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Ron Levett, born in Alfriston, East Sussex, enlisted in 1943 and joined the Royal Armoured Corps. He joined the British Liberation Army and took part in the liberation of Germany. He met and married his German wife, Ruth, while stationed in Münster then returned to England.
My wages as a shop assistant were only £4-12-6d a week and when I heard that the brickyard at Ludlay, Berwick were opening up and looking for labour I decided that I needed to earn more and would have to leave Wilde's.
When I called at the brickyard, I found that the foreman was Pat Laker, who I had known for years. I also knew a lot of the men. I got the job. I can't remember what the wages were but they were nearly double the amount I had been earning. The work, of course was manual and a great deal harder.
The brickyard was still in the process of being built. It was being turned from a small yard producing hand-made bricks, to a factory making pressed bricks by machine. The bricks were to be dried in tunnels using forced hot air, but the tunnels had first to be built.
There was a bricklayer and his mate laying bricks, with the rest of the gang making cement mortar (known as 'pug'). There were 8 people making the pug and the bricklayer was so fast that we could only just keep up with him. The four drying tunnels were completed in about two weeks. New kilns for burning the bricks were also built in record time.
A concrete base was built for the brick-making machine, with railway lines laid on concrete, to carry the bricks on small trolleys, from the machine to the dryers.
When the machine was delivered it was found that the holes in the base, which had been left to take the hold-down bolts, had been measured incorrectly and these had to be filled in and fresh holes made.
This consisted of one man holding a steel chisel in position, while another man hit the chisel with a sledgehammer. This could be quite dangerous for the man who held the chisel, but no one was injured.
A brick ramp was built about eighty yards long to provide a slope, up which rails could be laid to carry the clay from the yard where it was dug, to the top of the machine where it was tipped in and mixed with the clinker, which caused the bricks to burn in the kiln. The bricks were known as 'Stock' bricks, and many a local house is built of 'Ludlay Stocks'.
To dig the clay out in the 'backfield', we installed a large excavator running on wide gauge lines. This was a multi-bucket machine with an arm extending up the face of the clay being dug. A chain of buckets ran up the upper surface of the arm, turned over at the top, then cut a slice of clay about one inch deep on their way down the underside of the arm.
They then discharged their load out of the rear into a waiting skip, which ran on a smaller line along beside the main rails. The skip was then pushed along to the bottom of the ramp up to the brick-making machine, where it was hooked onto a chain, to be hauled up to the top of the ramp.
The lunch break was held in a small shed near the brick-making machine. The conversation was usually about football or horseracing, neither of which subjects enthralled me.
One lunchtime I finished my lunch and walked back to the clay field to discover that the excavator was inches from the end of the line, and was about to fall into the pond. I had forgotten to put the digger out of gear and it travelled so slowly that it was hard to see if it was actually travelling at all.
The machine was very old and needed constant attention from a firm of engineers who travelled all the way from Horsham every time it needed repairs.
In the end it was scrapped and an excavator on caterpillar tracks arrived, complete with driver. I was transferred to the main brick-making crew, just as production was beginning to run smoothly.
The bricks were formed in a wooden mould, three at a time, their combined weight being about forty pounds. The clay was forced into the mould, and then an arm pushed the mould clear of the operating position. As soon as the arm came back, one of the men placed another ready-sanded mould into position.
On the other side of the machine, the moulds slid out, one at a time, filled with clay. Another operator then had the job of removing the bricks from the moulds.
He turned through ninety degrees, tipped the mould vertically, and then carefully placed the underside of the mould onto three sanded pieces of wood, which were held on a turntable holding four of these stations.
The arms on this piece of equipment holding the brick could then be laid flat so that the mould was now inverted. The mould was then lifted off the fresh bricks and passed back to the man feeding them into the machine for cleaning and sanding ready for re-use.
A third man turned the turntable round to his position and carefully lifted the bricks by placing another piece of sanded wood on top of it and lifting it like a sandwich. He then placed it on a steel shelf on the trolley ready to enter the drying tunnel when the trolley was full.
A coal-burning furnace heated the drying tunnels. This was fed with fuel by a screw thread, which carried the coal into the grate. A thermostat fitted in one of the tunnels controlled the action. The bricks took about two weeks to complete their journey through the tunnels, by which time they were firm enough to handle.
They were then stacked inside the kilns and fired. Burning took about twenty-four hours, and the kilns had to be fed with fuel throughout this time. This meant two men being on duty all night to carry this out.
One of the characters working at the brickyard was Reg Pettitt. He worked most of the time in the clay field. A favourite trick was to tell Reg a joke, because once he started laughing, he couldn't stop and because his laugh sounded like a donkey, he could be heard back at the main machine. Haw-haw-haw he went!
Ron Levett, 2001
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