Outings & Humour
Bleddyn Penny: How do you go about overcoming that fear though and coping with working in such a dangerous environment all the time?
Arthur Bamford: You turn it into fun. There was no other way to do it because – very very early in the eighties; the the Steel Company of Wales, after the, after the long strike in 1980, lots of things had to change because our manpower had been cut by such a great degree uh the-there were lots and lots of accidents, far more than we used to have! Now, they put it down to varying conditions and everything else but it was down to, primarily, lack of manpower. So we used to go uh around in circles. Uh, how how can I say this now, what was I trying to get at. They tried to get everyone on the blast furnace to be safer by wearing things like safety boots, fire boots a full flame retardant green suit, helmet and glasses, safety glasses, but the old timers weren’t having any of that. Because the green trousers used to chafe in between your legs and they would rub you raw and you would end up with a horrific nappy rash so you-the the health centres idea to that was, put some cream on, but you’re talking about guys now who had been through the Second World War – to tell them to put cream between their legs and you just got told it was enough and they put up with it. There was one particular incident that I remember, one of the foremen said to my friend, um my friend’s name was Colin and Colin was, oh, he couldn’t wear a helmet, it hurt his head; he couldn’t wear glasses, too heavy for his ears and he, he was called to one side and he [the foreman] said, ‘listen now Colin, if you don’t wear your helmet and glasses I’m going to have to put you on report.’ So he swore and and threw a shovel and then went off to the locker room. Now y-you have to imagine a cast house, in front of a blast furnace, where you have molten iron running into, running from a four foot trough into a torpedo and diverting slag in another four foot trough down into the slag pool and calling him back from the locker room and all he [Colin] had on was a helmet and glasses and a pair of steel toe caps – absolutely nothing else! And he walked back to the sand dam where he had been shovelling and he started shovelling like that. And the foreman took his own helmet off and threw it against the wall and said, ‘what’s the f***ing point?’ But that’s the type of, um, the humour that that basically got us through it and it was, it was, it wasn’t a laugh a minute, obviously, because it was terrifying but that’s that’s how they dealt with it.
Francis Needs: Another manager then - this is quite famous, um, a manager, he never used to go, he wouldn’t come up on the crane, you wouldn’t catch him on the crane unless you invited him up. And he wouldn’t go down the cellars, down the cellars was out, he wouldn’t go. But we had one manager, in particular, he took, um, he took it into his head now to wander down into the cellars. So he went down the cellars and, um, of course, these oil cellar men, they were a bunch on their own, again, they were a smashing bunch of boys like. And he’s wandering around the cellars now and of course the cellar men they’ve got this little cabin - done out lovely, they got curtains in the windows, they had curtains, electric light, they’ve got a television, you know, it’s all... It’s like a little home from home. So one of the boy steps out of the cabin, and, uh, Courtney’s there, now, manager, and he says to him, ‘do you know who I am?’ And this guy looks at him, kind of taken aback, he steps backwards into the cabin, he shouts, ‘Rex, Rex, there’s a chap here who don’t know who he is!’ That’s a true story that is!