LIFE AFTER THE TECH

 

I left the Tech in 1960 when we emigrated to Australia. Things didn’t work out too well. We initially went to Brisbane. It was a fantastic six week voyage on the SS Orion, which took us to Gibraltar, Greece, Egypt, down the Suez canal to Aden, then across the Arabian sea to Ceylon as it was then. Crossing the Arabian Sea we ran in to a Monsoon which apparently blew us forty miles off course. It was amazing and terrifying, as the waves were so huge, that despite the size of the ship, it was going up one side over the top and sliding down the other. All we could hear for two days was the howling wind and crashing of crockery as just about everything in the ship got tossed about. As it heeled from port to starboard and back again, just walking along the corridors was an adventure, as one second you were walking in the corner of one wall and the floor, the next you had to cross the corridor and walk in the other. Playing table tennis with a friend I made on board was fun, as the table wasn’t in the same place when we hit the ball, as it was when the ball arrived at the other end. Eventually we arrived in Ceylon, did an island excursion and then set sail for Fremantle Australia. We then did a trip around the south coast calling at all the major cities for a visit – including five days in Sydney. The stay gave us time for several trips including to Lone Pine wildlife park, where they had Koala bears. We actually got to hold a young one, which was very enjoyable.

We finally arrived in Brisbane and came down to earth with a shattering bump. After disembarking we were taken to an immigrant hostel, which if it was designed to give people a bad impression of Australia from day one, it certainly succeeded. The place was a cross between a prison camp and army barracks. We were given one room for the four of us in a large wooden block, but there was no key to the room which was locked. I had to climb in through an open window and unlock it from the inside. This meant that as long as we were there we couldn’t all leave the room at the same time as there were all sorts of people in the camp and everything we had, other than the stuff packed in tea chests (can’t remember where they were) was in the room. The beds were wooden planks with just an inch thick mattress on them. I don’t know what was in the pillows, but it felt like rocks. To top it off, the camp was under the Storey Bridge over the Brisbane river. It was a steel bridge, which trams rattled across every few minutes until 2am, so needless to say sleep was a bit scarce. I won’t even mention the food in the canteen. Alright I will, it was terrible, you’d have to have starved for a fortnight to even contemplate eating it. After two weeks my dad managed to get a job and we moved out to rented accommodation in a suburb called Greenslopes. There was nothing green about it when we arrived.

In the fall I started school at Cavendish Road State High School which had over two thousand pupils, boys and girls, bit of a change from CBTS. The school itself was modern, but was out on the edge of the city in the bush (as the countryside is known), so despite the number of pupils and teachers there was no sanitation This was in common with many of the homes in Brisbane at that time, which had “dunny huts” at the bottom of the garden, regardless of how posh the house itself was. The city had grown much faster than the sewage system. At the school, a fleet of dunny wagons would appear every week to pump out the sewage tanks. Nice! Of course they were on a totally different curriculum than we had been, and were two thirds of way through the school year (January to December there) so I had to scrabble to try and fit in, which I didn’t really achieve I must admit, though I didn’t do too badly in Christmas exams. The style of teaching was Victorian with brutal discipline, the cane in use every day for large parts of the population. So many pupils were sent for caning I think they must have employed a team of guys just to carry out the punishments, but fortunately I never found out. If another teacher came into the class everyone immediately sprang up to attention until they were told to sit, as they did for the teacher before the lesson started. Outside there was no playground as such just a large expanse of grass, where things couldn’t have been more different, no discipline or supervision at all. I was with a boy who lived along the road from us and I travelled on the school bus with him and he introduced me to his group. There were five or six of us. After about fifteen minutes of chatter, and me trying to explain a bit about England, one of the boys said “Well I’ve been sent here by the town council to move you lazy buggers.” He then leant over sideways and farted loudly. At this signal everyone stood up and started fighting and I mean going at it wrestling and punching while I looked on in amazement. One of the boys started on me and I hit him back in the nose which started to bleed. He stopped at this, but I carried on until the other lads jumped me and held me down. When they let me up I looked around and fights were going on everywhere, piles of boys just laying into each other. My new found “friends” explained to me that they did this every lunch time. Bad as it looked it was all in fun and you weren’t supposed to actually hurt anyone. The boy with the bleeding nose didn’t seem to mind his injury, in fact was quite proud of it. Nothing was ever said about it inside school. Weird or what? I had wondered where all the girls were when we first went outside, I found out they had lunch in a different area. Now I knew why. After that I still ate lunch with them, but wandered off when the “fun” started. They seemed to accept it wasn’t for me and didn’t bother me again, after all I was only a bloody pommy kid.

