Factory Tales 1

My last two posts were somewhat of a departure for this blog, being only a day or so short of being topical. To return to business as usual, I needed to put up something today to hide Gone Away's flouting of stated policy of never being first with the news. In searching for a suitable subject, I realized that I have a whole series of stories on a theme that I have not touched upon before - what I might term "Factory Tales". This is the first of them.

When the decision to leave Africa and return to England was made, the one place I never intended to settle was the city of my birth, Coventry. I knew that it was the center of the car industry in Britain and this caused me to picture it as a grim, grey and gloomy industrial town, an appaling vision for one who had grown up in the open spaces of Africa. It was inevitable, therefore, that circumstances should dictate that we move to Coventry within three months of our arrival in England.

It was a pleasant surprise to find that my imagination had been completely wrong; there were no factory chimneys pouring forth palls of smoke to blacken the landscape. Coventry's car factories had been powered by electricity from the first and so damage to the environment was minimal. The factories were not clustered together into one vast industrial area but were dotted throughout the city and hardly noticeable. It was in fact a fairly pleasant and typical English town with a compact and defined central area surrounded by high density suburbs, but green with trees and surrounded by fields.

Inevitable, too, was the fact that my first job should be in one of those car plants I had so demonized in my imagination. It's in the blood. Both of my grandfathers had worked all their lives in the car industry, during the war my mother had been employed in factories making parts for tanks, and my uncle still worked for one of the car plants, just as he always had. A Coventry kid at heart, I answered the call of my roots and went to work as a machinist in a factory making engines for cars.

This was Morris Engines, a very old factory that existed by taking cast off machinery from its big brother in Birmingham, the Longbridge works. We would refurbish these ancient machines and then work them hard to produce the engine parts that were then assembled for transport back to Longbridge. I was assigned to the con rod section.

It is hard to describe the noise produced by a car factory. Picture a long warehouse building, so long in fact that to stand in the center was to lose sight of both ends in the mass of machinery, cables, pipes and roof supports cluttering the distance. Then imagine those hundreds of machines all working at once, chewing and ripping at metal, each one producing its particular sounds of mechanical monsters at the feast. The effect was like standing next to a Boeing 747 as it revs up for take off. Into this I wandered as an innocent from backwoods Africa.

I had thought that I would have problems in understanding the accents of my workmates but I need not have worried. I couldn't hear a word they said in the constant roar of the place. In time, I became able to hear conversations, just as they all could. Somehow one develops an ability to shut out the noise and speak without raising one's voice. And then I found that the accent was not a problem - I could understand quite easily.

My compatriots in servitude found my accent mildly interesting. In my chameleon fashion, I learned their accent quickly and eventually became quite good at it. But they could always tell. Most guessed at Australian but a few would try to be clever and venture New Zealander. But what impressed me most was how they happily accepted me into their ranks. My education into the English working class, so different from our stereotypical idea of the Englishman, was beginning.

As a newcomer, I was given the easiest job on the section to start with. There were two reamers and I was assigned to one of them. It was a simple machine, a cutter on the end of a long upright axis, above a basin that caught the lubricating "suds" that were directed on to the job by a movable nozzle. Place a con rod cap in the jig in the basin, haul down on a lever and the cutter would descend to ream out one of the two holes in the cap. Release the lever, whip the cap round, ream out the other hole and that was it.

So the job was not difficult apart from the fact that every machine in the place had a quota assigned it, a standard number of items that should be produced in a normal day. At first, I found this quota impossible to achieve. I would slave away as fast as I could and still not make the required number by the end of the day. But the body learns quickly. I found that on any machine I would need only a couple of days practice to achieve the required speeds. A week, and it was easy.

We had our tricks to get faster as well. Basically, these consisted of ignoring every safety measure supplied with the machine. There was a clamp to hold the job down on that reamer - we never used it, preferring to hold the cap down with one hand while we hauled on the lever with the other. A safety grille was supplied to flip around in front of the job before working on it - I never saw anyone use it. And we were not supposed to wear gloves when working but everyone did. The swarf (shavings of metal from the job) would cut your hands to ribbons otherwise.

It was on the reamer that I found out why there was this prohibition on wearing gloves. My fellow reamer at the time was fairly new to the task and I was charging along happily next to him, bashing out the quota so that I could do nothing for the afternoon (we all aimed at that), when I noticed my companion had stopped working. I glanced round and saw that he was staring at his hand.

"What's the problem?" I asked.

His face was a picture of surprise and wonder as he replied. "My glove. It's disappeared. It was there a moment ago and now it's gone."

I realized that he was right; he was staring at a gloveless hand. For a moment we both stood there baffled as we considered how a glove could disappear so miraculously. And then I looked down at the job he'd been working on. There, scrunched into a little ball around the cutter, was the glove. The cutter had caught it, whipped it off his hand and compressed it so quickly that he had not felt a thing. The thought of what would have happened if the glove had not come off so easily made us both a little more wary that day.

Although I continued to wear gloves, I became much more aware of the dangers in operating those old machines from then on. Although I learned how to get the maximum production from them in the shortest time, I treated them with respect and care. Occasionally we would hear stories of some poor soul who'd had an accident on another section; but on the con rods we were lucky - no-one got hurt in the five years that I worked there.

Occasionally we would run out of con rods for one reason or another and then the powers that be would move us on to other sections and machines. In this way I spent some time in most sections and gained experience in operating all sorts of machinery. After the decision to close the factory had been made, my section was one of the first to get through all its remaining jobs. I was sent off to work a machine on the engine blocks section.

As it happened, I had worked on that machine before so I knew how to get the best out of it. But I also knew that only two weeks before it had chewed up its operator's hand so badly that he had been rushed off to hospital. I had always expected that my luck would run out and I'd get bitten by one of those ancient machines before I left; now I knew that this would be the one to get me.

It was basically a turntable on which three blocks could be clamped. There was a pulley arrangement that was provided to haul the blocks from the track on to the turntable but we never used it; in the quest for speed, we would just heft them from one place to another. Above the turntable was a drill operated by a lever and it had the job of drilling several holes, reaming them out and then threading them. This entailed changing drill bits several times during the process and safety guidelines directed that the drill should be stopped for each of those changes. Needless to say, we swapped bits with the drill still going. And I still wore gloves.

But I was very careful in those last few weeks. There is a point in operating machines swiftly and repetitively where one becomes a part of the whole process. Man and machine blend into a blur of speed and efficiency where everything becomes automatic and the mind is left free to wander. There is pride, too, in cutting the time necessary for each job to a bare minimum. And that is the time when accidents are most likely, when the slightest mistake can have a painful outcome. I remained very aware of what I was doing as the days drew on to the appointed date for closing.

On the last day, I completed the remaining blocks without mishap and shut down the machine. I was elated - I had done my time and escaped the place without a scratch.

Working on the engine blocks we would get covered in iron dust and, with the sweat of a long day, this would quickly turn into red rust. So we would make our way to the washrooms and clean up before going home. I would wash my face down and then use a paper towel to rub it dry. As I dried my face that last day, one edge of the paper whipped across my eye. I did not think too much of it at the time but that night it became intensely painful. At the hospital they advised that I had scratched the eyeball quite deeply and for the next two weeks I had to wear a bandage over the eye.

So the place got me in the end, just as I had always expected it to. It was from an unexpected quarter but I suppose that's where accidents always come from. Perhaps I should be grateful that it was such a minor thing compared to what could have happened.