John Day 5 and Pattern making

 

 

Well I think it’s about time I got back to John Day and his reminiscences of his 1930s apprenticeship in the Royal Arsenal. If you have been following this you will see that his apprenticeship consists of working for a department within the Arsenal for a few weeks or months to see what they do and learn some of the necessary skills. They would then move on to another department. John was a premium apprentice and working at the same time for a degree at prestigious Woolwich Polytechnic. He, and his fellows, were destined to move into some sort of directorship - maybe a major management position.  Therefore it was vital that they were able to understand how the complex fabric of a major industrial environment, like the Royal Arsenal, was cordinated.

 

In my last article I described how he was working at the Land’s End electrical substation which was out in the very secret area at the far east of the Arsenal site. The next site he was allocated to was what he describes as the ‘Pattern Shop’.  What and where was this?

 

Clearly, things change, and it is not always going to be easy to pin down reminiscences from the 1930s .was allocated in the 1930s. John may use words to describe departments which are different from those used by today’s historians.The Royal Arsenal History website has got maps and directories but the scale and complexity are daunting.

 

Industrial pattern making wa something which was undertaken in special departments and I’m sure this still goes on where traditional industries survive. It is the making of a pattern – a model – of whatever is going to be cast in metal. Usually this would be in wood although other substances could be used and it would probably be kept and stored.

 

John is clear that he was being sent to work in a workshop where patterns were being made. Where was this? After poring over the ridiculously complex map of the Arsenal site I found ‘C81 Pattern makers shop’ . which was south of one of the loops of the Arsenal canal on the site which is now under, or near, the Plumstead  Bus station. I also consulted some people researching the Arsenal. One of them suggested a connection with the Royal Brass Foundry – and I’ll come back to that – but also to a building, C5, which dates from the 1880s and has since been demolished.   It’s shown on the map as a ‘foundry’.

 

John is quite precise in the position of this mysterious building. He describes it having a ‘kind of mezzanine floor’ with a system of mirrors looking down so that the foreman could sit up there and look at what everybody was doing at their workbenches below. He says that the foreman of the Pattern Shop was ‘Clarke’. Another of the Arsenal researchers sent me a photograph which he says is of the pattern workshops – but I’m not sure if fits in with John’s description or not.

 

John says that all the apprentices took the opportunity to make themselves a toolbox but the foreman told the shop labourer to smash them with a sledge hammer. He had made two boxes, one in pine to hold his tea-making equipment and the other in mahogany, which was kept in a drawer and never assembled. He told Clarke that the pine box was to keep the dust from his cup and it was allowed to remain - Clarke never knew about the mahogany one. Although Mr Clark comes over as a nasty bully I’m sure he had good reason given the amount of private work going on all over the place, as well as stealing what was probably Government property. I have read accounts of the same sort of thing going on in the Royal Dockyards and I guess it was so prevalent that none of them thought it was wrong.

 

Near the Pattern Shop was the Pattern Store. This may indeed have been the Brass Foundry building, although it is not particularly near the building marked on the map as ‘pattern shop. John says the ground floor was used for ‘wooden mock-ups of tanks to find out how much could be stowed and still leave space for the crew’. There are photographs of the Royal Brass Foundery being used as garage in this. John says one of the apprentices surreptitiously moved everything several feet forward and ‘opened a little door to drive his Austin Seven into the space. He then fitted it with a beautiful two seater body painted battleship grey’and ‘when we drove it out through the main gate I had a ‘Brooklands’ silencer for my own Austin between the floor boards’. (tut tut)

 

From the Pattern Shop the next step for John was the Brass Foundry.  I have mentioned the Royal Brass Foundary earlier here and I don’t think that this was where John was working. The Royal Brass Foundry itself is one of the most important of listed buildings on the Arsenal site and is one of the few which was not demolished for ‘regeneration’. Historic England describes it as ‘brass cannon foundry,1716-17, possibly by Sir John Vanbrugh, for the Board of Ordnance; extended and altered 1771-1774 by Jan Verbruggen, Master Founder, extensively repaired 1970s;’

As far as I’m aware it is still used as a bookstore for the National Maritime Museum and I can certainly remember being told I could go there to refer to books ...  but I could not ask where we were going because it was secret. I think that the Brass Foundry where John was working could have been one of several buildings marked on the plan but that it was in the oldest area of the Arsenal, where all the listed buildings are today.

Describing his time in the            Brass Foundry John says ‘I spent most of my time moulding skimmer cores and brackets for the wires of overhead cranes .  A great deal of the casting was done in manganese bronze from which the slag was skimmed off from the molten metal with a ‘cubic core’ .   He says.. the “core box” was used ... This was a block of brass with a hole of about an inch and a half square.  I made them by the dozen and they went into the core oven to dry - the oven was ideal for roasting potatoes for a mid - morning snack’.

He also made risers in which steel rods were pumped up and down to make sure the molten metal filled all the space in the mould and  ‘I spent some days casting arming vanes for torpedoes’. The mould was made in steel with six wedge shaped pieces to be pulled out and to release the fan shaped casting. ‘I stood by a crucible of molten aluminium, ladled it into the mould, gave the mould a bash with a mallet, which took the mould apart, took out a vane, put the mould back together and started all over again. It was not a popular job.’
A month or so later he would be off to another department’

He also mentions another premium engineering apprentice in the tool room at the same time – or a year earlier - and originating from Plumstead. This was Arthur Sherwood who became a Professor of Mathematics in Australia. I’m afraid that I was unaware that there was a Newcastle University in Australia and I wasted a lot of my time looking for him in our own Newcastle.  Prof Sherwood is however more famous for building the smallest ever working live steam locomotive in 1:240 scale in 1973. 

Premium apprentices were the very clever young men and perhaps all the private work and scrounging which John describes well were actually part of a training in which they could learn resilience and think their way through problems. Just part of their education as the future leaders of industry.