EnglandEarly on during the war, I worked at Duples Coachworks and volunteered to enter the boxing ring for a three round exibition bout with the local champ in aid of the Red Cross, to his amazement, and my own, I beat him, and was a local hero for the next few days, all sorts of people were coming round to congratulate me while I was still busy working on the drilling machine. I left Duples to work at a small factory in Willesden, inspecting machined products for the military. The Chief Inspector Mr Anderson instructed me, and taught me what I should do; it wasn't long before I had to transfer to the night shift, which amounted to a long walk to work during the air raids.
All went well until I received my calling up papers to join the army, this was in December 1942 and conscription was in force. It was just over five years later before I was discharged as unfit for further service following an 18 month stay in a hospital in Surrey.
Time went by, and we moved to a house near the Hendon Way. I started work at "Smith's of England"; it's now known as "Smiths Industries". It was in 1949 when I started there as an inspector in the flex shop, and it was very hard and heavy work, but after about a year I was transfered to the machine shop. The change was very good for me as it was about doing what I call a real job of inspection, the drilling section consisted of about 100 various types of drilling machines and there were always problems to sort out. As time went by I was moved to other sections including the gears, until eventually I was promoted to a Senior Staff position , and was put in charge of all machine and auto shops inspection personnel, about 50 people all told, male and female.
The Quality Stamp was to introduce a special year in which all employees were encouraged to renew efforts to improve the quality of their production and thereby lessen the number of rejected instruments.
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Years of work followed and much to my surprise I was called to the Works Manager's Office and was told that I had been chosen to put together a training department to instruct operators prior to them being set to work on the production lines. Also that I would have six female assistants to assist me after they had a course of instruction. It had already been decided that I should attend "Hendon College " for a period of about 10 days to do a course on all aspects of Operator Training; I felt that it was a time well spent, and was with about twelve other people also on the same course. After returning to work I was then responsible to our Personnel Manager, in today's lingo its "Human Resources Manager".
There was no doubt that I enjoyed my twenty years at "Smiths", a family friendly firm, I also had three brothers working there who were long service employees.We thought that we were too young to think about retirement in those days.
In December 1970 I gave up my position in the Personnel/Training Department.and we moved to a new estate in Wellingborough and the house wasn't completely finished, but when we saw a field with horses behind the house
it had all that I wanted to be able to move out of London. It was upsetting for the family at first, but we now know how right we were to move into our own house.
After working for a firm in Northampton for a few years I managed to get a job at Gestetner, not far from home, and I enjoyed working there for 11 years before I retired.
We have been to America seven or eight times, and even to Las Vegas. I would like to tell you of our last visit to see Barb and Kiri in Rochester during October 2007, we had a good journey, on time, and we arrived at Rochester Airport to collect our baggage and on to Park Square Lane. I won't bore you with the details, but we were so pleased that everything went well and we were soon at home and settled in after choosing which room we would like to have for our three week stay/holiday that seemed to stretch on to four weeks. There's no doubt about it, we were spoilt, and we loved it, nothing was too much trouble, there was plenty of time for shopping and we took full advantage of it. I spent quite a bit of time keeping a journal on the computer of our day to day diary of events. Four of us had a game of Scrabble some evenings, I think that I kept the score most times, but didn't do too much winning.
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Yes! it's me, looking a bit younger, about 45 years younger ©: Working on the Ferranti Co-ordinate Measuring machine in the Standards Room.
It measures two dimensions simultaniously, and one of the Company Directors said, "Now wear it out".
Yes, he meant it, "do a lot of work with it".
P G Weston 18/05/08 (It's now 4th June 2011).