Month: December 2010

STEALING STONEThere is a road in Belfast known as The Limestone Road and many years ago, long before the Hitler War, limestone was quarried in the hills above the Horseshoe Bend on the North side of Belfast. It was ground up, and taken by that road to the docks in bogey trucks. The ‘road’ was really a sort of railway, and until recently there was a short narrow street just off the Limestone Road, near North Queen Street, called Tramway Street, where the trucks were parked in a siding when not in use.. At the docks the limestone, which was of a soft nature was loaded to be shipped to England – I’m told, to mix in chicken feed to improve the egg shells. What was unsuitable, contaminated with clay or overburden, had been stacked to one side in the quarries until they were so full of waste they became unusable as quarries and closed down. I found this material one day when we were looking for a source of filling and amazingly it turned out to be the most useful and satisfactory filling of all. The very clay content which made it unsuitable in the first place, when mixed with the limestone which also was so soft in part, made up the whole material when crushed down tight into a homogeneous mass. When it had dried out it was like concrete. I mention this purely out of interest.
The other stone we used was for making concrete was just as difficult to find. We needed a stone which crushed down into pieces as near cubic in shape as possible, but unfortunately, in the Belfast area most of the stone while being basalt is more like slate and crushes into a flatter section. In the end we were successful, but thereby hangs a tale. One of my jobs was to check on materials and this day I could not make the amount of concrete agree with the amount of stone we had paid for to make the concrete. As we were using a very sophisticated method of making concrete where the quantities of the various materials were accurately measured, there was no way the discrepancy of having bought some thirty percent more stone than we should have used could be accounted for. Others checked the books with the same result, – something serious was amiss. First we checked the weigh-bridge which we had installed at the edge of the site.
There are stories throughout the building industry of lorries defeating the system. With sand it is a matter of spraying with water just near the site so the buyer is buying useless water at the price of sand. The solution, if that is suspected, is to refuse to weigh the lorry until water has stopped dripping. A certain amount of moisture is essential to stop the sand blowing during transport and this is what unscrupulous contractors sometimes play on.
Then there is the old chestnut of the lorry going in one gate, being checked, going out another gate and then going round again to be checked yet again. It was with this in mind we set up our own weigh bridge and checking system and it was therefore impossible to believe we had been hoodwinked. We filled one of our own lorries, sent it to the Town weigh bridge and then checked it on our own. It was fine, so there was nothing wrong with our equipment.
It is usual on a site to weigh the contractors’ lorries empty and to note the weight which is known as the ‘tare weight’. This saves having to weigh the lorries full and empty every trip and provided nothing has changed, the system works, except when the initial weight has been fiddled by removing all the surplus weight such as the jack, and the spare wheel and then subsequently carrying it If a lorry is making a great number of trips something as simple as that can amount to quite a sum on a big job. We checked that too, then we set our boxer friend to sit near the weigh bridge with a novel, and look like someone unemployed enjoying the sun.
It paid off. The weighbridge was level in itself but had been built on sloping ground. The lorries were very long with two axles at the back. The system we had agreed with the contractor was that the weigh bridge man would see the front wheels of the lorry onto the weigh bridge, go into his office and press a button, the weight would then be recorded automatically, he would then wave through the window and the lorry would slowly move forward until the back two sets of wheels were on the bridge and the front ones off. He would then weigh again and the sum of the two weights less the tare weight was what we paid for.
Our boxer friend found that unfortunately this was not the case. When the bridge man had seen the lorries onto the bridge and was on his way into the hut, the lorries would ease that little bit more forward until half the back wheels were on the bridge as well as the front ones, then, when the bridge man waved, the lorry would ease forward again and the two back axles were weighed. What was happening was that we had been unwittingly weighing one set of back wheels twice.
Nothing could convince us that after all the money we had paid out, the stone supplier was not surprised at his profit margin, it was too large to escape notice.

DIGGING FOR BRASS – LETHAL WEAPONS During the Hitler War, rubbish from most of the main industrial complexes in Belfast, like the shipyard, the Aircraft factory, the big engineering works, included furnace ashes, off-cuts of wire and road excavation arisings, indeed anything which was surplus and required to be quickly dumped out of sight, out of mind. It was sent to fill in the lower part of the estuary, North of the existing runway, in such a way that berms were formed to enable the area to be drained at low tide through sluices. When the tide fell below the level of the water within the ponds, the sluices were opened and the areas were drained in the same way the Dutch polders were formed
The area was in the shape of two black rectangular borders raised above tide level, side by side, and joined together along a line on the centre of the existing runway. The open spaces formed by these borders were wet mud at the level of low tide. This was what we were faced with and on which we were supposed to build the runway. I was sent there to work on my own to start with and the first job I had to do was to get some idea what the berms were made of. The centre one on the line of the old runway would be the basis of the extension and would have to support the new Comet aeroplane when it landed, while the side berms were to be the taxi-ways.