During the Christmas holidays (which was the summer break of course) my parents announced that they had decided we were going to leave Brisbane and move to Perth as they didn’t see a future for us there. So once again I was yanked out of school having finally made a few friends (pommies were not very popular in Australia at that time) to be taken somewhere else, to start again. They had decided on Perth because we knew a family who already lived there. A boy I had been at junior school with and his family had emigrated to Perth some years earlier. They had given up and come back to England before my parents were thinking of going, but they got together to discuss it. Don’t ask me how they met up I can’t remember, but at the time the Hawkins folks decided England wasn’t for them after all and they were returning to Aus. We later learned that not being happy in either place was a common affliction amongst immigrant families. They stayed in touch with us and settled back in Scarborough, which was on the coast (and still is I expect) about nine miles from Perth. So we packed up again including the tea chests which were still with us, got on a train and travelled for five days back across Australia through all the places we had stopped at on the ship six months earlier, but in reverse order. After we got to Perth we went out to Scarborough and met up with Richard’s family again to look for somewhere to live. Money was a bit tight as you can imagine, so we moved into a caravan park right on the edge the beach at Scarborough and lived in a variety of vans for the next two years.

I went to school at Tuart Hill State High School which wasn’t far from the caravan park, just a fifteen minute ride on the school bus. It was as big as the previous school, but thankfully was connected to the main sewage system - Western Australia seemed much more advanced than Queensland at that time. The only disadvantage of Perth was that if you got fed up with the shops there, it was eighteen hundred miles across the desert to the next ones. It was a very nice city and we liked it there, but work was scarce. My dad was a painter and decorator and very skilled at his job as he had served an apprenticeship when he left the army after the war. He couldn’t stand the slapdash way they worked out there as he wanted to do a proper job, but wasn’t allowed the time. In one house, where they had been hired to paint the interior, the owner had had an old fireplace removed and it was leaning against the wall in the room. Instead of moving it they just painted around it, they hadn’t been hired to move things. The guy that owned the small company that dad worked for was called Joe Kerr, unbelievably, and lived up to his name professionally. He was personally a really good guy though, a real down to earth ocker (not a mistake) Aussie. One weekend he had a party at his house and my mum and dad were invited, but were very surprised when the got there, as the men and women immediately split up into different rooms, the men in the one with the beer barrel. They didn’t mix all night. The women (except my mum of course) all wore posh party frocks and elbow length white gloves, all this in a fairly modest suburban house. Drinking in Perth was pretty odd at that time. The bars were all tiles and chrome plate, more like public toilets than pubs. The bars opened at six in the morning and closed at six at night and women weren’t allowed. This (closing time - not the lack of women) led to what was known as the five o’clock rush, when everyone left work and rushed to the bars. The pubs had a unique way of dealing with the influx, they pulled pints of beer just before five and lined them up until the bar was completely covered. The clientele appeared and drank as many as they could in the hour, but only paid for the number of empty glasses they had at the end. They then staggered off home to dinner presumably. My dad eventually gave up painting and went to work in a tire depot moving tires about with a forklift truck. Anyhooo... back to school.

They had a different system. There were two streams, one called Trades the other Academic. The Trades stream concentrated on practical classes such as woodwork and metalwork and less on English, Maths etc., whereas the Academic steam naturally did no practical at all and concentrated on the other subjects. When I started they didn’t know what to do with me, so I had to do a week in each stream. They finally decided I was Academic material, much to my disappointment and I stayed there until I left the following year. I did quite well in my final exams and left school with decent pass marks in seven subjects.

