A BTH Apprentice
1947/52
by Trevor Sidaway
The Apprenticeship Schemes, into the Machine Shop and the
vision Mary Gadd
The Apprenticeship Schemes
Prior to and during WW2 there was only one
apprenticeship scheme structured to provide an ongoing
supply of skilled Toolroom machinists and fitters and their practical
training was confined to the
Toolroom. But, towards the ends of the war as technology
rapidly advanced, driven by the demand of
the military and
supported by the growth of a more comprehensive technical syllabus, the
apprenticeship
scheme was
expanded to provide a pool of trainees with a more general engineering
background and
academic
qualifications that could lead to professional engineering status in later life
The BTH then recruited Electrical and Mechanical
trainees in about equal numbers and a smaller
number of Drawing
Office trainees, their training took them through most parts of the factory and
the
D. O. trainees were also contracted to spend some
time at the
However I
felt that their motives weren’t entirely altruistic as, in return for the
structured training
offered to
the apprentices, they had a group of reasonably bright young men who provided them
with a
source of very low cost labour—highlighted by the pay rates in the
Indenture Agreement
documents in
the previous section
These very
low pay rates were not unusual in fact there were some manufacturers that
actually made
a charge for
the training they provided for the full term of their apprenticeships
Starting Work in the Machine shop
The Machine Shop was
the largest single department of the 164,000 sq ft main factory block and
this picture, of part
of bay 3, was very much as it was on my first day there in 1946.
Looking up bay 3,
pictured from the Raw Materials Store end of the factory, in the direction of
Final Assembly
At the far end of the
bay, in the distance, is Charlie Morriss’s
office—the Machine Shop Manager
This is the bay where
Horace Chatwin
strutted his stuff and where Harold Lickert
kept his apprentices
going at full stretch,
Just out of shot, in
front of the lines of lathes, were the Gridley Autos supervised by Henry Siviter
from
To the left, the
other bays can be seen stretching out to the distance and in the adjoining bay,
bay 4, the
backs of the Ward 2A
capstans can just be made out—this is where the Jane
Russell look-alike worked
—well
supervised by Mr Westwood
My first day at work
was in the “Juvenile” section in bay 2, just in shot to the top
right
To give an idea of
the scale, this bay was just one of 10 similar bays and every type of machine
tool
was installed from
simple powered saws through to large horizontal spindle surface planers
It was during a
period of full employment and most of the 300 plus machine tools were fully
manned.
With piece-work the
norm the place literally hummed with activity with tons of swarf
being produced
every day however,
the place was always kept neat and tidy, as can be judged from the photograph
My First Day
My first day was a crass
embarrassment
No one had told me that I
would be in the machine shop and I hadn’t the gumption to ask whether or
not I would need overalls so in a
Department about the size of three soccer pitches, on top of being
the new
boy, I was the only one in “civvies”
I stood out like the proverbial
sore thumb
Pictured on the back step of
The
machine shop had ten large bays; I was in a small section, part of the second
bay— it was the
section
where all of the apprentices made their debut and was known as the
“Juvenile” section by the
main workforce It was a sort of backwater section with
a couple of
and some
centre lathes.
They were
all pretty ancient, as was the only other person working in the section—Charlie—he was
seeing out
his time to retirement but he was in charge!
It was the
only section in the Machine shop, apart from the marking out section that was
not on
piecework
I was put
on one of the centre lathes, I knew how to operate it so I didn’t need
any instruction and my
job was to
reclaim old electric motor shafts.
These were
up to three feet long, with a number of different diameters along their length.
The
objective was to turn off the larger diameters to produce a plain shaft that
could be re-used,
a piece of cake!