Huge plates of reinforced concrete and brickwork were sticking out of the berms like rotten teeth; they were bits of air-raid shelter demolished in the city and dumped randomly. In fact after some testing I discovered these slabs were tipped so badly they formed huge voids the size of a small room and this meant excavating thousands of tons of rubbish and replacing it with firm filling. It consisted also of everything from oil drums to rotting orange-peel.
The excavation of the berms brought us in contact with people known locally as ‘hokers’. People scrabbled through the tipped material with home-made bent steel hooks, for bits and pieces, garnering all the most valuable and saleable, later to sell them to scrap dealers. The material, which had been tipped for the runway, contained off-cuts of metals and short lengths of ship’s cabling with a heavy copper content, all very recyclable.
In those days the type of digging we were doing was accomplished with a machine called a face shovel, it would dig by pushing a toothed bucket into the face of the excavation and then scrape it upwards, filling as it went. At the top, the motion would stop, the machine would rotate on its axis and the rubbish would be jettisoned into a lorry by opening a flap at the back of the bucket.
It was this action, which worried me as much as the collapse of the face of the excavation itself. Before the machine was at the top of its scraping action, let alone had moved round, the hokers were into the excavation with their little bits of bent steel, scratching and pulling to find what they could before the machine rotated back and down again to start its dig once more. If the bucket had inadvertently opened, if the hydraulics had failed while the bucket was rising or rotating, if the face of the excavation had suddenly slipped, there would have been the need to call an ambulance, if not a coroner. I was at my wits end, because, no matter what I said went unheeded, yet it would be I who would be held responsible in the event.
A chainman is a labourer whose job it is to hold the end of a tape, help in setting out pegs and so on. My chainman hailed from a family of semi-professional boxers whose prowess was a byword in Belfast. Having tried reason and expletives of the most virulent kind at the top of my voice, I thought I would try him. I asked him to thump a couple of the hokers and maybe they’d see sense. He obviously relished the idea but declined as he said he would be put in prison. It appeared that in law his fists were deemed to be lethal weapons and any use outside a boxing ring could put him in chokey.
It was a pity he didn’t heed his own strictures. Some months later he was engaged in a ‘friendly’ football match during the lunch hour with a scratch team from our site playing one taken from the aerodrome people. In the course of the game things became heated and he broke the jaw of one of the opposition.

JOINING THE ADMIRALTY FOR THE SECOND TIMEUltimately the model work and the designs of the harbours were over and the quality of work as far as I was concerned dropped remarkably, to the extent that at time there was absolutely nothing to do. I would go to the bosses asking for work and the general answer was ‘Are you up to date with the technical journals?’ It got so bad that I used to try to shame them into giving me work by putting a huge notice on my desk saying – ‘Gone to the Museum’ – or the Library, or anywhere, including shopping. It was totally ignored, so I started reading ‘Situations Vacant’ I wasn’t the only one, there were three of us, all from my year at Queen’s, all fed up and disillusioned.
We answered an advertisement and had to go to London for the interview. I took Soph with me and while I was being grilled, she was looking at shops in Bond Street, which was just round the corner from where I was solving engineering problems in front of about five stern faces. When I came out Soph told me how beautiful the women in London were and how well they were dressed. ‘There’s, one.’ she said, pointing, ‘She seems to be waiting for some one.’ I agreed – anyone – with enough money. When I explained, Soph felt foolish for not having realised who they were, I thought it was rather nice to be so innocent.
I was appointed as an Assistant Engineer and the other two were appointed as Engineering assistants. Perhaps my Naval background had something to do with that. Once again I was gathering a level of experience by being in the right place at the right time, which was unusual for engineers who had only recently graduated.
We went to work on the extension of the North South runway at Sydenham Airport. We were acting more as contractors than Government employees as the work was carried out by direct labour. We received the design from Head Office and then proceeded to build it with our own men, materials and plant, for all the world like a contractor.
I was in sole charge at the beginning and this entitled me to lunch and have my regulation half pint in the Wardroom, as our side of the Airport was a Naval Air-base. I kept my lower deck experiences very much under wraps, not through snobbery, purely based on experience of the regular Navy Wardroom’s reaction to the Lower Deck in general.

