My Life Story as told by Noel Garvin.
Spoken and recorded by Noel for his family and given to us by his wife.
Thank you Cath.

My early life told by Noel Garvin
12/09/2005

Noel Garvin

"I was born the 21st December 1921. I lived at 16 Clavering Avenue, Dunston. It was a two bed-roomed upstairs flat and in those days, families all lived close together. My Gran lived in a flat the same as ours at the top of the street, it was number 130. Now my Aunt Jean lived at the bottom of the street at number 14. Now times in those days were very hard in the 1920s, there was very little work and people used to stand around the street corners in groups hoping they might get some little job to do for a few coppers. My father in a way was lucky now, lucky because he was a miner and in those days miners used picks and shovels to dig out the coal. They didn’t have machines like they have now. No pithead baths. They used to come home from work black dirty and wet with the coal dust. My father had been right through the 1914-18 war and very few men lasted that long. Unfortunately he had got gassed when he was in the trenches and it had left him with a very bad stomach and very poor health and in those days if you were off work sick someone would take your job off you so you had to work it doesn’t matter how bad you were so many mothers had to work. We had to help the family by taking in washing, making things, going out to work anything or anywhere to get money to exist on.

My mother was a charwoman she used to go down to the Cross Keys every morning and scrub out the bar. I remember getting a ride on her back while she scrubbed the bar floors then, when she had finished, she would come back from work, come home, get changed and then go back to the Cross Keys that was about eleven o’clock because she was a barmaid. Now my mother’s aunt was the manageress of the Cross Keys so that’s how she helped mother out so mother worked from seven o’clock in the morning until ten thirty at night. That was when all the bars closed.

Now I started school in 1926 that was the time of the General Strike and all of the men in the country came out on strike. They came out for more money, as they couldn’t live on the wages they got. It was a terrible time for everyone; people were dying because they had nothing to eat. Finally the bosses forced the men back to work because they couldn’t stand and let their family starve to death. So for the next few years things were very slow to get back to normal. By the early thirties you could see a glimmer of hope.

Now in the early thirties we moved to 26 Oak Avenue. It was almost a new council house with a garden. Behind the garden was all green fields right up to Whickham Highway. It was lovely to play in the fields. I was about ten years old then. Now in the winter we used to sledge right from the highway, where the Highwayman pub is now, right down to Ede Avenue in Dunston. Eeh, it was great!

There was always plenty to do even in the winter but, like all boys, we tried our best to keep out of trouble. Then in 1934 my mother’s aunty who had the Cross Keys died and my mother who worked all those years, well for the past few years had run the pub herself because her aunt was ill was made manageress so we left Oak Avenue and moved to the Cross Keys. I was about thirteen year old then and was getting about on my bike and getting ready to start work because working life you know began in those days early because everybody left school at fourteen."

My first job-apprentice at Taylor, Pallister and Company, Engineers
as told by Noel Garvin

Taylor Pallister's site
Noel Garvin outside Taylor Pallister's site
Noel Garvin outside Taylor Pallister's site

"Now seven days after my fourteenth birthday I started work at Taylor, Pallister and Company, Engineers. They had their factory underneath the coal staithes at Dunston. Now this was a small firm with about ten men and about fifty boys, all young apprentices. I was lucky to get a job. As I’ve told you before that jobs were very hard to get and I only got it through my mother knowing Mr Taylor that got me the job. He used to come into the bar with a lot of sea captains and a lot of engineers and get jobs and that’s how my mother knew Mr Taylor.

So I started on the Monday, a small built little lad about 5’3ins and 7 stones in weight and with my little new cap on as all the men in factories wore caps in those days. I’ll try to give you some idea of what it was like inside the factory. When I walked into that factory on that Monday morning, eeh, I though it was like the black hole of Calcutta! The factory was a large wooden hut with a corrugated roof the walls were made from used railway sleepers that had holes through from where the lines had been bolted on. Now inside it was black dark there was little lights here and there but no windows anywhere. The floor was an earth floor and dotted all over the floor were machines that were standing on flat blocks of concrete and running up from all of the machines was dozens of belts onto the pulley wheels above you on the ceiling that was driven by a single shaft that ran the length of the shop. A large motor at the other end with a big flat belt drove all of the machinery. The noise and the dust was terrible but you had to get used to it.

