In January 1950 I started an apprenticeship as a patternmaker in the brickworks at the marvellous wage of 9¾d per hour.
The newest apprentice got all the odd jobs to do. These included making the tea, sweeping up, going for the papers, keeping the fire going, running messages, going for ice cream in the summer, plus any other jobs that the patternmakers wanted done.
The sawdust from the machines was collected and used to line the football field on matchdays. The foreman who started me. Walter Bain, was off ill and died a few days later so I never got to meet him. The underforeman, Tommy Hamilton, was in charge for some time before another foreman was appointed. The new foreman decided to change a few practices. He decided that the apprentice should get a more formal training so I was to work with one of the patternmakers from 7am until breakfast time at 9.30am. Unfortunately no-one took into consideration that I went for the tea for the men at 9.15am. The patternmaker wouldn’t allow me to go for the tea and I thought a riot was going to start. A compromise was reached and I was allowed to go for the tea.
Apprentices had to attend evening classes three nights a week, we were not allowed to attend the trade school which operated in Falkirk during the day. The foreman would ask what I had been learning the previous evening. On one occasion I said we had been doing cubic capacities so he gave me the size of a boiler and asked me to work out the capacity. The patternmaker on the other side of the bench asked me what I was doing and when I told him he started working it out too. Soon half the shop was doing it and all getting different answers. When the foreman discovered this he did not give me any more sums.
The patternshop was situated on the top storey of a two storey building on the north side of the works and was quite a large building.
The patternmakers when I joined were Tommy Hamilton, David Crawford, Wullie Gladstone, Mungo Reid, Willie Dalrymple, Adam Scott, Adam Dunsmore, Adam Stewart, Johnny Stark, David Anderson, David Lindsay, John Pullar, Archie Gillan and Hugh Campbell who was the apprentice above me.
Later on many other people came to work in the patternshop among them being: David Mitchell, Archie Stanners, Jimmy Scott, Peter Adrian, Ian Preston, Allan Lowe, Bobby McLean, Billy Wilson, Walter Watson, Alan Lawson plus some others whose names escape me.
There were always competitions on the go at any one time. Most of the meal breaks saw the bridge school in action where the game was taken very seriously and people sometimes stopped talking to their partners because they had made a wrong call. There was also a pitchers competition. Pitchers are a smaller version of quoits where the pitchers were thrown at a pin stuck in the centre of a hole filled with clay. Darts were also played quite a lot. Each day some of the men played a Target word game taken from one of the newspapers. No one was allowed to start until after breakfast time and the competition was fierce to get the nine letter word plus the target of other words. Various small “arguments” were started for a bit of fun. For instance, one person would say that he could walk from Allandale to Denny in 30 minutes and somebody would disagree with him. The others would join in until everyone was at it. All good fun. There were other patternmakers in the shop who made moulds out of steel. They were not allowed to join the United Patternmakers Association for some reason but were allowed to join the Engineering Union and I don’t think they served a recognised apprenticeship.
Among them were Duncan McKenzie, Wullie Moffat, Alex Sorley, George Kordas, Jimmy Murphy, Billy Beck & Frank Burgess. George Kordas was Polish and had escaped from Poland when the Germans invaded that land at the start of the Second World War. He was quite strong and competed in hammer throwing at the Highland Games. There was an ongoing competition in the shop concerning a block of steel which was shaped for bending pieces of steel to be part of the wooden moulds. It was quite heavy and the object was to see how many times you could raise it above your head using only one hand. The record stood at about 80 times until somebody tempted George to have a go. He managed app. 300 and put an end to the competition and also just about put an end to himself as he was off work for a few days after straining the muscles of his back.