After an enjoyable few months working for the consultant in my first job, doing small designs and some minor site work, I saw a job advertised at about fifty pounds more, an increase of twenty percent, which could not be ignored, money rather than the style of job or its future prospects was paramount. In the case of the Consultancy I was their first assistant engineer as they had only just set up. If I had stayed I might well have grown to be a partner in one of the largest consultancies in Ireland but enough to eat is a greater spur to moving on.
I was appointed and for a year I worked as a Ministry Man on hydraulic models.
THE WAVE MODELThis work was absolutely fascinating in that, hidden away in the basement I was in a world all my own, I came and went as I pleased and no one worried me, but above all I was both learning at a hectic pace and at the same time my innovative faculties were being taxed for the first time. I was designing wave height gauges, I was applying stroboscopic, photographic analysis, and implementing much which I was reading up.
The models were scale models of two harbours in Northern Ireland. Unfortunately they were not siltation models, which they should have been, but as wave models they did provide some information. The harbours had been giving trouble to the fishermen in storm conditions, when they found it difficult to enter the harbours. Recordings of wave heights within the harbours and at sea in the vicinity of the them, had been taken over years, and related to tide level and wind direction. The beaches had been surveyed in the region of the harbours as well. Eric had started the first model and I took over from him. In the second case I started from scratch. The routine was to make the model to scale, flood it in the tank and then generate waves from different directions to ensure that the waves within all the parts of the harbours, as well as at sea, equated with the conditions surveyed in any given storm. It was only then, when we were sure the model was an exact scale model of the real thing and would react to modification as the harbour itself would in due course, that we were able to start modifying the model to reduce the inner wave heights under all circumstances of wind and tide.
We then set about modifying the structures and even adding things like moles, until the best design was achieved, by predicting still water in the inner harbour and a great reduction in wave height within the outer harbour.

CHICANERY IN THE OLD DAYSWhen I was looking for my first engineering job I had taken part in an interview at the City Hall, faced by a phalanx of about fifteen councillors, They had asked a number of questions without getting to the meat, so I decided I would ask the question – How much? The answer appalled me, they were only offering two hundred and fifty pounds a year for a graduate with two children to support. I refused and t and took a job with a consultant at two hundred and sixty. Those were hard times.
When Sophie was looking for a teaching job we had to write out her application, her CV, her references photocopied and send copies of everything to twentysix councillors. We were astounded, but even that was nothing, to the indignity suffered by John, a friend, and my boss at one stage. He had never learned to drive, so he asked me to chauffeur him around from councillor’s house to councillor’s house. The councillors were mostly farmers and their homes were scattered over a whole county. The weather had been wet for some time with the result the lanes were like scrambler tracks. We started after work and finished in complete darkness with the humiliation of sliding into a gate post and damaging the car.
That, however was not the real humiliation. At each house we came to he went and knocked the door while I stayed in the car. As the evening wore on, when he returned to the car he became progressively disheartened at the berating he received from some who resented being canvassed and said that they were totally against it, while others told him it was a good thing he had come because they would not have voted for him if he hadn’t. The only way he could have succeeded was to have learned more about the system and done his homework better. He should have sought out someone on the Council to advise him of whom to canvass and whom not to, all he had been told was that if he hoped to get the job he should canvass all, which he did; but then he was English, with the mistaken idea that professional people were employed purely on their merits and that interviews were above board.
I remember a case where the engineer to a road contractor fell out with that contractor and resigned. A while later he answered an advertisement for a job with a Council and was told by a senior member of the staff that it was a walk-over as he was more experienced and better qualified than the other candidates. When he asked later why he had not been successful he was told, in confidence, that the contractor had objected to his candidature, saying he, the contractor, would not get fair treatment from the engineer in future dealings, and the Council then appointed another candidate. As I have said before, such is the way of the world.
There was the other side of the coin. It was Christmas, I was deputy on a construction site where we were buying stone by the thousand tons rather than the lorry load. Conforming to convention, about two days before we packed up, close to the end of the day, out of the darkness came a car loaded with good cheer. We knew the contractor who supplied the stone, and he was there that night, to show his appreciation in a material sense. We, the staff, no matter what was stated on our contract of employment, applauded. There was a turkey and a bottle of Irish whiskey for each man in the office. I went to tell the boss and by which time some of the goodies had been unloaded and our thanks had been expressed.
“Hand it back. Say a polite thanks, but no thanks,” was the order and that was how it finished. The whole lot went back where it came from, but that was not the end of the story.
