The year wore on with nothing special happening and Christmas was looming on the horizon.

The Christmas and New Year holidays came awkwardly that year, with two weekends thrown in, so it meant a two weeks shut down with a start back for one day on a Friday. I had intended to spend the holiday with my parents in Somerset so that it would be a good long break, but Taylor-Woodrow said that the rule was for me to be back on the Friday or there would be no pay for the holiday. I said that I didn’t want pay, but was told to be back on the Friday as that was company policy. I said that my policy was that I am going, so have my cards stamped up for my return, just to show that I meant it. I came back the second week in January so that was that.

Down the road at Southall I went to the Crown Cork Company on the maintenance. It was such an involved and precise performance, just for a bottle top to be levered off and thrown away. There were huge presses stamping bottle tops out by the thousand - and the noise was worse than any ship’s engine room. There were no ear protectors supplied so everyone had either a thick scarf tied round their head and under the chin with pads on the ears, or balaclavas like the kids wore in the 1940s, or old towels or whatever came to hand. One chap naturally called “ Biggles “ proudly wore a tatty old leather flying helmet, it was like working with a lot of scarecrows and communication was lip reading or crude sign language.

One dirty place was called the “Gran”, where bales of cork bark were fed into a granulator which chopped them up into fine grains. They were then mixed with glue and pressed into plugs ¾” dia x 6” long and then cooked. When they had cooled down they were fed into a machine rather like a row of automatic bacon slicers which cut the plugs into slices 1/16” thick. These were the seals that went inside the caps, I said this was a dirty place - imagine all that fine dust, just like working in a fog. No breathing apparatus - just old scarves and handkerchiefs, so that we looked rather like a bunch of wild west bank robbers.

The formed caps were fed into an ingenious machine rather like a carousel that tipped them upside down and as they turned round a drop of gum was injected in followed by a cork disc. Some also had a disc of waxed paper - it depended on the product for which they were to be used. There were trials going on where a drop of molten plastic was dropped into the cup followed by a heated plunger that spread it out and cured it. This was to cut out the use of cork.

Another department was producing aerosol cans. There was a sophisticated plant capable of up to four-colour-printing and stoving the tinplate for the crowns, which was not working to full capacity so the aerosols helped to solve that problem. It was foreword thinking as aerosols were becoming the “in” thing.

The plant was a continuous process. Reels of tinplate, weighing about four tons each, were uncoiled and fed through the printer and oven, then through rotary slitters to form ribbons, where the width was the circumference of the can plus two “little bits”. Then they were chopped to a length being equal to the height of the can. They were then transferred to another line were the “little bits” were notched out and then they were rolled into a cylinder and soldered - the notches forming an old fashioned coppersmiths joint. They were not taking chances with these pressure vessels! The tops and bottoms were crimped on and that was that. The plastic caps and nozzles were also injection moulded on site.

One thing that was strange for a progressive company was that they owned a subsidiary in Belgium which built most of the machinery as “specials”. These were tested and shipped over ready to run.

We stripped them down completely and any tapped holes were drilled out and tapped B.S.F. or Whit, and all nuts and bolts replaced with Imperial. The thinking was that “ this metric lark will never catch on”.

All good things come to an end. The shop steward decided I ought to join the union, I decided that as I intended to move to Somerset to go it alone sometime I would decline his offer, so my cards were duly stamped up and I left, to head west for a break.

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