Now my first job was a messenger boy. I used to go for nuts and bolts over to Newcastle. I used to go on a tram and we used to get 3d to go to Newcastle but if you were crafty you used to get off the tram at Gateshead Station and pay 1/2d on the toll bridge and walk over into Newcastle which wasn’t very far so that means to say that you saved a 1/2d, and coming back you’d do the same thing – that’s a penny you’d save that day. Now we had to go sometimes three sometimes four times a week you know for different things because our small factory didn’t have any stock or didn’t have any stores, they couldn’t afford it, they used to buy the stuff they needed at that particular time. Now if you went over sometimes four times a week that was fourpence that was quite a lot of money! Now I lasted doing messages for about six months then I started in the can lab.

Now my job was making the cans – the men’s teas. Now all the men brought the cans. Inside the cans there used to be like a little ball of newspaper actually when you opened it out inside this was tea, sugar and thick milk rolled into ball. This used to be scraped off with a ruler you had in your pocket and then you put it into the cans. Now I used to put this huge cast iron kettle on the coke stove to get the water boiling. It was so heavy I had to ask some of the lads to give is a hand to lift it because I couldn‘t lift it when it was full of water. Now they used to stoke the coke stove to get it red to boil the water. Then this is where your cap comes in, you had to take it off and wrap it round the handle of the kettle because it was that hot by now, after a little while your hat used to get burned or singed through in the middle and sometimes when you put your cap on you only had a bit of the cap at the front and a bit at the back. It was nearly in half but all apprentices went through that but if you made the tea and the water wasn’t boiling or you got the cans mixed up the men would chase you and if they caught you they would kill you but what you had to do was to get a hold of the foreman and hide behind him, now they wouldn’t dare touch you. Then that went on for about six months and then you started to serve your time.

Now to serve your time you went on different machines and the boy on the machine showed you how to work it then he moved up to another machine and so on and so on so about every six months you moved up to do a different job so that you were really and truly taught well because it was a small firm and you had to be able to do everything even though you were only an apprentice.

Now in those days you only got one week annual holiday a year. Now this was the week that a couple of labourers used to clean the factory out. Well really it was a question of hygiene because as I’ve said before those sleepers were made of wood and they were really and truly filthy with different things so they used a white spray to lighten the factory up because it was dark and also like a lime wash the building over. Now if you left your coat or overalls hanging on a nail on the wall or you left your spanners on a machine when you came back the whole lot of you would just think the whole factory had been literally sprayed white, well it was. When you came to lift your spanner off the machine there was the imprint of your spanner on the machine and if you took your overalls off there was the imprint of your overalls or your coat on the wall.

These labourers never shifted anything and it was funny to see the lads or the men putting coats or overalls on as they were all striped where they’d been hanging up with the whitewash.

Now as I’ve said, the dust in the factory was terrible at times so what we used to do with the cast iron dust off the machines we used to get a shovel and spread this cast iron dust all over the floor and then used to get a watering can and water this cast iron dust. Now the dust and water used to rust and used to leave a hard skin on so over the years the lads had spread all this cast iron dust and watered it so that in places it was quite hard so this was the idea of trying to make the floor level.

Now once you had mastered all of the machines you then went outside to work on the ships. Now a fitter used to come and say to the foreman “I want an apprentice to go and work with me”. The foreman used to shout for a boy and you used to get your tools and the man’s tools and carry all his tools we used to go down to the jetty. Sometimes when you were walking down the jetty the coal would run down your back and on your head because they were loading the ships up, now as I’ve said before the factory was underneath the staithes and when the coal wagons used to rumble across the top of the staithes the whole staithes used to shake and coal dust used to come shimmering down and get on your head. Sometimes you used to look like a pitman by the time you got on board the ship.

