facility) and I got rather good at it. One day while I was
tucking in an eye splice one of the older men came over to my bench and said
"Ere, Sime, make it last". He was telling me to slow down because, if
I worked too fast, the rate for the job would be cut, reducing everybody's
wages. I asked him how long the job should take, he told me and I timed myself
accordingly to avoid stepping on anyone's toes.
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| Blast furnace was a dangerous place to be |
One day I got talking with the local representative of the metal workers
union--as a trainee I was not eligible to join the union so posed no threat. I
soon got a sense of his hostility and resentment towards management and the, ‘educated'
classes (of which I was one). "It's them against us" he declared “that's
the way it's always been and that's the way it's always going to be."
I heard echoes of the industrial revolution and the savage suppression of
unions--and union organizers. It was ironic that the first post war Labour government had just been
elected and was busy dismantling what was left of the British Empire. Not only
that but they were nationalizing heavy industry and turning the railways and
the coal mines over to public ownership. The1948 film ‘I’m alright Jack" catches
the contradictions of that period.
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| The popular 1947 film I'm All Right Jack made fun of the pseudo-science of time and motion studies |
The last three weeks of my one-year stint I spent in the heat-treating
facility. It was run by veteran employees who had acquired an intuitive sense
of temperature--how hot was hot. Although we had pyrometers they were seldom
consulted--the degree of heat given off by hot metal could be gauged close
enough by the experienced.
I was set to work wrapping tappets with scrap leather and filling metal
boxes with the bundles. I didn't know it at the time but we were 'case
hardening’ one end of the tappets because they took a beating--literally.
Thousands of times a day they would impact the valves to exhaust diesel fumes
and admit fresh fuel. The techniques of case hardening had been known since
medieval times but the explanation had to wait for modern metallurgy.
The scraps of leather in which I packed the parts, when reduced to carbon in a furnace, formed a shell of high carbon steel
backed by the softer and more ductile mild steel beneath. The technique was
developed by armorers to provide a keen cutting edge for swords, spears and
other implements of slaughter. The migration of carbon atoms into the iron core
was not reversable so the structural change was permanent.
My 12-month stint at W.H. Allen’s was up and I moved to Cambridge and was
plunged into the nuts and bolts of engineering: stress analysis; calculating
design loads; the mechanics of thin shell structures and so on. I was
increasingly bored by the nitty-gritty of engineering and eventually switched
to the School of Architecture.
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| Cambridge University students in the 1950s. Simon back to the photo. |
I will always treasure the twelve months at W.H. Allen’s. It was time well
spent and gave me a grasp of manufacturing techniques and how materials are
likely to behave when subjected to extremes of heat and mechanical stress.
Cambridge is threaded by a river with an active swan population. I used to take
my bike down to the bank and feed them stale cakes and buns from the local
bakery--anything but doughnuts.
Simon Watts
March, 2019
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