ARM See when you are building a big place like this, there is a surveyor who acts on behalf of the contractor, that would be on my side and there is a surveyor who acts on behalf of the corporation in this case and every month, but every three months, I think it is, every three months, the builder draws so much money on the amount of work he has done. He can’t go on until the end of the contract. And instead of measuring it up, every little bit that been done, they photograph from the same point every time they come on, every three months you see and then they can assess how much has been done and they pay up on that and then at the end of the time, of course, they have a final measurement, that’s when they get the…

Q So do they go back to the plans and see if it all measures up as they wanted it?

ARM Well not that, not that really. When an estimate is got out for a job like this, which is about that thick.

Q Couple of inches?

ARM Oh yes, terrific. And um, everything is in there that’s got to go in there. You start off with the foundations and there are so many cube yards of concrete going in and there is so much steelwork, you get paid on that. There is so many, in this case, million bricks. They haven’t got to measure each panel of brickwork, because they know how much is in there beforehand.

Q So when did you start work on the Council house then?

ARM I went there in 1949 you see, here’s a picture that was taken in 1940 you see but the foundations was cut out in 1936 and it was quite a place there, you know. There were some of the slums of Bristol in behind there at that time and um

Q So they cleared the ground and just started to build

ARM Oh yes and it’s Brandon Hill, what we call Brandon Hill stone that’s very hard, as hard as steel, it’s pinkie, pinkie. On these big jobs, as a rule, you get a reinforced concrete engineer, who puts the foundations in, and then, a person like myself comes along who’s got a trade and now become a general foreman or site agent. He takes on and he is the one that’s got to administer the job and see to it going up and make it pay. Q So was that one of the hardest things you ever did, putting the very big roundels in the two porches on either end?

ARM Oh, was the hardest thing we did?

No, fitted like a glove.

Q Where were they carved? – Do you know?

ARM In our yard, in Cowlin’s yard which, well, coming to that, we had these two cranes you see out on the front. They had a 90-foot jib, you see, up there, 90 foot.

Born at Langford, the last day of 1906, that would be the 31st of December and I was christened Arthur Raymond Millard and I went to school at Churchill, Churchill Ordinary School, Elementary School and part, last three years at Burrington, because we moved to that part of the parish. I left school at 14 and my father, who was a stonemason cum bricklayer, had taken on to become a general foreman for a building firm at Winscombe named Shopland and Orum and he was taken on as foreman to build some houses for them. He wanted me to go in, be apprentice to a precision engineer but this engineer was a one-man job at Winscombe, wasn’t too keen to have to bother with a boy, you see. So my father said to this contractor ‘well I’ll stay with you four years, if you take my son as an apprentice carpenter and joiner’. He said ‘right’. So I was apprenticed for four years and my wages was five pence, I started at five pence an hour, which was 18s 4d a week and that was good for an apprentice. Usually, the same lad who was an apprentice for a different firm took no more than 10 Shillings a week and in the four years, each year it went on a little bit so that last year I was getting £2 15s 0d a week. Well, a craftsman’s wages then, a carpenter, plumber, bricklayer, what have you, their wages out here then would have been no more than one and four pence an hour when I finished my apprenticeship. So if you worked that out, you see at 44 hours a week, that was £2 4s 0d and four times three and eight pence, what was that. It was only three pounds something for a full man’s wages so really I done, I was doing quite well anyhow, so just before my time was up…

Q You did four years?

ARM I did four years, I’ve got indentures but I’ll show you. My father left the firm, they didn’t have so much on at that period and he went with a firm, a building firm at Nailsea. So at that time they started quite a number of, building lot of Council houses in Wrington, Cheddar, Congresbury, Clevedon, and this builder, John Moore the name was, my father went to be general foreman for him. So when my time was up, course I wanted the man’s money and um, so I left them and went with this firm as well and we used to travel, the first lot of houses was at Cheddar. And we used to travel daily on a lorry, about 22 of us on a 30-hundredweight lorry. Anyhow, I think we built, it doesn’t matter much, I think we built 18 blocks that is two in a block at Cheddar. Then we came to Congresbury and built another dozen like that. Then Wrington, which you pass on today, you wouldn’t know them. Then I went to Clevedon for a while and that went on from, it was about 1927 when I finished at Clevedon, I would think, because just along here from the lights, as you came this way, there was a house on the right standing on its own, which is the Methodist Minister’s Manse and the builders were Cheddar people, but they wanted a carpenter/joiner there and I was living over there then. So that was ideal, so I left Clevedon having done that job and worked on three or four more houses here and around Winscombe and that and this took us on to ‘29. And the local builder said to me ‘Ray, he said, if you see a job going I shouldn’t hesitate to take it because I don’t know if I got much coming off yet a while’. So down at Kewstoke, Weston-super-Mare, Birmingham Corporation were building a sanatorium, which is still there and which Birmingham people come there for holidays. So I went down there to see their general foreman, asked him if they wanted a carpenter/joiner, well they said ‘not this week’, this was a Monday, so I don’t want anymore this week he said, but I’ll drop your card if it’s, so I said, ‘all right’. So I left there. Now Winford Hospital, well they just started to build the first brick part of the hospital, wards and everything at Winford, which was another firm from Aywood and Worcester from Bath. So I went there and had the same story. Well not this week, but drop you a card. So I came back and someone told me, oh no, there was a local builder at Rickford on the way to Blagdon, which used to employ most of the labour around here, prior to this age anyhow. So I went to the joiner’s shop and there was only one joiner there and I told him what I’d come for. He knew me a bit, but he knew my father well and oh he said ‘you don’t want to waste your time coming to an old place like this for a job’. He said ‘you want something better than what you’ll get here’. He said ‘why don’t you go up to Coombe Lodge’? Now this was the estate of Sir Vernon Wills, one of the Wills family. He said Cowlins came out yesterday and start to pull down the old mansion and build a new one.

10.00

So I went up to Coombe Lodge, this was the second day they’d arrived. So I had seen the foreman, William Carey his name was, ah he said ‘yes, I can do with you’, he said ‘start in the morning’, fine, so I started in the morning and as I said, we had to pull the whole place down. