I had the pleasure of living for a few years in Eaton Socon working for the CEGB - The Electricity Power station there. I met a gentleman, who became a good dear friend, until he died not so long ago. Isnt it funny though, sometimes you just meet someone who you just gel & get on with - and I used to work with Harry as much as possible.
One of the jobs we were allocated was the overhaul of one of the Parsons' turbines. The rotor had been sent away to be rebladed and rebalanced. We were working with the Parsons' guys and were in the process of putting the main casing back on. The casing was held together with rather large nuts and bolts in the region of 3 inches in diameter, by about 2 foot 6 inches long. The procedure was to heat the nut up to a predetermined temperature, place it on the bolt, tighten it down with an engineers precision instrument number 12 - A Monday hammer or a bl**dy big sledge hammer :) and you tighten the bolt down.
We had a young apprentice working with us and we all took turns on the hammer.
When it was the young apprentice's turn to swing the hammer, I noticed Harry jumping around like a wicket keeper as though to catch a ball. I wondered what was wrong and I could hear Harry shouting but I could not make out what he was shouting. The next thing, the big hammer goes flying, scattering two blokes and it demolished two guages on the instrument board.
Harry did not catch the young apprentice. The young apprentice went sprawling across the floor - it turned out the young apprentice had not been breathing when he was swinging the hammer and he held his breath.
Apparently, Harry had been shouting RED, PURPLE, BLUE - HE'S GONE!
The apprentice was brought back round quickly - as Harry was the first aider.
The other thing was, every 2 weeks you had to do first aid training exercise alternatively if you were in the fire fighting team, you did an alternative fire fighting exercise.
Harry's nick-name was SQUASHBODY the reason being - during one of the first aid exercises on the outside boilers they assimilated a collapsed man e.g. a full life size weighted dummy on the top of the boiler. The idea of the exercise was to bring the lad down from the top of the boiler on top of the stretcher, well midway up these boilers, there used to be a crane gantry sticking out the side for lifting and lowering heavy valves etc., so Harry struck on the idea of putting a sling around the stretcher that the dummy was on, and slinging it out onto the gantry and lowering it to the ground quickly -
to gain Brownie points . Everything went well until they got the body about 2 feet out from the side of the boiler and the stretcher twisted and it slipped through the sling so it ended up hanging vertical - body was not really fastened to the stretcher properly and it just slipped through. Needless to say, the dummy was spread all over the place at the bottom of the boiler. We used to have Doctors and Nurses come on site and used to judge these and give advice.
The Doctor said IF I HAD KNOWN YOU WERE GOING TO DO THAT i could HAVE DUG A HOLE WHERE HE LANDED AND BURIED him at the same time
.
By the way lads, have you heard the News,
BRITISH GOVERNMENT TO DISBAND ALL ARMED FORCES AND EMPLOY SEVERAL MAYHEMMERS - MORE KNOWLEDGE OF BLOWING STUFF UPaye
john e
bluebird