Stories from the Construction Industry.    

                 

For whose of you who work in the industry or know people in it you may like this list. I worked in construction for over 50 years and have written down a few stories from over the years. I am hoping to get more from people who read this blog.

     As it is near Christmas, I am going to start with one from that time of year. I look forward to hearing from you. 

1.   

                                                                                                   

In the mid-1990,s when health and safety was getting a lot hotter in the UK. I was working on a very large site which at the time was worth more than £100 million. I was a GF (general foreman) there, and had a lot of people under me and other responsibilities.

    I had a office in a block near the main entrance which also housed the safety officer. He was on my case all the time about things. RAMs (risk assessment & method statement) had just came in and he wanted one for everything.  Not long before Christmas he cooked a mince pie in the microwave in our kitchen. When he took it out he had cooked it for too long and burnt himself. I had to give him, “first aid.” I later put up a “risk assessment” on the kitchen wall of how to cook a mince pie. To say it did not go down well would be an understatement!   

2.  

                                                                                                                                                                               

                                                                                                 No News!

I worked with an agency manager at a very large site. He went to the office and said he had a message to ring home. They left him in the office, a while later he came out crying and said that his wife and two children had been killed in a head on car crash.

  We were all totally devastated, he went home, it was a Friday. I went home told the family and watched the local news, there was nothing on about it. He never come back the next week, and his agency knew nothing about the accident but said he had left them. Our security manager did some digging and it was all a lie, he made it all up. He was separated from his wife and had no children. To say I couldn’t believe he did that is a total understatement!

                                                                                              

3. 

                                                                                             

Toilet rolls! I stopped buying for my sites the kind of toilet rolls one would use in the house as they kept getting nicked. I started getting the big ones for machines and would leave them on the back of the cistern, that stopped it.

   I opened a site one morning and put new toilet rolls (the small ones) in the toilets about 7/00am. I went back a few minutes later and they were gone. I went to the only other person on site at that time, a painter and said “you have nicked the bog rolls.” He said, “no.” I said “well we are the only two people on site, and I know it wasn’t me.” He gave me them back.

                                                                             

 4.                                                                              

       

While on a health and safety course in London (2017) there was a Greek woman who was in London getting all the qualification as a site manager to go home with. When we did the section on asbestos she said in Greece you could pick it out of the ground and when she was young she and her friends played ‘snowball’ fighting with it.

 

    While on the course there was the London/Westminster Bridge terrorists attack, which the tutor told us about in class. The next day in my hotel I met a chap (Ozie) who had been hit by the car in the attack, he a broken leg.

5.      

                                                                                                

     

      

I was handing a flat over to an older lady who I met a few times and with one of her daughters and they were very pleasant. The ground floor flat had been a show flat and we had just moved the show flat furniture out when another when of her other daughters turned up. I put my hand out to greet her and introduced myself. Without taking my hand or introducing herself she said. “Right I snag apartments and houses for???? (a big company who will remain nameless) and I want all these carpets replaced.” They had marks in it where the furniture had been.

     We snagged the flat together and apart from the carpet there was very little. When she was gone a male cleaner, who had been there all the time said to me, “do you know how to get the marks out?” I said “no.” He said, “get a tea towel, wet it then with an iron, iron the marks out, then hoover the carpet.” I brought our iron in the next day and did the whole flat in a short time. When “the snagger” can back she never mentioned the carpet.

6.

                                                                               

    

I worked for a small housing company in the latter days of my career as a site manager. I had some information sent me from one of the health websites I am on. I got an email from them saying what to do if a person thinks they are having a heart attack. That is to breathe in and cough out strongly, and to repeat it several times. I had done this a few years before, when I got to hospital the doctor said, “I think you stopped the attack.”

     I passed this email onto other staff members as I thought it might help others. I got a reply from the owner of the company “telling me off” for doing this and not to use the companies email for such a thing.

     When he came to site a few days later I said to him. “I am sorry for sending the email about the heart attack, so when you are out running on your own (which he did a lot) please totally disregard the information I gave you.” He said, “I told my wife about it,” she said, “you’re an idiot for doing that.” He did agree and said “sorry” and thanked me for the info. 

7.

                                                                                  

The urgent pad! When I was managing, I very rarely carried a note pad with me when out on site, unless I was doing an inspection of some kind, ie safety or snagging. Even if I did and something came up, particularly if it was urgent, I would use the “urgent pad.” And that is to write on the back of my left hand, a person should always see that when they got back to their office. There were some days when the “urgent pad” was full, and I would use the second “urgent pad” and that would be writing up my left arm.

8.                                                                                 

On some sites with a company I used to work for I organised all the “onsite training.” We had a forklift course one day and at the end the trainer, who I knew well said that he had asked one of the lads at the end why they should fill the forklifts diesel tank up at the end of the day and not in the morning. The reason being that condensation can form over night and that would put water in the diesel, which is not good. The lads answer was. “You may have had a heavy night out the night before and would not be up too it.” That is a worry.

9.                   

                                                                                   

Chain boy – I wanted to explain what this role is. A chain is 20.117 meters – 29.528 yards long. This was my first job. A chain boy (could also be girl) was a young person used to assist the setting out engineer by holding the end of the tape, staff etc. The name came from many years ago (before my time) they used a chain to measure, which was 29.528 yards long, almost 30 yards. And the boy holding the end was – a chain boy.

       The instrument they use now, theodolites and dumpy levels (these are used setting out, measuring angles and heights) have changed a lot in the days since I started over 50 years ago (now 2022) in 1968. 

10.

                                        

Anne and I had been out for the night in London and fell asleep on the train coming home and woke up at the station after our stop. We got off and went to other platform and the last train had gone. We went in to the courtyard and a taxi was dropping some people off, so we waved him over, and done a deal over the price.

     When we were on our way the driver said, “I know you.” I said, “yes no doubt I have been in your cab at some time. He said, “no, your name is Tom and you work for Premier Properties, I have just brought a flat off you, and I have a snagging list for you.” Talk about work never ends, nearly midnight, on a night out, and I get a snagging list, as I said, “work never ends.”

11. 

                                              

                                                                             One of you will die today!!!