Now when you got on board the ship, a lot of the ships, the olden ships had pipes, steel pipes that used run from the engine room right through the ship along the deck and on to the winches, because the winches were all driven by steam. Well in the winter a lot of these pipes used to split with the ice and what not so our job was often to put new pipes on and while you worked at one end of the pipe the man worked at the other and you watched what he did and you did the same. Sometimes the man used to say. “Go along to the galley”, you know what the galley is on a ship it’s the cookhouse. “Go and see if the cook has any nice tasty bits for you, you know a cup of tea or something like that”. You used to run along and of course in a morning, a lot of the sailors, if they had been out the night before drinking, didn’t want breakfast. The cook used to cook bacon or sausages in a big square pan about two feet square. This pan, you could hardly lift it, full of sausages, he used to say “Go on lads, get rid of them”. So we used to pick up the pan and run down and have a good feed of sausages or whatever was going, have a cup of tea and as I say the sailors and the cooks were always very good to the apprentices because you know we were always hungry. Lads of sixteen and seventeen year old, well, we would eat anything! Sometimes if the ships, if we didn’t take them the coal used to be loaded on and they’d be left. So we used to fill our pockets up with apples and things like that. We were up to all the good tricks that were going.
Down in the engine room, sometimes we used to have to work down the engine room. When you work down the engine room, eeh, it was terrible to have to work down there it used to be frightening!

When you look down from the top of the engine room doorway you could hardly see the bottom. It was all machinery with like open steel ladders zig-zagging all the way down to the bottom of the ship and the heat, oh, the heat was tremendous! The engineers used to have to strip to the waist just for the wet, it was like a scarf round their neck. Actually it was to stop the wet from running down their body because the sweat running down used to like, irritate them.

We used to put new pipes in the bilges. Now the bilges of a ship is the very belly of a ship, right down to the very bottom. We used to open the floor of the engine room, that’s right at the bottom, we used to open the floor and like trap doors, we used to go down and inside you could hear the sloshing of the oil and the water. You didn’t have any electric lights down there in them days, you had no electric leads. You used to take candles down with you and light a candle and we used to hold this candle.

We used to go down this hold and crawl underneath the flooring of the ship, right away along, and they were all into compartments, you used to crawl into another hole into the next compartment until you found the pipe that had got a hole in that had to be replaced.. Well you were working by candle light and all the oil was sloshing round and away in the distance you used to see just a little light and that was coming from the little hatch that you had left open. Well some of the lads used to play tricks on each other, you know, they used to close the door, eeh, well you were terrified well it was terrifying, you didn’t know where to go. Sometimes if you tried to turn round in a hurry but you couldn’t turn round in these little compartments you had to go backwards and your candle used to go out. Eeh, and you used to be frightened and you used to have a spanner or a hammer in your hand and they were knocking to tell you them you were there, eeh, it was frightening. in fact some of the boys wouldn’t go down into the bilges and then we got to an understanding that if I went down the bilges one of the lads would sit on the hole, like the little doorway and he would sit on there with his legs dangling down so I could see him and he promised that he would never move till I come back out again but some of the men wouldn’t go down and you used to get extra money for down the bilges because it was so dirty because when you come up you can imagine what you were like I mean the oil was running off you, you’d just think you had dived into a pool of oil, stinking oily water, now that’s the type of job that you used to hate. Now that was one of the dirty wet jobs. What we used to do we used to do another job.

Now this job was what we called floating the safety valves. Now on a ship you usually have three big boilers, now these boilers go from the bottom of the engine room to the top of the engine room the full side of a ship. Now these boilers, obviously, that’s the water that they boil for the steam, Now we used to go on top of these boilers that had a valve, the very top had a valve on, a safety valve. Now you used to have to trudge through the top of the boiler which was anything up to a foot deep in dust, because obviously, all the coal and everything when it got down onto the boiler it was pure dust, they could shovel it off, and our job was to get aside this big valve, the valve was about two foot or three foot high, a huge valve with a big spring on the top and a nut, and we used to have to stand there with a spanner and down below used to be a series of men in different parts shouting the orders out. Now when the engineer was down at the bottom of the ship in front of all his gauges he used to look at the gauge and lets suppose the gauge had to be up to the red mark, now when the steam got to that red mark it had to blow off, else it would burst the boiler. Now our job, they used to shout up “ready, now”, and when they said “now” we had to open this little nut so that the steam would blow off and that was like adjusted, so they knew by the gauge when that come to the red mark on the gauge that the valve would blow off and that was our job. But can you visualise a foot thick dust all over the tops of these boilers and when you let the steam off the pressure was at bursting point in the boiler, so you can imagine it blew the dust, well you used to come out of there and the heat was tremendous because you were standing on top of these boilers. Now when you come out and you looked at yourself you just had little white lips or red lips and white eyes. You were black.