There was not much work about and I ended up greasing cars and selling petrol in a garage in Perth, travelling every day on the bus. The guy I worked for was another rock solid Aussie type and I enjoyed it as a change from school. He was getting on a bit and after I had worked there for a few months he decided to sell up. I don’t think it was because of me! He sold to a bunch of Italians, but he said not to worry as he’d made them promise to keep me on. So, a bit worried, I went into work Monday morning and met my new employers, who did not seem all that friendly and didn’t talk to me much. I carried on with my tasks as normal during the week and on Friday afternoon I was told they had their own boy to do my work and I was fired. So much for Italian promises. I was out of work for about six weeks which was a blow because by this time we were all saving as hard as we could for the fares back to England. I finally got a job in another garage, not far from the first one, working for an ex motorcycle cop called Roy Jaksitch. Serbian originally. Man he was ugly, he had a nose like a small loaf of bread was about six foot four, built like a brick s..t house and according to the mechanic who already worked there, was bent as a nine bob note when he was on the police force. He was a scary character and hard as nails.

One day I was servicing a car on the hoist. It was American, huge and had a sump plug as big as a dinner plate. I drained the oil did the greasing and let the car down, then filled it with new oil, it took fourteen pints. When I checked the oil level there nothing on the dipstick, I checked again still nothing. I looked under the car and in the hoist well there was a lake of oil. I had forgotten to put the sump plug back in, it was there sitting on the hoist grinning at me. Not only did I have to clean the whole mess up, which took forever, but I had to pay for all the oil, which meant no pay that week.

Eventually in the summer of 1962 my parents decided we had enough money to go back home and start over. My mum went down to Fremantle to the P&O lines office and bought tickets for us on the Oriana, a brand new ship making only its second trip to Aus. The Oriana was the sister ship to the Canberra, which you probably remember played a troop carrying role in the Falkands war, although the ships didn’t look alike. I think they were called “sisters” because they were launched at the same time. The trip back to England took only twenty-one days. That ship could really motor. We stopped at Aden again for a visit and then at the top of the Red Sea we got off the ship (leaving our luggage aboard) and took a coach tour from the town of Suez up through Egypt to Cairo. We went to Cairo museum which was fascinating. We saw the King Tut exhibition, which was in its own room, a big one with armed soldiers outside the door. The room was amazing with the original gold covered sarcophagus and cases and cases filled with gold and jewels. Astonishingly there were medical surgical tools which looked like modern ones, but made bronze and ivory. The guide told us to walk slowly when we left the room, because the soldiers outside tended to shoot before asking questions of anyone in a guilty hurry. Afterwards we did a trip out to the Great Pyramids. Awesome. Meanwhile, the ship had navigated the Suez Canal and docked in Alexandria, where we rejoined it and set sail for Naples, Italy. We arrived there at 6 am and the captain put out a special announcement for passengers to get up and see the sunrise as we steamed into Naples bay. What a sight, the whole landscape was bathed in shades of pink early sunlight, it was quite spectacular. While ashore we went on another trip to Pompeii, again an amazing experience.

Finally we returned home to Southampton via Gibraltar and sadly left the ship. I know cruises like this are commonplace today, but in the early sixties not so much, it was something I’ll always remember. We went to live in Bishopston Bristol with my aunt. She had a four bedroom house with only her and my uncle living there as the kids had left. My uncle worked for Bristol Siddeley Engines just down the road at Patchway. He arranged for me to get an interview with personnel as it was then known. They had no idea what my Aussie qualifications were worth, so I had to go to their Technical College for a series of tests to see what I knew. Apparently not much, because they offered me an apprenticeship as a fitter/turner. Lacking any other offer and having zero contacts in England I accepted. I really enjoyed myself in the workshops, which were massive working on machines and development jet engines with the skilled fitters. Half way through the five years we had to specialize and I was moved up to the engineering stream and went to work in the engineering drawing offices. That’s where I finished my apprenticeship as a fully-fledged (almost) engineering draughtsman.

During my apprenticeship I also went to college, of course, and ended up with various City and Guilds certificates in mechanical engineering. I got tired of draughting and wanted to go into development engineering, but my qualifications weren’t good enough for that, so I went back to night school at Brunel, then independent but now part of the University of Western England. I managed an HNC in mechanical engineering and finally got into development, where I worked for a few years before moving into Reliability Engineering doing failure and risk analyses on engine designs for certification. While I was in the drawing office the company was taken over by Rolls-Royce Aero Engines. As a reliability engineer I got to travel quite a bit around the country and flying to Germany and Italy on the company jet to visit partner and sub-contractor companies. The company jet was quite luxurious with proper tables and tablecloths and a uniformed steward to cater to your every whim, of which I naturally had many.