My Second Day
was no better
Mom had bought me a pair of overalls—they were brown--so I came in
for a lot more stick
My Third Day
The angel Mary Gadd
I had just
engaged the traverse to make a final clean-up cut on a very long shaft when she
appeared
She came
down the stairs from the top office and sashayed along the main gangway at the
top of the
Machine
Shop in a sort of bouncy walk that tended to exaggerate her obvious attributes
I was
transfixed and watched the vision approach and vanish towards the next
Department
—the
Winding Department—goggle-eyed and open mouthed
The
machine gun type rattle, as the tool post ran into the revolving headstock was
deafening and as
I
disengaged the saddle traverse, the plump Charlie
came wobbling down the section to deliver the
second
biggest “rollicking” of my B T H experience
A subsequent look at the toolpost
showed evidence of some old scars so I was clearly not the first
to loose his head over Mary Gadd
Pictured in 2006
The Mary
Gadd Staircase
Down from the
offices it led into the main gangway along the top of the Machine Shop and into
the Winding
Department. The
partition, on the right, is new so that the gangway was open to the machine
Shop
Looking down from
the staircase, along the gangway, with the Machine Shop on the left and the
Winding Department
in the distance
The small office on
the left of the gangway is new otherwise things look very much as they were
sixty odd years
ago except for a partitioned off stores area, on the
right of the gangway, running for almost its full length
The
Stores separated the Machine shop from the Final Assembly Department and Main
Test
Departments
and contained all the components manufactured around the various parts of the
factory
together with bought in parts—fittings and screws etc.
These
were grouped together into kits before being moved on to the Final Assembly
Dept. where
they
were assembled into completed units ready for testing in the Main Test
Dept.
A Mr Cutler, whose son Clary played right half for the first
eleven helped run the stores.
He was an enthusiastic supporter
so, as I had been drafted into the first team by now, I had no
trouble in helping myself to the
odd handful of plated screws and fittings to spruce up the motor
bikes that were being rebuilt by
my older cousin Jack Shaw in the backyard of his home in
From then on things began to improve, I even
started to become quite proud of the uniqueness of my
brown overalls and my trek around
the large machine shop began with
several months on each section
Gridley Autos with Henry Siviter
This was a
section that ran along the bottom of the first two bays in the machine shop,
there were about
four
single spindle autos and one very advanced multi-spindle unit.
They all
produced components from round steel bar stock, were fully automatic and
controlled from a
series of
tappets and trips that engaged the traverses and drives—no CNC in those
days
The single
spindle units were in effect automatic lathes and produced mainly washers,
sleeves and
collars; the multi -spindle unit had a
horizontal turret carrying a range of tools and could produce
components
with far more complex shapes.
A
Multi-Spindle Gridley
A similar but later model to the one on the section---circa 1960
During my
spell it turned out commutator shells—a sort of
shouldered sleeve, about 4 inches o/d onto
which
copper commutator segments were subsequently
assembled
It was a
large machine for its day, it used undiluted cutting oil and when the turret
retracted and
indexed it
seemed awesome
I was full of admiration for the man, Henry Siviter
who single handedly set
up and oversaw all the machines
He lived in
Henry pictured in 1958
51 Years Service
The BTH factory
was custom built for armaments manufacture for the First World War; and in
1920 it was
acquired by the BTH and Henry joined them in
those very early days
Henry was presented with this clock in 1955, he
retired in 1971 having completed 51 years
service with the BTH
Ward Capstans/Turret Lathes with Mr Westwood
and Horace Chatwin
Occupying
the bottom half of bay four were a number of Ward 2A capstans.
Apart from
apprentices they were operated entirely by women and girls with a male
supervisor,
Mr
Westwood, who did all the
setting up.
He was
middle aged and the girls gave him the run around especially when friction
arose over the
allocation
of the best paying jobs but he had the patience of Job although he occasionally
vented his
pent up
wrath on us poor lads
The
machines were the smallest in the Ward range and a pleasure to use; we were
given the small
batch work
and were allowed to do our own setting up.
At about
this time the film “The Outlaw” was on release and Jane Russell’s heavily advertised
38-inch
bust was the topic of the day.
Girls were
somewhat “smaller” in those days but one of the girls, shapely but
extremely well built,
claimed to
have an even bigger bust and she had no qualms about handing us lads a tape
measure.
I think
she took a deep breath but I made it a good 40 inches!
The Ward 2A
Capstan
Introduced in the 1940’s it was the most popular lathe in the
range and many were still in
use 50 years later. It had a reversing six-speed gearbox, a collet chuck and was a pleasure to use
A fellow apprentice worked with me on this
section, I knew him only as “Dinky”
and he was a very
enthusiastic table tennis player, playing in
the works team in the
He was the proud owner of a Victor Barna table tennis
bat (Victor Barna was
just about the world’s first
superstar, winning 22 world titles)
His best mate and fellow apprentice was
called Stan and, while working in the
Millwrights, he had
established a record by building the largest
“foreigner” by any apprentice—quite a feat!