Now you got 2s 6d for floating the safety valves and there was only about three of us that used to do it. The other ones either wouldn’t do it couldn’t do it, so we always got the job of floating the valves and we used to get 2s 6d, now remember, I only got 7s 6d a week for me wages, seven and tuppence actually, there was 4d off for stamps, so 2s 6d, that was a third of your wages you used to get for floating the safety valves, so that would tell you how dangerous a job it was, but there it was, it had its compensations. Of course that was the hard bits of jobs but it wasn’t all doom and gloom.

We had some very good lighter moments when we used to get back to the factory. If we were having our lunch out, you know and sitting outside we had a big crane, it was a hand winch crane. It had a big basket on the end. The basket was about three or four feet in diameter and they used to swing the jib of the crane out over the Gut, part of the river and the launch used to there and they used to fit it with bits and pieces and then wind it up and swing it back in again and that’s how they used to unload the launch.

In our dinner hour when we used to be carrying on you know, ‘cos we were old then, sixteen and seventeen, we used to put the young apprentices in the basket for a ride and say, “Go on, get in we’ll give you a ride”. We used to wind them up and swing the jib right out and put the brake on and leave it out. Course when the buzzer blew at one o’clock we used to go in the factory and working away and the foreman, they called him Alf, he used to say, “Whereabouts is so and so?” “I don’t know”, we used to say. “He’ll be hanging about somewhere”. When Alf used to go and see them sitting the basket because he couldn’t do anything. They couldn’t get back in. He used to be hopping mad at them. The apprentices daresn’t say anything you know.

Other times, you know, at lunch times they had a big lifeboat. It didn’t have an engine in it. This lifeboat was the funniest looking boat you could imagine because this boat was cover in thick, red paint. When I say thick, red paint it was thick, red paint. It was about a foot thick in places. You could lift it off in a shovelfull and throw it overboard and make big splashes. The launch used to tow it out and tie it alongside a ship and the men, the painters used to have these big five gallon drums of lead oxide paint and brushes on the end of a big long rod and used to dip it in and paint just above the waterline up to the Lloyds register mark and paint it red. They used to right round the ship like that and paint the ship. Obviously they couldn’t paint below the waterline. That’s how they used to paint it. Well of course, there was more paint on the lifeboat than there was on the ship. Sometimes if you sat down and the paint wasn’t dry and when you got up your overalls used to be red paint, but never mind getting back to this lifeboat.

On a dinner time we used to eat our sandwiches in about five minutes flat, then we’d say “Come on”, and get the oars out and go and row the lifeboat into the Tyne, ‘cos the little Gut part was adjoining the Tyne. So we used to all get in the boat, get the oars out and row out into the Tyne. Young lads never thought about it at that particular time, but we used to row with the tide and it used to go great you know, up by the flour mills which was alongside and then someone would say, “Hey we’d better turn round”. And when we came to turn round that was another story. You couldn’t row against the tide it was that heavy. Eeh, sometimes it used to take us an hour to get back. Sometimes it was half past one or two o’clock. Well the foreman was standing on the quayside waiting for us to come back. He used to be raging and he used to send us all home. Well of course when he used to send us all home he used to be kicking himself because he couldn’t get his work done.

This was the type of thing that the lads used to get up to. But, you know, all apprentices used to get up to various things, for instance in the shop with the foreman. You see we had another factory on the other side of this Gut. You know what a Gut is, it’s a little stream. Now then, Alf, he used to be the foreman of both shops, he used to go over this little footbridge. We would say to one of the apprentices, “Look out through all the holes in the wall”, that was where the sleepers was, “and look out over the bridge and you let us know when Alf comes back”. Well of course the men used to have domino handicaps and play cards and everything and nobody worked when the foreman was out. The little apprentice would say, “Alf’s coming back”. By the time Alf came through the door, we were all working like mad. Alf used to come in and look round and see the little lad and get hold of him give him real good belting on the bottom. He would say, “What’s that for?” “You’ve been watching me over there”. “I haven’t,” he says. “You have”. There was a white ring on his face, on his eye where he’d had his eye to the white wall. Remember I told you about the walls being whitewashed? Well he used to have a ring round and Alf used to know who’d done it and he daresn’t tell who had told him to keep an eye open. And these are the type of pranks us lads used to get up to."