The railway siding ran under the patternshop and the wood for making the patterns was delivered in wagons and pulled up through a trapdoor in the floor of the patternshop by the patternmakers. This could be quite a heavy job especially when the 20ft lengths of yellow pine were wet. On my first time at this job I was to partner another patternmaker to stack the timber at the far end of the shop when it was pulled up by the others. When we had finished the foreman said he thought the stacks were not very safe and asked us to fix it. Unfortunately the other patternmaker thought otherwise and refused to fix it. As a result he was sacked. I found out later that there had been bad blood between them for some time. Another man to fall out with the management was Bobby McLean. Bobby came from Airdrie and had been a patternmaker at Fairfields shipyard in Glasgow which got him his nickname of “Fairfields Bobby”. He was a very good patternmaker with a tool box filled with tools we had never seen before but he also thought that he was indispensible. One day something went wrong with the steak pie in the canteen and everyone who had partaken of it had a bad case of diarrhoea during the night. We all managed to come out to work the next day except Bobby and when he appeared the following day he demanded to be paid for his day off. When he was refused, he said he would leave if he wasn’t paid so the management said he could leave, which he did. Yellow pine was good wood to work with but could be quite expensive and the foreman decided to buy cheaper timber which was full of knots and the grain was uneven. In addition to this, the yellow pine was good for making “home jobs”. “Home jobs” were an on-going occupation in the patternshop and leant a bit variety to the work. These jobs were not always for the patternmakers as the various managers in the works wanted jobs done too. One Christmas the whole shop was stopped to make a layout for one of the Stein’s son’s railway which was to be a Christmas present for him. It was quite an expensive present. The foreman was also into this. he tried to make an aluminium casting which was to be used as a deflector on a fireplace of a friend of his. This was to stop hot ashes falling out of the fire and on to the carpet. He had about ten attempts at before he was successfull and the total cost was about £100. “Home Jobs” were his downfall as it was discovered he and his wife were making furniture in the patternshop in the evening. He was sacked and Tommy Hamilton became the foreman again. Most of the men were involved in petty thieving such as taking firewood kindling home each evening all nicely ready for their wives to start the coal fire in the morning. Other bits and pieces were taken, some with permission, some without. Most of the management knew it was going on but turned a blind eye to it so long as it didn’t get out of hand. Archie Gillan, one of the patternmakers, had been given a job for life after losing a leg in an accident at the brick machines. Archie played on this and I don’t think I ever saw him making a mould. His principal job was looking after the mould stores and telling anyone where to find a mould that was required. He also slept part of the day. Archie needed some green paint at home and duly filled a lemonade bottle with this and placed it inside his coat pocket at 5pm when he was going home. Unfortunately the weight was too much for the pocket and the bottle fell out and smashed on the ground at his feet while he was clocking out. Archie just walked on and later we saw the works manager and the watchman looking at this pool of paint. Undaunted Archie arrived at work the next morning with one black shoe and one green shoe !!! He also used to take the valves out of his radio and bring them to work so that his landlady wouldn’t be able to listen to his radio. He sent a letter to a Norwegian radio station congratulating them on the programmes they broadcast in English. They replied thanking him for his kind words but also stated they didn’t broadcast in English. Once someone had written their name and address on a length of timber that arrived in the works from Canada. Archie duly made a note of this so that he could write to them (possibly to get an invite to Canada). The next batch of timber to arrive in the works also had names and addresses on it a n d t h i s w a s p o i n t e d o u t t o A rc h i e . Unfortunately he wasn’t told these had been added after the timber arrived. What a character ! He met a couple on holiday once and, as people do, they invited him to visit them if he was in the area. Archie took them up on this and visited them in Dunoon…… every Friday evening and stayed till Sunday. One Friday when he arrived he discovered they had moved to another town without telling him. It took Archie a week or two to trace them and resume his visits each weekend.
Patternmaking was quite a skilled job and very different but equally as skilled as patternmaking in the foundries. The foundry patternmakers made patterns which were the exact shape of the finished casting whereas the brickwork patternmaker made moulds in which the finished brick was moulded. There was a very large range of bricks which were hand made in the works and many intricate shapes from arches to domes. They also made bricks for the fireboxes of railway steam engines and also made the firebox linings for the Queen Mary & Queen Elizabeth ocean liners and many others. The patternmakers were left pretty much on their own without much interference mainly because none of the higher management knew much about patternmaking. Occasionally one of the directors would make an annual appearance and just stand in the middle of the shop and look around just to make sure nobody had stolen it ! On one such occasion, Kenneth Sanderson, a director, was standing looking around and, unfortunately Tommy, the foreman, was cutting up firewood for Bob Fraser, the company secretary, and putting it into bags. He got quite nervous of the director standing behind him and eventually he turned round and said, “It’s not for me, ye ken”. I don’t think the director had even noticed or bothered what was being cut. Tommy was a very genuine man and wouldn’t do anyone any harm but he was never cut out to be a foreman and unfortunately some of the men played on his good nature. I think he would have been happy to remain an underforeman. Another good point in having a patternshop on the premises was that parts for machinery could be processed in-house. For instance, if part of a Bradley brickmaking machine was worn out and had to be replaced, a pattern could be made and sent to a local foundry in Denny and they would make a casting which would be sent back to the brickworks and machined ready to be fitted to the machine. This was a cheap and quicker alternative to buying parts from the manufacturer although probably illegal.
