Post War Employment

1961 Sparshatts

Commercial vehicle body builders based in Wicor Mill Lane, Portchester, and then Burrfields Road, Copnor. Dad was a wood machinist. There were three workers, Dad, Reg Williams, and Trevor somebody. The machine shop was something like this picture  (but nowhere near as clean!) with dust extraction pipes which sucked out the sawdust and channelled it outside into a big shed. I worked at the Portchester factory for a couple of months in 1967. Dad was in charge of a big circular table saw rather like the one in the picture. He started with rough cut planks straight from the sawmill still with their bark edges, and ran them through the saw to produce squared edge cut lengths ready for processing on other machines. It was heavy work. The rough planks straight from the tree were about fifteen feet long and up to 4 feet wide. Thickness about 2 inches. The cutting technique was for two people to carry a plank to the saw table and rest it one end on the saw table and one end on the floor. Start the saw - it was quite noisy. Then Dad would go to the end of the plank that was on the floor and lift it and push it slowly through the saw to remove one bark edge (the 'wany edge'). When it was half way through and supported by the table, Dad would walk to the other end of the plank and pull it through. This process would continue for subsequent cuts but this time the plank would rest against a side guide to achieve a uniform width. And so on until there was enough wood for the job in hand. For shorter planks he would push it through the saw and finish pushing with a long stick - to make sure he didn't slip against the moving blade. I never saw anyone else use Dad's table saw. He also did his own saw doctoring - the circular saw blade was removed from the machine. Then the blade was clamped into a wooden jig and Dad filed the teeth to get the sharp profile back. It took most of a day to do a blade.

Dad was always careful about safety. I think he was the only one in the wood machine shop who still had all his fingers. He saw Reg Williams lose a couple of fingers one day. They took the cut off fingers to the hospital but they couldn't sew them back on. 

There was another old chap called Joe Main who worked as a cleaner on the site. One of his jobs was to empty the sawdust shed when it got full up. To do that he had to enter through a door in the side of the shed and shovel the sawdust into a big barrow. That was ok until someone turned on the extractor fan with him still in the shed. He would come storming into the workshop covered in sawdust from head to foot. Of course nobody owned up to it.