While l was still in the drawing office I met Eileen, the girl who would become my wife. My parents had bought a house in Bath after we had been back about eight months, so I was back there. Eileen and I were married in 1975 and bought a house in Pucklechurch. It’s a small village between, and north of, Bath and Bristol. We lived there for fifteen years until the next big event happened. I was in the office one sunny afternoon in 1989, staring out the window and wishing I was out there and not here, when the phone rang and an unknown voice asked me if I was in Reliability Engineering, and I said I was. He then asked me if I had ever thought of working in Canada, at which point I thought maybe the company was hinting at something, or it was someone playing a joke. But no, it was a headhunter form Toronto calling on behalf of a Canadian firm called SPAR, who were heavily into aero-space systems and designing and building the robot arms for the American Space Shuttle.

Long story short (or fairly) a director and his wife came over from Canada and interviewed Eileen and me in London, all expenses and then some, paid. I was offered a job in Toronto and accepted. In 1990 they sent a team of movers to the house, which I had sold by then, and packed everything we owned including bed, three piece suite, table and chairs, the entire contents of my garage, (without the car though) into a container and away it went. They paid for everything including shipping our cat over and boarding it while we found a house. They had a down town flat ready for us stocked with food and drink for which they paid for the first two months. I didn’t have to start work until the following Monday so I drove the car, which they also had for us, very nervously on the wrong side of the road, out of the city to see what was about. We found a small town called Orangeville about forty miles north of Toronto and within a week had bought a house. We’ve been there ever since.

When I started work I discovered that they didn’t really know what a reliability engineer was. They only did part of the job we did at Rolls. After a few days they made me Material Review Board chairman on the Shuttle robot arm program. I had no idea what an MRB chairman was, so with some great help from my new colleagues I had to learn fast. It turned out it was chairing meetings with our engineers and their equivalents at NASA to resolve problems encountered while building and testing the Arms. Since the Arms were mechanical but computer controlled, some of it went over my head for a bit, so I had to wing it. Unlike Rolls the reliability department was part of Product/Quality Assurance not engineering, so when the post of program quality manager came up I applied for it and got it. This entailed being responsible for all quality matters relating to the arms and managing a team of a dozen quality analysts, as well as the guy who took over my job in MRB. Doing this job involved much interaction with our subsidiary company in Montreal, and eventually I took over one of our projects that they were handling because it had got into a mess. I was travelling to Montreal every Monday by plane and back again on Friday for two and a half years before we finally got it completed. Sometimes I stayed over for two weeks if we were testing units which was partly done in thermal/vacuum chambers and ran 24/7. It felt like I was living there and just visiting my wife. Don’t know how she put up with it, on the other hand....hmmm!

Eventually in 1998 I moved back into engineering and became Production Engineering Manager for the Shuttle Arm Program, managing the team of excellent engineers who kept the arms flying by resolving the myriad of problems with the arms themselves. The test equipment was even more complicated. In the course of this, I made many trips to NASA in Houston and a few to Cape Canaveral and was lucky enough to be allowed onto the flight deck of one of the Shuttles.

I retired in October 2010 just before my 66th birthday. If you are interested in that story you can read it by googling my name, and read the write up they printed in the paper. To me it reads kind of strange, because they asked a string of questions, but only printed answers, so some of it looks a bit disjointed. I spend my time messing about in my garage on my lathes and milling machines making steam engines (static) of my own design. Lots of bits but only one that really works, must try harder. Other than that Eileen and I are cryptic crossword fanatics and do a couple every day. I also love sudokus and try to get a couple in most days. During the summer I spend a lot of time cutting grass, we have about 2/3rds of an acre of garden. I have a ride on lawn mower, but also many trees so some of it has to be done manually with the hand mower which is also powered but takes a surprising amount to manoeuvre around obstacles and up banks. In the winter of course there’s that great Canadian pastime – shovelling the white stuff. Well congratulations if you got this far, I didn’t mean it to be as long as this, but once I got going I couldn’t stop!!

 

5th September 2021 – Peter tells us he has stage four cancer and there is no way out of it.     

All the more reason for printing his ‘story’             Thank you Peter.

 

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