One of you will die today! This is the story of the safety film I saw in the early 1970’s the film stated with a chap pointing his finger at the camera and saying that: “One of you will die today!” That was because over 400 men (it was predominantly men at that time) were dying a year at that point. 

   In the early 1980’s a top director of the National Railway construction was asked: “Do you realise how many workers die on railway construction each year?” He said: “It is the construction industry, men die!” And that is how it was looked on, people die.

    I have talked to workers from that time, and while we didn’t think it when we went to work each day, we all knew we may not come home that night! I am pleased to say things have changed a lot now, 2022.

     I say that above, then look at the construction on the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar and look how those workers have been treated and how many have died, also the Beijing, China Olympics, 2008, and other projects around the world, and I will say: “As a world ,we still have a very long way to go!”  

12.

  

We now live in a time where drinking is forbidden on most sites? Lots have breathalysers and also do random drug testing.

      When I first started in the late 1960’s, men used to go to the pub at lunchtime on a regular basis. Some would have 2 or 3 pints in the allowed half an hour break. They would often drink a pint of milk before they went as they said: It would, “line their stomach” and stop them from getting drunk. I am not sure about that one?

      When I first started work, on a site at Heathrow Airport (we lived a couple of miles away) I would often get a lift in a van that past nearby. On a Thursday, pay day, they would take me to my local pub, ‘The Bell on the Green,’ at Bedfont and have a fair few pints, then they would drive home! I was 15/16 at the time!   

13.

  

As I have said a few times I worked in the construction industry all may working life, from 15 to 66, 51 years. While in the earlier years I tiered to get out of the industry, I have to say over all I am pleased I stayed. I worked in civil engineering, i.e. Roads, airfields, reservoirs, and much more. On the building side, I worked on office blocks, factories, breweries, sugar soils, town centres, etc. But I am going to talk about house building here.

  While I had been involved with housing a few times over the years, mainly ground works, foundations, etc, I had not done a great deal on housing.

    I got into house building in 1999, with a company called Premier Properties. I, as many other workers in the industry always felt that the housing side of the industry was the easy end. “Build one house, and you can build them all.” That is not quite the case as you can get some complicated builds, but over all it can be easier than other areas. But if a person says this to workers who have only been on house building, I would say “watch out,” it does not go down very well, to say the least!

     One worker I know who had been in house building all his life gets very upset when another who has always worked in the industrial part of the industry says to him that “house building is the easy end of the industry!”

14.                  

Things that have changed over the years since I have been in the industry, and since I have left it. They are many more as well as the ones below, I may come back to it at some point.

Cutting down pile caps. All of this used to be done by jackhammer, I know I did many of them over the years. Now (2022) is all mechanical, from a machine that crushes them. This has been the case for some time.

The tube used on a concrete skip to stop the concrete separating. A concrete skip now has a tube fitted on the bottom of it for when concreting shuttered walls and columns. The concrete rolls down a spiral inside the tube, before this the cement and aggregate would fall and separate so the stone would then be, “honeycombed.”

Concrete mixer lorries that give you the amount of concrete you need. I first saw this a few years ago and was very impressed. No longer do you have to know the exact amount of concrete you need. The lorry carries the materials and mixes the amount you want on site, very cleaver.

Safety gear. Not sure where I start with this one? While safety has come on so much since I started in 1968, a lot of the gear is still along the same lines. I suppose the main thing is that workers now have to wear the safety gear all the time, on most sites!

     Before safety boots came in, I along with many other workers had many foot injuries. These would be toes, i.e. Items falling on them and soles, walking on pointed items, mainly nails left in timber/wood.

Tower cranes. Luffing crane. I had worked with tower cranes all my work life, well from my second site when I was 16, a multi-storey car park at Heathrow Airport. You don’t seem to see many tower cranes around now (2022) as they mainly seem to be luffing cranes. A level luffing crane is a crane where the hook remains at the same level while luffing; moving the jib up and down, so as to move the hook inwards and outwards relative to the base. 

15.     

What is banter? People make raciest remarks, but see them only as jokes/banter and don’t see their selves as raciest. What do people call banter? I have just seen an acritical in a paper (February 2022) where a plumber was called “half dead Dave” by staff and workmates. He won an employment tribunal case. He was made redundant, he said, because of his age, and he was the longest severing person there.

      There is height – weight – body disfigurements – speech, lots of different things. I had a contracts manager, not long ago who used to always go about my height (I am not that tall, and have had it all my life). He was in our office one morning when I was in inducting a chap and we got up and the contracts manager said, “oh Tom, you have found someone smaller than you.” The chap said, “things grow until they are perfect, it takes some things longer than others.” The manager never replied.  

      In the end if a person who is on the receiving end of this so called, “banter,” (I call a lot of it abuse) does not find it funny. Well, do you know what, it is not, “banter.”  

16.

CSCS cards. These cards that were brought into the industry to prove what trade a person was and also to show that they had done the safety test and was aware of safety issues. Like everything, this open to abuse, i.e. fake ones. 

    A chap who came to my site was telling me, while I was inducting him, that a foreign guy (I think he said he was Easton European) came to the site he was on with a card as a ‘Steel Erector’ (this is a person put up steel which as a rule would form the frame of a building, and can be dangerous work) but on his card it said ‘Still Erector.’ As one of the lads said to me when I told him about it, “he is still a steel erector.” Which I thought was funny.

17.

A site manager I know, Richard, was working on a pipe line across southern England. He has an issue with a worker over him wearing PPE, he wouldn’t do it most of the time. Richard had words with the chap’s boss, as he was a subbie, about the problem Their work took them through a golf club.

     They were together on the golf course this morning when there was a noise and the chap said he had been hit in the head with a golf ball, which he picked off the ground. Richard was looking around to see where it had come from, there was no one around, the chap started laughing. He had done it himself, it was a wind-up.

18.

                                                                                                     Nine Lives.         

While a lot of construction workers seem to have accidents and dare I say, “near miss’s” over the years, I have listed some of my, very close near miss’s below. I will put them all on over the next few days or so.

 1. 