No longer an apprentice as told by Noel Garvin

Noel Garvin, right, and friend

"Now jobs was getting better, work was getting better all over because this is now -I’d been at work about two or three years- so this would be about 1938. Now war was impending, every place was starting to get busy and they were preparing for war. Late 1939, war started.

In 1940,I applied to join the Navy as an engine room artificer, well an artificer is an engineer, and when I went in the navy to join the man says “How old are you? I said I was eighteen and the man said “Well go back and come back when you are twenty-one, when you are a man.” So I thought well, no. So I went across the road in Northumberland Street and I went and joined the Air Force. Now I got my calling up papers to go away in the Air Force about a month later, but you had to get your employer to sign the papers to let you go because we were in a reserved occupation, that meant to say we were doing war work!

So I had to take my papers in to Alf to get them signed. He said “I’m not signing them” so I couldn’t’ get them signed so I had to send them back. Six months later I got some more papers and I asked Alf to sign them, but no, he wouldn’t sign them. So later in 1940 I got another set of papers and this time I didn’t tell him and I waited till the very end – the last day and then they called me up.

Now I came out of the forces in 1946, August of ’46, and I went back to work at Taylor Pallister’s.

Now as I’ve said previously I was pretty good at my job and the foreman had said to me “Noel, I’m going to put you on maintenance“, so I was doing all the jobs in the factory preparing machines and whatever wanted doing I used to do it. The factory was very old and to keep the factory going I had a very dangerous job. At times I had to go up onto the shafting up a height and I had to pour on, this like black treacle to make the belt stick to the pulleys to drive all the machines because they were trying to push more out of the machines than the motor could give. If they pushed too hard it used to blow the main fuses of the shop. Then I had to go and put new fuses in the shop almost every day to keep the factory going.

So just after the 1950s, actually it was about 1955, they built the new factory in the old Dunston colliery works. They had pulled the colliery down, they’d left the colliery offices up but they pulled the colliery down and we had our new factory built there, which was a beauty.

Just a little thing I remember. I told you I got a bike when I was a boy about eleven and I used to ride round to the colliery, Dunston colliery, with a cigarette and a match in my pocket. Not for me, I used to wait for my Dad coming up the shaft and I used to sit there and give him his cigarette and his match and now we are here on the very spot where he was working. Of course my father died in 1941 just after I had joined the Air Force but we’ll come back to that later on.

This new factory that they had built was beautiful airy and light with windows all over and we had the job of moving the old factory, all the machines into the new factory. Now there were three of us at the time, two fitters, Bob Foster and I and an electrician. So what Mr Taylor done was to stagger the men’s holidays so the men were off instead of a fortnight it was spread over three weeks and in three weeks we took the roof of the old building off underneath the staiths and we got the cranes in we lifted all the machinery out of the roof and onto the flat trucks, on the railway trucks and of course the railway lines ran right past the factory so we lifted them out of the old factory, through the roof onto the trucks and had the engine take them along to the new factory. We took part of the new factory roof off, lifted all the machines through and lowered them into the new factory, put them on skates and put them all in long lines. Now there was no shafting but they had little motors on brackets with little belts on that we attached to every machine so every machine had its own little motor. It was just a little unit. So the whole factory was fitted out and we bolted all the machines down and we got the electrician to connect all the motors up. We worked day and night, weekends and I was hardly home for three weeks putting all these machines in and at last, on the Sunday before the men started work on the Monday we bolted the last machine down. Now Mr Taylor was so pleased with us that he said,“I think you lads should have three days holiday with pay and have a rest”

Shortly after the factory got going I was made up to foreman. Alf had retired. Now this was the busy years. All over people were working long hours, for instance I worked, or the factory worked, from seven o’clock in the morning until nine o’ clock at night on a Tuesday and a Thursday and we used to work Saturday mornings and sometimes on Sundays. But this was happening all over. The place was busy, very busy! In fact, it was so busy that after about twelve months I was made up to Works’ Manager and I had to handle then, all the unions.

But a little few light instances what happened, that the apprentices were larking on. We had Fentimans, the pop people, who came in and said, “We’ve got a pop machine or a lemonade machine we’d like to put it in. I said,“providing there is no liability to the company, you can have a go”. About a week later the man came to refill the machine. He got the shock of his life because all he got out of it was one coin a sixpence. It had a hole drilled in it with a long wire on and every time someone wanted a bottle of pop, they put the con in, pushed it in on the end of the wire, pushed it down, got the bottle out then pulled the wire back out with the coin on. So that’s how they cracked that. So when he took his machine away he brought another one.