It was a 3 ft high model crane and to get it
out of the gate and past the security guards he stripped it
down and taped the long components to his
bare legs. He walked a little stiff legged and was forced to
stand all the way to Stourbridge on the
train but he made It!
Halfway
down bay number three; Horace Chatwin
worked on a large Ward turret lathe. He was also
responsible
for an ancient Herbert 9A turret lathe and I was seconded to him for about two
months.
The 9A was
one of the largest in the range and should have been scrapped many years
before, it
creaked and
groaned a lot as I tried to coax it to work and I found myself finish machining
the
commutator shells that I
had earlier produced on the four spindle Gridley automatic.
The
critical diameter was the bore, about 2” dia., it had to be a good
sliding fit when assembled on to
its motor shaft and an old reamer was
used but no matter how careful I was, I was rarely able to
“coax”
the plug gauge into the bore. It worried me but Horace was quite philosophical
about it and
subsequently
the patrol Inspector seemed to have no qualms in using his rawhide mallet to
persuade
the
“Go” gauge into the bore
Horace was slim, bald,
had a craggy face and a ready smile and occasionally, for no apparent reason
he would
stride up and down the bay, twirling his swarf rake
like a walking stick, with a beautiful
rendition
of “I’m Burlington
Alongside Horace was another Ward Turret lathe, the operator was an
unpleasant bullying individual
who had risen to the rank of Chief Petty
Officer during the war—and he let everyone know it.
He lived locally and went home
for lunch, this day it rained incessantly and he came back into the
shop wearing his Wartime Petty
Officers Navy blue Macintosh and gold braided peaked cap.
I think that the reaction took
him by surprise—those machines that were running stopped and a chorus
of boos echoed around the department, none
the least from those who had recently been demobbed
from service in the Pacific.
His other claim to fame was that
he was married to the Daughter of the Machine Shop Manager—this
didn’t go down too well
with the rank and file either
The Milling Section with Harold
Lickert
In an area
in the middle of the third and fourth bays, the milling section had a full
range of machines,
including Alfred Herberts,
Archdales, and Cincinnatis.
There was
also a very light duty machine that was only ever used for machining screw
driver slots
in the
heads of cheese headed screws. The
screws were made on the Ward 2A section
A similar but larger model to the one on the section
The
supervisor was a Harold Lickert
and he rightly had the reputation as a slave driver making sure
thatwe stayed
on the job which, most of the time, was spent in boring repetitive production
work and
the job
that we all came to hate was milling chamfers on the corners of the laminated
pole pieces
The only
respite came when he was offwork when we would pick
up the most complex component to
work on
and I recall honing my skills using a compound table and a dividing head to
finish mill an
unusually
shaped partly spherical component.
With Don Sergeant, an older apprentice, we took all day to
complete it and got it right however we got
no
plaudits from dear Harold when he came back
One reason for his “dedication”
was that he was credited with half the value of the piece-work ticket
of our work, what happened to the other half
I never knew. But, on reflection, I don’t think that his
discipline did us any harm and one
consolation was that from his section we could “eyeball” the
girls that worked on the pillar drills
farther up the bay
Pictured in 2006 these look like some of
the original pillar drills
The Broach and Arthur Hadley
Just in front of the Milling section was a single large broach, most
of the time it was unused but,
occasionally, Arthur
Hadlley would appear and set about broaching
the bores of a crate of
components. He was probably
the hardest worker in the place and didn’t seem to “take a
breath”
until he’d finished
his stint. Then he’d vanish to some other part of the machine shop as
quietly
as he had
appeared—never a word
The broach was a large
capacity one and most of the bores seemed to be more than 2 inches dia
so that the broach tool was
quite heavy. He handled it with ease, slipping the component on to the
tapered end of the broach and then with a
flourish he’d drive the other end into a slab of lead to
force the component down the
taper as far as it would go.