In November 1980 I was working on a site which was a drugs factory, and we were building an extension. I was doing some “making good” around the base of a fire water sprinkler, which was in the ceiling, about 16 foot from the ground. I was working on top of 12-foot trestle. It started to wobble, a chap at the bottom tried to stop me from falling, but instead I went down head first. The next thing I remember was waking up in hospital later that day. I had broken both of my wrists, 10 stiches in the side of my forehead and a lot of bruising, I was off work 3 months.

     The next morning while in bed in the hospital (I was there about a week) the consultant came around. I had the worst headache ever, he said. “Now that we know what happened yesterday, you should be dead this morning, or at least you should have broken you neck. You are very lucky!” 

2.  

 

This was almost 1 year later, early December 1981. I was working on a railway bridge which was part of a new by-pass through Bracknell and Wokingham in Berkshire. We had concreted a very high abutment walls the day before which would carry precast concrete beams across the railway lines, to form a bridge.  We had just striped the very large shutters by crane and two of us were covering the wall with hessian sheets which were fixed to a 21-foot scaffold tube to cure the concrete, which we were carrying along the top of the wall.. As we were walking along the wall the chap behind me tripped and the momentum of his trip sent me over the side of the 30-foot-high wall. There was a scaffold 3-foot off the wall to stop things falling on to the railway line. I hit the scaffold, bounced back on to the wall then back on to the scaffold and this time landed about half way down, legs each side of a scaffold tube and on top of a scaffold fitting. The overalls had on were ripped already and this saved me from falling more as the material got caught on the fitting, I turn up side down, but managed to hang on.

      I got to the bottom and felt okay, but an ambulance had already been called. I sat down to wait for the ambulance and then felt wet running down the inside my overalls, I thought I had wet myself, but was relived to release it was blood. While on the way to hospital I went into shock and was unable to talk when I got there. They stuck an injection in my leg which sorted it out. Another lucky escape!     

3. 

One very near miss was when I working in Derby. I was climbing on some shuttering timbers that collapsed, I fell a few feet before I garbed hold of a scaffold tube which stopped me from falling a long way to the concrete floor below. I used a ladder after that!

4. 

I was at the hospital for an endoscopy (camera down the throat) and when the nurse took my heart rate it was 140 beats a minute, which is over double the normal rate. She went away and made a phone call, I was then taken away on a bed and another nurse said you are shortly going to be surround by six doctors. She was not wrong, within minutes there was six of them around me. I soon had pipes and tubes hanging out of me all over. I spent two days in hospital, it worked out I had atrial fibrillation (AF) it is an irregular heart rhythm which can cause blood clots and increases the risk of heart failure or a stroke. I am now on lots of medication, but I was in the “right place at the right time.” 

5.

I was at a Derby County football match when I lived there, at their old ground, which was called the Baseball Ground. I was on the ‘Pop Side’ at the time where their mad supporters used to go. In those days the crowd would often surge down the terraces, (as we were standing) this day I got caught on a crush barrier which most others managed to avoid. I did think I was about to die with the pressure on me from the crowd. When the surge went back I ducked under the barrier, but for those few moments, I thought it was the end! 

6. 

I was working on an office block in Derby in the early 1970's. It was near the end of the site and our gang were putting the drainage in a trench about 6-foot deep at the front of the building. No shoring or sheet piling had been put in place. It had been raining on and off all morning. We went to lunch and there was a thunder storm, when we got back the whole trench and the muck that had been dug out had all caved in. Half an hour earlier and we would have been in it.

7. 

I was working as a hod carrier in Bracknell and we were building gable ends (this where the roof goes on) of a three-story house. The scaffolders had put boards on the timbers holding the trusses together. I had been passing the hod’s of mortar up from the inside to the bricklayers, standing on the boards. I passed one  up and as the brickie grabbed it the timbers which the boards were on collapsed. I fell and landed on the joist lift, 10 foot below, the concrete floor was about 20-foot below that! 

8.

I nearly got crushed to death by a dumper in the Falklands. I was shovelling concrete out the front of a dumper when the foreman called me over to talk, as I could not hear him, as I did that, the driver of the driver dumper kicked the gear stick into gear and it jumped forward and smashed into shutter where I had been working. I didn’t get on with that foreman very well, we were always falling out about work. But I have to say he saved me there!

 

9. 

I nearly got blown off the top of a high unit on top of a lorry in the Falklands and I only saved myself from falling a long way to the ground by grabbing on to the chains of the crane I was hooking the unit onto.

  We were working on the Tank Farm which was beside the sea, it was always windier there. I had climbed on to the top of the unit to chain it on. As I got on the top a large gust of wind blew me over the side, it was just as the chains were coming in, I was in mid air when I grabbed them.

 10. 

 

I was working on a site in Algeria. One night in the dark I was returning to the camp on my own after finishing power floating a concrete floor slab. I went into a hole which had been dug for a manhole that was full of water. I kept sinking down in the mud at the bottom, God only knows how I got out? The dig had not been fenced off in any way, and the ganger who was in charge of it took the micky out of me when he saw the state I was in, in the canteen, then got told off by the site manger for not fencing it off. I think it was pure adrenaline that got me out of the hole.

                                                                     That’s ten, oh! A person only gets nine!!!

19. Bad days. 

I had a site in Fleet in Hampshire. The site we were working on was two large houses at the end of a long narrow lane which came off a residential street. To say the neighbours did not want us there is a massive understatement.

    This was a day in July, a nice summers day? It never stopped raining all day. We had a crane and two lorries with floor beams for the first floor of both houses. I had told the company supplying the beams the length of the lorries to send, as they had to cross the road to turn into the lane. They sent lorries bigger than what I asked for. We had got the crane in, but when we came to get the first lorry in it was a real nightmare. The lorry first went into the hedge of the of the people across the road, who came out screaming and shouting the lorry then reversed into the wall of the old lady next to us, which knocked it down.

  The chap from across the street shouted right in my face, his wife punched the wing mirror on the lorry and cracked it. Loads of people stood in the street watching, there was dogs barking and the rain continued to lash down.

   I sent the lorries away and the people across the street phoned the police, who turned up. The officer in charge asked me what happened, I explained and said, “two crimes have been committed here today and both of them have been committed by the two across the road. One is harassment, and to put a person in fear of violence. And the second criminal damage.” The policeman went and saw them, when he came back he said, “we will be taking no further action, they are both a nightmare, and well done for not losing your temper with them.” I got the bricklayers to give the lady next door a complete new wall which she was very pleased with, the ones across the street kept away from us from then onwards.  

