John Day part 2

 In my last article, a couple of weeks ago, I introduced you to John Day who was an important engineer at the Patent Office. In his retirement he wrote a long series of articles for the Greenwich Industrial History Newsletter about his apprenticeship at the Royal Arsenal in the 1930s.

 I’ve always been quite keen to extend what John had to say to a wider audience but he only ever gave us permission to use his material in the newsletter and if we wanted to reproduce it somewhere else we would need to get permission from his descendents. I have no idea if John had children or how we could contact them if he did.  So I am using quotations from his material as part of these articles which seems to be the only option we have of getting what he had to say better known. I hope it’s interesting, anyway.

 

I should perhaps confess that all of what he says about different types of guns and other weaponry is like a foreign language to me. I am doing my best to record what he said but I am well aware that I may be making some really silly mistakes. If you spot any, or just want to comment, please let me know. I think it would be very interesting to learn a lot more about what was actually done in the Arsenal as it’s an important part of Woolwich’s local history.

 

In my first article – using material taken from his account – he was at the start of his apprenticeship in the Arsenal.  He was given an introductory job in the New Fuse Factory where women workers put together components.  He had also been set some easyish tasks and made various items and at the same time helped staff with maintenance work on the shop floor.   

His next move was to spend only a month in the Mechanical Test House – a building just across the road from the Power Station. This was an important part of work in the Arsenal with a long history in state military manufacturing establishments. But there was little for an apprentice to do here apart from watching ‘slinging ropes and chains being tested for load bearing’ and ‘odd samples of metal being broken and tested for hardness on a Vickers diamond machine -a machine, so called, because it left a diamond shaped imprint, had been developed locally at Vickers Crayford works in the 1920s – and has gone on to become standard equipment for the test. However, John said, they were only allowed to watch and not to be involved. I wonder if there were legal limitations which meant testing could only be undertaken by those qualified to do so.

Back in the office there was homework to do from the classes at the Polytechnic and when they were finished ‘there was a drawer full of western magazines’.

Facilities were not wonderful and a toilet was situated in the middle of the wide roadway outside of the Power Station. It was built from corrugated iron and flushed, continually, by a stream running underneath into a sewer emptying into the river. Nevertheless first thing every morning it was full of ‘newspaper readers’. One morning one of the apprentices made a paper boat, and floated it down the stream having put some paraffin soaked cotton waste in it – with resulting ‘Irate men and a good illustration of pandemonium’.

At the end of the next month John was moved to the erecting bay of the Main Machine Shop, this was in ‘Laboratory Square’ - the oldest part of the Arsenal. There they were building Mk.1 Dragons, which he describes as “gun towing tractors that held a gun crew of six ‘and which had been developed by Vickers at Crayford. John says they were powered by a ‘4 ½ litre Meadows engine’ - Henry Meadows was a Wolverhampton based engine and gearbox specialist. John said It had a ‘Wilson preselector gearbox to the front axle, having two steering clutches’ and that they were ‘full track vehicles’ with a top speed, unloaded, of about 30 m.p.h.

John was soon involved in testing these vehicles. To do this apprentices went out with the ganger. acting as his mate– in John’s case the ganger was Owen Stott, ‘a large Welshman’. They used a tank testing area which was between the Danger Buildings and Plumstead Road. It had ‘built-up single figure gradients’ and was crossed by a railway line. It was also home to some rabbits – we rarely hear of any wildlife on the Arsenal site, but here it was, just off Plumstead High Street. Owen was always overjoyed to spot a rabbit and chase it at full speed over the testing ground and John comments ‘ one soon learnt to hang on tight when this happened’.

 

Owen taught John a lesson which he said he had never forgotten. The Meadows engine used on the Dragons had a radiator at the rear that included an oil cooler. When one leaked John was given the job of replacing it. After he had installed the new cooler he ran the engine to see that it wasn’t leaking and while concentrating on this he leaned very near to the unguarded fan. Owen saw the danger and ‘tossed a crumpled sheet of newspaper into the fan ... which produced a white explosive blur’. John says ‘I shot out over the three foot high side of the vehicle in one bound ... you won’t find me near an unguarded fan again’.

Another job John was given in the erecting bay of the Main Machine Shop was using a hammer and chisel to cut flat surfaces on the sides of cast iron mountings of 6 inch coast defence guns so that ‘the  new - fangled predictor gear’ could be added to them. Guns of this type were closely identified with the Royal Arsenal and the ‘new fangled’ gear would enable their use with changing needs and conditions. He also worked on the scraping of the flat surfaces on the saddles of 2 pounder anti - tank guns. These are said to have been Britain’s main anti-tank weapon and John comments ‘a nice little gun that was too weak for its intended work’.

He also notes a lightweight tank as ‘interesting in having two A.E.C. bus engines on their sides under the floor’. AEC were of course the west London based bus and lorry manufacturers who were to make enormous numbers of military vehicles in the Second World War and it is interesting that their engines were also being used in tanks. In the mid 1930s – at around the time which John was describing - they switched production away from petrol driven engines to diesels, but he doesn’t make clear which fuel was used here. He also comments about these tanks that as much of the interior as possible was made in light alloy.

There was also much to be learnt in watching established staff at work. He describes watching three men ‘securing armour plate to magnesium alloy framework with red - hot rivets’. One man ‘held the rivet gun, another held the rivet snap and another had with a lump of sacking to put out the fire!’. He explains that all the joints had to have at least two right angles, ‘since a lead bullet would squirt through one right angle joint ..  that’s why tank armour is all one piece, or welded together without joints.’

He then moved on to pattern making ‘which made a change from dealing with metal’. ‘’He describes Tom Hammet, who was the next tradesman he was placed with. Tom was ‘a craftsman of the old school’ and nearing retirement. He made string musical instruments, including a homemade double bass which he played in a local orchestra. He was also a Methodist lay preacher. John said ‘To Tom, Picture Post was utter pornography.’

He described how Tom ‘ once he made a small mistake in 2 inch diameter core box, some eight inches long, cutting too deep less than a sixteenth of an inch, over an area of about a square inch. So meticulous was he that although he was on piecework, he neatly cut out the offending area and inserted a new piece - even matching the grain, though it would have several coats of paint and varnish over it.

It was all part of his education.