I heard one of the engineers at a local factory here in Willand had died suddenly in a pub. They wanted a maintenance engineer and I thought I know all about that. I know about refrigeration, about mechanics, I know all about generating. I had a good knowledge of electricity and knew I could do the job. So I went up to the factory in my sailor suit, all the girls admired my uniform when sailor Jack came in (I had kept the uniform you see). I went to see the boss. He asked what credentials I had which weren’t much because everything had gone down with the ship.
Anyway the boss said, “Let’s have a walk around”, he takes me down to the engine room to great gas engines generating 3-phase mains voltage running the whole factory. He said, “This is what you will be looking after”. I thought this is all right; watch keeping in here is going to be a snip this is. I said, “Will the other chap give me the procedure for starting etc?” He said, “Two shifts, you start 5.30am one week and 1.30pm the next week alternately”. The other chap came from Holcombe Rogus and had been down there with the chap that died. The chap that died was the better engineer of the two and they hoped I had more knowledge and would do a lot of the electrical work that the assistant couldn’t do.
I then went to see the boilers with the boss. There were two vertical boilers with coal fires and I met the boiler man who’s name was Charlie Pengelly. The boss said there would be times when I would be required to fire up the boilers during holidays and if Charlie was ill and so on and did I have the know-how? “Oh yes Mr. Maunder” I said, “Although I have never had to fire a coal burner I have been used to thirteen fires on one boiler and fifty two fires flat out in one boiler room and there were two boiler rooms so you can work that out a hundred and four fires could be lit and steaming”. “Yes”, he said, “But there is a 100lbs pressure here you know, not a pressure to be played around with of course, very dangerous, leaks”. I said, “Mr Maunder I have been used to working on boilers with pressures of two hundred and fifty and two hundred and seventy five and on destroyers at three hundred psi. That is an oil stove compared to what I know. I can assure you given the time and the opportunity I can handle this”. He said “We haven’t got a high pressure feed pump so we have to inject the water. Do you know anything about that?” which of course I did.
He took me up the bake house next, he said “We make about seven products here sausages, burgers, pasties, pies, faggots, ham, quite a bit of equipment up here as well, pastry rollers, dough mixers, bone machines, sausage fillers, fridges up here as well to cool it all, pastry rolling machines, burger stampers etc”. I thought this is all a bit much. Does he expect me to look after all of this? What am I going to do when two things go wrong at once? Different bosses were responsible for different departments and this came under the shop part of the Company and my area came under the Engineering Director who knew nothing about the other part of the operation.
Thinking back to what my role was in the Navy I asked how I was going to stay
in the boiler room watch keeping on those engines if something goes wrong elsewhere.
“Oh” he said, “You don’t stay in the boiler room all
the time, you oil it up, you have automatic oilers on both engines everything
is 100% reliable”. Then he took me across the yard to the egg-grading
centre, four machines grading boxes of eggs being brought in from the farms
every day. Then they started plucking chickens, they bought some dry pluckers
that could pluck a hundred chickens a day. Well, nobody realised what responsibility
I had at Lloyd Maunders. They really piled it on me. Later the Company started
processing chicken in a big way, collecting from the broiler farms in the area
five hundred a day. Eventually this went up to seventy five thousand a day mainly
to go to Sainsbury’s supermarket.
I retired from Lloyd Maunder on 31 October 1986 on my sixty fifth birthday; I have been retired twenty years and I am now eighty five years old. I worked at Lloyd Maunders for forty years and three months.