20.                   

   

When I was a boy. These are things that were said to me at that time. Mainly it would start with “sonny.” One was: “Sonny, I was in Bagdad (meaning during WWII) when you were in Dads bag.” Meaning I was not born, and to a young person, to voice out against this person would not be good. The term was a “put down.”

    Another one was: “Sonny, I have forgotten more than you know.” Regarding this one, as the years have gone on I know how they feel about this. In regards of we do learn and pick up at lot over the years, as do people in many industries, but we also forget it as the years go on!

     Another was: Sonny, you have never seen winters like I lived through in the 1940’s.

21.

Roger. I worked with Roger a couple of times while I lived in Derby. He was a bit older than me, properly in his late twenties at the time. When I first worked with him it was on a Taylor Woodrow office block site at the back of the town centre. He was the hoist driver there. He would operate it from the top on the scaffold where he had a cabin to work from to keep him out of the weather. At the rear of his cabin he set up a pigeon loft. He had a trap door so when racing pigeons went in to eat food he laid out for them, they could not get out. He had loads at one point, but the site manager made him take it down and let them all go.

     I got him a job on my next site. He was on the odd side, but I liked him and he was a good worker. We had to work late at night a fair bit. This night he said, “Tom I have to go by 6/30 tonight.” I said, “Okay, are you going out?” He said, “no, Wonder Woman is starting on TV, I can’t miss that. He told me he used to go to the wrestling shows in the town, but got banned when he got carried away and got the chap in front of him in a ‘headlock.’    

     

22.

At Gatwick – This is what I said to the RE (resident engineer) and he put it in his opening speech with the Transport Minster there, Malcom Rifkind. He said a few days before the opening he was on site and he asked a hard-hatted construction supervisor, “will it be ready on time?” And the answer he got was, “if I don’t go home between now and then, it will be ready.”  One of our managers asked him later, had he made that up? He said, “no it was Tom.” I do remember it.

      The work we did at Gatwick was Pier 4 at the North Terminal. Part of it is in the photo above.

23.

     

Our Project Manager when I worked on Pier 4 at Gatwick Airport, was a chap from Manchester, called John Bowman. I will say he was properly the best boss I ever had. I was a general foreman there and run the labour, forklifts, deliveries along with other things. We had 4 section managers who I worked for also, but John and I got on very well, that is more than I can say about the managers and him. I have to say John could be a hard man to work for in so much as he pushed the job a lot, but I didn’t have a problem with that. Once a week I would have to walk the site with him, it was a fair size. He would always ask me peoples names if he did not know them, then use it to talk to them. This was a thing that I picked up off him, along with many other good things. 

    At the end of site John just let the rules go a bit, he had been very strict and then relaxed, and then kept telling me to lighten up! You don’t need to ware your safety helmet anymore he would say every time he saw me. And one day he said, “come on, we will walk the wrong way up a moving walkway.” Very odd. I was with him nearly 2 years there, and learnt a lot from him.

24.

Overseas working: 

I worked overseas three times in all. In the Falklands, 1983 – 1984. Algeria 1986 – 1988. Namibia 2002.

   The last one was for a charity, Raleigh International, so I will not go into this now as I was not employed by them, and it was my choice to go as a volunteer. This is how workers were treated.

    The other two took British workers and the contracts were held by British companies and they were both tax-free for the workers. There were many things about both regarding how badly they treated the workers, I will run through a few here.

    On both contracts, a worker had to work a flat 60-hour week. At this point in the construction industry in the UK it was 40 hours, then over that a person was paid at an overtime rate. Not only did we have to work those extra 20-hours but the overtime was at a flat rate. In Algeria we got the overtime paid a month in arears, in the Falkland’s it was at the end on a person’s contract, 14 months. And if a person lost anytime, without a sick note i.e. because of the weather it would come out of their overtime.

   If a person resigned before the end of their contact they had to pay their fare home, and “their keep” until they got home.

   There were many other things that I may bring up again, but if you complained it was, “get on the next ship,” in the Falklands or the "next plane" in Algeria. 

25.

Pensions.

This about talking younger workers into having a pension. Things have changed now but there was a time when workers did not have a pension unless they took one out their selves, which I did, aged 39. Of course, self-employed workers still need to do this.

    I have talked to many workers over the years about taking out a pension, much of which fell on “deaf ears.” 

   I have talked 3 people who have been self-employed into getting their ‘state pensions’ which they thought that they were not entitled to because of always being self-employed. I helped one chap do it, on my computer in my office. You would have thought he had won the lottery when he received not only his state pension but the back pay also. 

    I have known some older workers who think as they have no pensions they have to work until they drop, and unfortunately, some do!

 26. 

A neighbour at a site in Dorking who was a solicitor was always on my case. The road to the site ran past the house he lived in, it was a newish house. I asked him one day when he was having a go at me, “how do you think your house was built?” He said, “That’s got nothing to do with it.” I think it might have somehow.

    I had no problems with any of the other neighbours, and we were finished I bumped into him and we were talking and I said “he was the only one I had any problems with, the others had been fine.” He said, “it was because I kept you in line.” I walked away at that point.

   We had a mini digger stolen from there one night just after Christmas. The lorry came up the hill past his house late at night and disc cut the gates off, our friend did not phone the police! 

  I got a phone call from the Portsmouth port authorities’ police in the summer saying the mini digger been picked up on a low loader lorry that morning about to go onto a ferry. Our ground works sub-contractor got it back.

27.

Just before we opened Pier 4 at Gatwick I was called in the office by John Bowman one Friday night and the police were there. I was asked could I set the site up so that the police could do a mock attack on the pier over the weekend, which I did. When we got in on the Monday morning there were red paint dots everywhere, they had been pain-balling!

   We had the same in the Falklands. Early one morning there was an attack on the airfield, there was soldiers running on to the runway firing at parachutes who were being dropped by an aeroplane.  We had not been told and everyone thought the Argies were attacking again. All the firing was blanks, but we did not know that!

28.

 Back of toilet doors.

In this section I am going to put things I have read on the back of site’s toilet doors over the years. Here are some below.