Sometimes he’d repeat
this to force it a little farther down the broach tool before loading it into
the
machine and engaging the
drive
This literally pulled the
tapered broach tool through the component bore and to me, it always seemed
to be a rather crude
operation but this was belied by the quality and accuracy of the finished bore
The “pull trough” speed of the machine was pretty slow and
I think that Arthur hammered the
broach tool into the lead slab with great gusto in order to drive the
component down the taper
and so shave a couple of seconds off the allotted piecework time
Arthur was the regular first eleven center
forward, of the old fashioned type,
and he had the build and appearance to suit including a center parting
and
plastered down hair that was never disturbed even during the most competitive
games
The Centre Lathe section
This was
located in the fourth bay between the Milling section and the Pillar drills.
The
supervisor (name forgotten) was the opposite of Harold and gave us a mixture of
production
and small
batch work
The disadvantage was that we were very close to the
Machine Shop offices. These were built on a
raised platform so they overlooked us although the
head foreman,
Ted Barker, was a genial and tolerant person. He would only reprimand us if we
took too long over
our tea breaks; unfortunately I was somewhat
conspicuous in my brown overalls.
He shared one of the two rooms in the office block
with a very pompous clerk—a diminutive man
with delusions of grandeur who took great pleasure in
bullying the apprentices
The adjoining office housed the Machine Shop Manager, Charlie Morris, he rarely ventured out
on the shop floor and reminded me very much of Capt. Mainwaring of Dads Army.
I only had one conversation with him, I recall he gave
me some good news but I can’t remember what
One big advantage was that the centre
lathes were closer to the girls on the Pillar drills than the
Milling section
The Fabroil Gear (Pinion) Section with Len
Turner
Fabroil
gears met the need for a lightweight, quiet gear for medium duty applications
and I was one of
the few apprentices to work on this section; it was in
number one bay and was a self-contained unit
The gears were produced from a hybrid of steel and
compressed cotton blanks. The cotton came in
large bales and was compressed, under heat, into near
solid flat sheets, about ½ inch thick.
The discs were assembled in a jig between circular
steel end plates, the assembly was then compressed
to a specific length and a ring of drilled and tapped
holes were made through their length. Studs were
then inserted in the holes so that when the assembly
was removed from the jig the studs retained the
steel/cotton “sandwich” in its compressed
state
The protruding ends of the studs were then chiselled
off to leave a cylindrical blank and a large range
of blanks of differing diameters and lengths were
produced daily
About a dozen lathes were used to finish turn, face and
bore the blanks, some of these lathes were
very old machines driven by flat belts from overhead
shafting that ran the length of the section.
There were also some modern lathes and I worked on one
of them—a Dean Smith and Grace model
The
13-inch Dean Smith and Grace lathe
The most popular in their
range, introduced in the 1940’s
The trick was to get the get the gear blanks running true
in the chuck, it could only be held in the jaws
by the fairly thin end plate so it was very easy to
get it out of square so that it ran eccentrically.
A blow, of the right force, on the
than done but the foreman, Len
Turner had a gift; one spin of the chuck followed by a single tap with
a hide mallet—bingo!
He also wore brown overalls like me so
we had a sort of empathy from the outset
The Gear planers with Cyril Southall
After machining, the blanks were moved to the end of
the section onto a series of gear planers
These were all
the operation was automatic and most of the planers
were operating continually
The Fabroil blanks were
mounted on a horizontal mandrel and the gear teeth were “shaved” by
a
reciprocating cutter that had rack like gear teeth.
The mandrel and the cutter were geared together so
that the mandrel indexed slightly between each
stroke of the cutter and the selection of the correct
gear train to produce the correct number of teeth
on a given size of blank was crucial.
There were calculation tables to help but it was still
a highly skilled job, especially so for single and
double helical gears and one man—Cyril Southhall—ran
the whole section
He had an unusual physique; he stood about six feet
four, had the build of a heavyweight boxer and
he wielded the three-foot spanner, used to lock the
blanks to the mandrel, with consummate ease.
He was also a very keen motor cyclist
Cyril was
eventually promoted to manage a new department that was built to manufacture
Stator/Rotor units
Bay 10, the Shaft bay, the last bay
in the Machine Shop
A very early
picture of bay 10 in the Machine Shop, the last bay before the entrance to the
Winding Department.
By the time
that I arrived in 1946 most of the old belt driven machines in the photograph
had been
replaced with modern lathes and cylindrical grinders
There were other bays in the
machine shop that I didn’t work on, they were;
Auto Section
Unlike the Gridley autos, these were set
up to machine iron castings, including end shields and
stator frames
Shaft Section
This included a collection of lathes and
cylindrical grinders and finished motor shafts were
produced from bar stock and reclaimed
shafts.