“This one”, he said “was the state of the art, the very best, the latest technology, vandal proof!” You name it, it was or so he thought! This was an orange machine, you’ll have seen the type a square plastic bowl with an orange that revolves going around and the oranges getting mixed up. It took a day or two before our apprentices cracked this system. But crack it they did and how they managed that was, they put the plastic carton in the machine, put in the money and the machine filled up your cup, but before the cup got filled up to the top when it was only three quarters full, the machine, which was plugged into a socket at the bottom, just before ¾ full someone switched off the machine. Then they took the cup away and put an empty cup in its place, put down the switch and the machine started off again from the beginning, pouring out, again but before it got to the top, switch it off again and so on, providing nobody was getting too greedy. If somebody got too greedy and let it click over they had to put in another sixpence in but they could empty the machine with one coin, So, when the chap came back to empty it, he got sixpence out. That was the end of him!

Well later on, because these machines were all over, they were putting them in every factory all over the place and they were saying “If they’ll work all over, they’ll work here”.

Later on another machine vendor came in, this time with a cigarette machine. He asked if he could put it. It was foolproof in the other places that had it. I told him you’re wasting your time but he insisted, but they managed to crack that. So, as I said before, our apprentices were well and truly trained. They were really geniuses at beating the system."

Promotion to the board as told by Noel Garvin .

"About 1969-70 Mr Taylor senior retired and I was asked to join the board as a works director. Now this was a wonderful moment for me. I only wish my father had been alive. Here I was, a director of a company on the very spot I used to wait for my father to come up from the mine with a cigarette and a match when I was a little boy!

Well, this wonderful day was greeted by all the directors greeting me in the board room and then they showed me my new office and told me to go and pick up my new car. It was a beauty, a gold coloured Vauxhall Ventura, it was 3 ½ litres. That was the biggest car on the road at that particular time.

About six months previous, Mam (or Nan) and I were going through the town when we seen this lovely green Jag and we bought it, second hand of course. It was very expensive to run but we loved it. Heads would turn when we were out in it. Inside was real green leather. It had that beautiful hid smell about it. Oh, how I wish we had kept it! Anyway, I would love to have put that away in a garage until now, It would be worth a fortune. I was sorry to part with it but that’s life! Anyway we had a new Ventura to try out and to take its place.

Well as I’ve said before things were getting very busy and you don’t get made up to be a director for nothing and one of my main jobs was to deal with the unions.

Late l960s and early 70s were the days of the very strong unions. There was full employment, industry was booming and shipyards were working all the hours that God sent. You could work seven days a week and many men did. A man could leave one firm say on a Friday, and start another firm on the Monday. For the first time the working man had money in his pocket. They worked very hard in those days but they played hard. Many had holidays abroad, some even twice a year. Others bought their first homes, a thing unheard of before the war. Some bought their first car. This of course was very good for the building trade, the car people who couldn’t build houses fast enough. Housing estates sprang up all over the place. Yes, it was good, but not for the managers of the factories. We had to walk a tight-rope to keep production going and strike free. Now the worst offenders were the dockers and the car workers. Their demands grew every week, week after week. They wanted more for the job. The dockers, well, they could paralyse the whole country in twenty four hours. That is if they called a dock strike. The car workers’ demands were even higher, they wanted higher wages and better conditions which unsettled other workers of smaller factories. There was even a song by Alan Price out at the time, “Oh you can’t touch me I’m part of the Union”. Sung by all the pop groups.

Then there were the electricians, the power workers. They drove the whole country into the ‘three day week’ when we only had electricity for three days. They worked a go-slow, it was terrible. You know you felt “What could you do?” You had to fall in line with these men some way. Now I felt, obviously in my own little factory, the only way to avoid trouble was to have that close contact with the shop floor. You know to nip anything in the bud before the trouble started. Get things sorted out. Get the grievances sorted out before they had time to fester. It wasn’t always easy. You might have one troublemaker and they could stop production in a minute, but I managed better than most and tried to be fair on both sides. After all you know, I had worked on the shop floor. I know every man in the factory personally, and the only strike we ever had was when I was on holiday in Scotland, and once Mr Harley Taylor, he asked me to come back and sort it all out. So they sent for me and I came back and sorted it all out and peace reigned once more.