1.       When I worked for John Laing in the 1960’s, early 1970’s, I saw on the back of a toilet door one day. “The wages of sin, is death of course, but the wages of Laing’s are a fucking site worst!”

2.       We were told before we went to the Falklands that the snow does not lie there long as the wind blows it away. On a toilet door I saw one day. “The snow does not lie in the Falklands, only JLB does!!!”

3.       I saw on the back of a Taylor Woodrow door in Derby. “The crabs in here are on the seat, but go next door and they can jump six feet!”  

4.       In Algeria on one door someone started a list of song’s dedicated to different workers or gangs, people added to it. To one of the cooks was, “Always in the kitchen at parties.”  He wrote beside it, “that’s the last place I would be!”  

Not on the back of a toilet door, but a story I was on the wrong end of, but love the story. I worked as a hod carrier for a bricklaying sub-contractor for a couple of years. It was run by two older twin brothers, who to be fair could be a right pair of grumpy buggers. Late one Friday afternoon not long before we went home for the weekend I was on a dumper and run over a wheelbarrow that one of the brothers had brought in from home. I had a row with another hoddie who had left it in the road as to who’s fault it was. But we decided to tell Joe (not his real name) on Monday as we didn’t want telling off before the weekend. Come Monday I had forgotten all about it, when I first saw Joe, he said. “What happened to my wheelbarrow and why didn’t you tell me about it?” Before I could say a word, he said, “did you think it was going to get fucking better over the weekend?” I am not sure what reply I gave?    

 29.

George who I use to work for at French Kier in 1981 was an old general foreman and used to work for W&C French before they joined Kiers in the 1970’s, George had been with them since he was a child and was about to retire. 

   W&C French had been the first company I worked for when leaving school at 15 years old. George brought some old magazines in from French’s from years before and it had an article on the gang he had worked for when he first joined them, where his father worked.

   It was a drainage gang, they had no diggers, all the trenches were dug by hand. They had photos of all the men and George. Once they laid the very large pipe in the ground and back filled it, his job was to march a Suffolk Punch shire horse up and down the trench to consolidate it. It was also his job to look after the horse, feed it etc. Things had changed a fair bit in the industry in Georges lifetime.

 30. 

Just before I retired in January 2019 (now May 2022) the industry was losing 2 people, mainly man a week to suicides. While the industry along with its main charity The Lighthouse Club, has been doing a lot to help the problem, as far as I know it is still high. I have known some lads who have taken their own lives over the years. And of course, the question is why?

    I have had many a debate about this, many things have come up, here are a few, I am sure there are many more. Debt – drink – drugs – bullying – trying to be macho – home life – racism. As I say the list goes on. I was at our local doctors for a Christmas get together and I brought this up and some people there seemed to think all builders were rolling in money, ha-ha-ha!!! I will come back to this another time.    

31.

First thing one morning at Gatwick we needed a walk-way pit cleaned out very quickly and none of our labourers had stated work at that time. I used to get there early in the morning, so I got up there to clean it out. As I was doing it a worker from a sub-contractor was walking along kicking all the 110volt power sockets that were hanging from a overhead cable into the air as he passed them. I told him to stop as he would damage them, he told me to, “fuck off.” I was about to have a go at him when the radio under my jacket came to life, he then realised I was not a labourer but a supervisor and did a runner.

   I reported him and my boss John wanted to sack him but his boss talked him out of it as they were short of men. He had to apologise to me, and he said he thought I was a labourer, that is no way to talk to anyone no matter what they do for a living!!!

32.

Women on site. 

                                                                                                     

More women are coming into the industry these days. I did come across some before I retired but not that many. It is about time this happened, but I do know that some have had a very hard time over the years. I remember reading about a young lady who was an apprentice bricklayer in the early 1990’s who took the company to an industrial tribunal for “constructive dismissal” because of the things that were said to her and that her bosses did not sort it out for her. She had some awful things said to her, I am pleased to say she won the case. I really can't believe what some of these idiot blokes come out with???

     I had a gang of three female painters on one of my last sites and they were very good, and I have to say, gave as good as they got, if anything was said to them. Over the years it has been a male dominated industry so personally I am pleased to see them come through. I did a course as a Construction Ambassador and the role was to go to talk about encouraging women and young people into the industry, it is needed!

34.

The toilet door ‘Top Ten!!!’

This is a section from my dairy from Algeria. In one of the site toilet walls someone started a top 10 song list about people on site, which was growing all the time.

1.       All of the day and all of the night: The concrete gang.  That was because of the hours we were made to work (The Kinks – 1964)

2.       Whispering Grass: This was for a lad, Dave who was said to have split of some of the other lads. (Windsor Davis and Don Estelle – 1975)

3.       Putting on the Agony! This was for a lad Ken, who the lads reckon was faking a bad leg. (Lonnie Donegan – 1957 – the real name to this song is Puttin On The Style)

4.       Get back: This was for a general foreman on site, Mick. He would just be moaning every time he came out on site, the lads just wanted him to get back to the office. (The Beatles – 1967)

5.       Always in the kitchen at parties: This was for one of the cooks Joe, who was a party animal. He wrote beside it, “that is the last fucking place I would be at a party!” (Jona Lewie – 1980)

6.       The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde. This was for two lads, Mark and Larry who got in a fight in a nearby town. (Georgie Fame – 1968.)

7.       Money, Money, Money. This is for a gang of carpenters who also seemed to be moaning about their lack of overtime.  (ABBA – 1976.)

8.       American (Algerian) Pie. This was for one of the lorry drivers, Don. He had an argument in the canteen one night over the size of pie he was given. (Don McLean - 1971)

9.       Space Oddity. This was for one of the pipe layers, Colin. He used to buy “weed” off the locals and would smoke it nearly all the time, day and night. He was always, “spaced out and very odd.” (David Bowie – 1969)

10.       My Way. This was for Eric a digger driver. No mater what he was told, 9 times out of 10 he would do it “his way!” (Frank Sinatra – 1967)

Good fun.