Radial Drillers
These were large capacity drillers and
handled all of those components that were too large
or complicated for the pillar drill
Marking Out
This was staffed by one man, Frank Green. He worked on a very large surface plate and
emphasised the technical nature of his job
by the use of his slide rule
He was one of the very few works employees
to own a car, Harold Lickert from the milling
section, was a regular passenger. I think
they both came from Lye
Although I didn’t work
directly on these sections I helped to maintain and repair the machines
during my 12 months in the
Millwrights Dept so I had some insight into their capabilities
Inspection Department with Mr Bassano
The Chief Inspector was a Mr
Bassano, and he had a small office on the ground floor of the main
office block, the rest of the Inspection staff were
patrol inspectors strategically placed around the
factory to provide 100% checks on all the critical
components in the Machine shop, and Winding
Department together with inspection of completed motors
and systems in the Final Assembly
department
Mr Bassano came from a distinguished Old Hill family
(the grandson of Emeline Barrs, of
Barrs Road, and the great nephew of Ann Haden, of Haden Hill) he lived in an impressive house
in Haden Hill. I believe that the Bassano family still owned a fair amount of Old hill
at that time ,
including the Old Hill Cricket Club grounds in
His background made him an unlikely candidate for a
career in engineering but his gentle and
genial disposition endeared him to the inspection
staff and workers alike
My sharpest memories of this time was that spent in
the Winding Dept, checking the size and shape
of the
coils wound by the girls--there were girls everywhere, all sizes, all ages and
I was by now
eighteen years old!
At the bottom of the Winding Dept, in a separate area,
was an Inspection desk; this was the base
for a very attractive girl inspector—I recall
her name as Mary--she was a couple years older
than
me and every morning I listened spellbound to the
amorous tales of her encounters with her
seemingly innumerable boy friends
This is the only time I envied the
Electrical Engineering Apprentices—they spent a lot more time
in the Winding dept than me
The Winding Shop Superintendent was Chick Atkinson and one of his Supervisors, Frank Millington,
known by all as “the
Count” mesmerised all of the apprentices with his tales of “derring do”
Whether he mesmerised all of the girls in the same way
is open to doubt
He addressed all of the apprentices by the same
name—Cocker—the girls were called
something else!
I have few memories of my time in the Final Assembly
Department; I remember Horace Pool on the
mall motor section and a very loquacious Clary Kite on the Amplidyne
Generator section
Clary later became a partner in the Lye based builders Billingham and Kite
and I bought a house
from him in Stourbridge in 1966
The Chief Inspector, Mr Bassano, was totally preoccupied with the
restoration work he was doing
on the organ in the
instrumental its building and the only
real conversations that we had centred on his beloved organ!
He was fearful that he would never live
to see it finished—he did and just as well, I got married
there in 1958 and the organ
couldn’t have sounded better!
Wedding day 6th
June 1958
Machines Mothballed in the winter of 1946/47
During the months of January, February
and March, the country almost ground to a halt with
temperatures as low as minus 20 degrees
C and snow drifts up to 10 feet deep in exposed places
Power was cut off to parts of the
country and for a time the BTH was effectively shut down and the
workforce laid off
The Apprentices were kept on, there may
have been a legal reason for this, and I was part of a team
that was handed a tub of grease and
instructed to smear it over all the critical surfaces on machine
slideways etc
It was rather an eyrie place to work in
with no lights and no background noise but we set about the
job with gusto applying very liberal
layers of grease to anything that didn’t move
Three days later the emergency was over
and fortuitously I was not in the team responsible for removing
the grease
Coming back from Dudley Tech, on the top
deck of the number 243 Midland Red
Cradley Heath double
decker, we
got as far as the Mouse Sweet Brook crossing , about 200 yards
to Old Hill Cross, before the driver
stopped and ordered us off.
He claimed that the bus was in danger of toppling over in the drifts
A
Dudley Tech Junior and early days at the BTH
into the Millwrights, the Toolroom
and the Cannon dynasty
The Planning Department, Final Test and Sport
Dudley Senior Tech and my fellow
apprentices