Next day was that silly day when everyone turns up to work, nothing is done, and near lunch time tongues are hanging out for the ‘heavy’ which is standing, row on row, on the boss’s table, waiting for the twelve o’clock kick off. When all our glasses had been charged, the obligatory ‘thank you for all the good work you have done’ had been said, the boss raised the matter of the turkeys. I had noticed that he had been singularly liberal with the Scotch and suspected he was trying to soften the blow which had already fallen, a sort of vinegar and brown paper after the event.
“About the turkeys and Irish,” he said while lifting a wash-leather pouch from an inner pocket. “I received this, from the same source and, as you’ll see, it is etched with my name.” He held in his hand a beautiful gold cigarette case. “This is something I have always coveted, but it too has to go back, engraved name or not.”
I like a man who is even handed, even if he would like to cut off his own hand, perhaps especially so.

FINALSIn second year we were tackling the more technical subjects and I had been persuaded to buy a text book which the others in our group thought was easy to grasp and a guide to what we were finding difficult. Lectures were never contiguous and sometimes we even had to walk down into the centre of Belfast to take other subjects at the Technical College. When these breaks came we would congregate either in the Union or a cafe in Town and there we behaved, not like students in the accepted sense, but like mature men at a club. By student standards we were mature. All had seen service either abroad or at sea, all knew we only had one opportunity and about half were married. Life was real and life was very earnest.
At one of these café sessions someone asked who had read what in the book we had bought. I kept quiet because I had read nothing, I had had no time. Each of the others said they had read this much, or those chapters, and then ensued discussions I took to indicate how much they had read. I felt left behind and rather stupid for being so dilatory.
When I was back at home I started a reading schedule which I hoped would bring me up to date and I allowed for the fact that the others would also be reading while I was doing so. Within a week I had read through about sixty percent of the book and considered I understood at least eighty percent of what I had read. This placed me ahead of the class work which meant that when it was broached I understood it that much better. A week or two later I raised the matter of the book only to discover that the whole thing had been a leg-pull and the others had hardly opened the book at all. I had to take the joke in good part, but what with Linda to amuse, house repairs and other responsibilities, the extra work had been a drudge and I was in danger of losing my sense of humour. It was then I realised that they had inadvertently been responsible for me reaching a standard which allowed me room to breath while understanding what was going on round me. On balance I think I had come off best.
There was a point where I thought I would be sitting my finals from a hospital bed. As usual the whole thing was like a pantomime rather than a sensible progression of events, but for a day or two it caused unbelievable consternation and worry. It started with a funny squeaking noise, which the family thought, was Lizzie crying, and one or other of the women would rush upstairs on an errand of mercy. I would tell them that it was my chest, I was a heavy smoker, but they chose not to listen and hurried off. After several days spent in useless running up and down stairs they believed me and insisted that I see the Queen’s doctor. It was the beginning of the first Term of my final year.
It must be remembered that I had had TB as a child, and was scarred on the top of one lung as a result, although at that time I was not aware of the latter. The Doc listened, pummelled, sent me for an X-ray and then, in his most conciliatory tones, weighed in with the glad tidings – I was at death’s door, needed immediate hospitalisation – soonest, must arrange to have my lectures notes sent to the hospital and sit the exams there. Panic set in, but I decided two things – I would get a second opinion and I would see the British Legion because I reckoned Soph had a claim if I snuffed it along the way – it was as serious as that!
The chap I went to for the referral lived in a dungeon on University Road, he was crisp, competent and looked at my chest in his own X-ray machine, which operated like the ones in shoe shops in the days before X-rays were thought to be dangerous. When they were removed I reckoned that a lot of the fun of shopping had been removed from children’s lives. It turned out that I was OK, just needed to cut down on the fags – cigarettes.
I have included these two stories to give a guide to the pressure we were under as ex-service students. Then came the finals in 1950 when I was really taken ill. We were sitting Final Structures, a subject most would be leery of, myself included. I had hardly sat down when I was struck with a blinding headache, I felt sick, and the pain was fierce. It was similar to what Willie described when she had a severe attack of migraine.
I whipped through the questions, decided what I could answer quickly, completed them in a way that was almost a shorthand and then put up my hand. I asked to be taken outside, to obtain a glass of water and an analgesic and to be allowed to walk in the fresh air for a few minutes before returning to complete the paper. The furore this caused was immense, and the little conferences which went on between the officials showed that I was probably a first in their experience. Fortunately they agreed and an invigilator and I patrolled the grounds for five minutes until the powder had taken some effect. I then returned and finished as quickly as I could and left ahead of the rest because the headache had returned. I passed, possibly more by luck, but I passed and that was all that counted.