35. Tool Box Talks. What are they?

I think a lot of people know what ‘Tool Box Talks’ are, but I will do a bit on them as they are a thing that came in mainly in the early to mid-1990’s. I was doing a ‘first line supervisors’ certificate’ while I was with Shepard’s (it was two and a half years) and one of the modules was a ‘site managers health and safety certificate. This was all with the CITB, Construction Industry Training Board. I had a week away at their HQ in Norfolk for this I went there a few times along with our head office in York

   The idea is that the talk is given around, ‘the tool box’ on site. I had a book of them, there are many and depending on what work is being carried out. I remember when I first started doing them the lads where a bit like, “yeah I know that!” But it is suspiring how much they didn’t know. I think they have gone a long to bringing down the amount of injuries, illnesses and deaths in the industry. I shall do a list of just a few below.

1.       Plant and equipment.

2.       Control of dust and fumes.

3.       Alcohol and drugs. (not where to get them, ha-ha)

4.       Young people on site.

5.       Portable hand-held tools.

6.       Working over water. We had one site next to a lake.

7.       Abrasive wheels.

8.       Manual handing.

As I said these are just a few. They don’t take long to do, I used to walk around on a Monday most weeks, with the talk for that day and of course the attendance register.  

36. Cable and pipe breaks. 

I was talking a short while ago (May 2022) about the dangers of breaking into cables or water pipes etc. I will list a few below.

1.    Cutting cables can be a big problem, are they dead or alive? We cut a 20,000-volt cable on site that we had been told had been turned off, it had not and nearly killed a lad.

2.      I worked with a groundworker who was cutting a 40,000-volt cable that he was told was dead, it wasn’t. He was in hospital then off work a long time. He has a permanent shake after that. He got compensation for it. The lads called him, “Sparkie” after that.

3.    I was working on the A329 bypass in Bracknell near the supermarket head office of Waitrose. One of our lads was jackhammering out some concrete and he went into a cable that shut down the whole of Waitrose offices and warehouses.

4.     This again was on the A329 bypass in Bracknell. We were digging near a large water main carry water into Bracknell. We were told that if we hit this pipe it would flood the town before they could turn it off. The water board came out and spent a long time making the area it was in, you have guessed it, we hit it, as they marked the wrong area. But it wasn’t that bad and we got it turned off before to much damage was done.

5.    We were doing some work on some foul man holes. There was a massive storm one night and the area flood and poured into the pipes we were working on. It blew a manhole cover off nearby and flooded an underpass. Well you can guess what mess that came out of that. I was a GF there and had to get it cleaned up, not nice! 

37. Things stolen from sites.

Construction site are targets for stealing gear and this is for many reasons. I have put a few below which happened on sites of mine.

1.       I was GF on this for Shepherds at Panasonic in Bracknell. We had security on site and not far from the office (where security was, probably sleeping) behind a concrete wall, the robbers striped a very large drum of copper cable overnight. We found all the off cuts the next morning how the guard did not see or hear I will never know?

2.       We got broke into on a site in Camberley that I was site manager on and had a guard (in the office). I found the chain cut off the gate when I got there the next morning. They had nicked a compressor. Again, I don’t think the guard had come out of the office all night. The next morning, I got there and he was walking up and down the site. He said to me, “all safe boss.” I said, “come with me.” I took him outside of the site, out of the front gate, and all of the grass turf we had laid there the day before, had been nicked!

3.       I got to a site one morning where we had not long started and the robbers had been there. We had an office which was a securer metal unit. While they could not get in, they totally buggered the lock up, and I couldn’t get in with the key, and had to wait nearly all day for a lock-smith to come out and get us in.  

4.       I had a site not far from home which we had just started. No one was due on site but I was going in there to get something out of the office first thing. I went out to my car (a company car) and it wouldn’t start. I had to wait for the RAC to come out, it took a while. I got to work and we had been broken into and a mini digger had gone. I talked to the neighbours and they said they heard a noise not long before I got there. So, if the car had started I would have drove into them! 

 5. We had a toilet/canteen, welfare unit stolen from site. I think it was a sub-contractor. One of the neighbours heard noise about 5/00 in the morning but did not ring the police. That chap was on my case all the time when we made a noise out of planning hours, but when we needed him he didn’t care.

   I think this subbie was involved and one of his lads asked me many times had the police come up

with anything? I did wind him up and told him “they are about to arrest someone.” Which they never

did.

38. More things stole from site!

This is a follow on from number 37, Things Stole from Site. I am going to call this chap Jim, not his real name. I took him on as a labour when I had a site near where he lived and advertised it in a local Job Centre. I had a few sites on at the time and an assistant on this site, Norman, also not his real name. I wanted to sack Jim in the first few weeks he was with us, as I did not think he was very good, but Norman talked me out of it.

     Jim grew on me as time went on and he became an assistant site manager for me. Things go missing on site from time to time, and we had our fair share of that happen. It was only after the company went out of business and I was taken on by another company to finish sites that I found out from many people that it was Jim was doing most of the nicking to finance his drug issues. It was under my nose, and I had come to truss him, but worse still was that lots of people knew and did not tell me. When I was told what he had taken, it all “fell into place!” Because I had come to trust him, it was like being, “cheated on!” 

39. Jon Trill.

Not sure where to start with Jon? I will say he was Scottish and from Glasgow.  I worked for him on and off for about 18 months when I was in Algeria in the mid to late 1980's. When I read back over what I have written about him in my diary, over all it is not good, we had words many times and to be fair when I look back it is a wonder that he never sacked me, I think he knew I would always get the work done, and do the long hours that they wanted from us.

   I know he has struggled with the heat there and he has never seemed to have got a tan, in fact his face seemed as grey near the end as when he first came out. Many times, when we had a fall out he had come back shortly after and of course I was still fuming. To be fair he did that to start with, then he learnt his lesson and left me alone for a while.

   At Tizi, (Tizi Ouzou, this was the first site I worked on there) whatever the starting time was he would be standing outside the canteen and the same at break times watching everyone come in and out, which to be fair, was “bloody ridiculous!”

    I do know he had a job to do and has to push, but I think he went too far, too many times. Below is a song that one of the lads sang in the bar one night at Tizi when he and Dave Stewart (Project Manager) were in, Dave laughed but Jon didn’t. It was to the tune of, “D’ye ken John Peel?”

 

D’ye ken Jon Trill with his face so grey?

