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George Spenceley recalls his years as a long distance lorry driver, the friends he made and the incidents that happened along the way.
I changed jobs again and became a 'shunter' with a transport company at Stockton. They moved and stored Heinz tinned foods from Lancashire and London. I started work at eight in the morning and assisted in the offloading of the vehicles that had been brought in the previous night.
It was my job to drive the empty vehicles to local factories and reloaded them with ten tons of salt, or to the steel works for small 12 inch bags of shot, they were very heavy. Loading the vehicles often took a long time and it could be eight or nine at night before I got back.
Thinking I was finished for the day I would often find a note ordering me to take a vehicle loaded with colliery arches to Bury in Lancashire. Now loyalty to one's employer is fine but I found that the more hard working and conscientious I was the more they expected me to do with no extra payment.
After two or three of these mammoth shifts I rebelled and refused to take the vehicle out of the yard, I just went home for a rest.
I arrived next morning to find the vehicle still in the yard with the boss standing beside it tapping his foot, he ushered me into his office. 'Why didn't you take that load last night' he asked, 'who put you up to disobeying my orders'.
I told him that it was my own decision to go home and that I didn't think it was good enough, the other drivers had already gone home after their shifts so why should I be expected to stay on and drive the old vehicle through the night after working all day? I wasn't even getting paid for it.
He didn't answer for a while and stood looking out of his office window then turning to me he said, 'Right, I'll give you three options, one you take the vehicle to Bury now, two I'll send you home on suspension until I get a vehicle to replace the old one you refuse to drive or three, I'll sack you'.
'Well Mr.' I said to him, 'I've never been sacked before and I don't intend to drive that vehicle today or any other day so here's my notice, after Saturday I'll have found another job'.
I'd called his bluff. He started to say that I was a driver he'd find hard to replace and wouldn't I stay until he could find someone to replace me. I refused.
During the following week I called in to the employment office at the steel works and accepted a job as a fitters mate with the promise that I'd be trained as a crane driver. I started work the following Monday.
I'd always led a very active life and this was just the opposite, I was to carry tools for a craftsman and act as a 'gopher'. Whenever the fitter required a tool for the work he was doing he would send me to the foreman, he'd write a requisition for me to take to the stores and I'd collect it.
There was always a queue of fitters mates and you could wait up to two hours just to collect a simple thing like a nut or bolt. No wonder the labour costs were crippling British Steel and the country was in such a state.
The noise from the open-hearth furnaces was deafening. The furnace walls only lasted a few weeks then the unit would be shut down. The gas or oil fuelling to the furnace would be turned off and within twenty-four hours of cooling the furnace roof would have collapsed into a heap of bricks.
Once it was cool enough the brickies labourers would clear the rubble away and make it ready for the bricklayers to reline the furnace. Refractory bricks were used to withstand the high temperatures needed to make steel and the arched roofs were held in position by wedges of wood.
When the rebuilding was complete and it had dried out it was slowly reheated, the bricks would expand and burn away the wooden wedges so holding it firmly in position.
One of my jobs as fitter's mate was to change the door on the furnace as and when it was required. I'd place a ladder against the furnace to give me access to the chain that opened and closed the door. As I removed the chain the searing heat seemed to engulf me, I found it quite frightening.
I felt I was wasting my time as a fitter for even though I'd completed my training on most aspects of crane driving it would have been years before I'd have got a regular position as a crane driver so I decided to leave.
George Spenceley, 2002
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