By this time we had done away with our general repair work on ships. We concentrated on the making of big blocks and tackle because every ship had to have lifting gear. We supplied rudders and rudder carriers, many with a lot of patents. We supplied these all over the world, including a lot of the ice-cutting ships that went through the Russian waters, through the St Lawrence seaways to keep them free all year round to get the ships through.

One of my jobs was also to go, on request, from captains and people like that, to go to the likes of Rotterdam where ships were having refits to see what was needed. We had agents for selling, I didn’t do any selling, I just met these captains and their agents and sorted their problems for them and also get orders as well, and just then come back. We were on all kinds of ships, Russian, Chinese, wherever there was trouble I was there.

We also were still a family business but times were changing in the seventies up to the eighties. Now Mr Taylor decided in about 1978 to float the company and make it a public company because before that it was just owned by himself. Well, there was a lot of changes happening, there was these people from London, they were called in those days asset stripping. What they done they found a nice company that had money, and was running well and they would take all the money off the company and they would make the company go into overdraft and cut down on the men, sell all the assets that the company owned, make a real good profit out of them, fill all their banks with the money, then just let the company go to the wall and it would collapse.

Now, it was at this time, well, we managed to stay afloat obviously, but we were taken over by a London company called Bardsie. Mr Harley Taylor retired when the new manager of this company came up from London. They came up every week. They flew up every week for the meeting to see how we were getting on and they wanted, well, they were always on about wanting cutbacks and more money and everything. We had a board meeting every week and it was heated at times, especially when it was suggested that the work force had to be cut again, sometimes cut by as much as twenty five per cent. You know twenty five per cent of a small company, if you have a company of one hundred and sixty you know you are cutting back a lot of men. Their methods were considered cost effective by cutting the work force, but it didn’t work out like that. If you haven’t got enough men to make your equipment then you can’t get the money in, so it’s false economy to cut back too far, which these people wanted.

At this time I was now about sixty-one years old and the move I asked for – well I wanted to retire. So I said “Will you let me go?” They said no, or only if you attend to the unions and get an agreement for the hours. You know special agreements with them, they would consider it. Now that wasn’t good enough for me, so I got onto Mr Brighthouse of Bardsie and got an agreement with him. It took a lot of work to get this agreement that I would settle the union, settle them down, get agreements for the company that there would be no trouble and all this type of thing, cut back on the manpower which was very hard for me at that time because I had started nearly all of the men from young boys and I knew their families and everything. It was hard to pick out men and finish them. They were very sad days that last twelve months. It took me about twelve months to get all this sorted out.

At last the day had arrived! I was sixty-two. Fancy, after forty-eight years with the one firm, that was right from a boy to a man. Well, I was glad to be going but in a way sad to be leaving ‘cos I was leaving my many friends I’d made during my lifetime at work. But mind they gave me a grand send off. It was a big surprise party, it was all arranged. It was arranged in the boardroom with all of the men off the floor (well as many as they could get in), as well as the office staff and fellow directors. I get a bottle of whisky and six tumblers now they were from the shop stewards, they were feeling me going more than I was, a tobacco jar and a pipe from the men and from the office staff I got a wood turning lathe and portable garden hose. They were making sure that I was going to be kept occupied when I retired. Then the directors, they gave me a stereo radio and a set of matching leather suitcases ready for my many holidays abroad. You know there were many funny remarks, they were sorry to see me go but the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.

I got a lovely retirement card from the office staff, mind the funny remarks on and all the office staff signed it and they all put their little comments and little verses on. Now I’ll treasure that for the rest of me days. This was now the 13th January 1984 I left Taylor Pallisters for the last time. That was the end of my working days.

It is now the 13th January 1997 and I am seventy-five years old now and I’ve had a wonderful thirteen years of retirement. Now we have seen some great countries on our travels on our many holidays including Russia and America. We’ve seen our grand children grow up and I’ve had a good time. God has been good to me and I have had a great life.

God bless you all!"

I

Posted on February 24, 2006

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Posted by: Linda Taylor at January 7, 2011 12:28 AM

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