D’ye ken Jon Trill at the break of each day?

D’ye ken Jon Trill, when he’s far, far a-way?

But he’ll be at the gate in the morning!

I along with many others thought it was really funny, it brought about a lot of cheering and clapping.

40.    Billy the Snake.

This is a chap I met while I was on a at site called Batna, in Algeria, it was at the start of the Sahara Desert. He was a ground worker from Liverpool, a "Scouser." 

    He was called ‘Billy the Snake’ because he was the one they called if one appeared anywhere, he just went in, and got them out. 

    He was telling me that every time he went on leave he would buy some baby tortoise’s which he took home in his jacket pockets to sell for some really good money at a local pet shop. He also told me that he got hold of a scorpion and kept it in a box and took that home as well. He said he also took a couple ounces of “wacky backie,” cannabis, also in his jacket pockets when he went on leave. Did I believe him? I did start to think there was nothing I wouldn’t believe as the years went on!  

41. Bats in the loft.

I took over a site in Bagshot Surrey, it was a big old house which was going to be replaced by two blocks, each of ten apartments. I had the “demo lads,” on site and was about to start when we had a visit from Defra (Department of Food and Rural Affairs) they had a phone call from someone, saying there was “bats in the loft.” Yes, there were!

  This totally change the whole job. Not only were there bats in the loft, they were also in the hanging tiles that ran around the external top half of the house. We had to clear them from the house and put bats houses up for while we were building. I had to employ a person, Jan Bat’s as I called her, to oversee everything we did regarding them.

   We had to build a “bat house,” in one on the lofts with access through the roof tiles. A tiler and I designed a lead entry for them to enter the loft and he made it. I showed Jan and she really liked it, to the point that she asked could he keep one, which I said yes to.

   Word was that the land buyer (a son of one of the owners) had ripped the chap off who we brought the house off and it was him who rang Defra. That was about 2005 and they reckon that cost us (the company) about one hundred and twenty thousand pounds!

42. The Ice-cream Lady.

When I first came back from working in Algeria I got a job as a GF working for a company called Shephard Construction who I ended up working for, for over 8 years. This site lasted over 18 months and, in the day, 1988 was worth over £20 million which was a large site in those days.

    We had a canteen lady who run it for herself as a business. She could be a miserable devil and was very money orientated, there were a lot of lads on site and the canteen was all ways full. She would be open from 7/00am until 4/00pm.

    We had one very long hot summer, and in the afternoon an ice-cream van started coming to site about 3/00pm (afternoon teatime) and also all the lads on site started use the van, of course this took the canteen ladies business away. The van was driven by a not very old Australian woman, who you wouldn’t want to mess with.

     One afternoon the canteen lady came out and said, “you are taking custom away from me, this is my spot, you need to go away and not come back!” The girl in the van held up the ‘rocket lolly she had in her hand and said, “you need to f--- off love, or I will come around there and stick the lolly up your c---. She did go, and never came back!  

43. John on the radio at Gatwick.

We had four section mangers at Gatwick Airport under the project manager John Bowman. I was the only general foreman, I controlled all of our labourers, forklifts and plant.

    We had a northern manager Harry, who didn’t get on very well with John. When John got his lift on a Friday night about 4/30 to get his plane home to Manchester Harry would come on the radio (all of us supervisors had one) and would start singing songs that John was gone. I told John as not only did I get on well with him, I thought Harry was bang out of order. So, one Friday John took a radio in the car with him, when Harry had finished singing John came on the radio and said, “I will talk to you on Monday Harry.” Harry found out it was me but could not do a lot about it, but he wasn't happy - ha-ha!  

 44. The Loft.

After the company I had worked for, for almost 10 years went out of business because of the building crash in 2008 I was taken on as a site manager by the company who had lost around £4 million they had had invested in the company. So, they formed a house building company to buy housing sites we were working on off the bank, so that they could get their money back. They also brought two sites off the bank that another company had just finished who had also gone out of business. They were going to rent them out. These sites had not been signed off by the local authorities and insurers, so I was asked to get them signed off.

    One was in Guildford Surrey. One day I took our electricians to sign off the electrics. We got to the flat on the top floor and needed to get in their loft. A chap answered the door with another chap behind him. I told him what we needed to do. He stood and under the loft, and in a foreign accent holding his arms out, said, “the loft is not available today. You will need to come back another day.” Which we did, we never found out what was in the loft, when we did get up there it was empty, but for a few boxes. I do regret not telling the police about it.    

45. The Dartford Warbler.

I think I had heard of a Dartford Warbler up until the time of this next story. I shall explain what one is first, then tell the story.

     The Dartford Warbler is a bird from the warmer parts of western Europe and north-western Africa. It is a small warbler with a long thin tail and a thin pointed bill.

    When I worked for Premier Properties for most of the "noughties" at the start of the 2000’s we had a lot of work in and around Surrey Heath and other local authorities. The Dartford Warbler had a decreasing population in these areas and the councils stopped all new building work in the areas for a while, if any of the new builds meant woodland or trees would have to go. This meant we had to move further afield. PP went out of business in 2008 because of the bank’s crashing, but I don’t think this helped.  

46. Wanted IRA man.

This was while I was working on the A329 in Bracknell about 1979. All the Sunday newspapers on their front pages carried photos of the IRA’s most wanted men who had allegedly been involved in bombings and murders. We had a lad on site who was working for an Irish ground worker, and had only been with us a short time who looked very much like one them.  

   The site covered about five miles of road. On the Tuesday evening when we were nearly finished there was a police helicopter flying above us. When we got back to the yard there was a police van there with the back doors open, it was full of armed police. George the GF had rung them, but the chap had not turned up that day. Never found out if it was him or if they got him, he never came back to site! 

47. The Lighthouse Club.

The lighthouse Club is the construction industry’s only charity, as far as I know? It collects money in different ways to help workers who can not work through injury, illness or families of workers who have died and need finical help.

    I have been a member for many years and was a volunteer caseworker for Hampshire for some years. This involved being given a case of a person or people in need, going to visit them, filling out forms and make a case for them to get help.

   The first one I had was a lady who lived near Portsmouth. Her partner had been killed in a car accident, he was a painter. I say partner because they were not married, and that alone caused her a lot of problems. She had a young girl and two younger boys.

