JOHN DAY 6

 

 well must get back to John Day and his reminiscences of his 1930s apprenticeship in the Royal Arsenal. His apprenticeship involved working for successive departments within the Arsenal for a few weeks or months to see what they did and learn some of the necessary skills. They would then move on to another department. As a premium apprentice it was vital that he understood how the complex fabric of a major industrial environment, like the Royal Arsenal, was co-ordinated.

But first things first – as John said ‘There was always tea making.’ He described how this was done.  Water was boiled in a conical tin can. He does not say how and what was used in order to heat it up - but I suppose in this sort of workplace  there must always have been some sort of heat source in which the can of water could be to put to boil. Next, he had to have what they called a ‘screw’ which was a small piece of newspaper which had been brought from home and contained a mixture of tea leaves and condensed milk.  I can only just begin to imagine the state of condensed milk which had been wrapped up in newspaper - in the days before plastic bags. The tin can used for boiling the water had a cup in the lid and the mixture of tea leaves and condensed milk was scraped into the boiling water. I do rather suspect making and drinking this horrible mix was for many young men part of a rite of passage into the working world of ‘men’ - but you didn’t have to do it like that, lads, you know!

Luckily washing the overalls was done by one of the labourers – which at least avoided being confronted by Mother who probably didn’t appreciate clothing which had had condensed milk wrapped in newspaper in the pockets.  The labourer/launderer boiled them up in soda over the blacksmith’s forge in his lunch hour. The money he made out of this for this was paid into the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society funeral department so that when the time came he would get a funeral with black horses, plumes and all the trimmings. He also supplied cigarettes, tobacco, biscuits and sweets which he brought wholesale and sold at retail prices.

He goes on to describe the hours of work in the Arsenal at Woolwich. Weekdays were 8 a.m. to 5:40 pm and 8 a.m. to 11a.m. on Saturdays. There were two weeks holiday which were made up of ‘closed week’- this was for the ‘Kings Birthday’ which was on the Friday afternoon and Saturday morning before Whitson bank holiday. There were also ‘bean feasts’ and bank holidays.  

 

Workers had to ‘clock in’ each morning using Gledhill- Brooks time clocks and individual time cards.  There were two racks for the cards one each side of the clock, in and out. These were normally kept shut during working hours and opened a few minutes before clocking off time by the time clerk.  By rattling the handle the clock could be made to jump a minute and the first to arrive was expected to gain this extra minute for the rest of the queue. Workers were allowed to be just one minute late – after that lateness was counted in 15 minute segments.

Nobody was allowed to start work until the foreman had walked up the shop, when there was a panic to put away newspapers. John describes how ‘I once started before the foreman came as I had a ‘stranger’; or ‘contract’ job for a friend on hand’ and ‘received a right earful from the stop steward.’

 

He says ‘another earful was earned’ when he was doing a private job on a Brown and Sharp surface grinder. ‘Somebody’ wanted to make a spirit level and had acquired a length of stainless steel similar to a flat bottomed rail and John was asked to grind the base. He ‘put the stainless steel on the magnetic chuck, switched the chuck on and brought the grinding wheel down onto the rail .... that was when I learnt that stainless this is not magnetic.....’

 

‘There was a bang, the rail flew across the shop ... the wheel on the machine broke and bits flew through a window ... across an alleyway to another window .. and landed in the shop next door.’ Questions were asked.

 

There had been no guard over the wheel which John had used – no surprise there! Guards slowed work down nobody used them.  The enquiry into the accident  laid down that guards has to be refitted. They stayed in place for a week or so.

 

John commented that most of the machinery dated back to the Great War and was driven from line shafting through open belts. There were no chuck guards on lathes, no cutter guards on milling machines and speed changing on cone pulleys was done with the lump of wood against the moving flat belt. He says ‘we learnt to keep clear ourselves rather than relying on somebody else having made a machine fool proof.;’  and ‘I don’t suppose there has been a great reduction in industrial accidents in this mollycoddle age’.  Oh dear!

 

John’s next move was to the New Fuze Tool Room as a centre lathe turner. I was put on an old 8 inch Le Blond lathe. ... apprentices always got the most worn-out lathe - if we could do a good job with that, we could certainly use a more modern tool’. The jobs varied from 0.2 in. diameter striker pins to 4 in. diameter bronze discs.

 

In the tool room working next to John was a ‘rotund, red faced, cheery character who had a mind like an engineer’s pocket book’. This man had instant recall of all the decimals for fractions of an inch by sixty -fourths, the sizes of number and letter drills and the thread depths of all the screw pitches - all to four figures !

 

Then ‘in our fourth or fifth year we were given a turning test’. They were given drawings and from them had the choice of jobs that could be done in less than a day. They also were given a very modern lathe in the Carriage Tool Room to make it on. ‘These lathes were so complicated compared to the old clapped - out ones we were used to, that we either spent the morning trying to find out how everything worked’ or, as I did, nipped back to the old machine that we knew and machined the test piece on that.

While he was in the New Fuze Factory he also worked on a milling machine. He made ‘a set of helical milling cutters for use in the tool room’,   A helical milling cutter is a cutting tool featuring angled flutes wrapped around its body.

John says this job was ‘right in the deep end!’ ...’Anyone who has done helical milling will have found that the calculated settings for the helix are not the settings for the machine, that is where experience comes in’.  He was taught by Fred Best ‘the highest regarded miller there.... Fred’s job was making the gauges for slide ways for the new 3.7 inch gun which were planed on his Parkinson milling machine using the fast table feed’.

Fred did not hold with advanced education and told John he was wasting his time ‘as there are people with degrees sweeping the streets.