John Day last days at the Arsenal

 

And so – I have reached the last couple of episodes of John Day’s memoirs which I’ve been following on and off for the past year. John Day was a premium apprentice in The Royal Arsenal in the 1930s; and  I’ve been using extracts from a lot of autobiographical material which he gave to Greenwich Industrial History Society Newsletter in the early 2000s. In them he describes how he was continually moved from Department to Department in the Arsenal with perhaps only a few months at each place at one time. So I’m afraid this last episode is going to be a bit fragmentary in that John is clearly just jotting down a few last points and ends up with when he eventually left the Arsenal.

 

In the last section of my previous episode- he was at ‘The Tinman’s Shop’ – another department near the Plumstead Gate.  He explained that the Tinman’s Shop was, among other things, responsible for making ammunition boxes used to keep detonators and fuses dry in humid atmospheres. These were often nearly two feet long and, he says ‘it was an education to watch a seam – which ran the length of the tin – being made neatly with one stroke of a soldering iron’. The irons used for this were made of heavy copper with a blunt end; while, he says, ’thin irons like the ones used for D.I.Y were known as ‘winkle pickers’.’

 

Everywhere he went in the Arsenal there were always people doing ‘private’ work and this included John himself.  ‘During my stay I made a “Brooklands” silencer, presumably for his motor bike, from sheet steel and had it dipped in tin on the night shift for a packet of cigarettes.’ He explained how the silencer was developed because neighbours of Locke King, who built the Brooklands motor racing circuit on his land, complained about the noise.I found a blog site which explains the background to the 1924 legal action against noise from the circuit and about the silencer

https://simanaitissays.com/2014/05/24/brooklands-and-its-silencers/

 

John continued with a  story about guns “One morning when I came in, there was a terrific row going on in the foreman’s office. This was because the barrel of a 3.7 inch gun was about 14 feet long and during production had about an extra foot less on manufacture. This was done on the night –shift and on this occasion the two feet had been sawn off the same end. The foreman said, amongst other things ‘What are we going to do with that gun now?’ to which the reply was ‘You can always put it a foot nearer the enemy’.”

Another month or two, between polytechnic term times, was spent in the Shell Tool Room doing odd jobs that included the design and manufacture of a lathe slide rest. John explained that all the tool rooms had a blacksmith to do odd bits of forging and lathe tool making. The one in this shop had been apprenticed to an ornamental smith and “ one day he showed me a rose that he forged as his test-piece. It was beautiful, even down to the veining in the petals and leaves.”

One Christmas was spent in the Forges with another apprentice, who’s name John had forgotten. There was a hearth next to the south wall and near the door. The first thing each morning they lit the fire with paper and wood and put some coal on top to roast into coke which produced a clean fire. Then, it being winter, the tools were warmed since a sudden blow on cold thin steel could find it shattered. He said “There is something fascinating about forming red hot steel which has the consistency of cold lead”. The two main occupations were forging pairs of tongs and making templates. When there was a complicated forging to be done, it needed a template of thin plate to check the shape against and an apprentice was the stooge to make it ....”but someone clever could avoid this.”

 

He describes how they made themselves a toaster comprising a 4” square slab of steel about ½ “ thick with a long handle. “This, heated to red heat in the forge, was the best and most even toaster I have come across for cooking toasted cheese” and “at Christmas we decorated the forge and extended our menu to include kippers cooked the same way.”  And he adds “it may be the only cookery that many men ever undertake - but it’s about adapting their tools to do the work of the chef.”

Also “in-front of our forge was a small steam hammer worked by a rather dour individual. We soon discovered that it was not as easy as it looked to take down a square section, keeping it square. With the slightest provocation, it would go into a diamond shape and it needed strong wrists to hold the diamond edge on to get the metal back to square. High speed steel, worked at less than near white heat would split like bamboo.”

Back to Christmas “as usual short of cash, we collected a number of old files and forged them into scrapers and screwdrivers for some of the awkward jobs we knew existed in the fitting and assembly shops. We went round these shops selling them and taking orders for other special tools.”

One day I went to the heavy forge and sat up on the crane gantry watching the forging of a part of a big gun barrel. To see a lump of red hot steel, some four feet square and ten feet long, being squeezed to shape under a huge hydraulic press is something never to forget.”

“Just behind our forge was a 1000 ton hammer made by James Nasmyth; it was dusty and neglected even then - what a lot of our treasures have been lost”. Yes, What did happen  to many interesting devices remaining in the Arsenal when it closed? It was always my understanding that everything was junked.

The last shop John worked in as an apprentice was Miscellaneous Machines situated at the Warren Lane end of the site.  John, writing in 2001 said it was sited ‘near where the new Museum of Artillery will be’. He wasn’t to know that the ill fated Firepower Museum lasted just a couple of years and I think the building he mentions is one of the ones used by the entertainment group, Woolwich Works.

At Miscellaneous Machines John worked on what he thought must have been a rejected export to Russia just after the Great War.  All the wording on it was in Cyrillic and, what was worse, all the feed handles worked the “wrong” way - because for a fixed handle to move a slide away by clockwise turning, the thread has to be left handed.

John also made bits for a printing press which the foreman was building for himself -all the apprentices well knew that if they got a drawing on an odd sheet of paper, it was a 'foreman’s foreigner'.

He said there was a first year apprentice in that shop who asked about a difficult screw cutting job. “I lent him, grudgingly, my special screw cutting tool with instructions not to let it get blunt. When he came back it showed signs of heavy use, so I told him to take it to the shop blow pipe and harden it, but not to get it too hot. He came back, very hang dog, with a shapeless blob of metal to the delight of the rest of the shop who knew that the tool was made of lead !”.

 

There were traditional joke messages that the younger apprentices would be sent on - caught by the old favourites of “a long weight” or “a right hand cuff”, but Woolwich had a special trick that was foolproof. “Going to the stores to borrow a tool, one would be told that 'Bill Starbuck' had it, but was 'not using it at the moment'  Enquiries about Bill’s whereabouts landed one in a far corner of the shop asking again, only to be told he was working in another building and to go there. The other building either denied knowledge or moved one on another wild goose chase!”

It all had to come to eventually. John became 21 and could no longer be an apprentice, so when the term at the Poly finished, he went back as a journeyman fitter for a few months.  He was engaged in fitting drum brakes to Great War equipment which was being resuscitated:. When he left he was not allowed to take with him  ‘a very nice set of single ended spanners up to 1 inch, which had arrived with a new electric motor and had never been entered in the books, so I reckoned they did not belong to Woolwich!. There was quite an argument.”

John left the Arsenal  and I understand most of his career was in the Patent Office.  He wrote all of this in retirement and I never actually met him although I know he did a lot of            work in the Royal Artillery library.