   Her partner had almost striped the downstairs of the house just before he died, and only a couple of weeks before I went to her, DIY SOS from the TV had gone and fixed the house up for her. We got her a monthly grant and the LC gave her that for the maximum of 5 years, which I know helped her a lot. They do a lot of good for construction industry workers and families who need help.

48. Fire on site.

This was on site at Princess Square shopping centre in Bracknell and while no one was ever caught it seemed it was caused by some workers. The decking was burnt down and caused a lot of damage. When I got to work in the morning the fireman was there. It was found by the firemen that there was wood set up under the decking and had been set alight.

     A lot of concrete slabs had to be broken out because of the damage done to the slabs. It was found by a RE (resident engineer) inspector who was covering on site for the RE who was on holiday that a lot of re-bar (steel reinforcement) had been left out of the slabs, beams and columns. Loads of concrete had to be broken out and replaced. It worked out that less steel was being used and it was being sold for scrap money. I left shorty after but I think people did get done for it. A lot of fingers were pointed over who had started the fire. 

 49. Bridge over the River Loddon.

The River Loddon is a river not far from us in Reading. The bridge that was being concreted across the river for A329 dual carriageway viaduct collapsed in 1972 killing 3 and injuring 10 of the workforce. Looking it up it says the cause was, “design error,” I suppose that was on the shuttering decking? 

     I bring this up for a couple of reasons, first is that I remember this happening. I was working on the Eagle Shopping centre in Derby, and a short while before this happened we were concreting a large deck one day when it dropped/moved, which we all thought was going to collapse, very frightening. The other reason is fast forward to the early 1980’s I was working on the A329 in Bracknell, when I worked with a Irish lad, Peter who was on the bridge when it happened. He had been told to go to dinner and had just left the bridge when it went down, how lucky was he?        

50. Large cranes on the A329 + Princess Square.

I will start with the crane we used on the A329 dual carriageway between Bracknell and Wokingham. We built a bridge across the railway, the concrete beams that we laid across it weighed 25 tons each. We had the largest mobile crane in the country because the crane had to stand so far back. For the outriggers we had to concrete four bases for each of them with 6 meters of concrete in each. It took 10 low loader lorries to bring every thing we needed, but we were told had they have had to bring everything it would have been over 20 lorries. We laid them all one Saturday night from 11/00 o’clock until 5/30 on the Sunday morning.

    On Prince Square which was a shopping centre I worked on in Bracknell town centre, we used a very large crane to lay some very large metal beams across the main roof. We closed off the ring road one Sunday morning and again it took many of lorries to bring all the gear. A lad I was working with at the time Paul, had his photo on the front page of the Bracknell News the next week giving me the thumbs up when the main beam landed.  

 51. A329. Sand and bolt on railway line.

Going back to the A329 dual carriage way there were some other incidents there, two of which I will do in this one. The first one was in away not really down to us. There was a massive amount of sand on the side of the railway. One night we had a really large thunder storm, the sand slid onto the railway lines and closed it. We spent the next day having to clear it. We got a write up in the local paper for that also, but no photos this time.

   The second one was down to us. We had a very large shuttering wall bolt fall onto the live rail as a train was coming along which knocked “the boot off” (this carries the power to the train) the live rail and stopped the train. Not good!           

52. Nearly bringing Gatwick Airport to a halt!

We, nearly brought Gatwick Airport to a halt one Saturday morning. We had to expose areas around the fuel pipe line that feed the airport of airplane fuel, this was for areas under the pier that we were building for bases. They did not have up to date drawings of where the pipeline were, as it was in the middle of our access road, we closed the site and the road for the day and just a machine plus driver were to expose them. 

     In the ground above the pipeline was two cables, the first would cause an alert if broken, if the one below that was broken it would “shut down,” the pipeline. Yes, we broke the first one. I saw it, I put my hand up to stop the driver, and he just crashed through it. When I asked him why he had done it, he said, “I thought you was telling me to go for it.” Mad man. We had BAA with us very shortly after, who were not happy to say the least.    

53. George in Algeria – Expresso – Depresso.  

I worked with George who came from Wigan on a site called Tizi Ouzo in Algeria. George was nicknamed “Expresso Depresso” this was because he was a very heavy drinker (as a lot of men on this site were) he was out drinking every night and often came in drunk and late the next morning many times. The nickname came from him going, “in a blink of an eye,” from being in good form to being very low and down.

    We, the concrete gang were pushed very hard in the amount of work we had to complete each day. George was not only very lazy but also very overweight which is never good for shovelling concrete all day, but the heat we were working in made it very hard for him.

    George got very upset with “our gang” one day as someone took his boiled eggs, and he shouted at us all at the table at tea time and called us a lot of bad names. I waited till we got back to work and pulled him about it. He pushed me over, and we ended up having a fight, which we could have both been sacked for. I told our foreman Iain who said he would make sure I didn’t go, nothing came of it, but George did get sacked a short time after.     

 54. Lads losing fingers in accidents.

I worked with a few lads over the years who lost fingers in accidents, here are a few. When I first left school I worked for W.C. French at Heathrow Airport. There was a plant fitter there, Brian who had not been back at work long who had lost the fingers off his right hand in an accident in side a very large concrete batching plant. The paddle inside had got jammed and he got in to release it, when he did, he nearly fell over, he put his hand out to save himself and the paddle cut his fingers off.

    While I was working in Algeria we were concreting one morning. One lad was opening the handle on a concrete skip and another lad was pushing it. The lad pushing it tripped over and one of his fingers got cut off by the big metal cogs on the back of the skip. I took him to the medic, who sent me back to get the finger, when I got back one of the lads had thrown a shovel full of concrete on it!

  One Saturday morning when I was a GF at Farnborough airbase a lad was loading large concrete drainage pipes on the back of a lorry. The pipe swung and caught his fingers between that pipe and another, and cut them off. We got a ambulance and someone got ice from the canteen and put the fingers in a bag of ice. I took him in a van to meet the ambulance at the start of the site. It ended up that they could not use the fingers as the had been put in the bag with the ice and got contaminated. They should have been in another bag next to a bag of ice. I worked with many other lads over the years who had lost one or more fingers.    

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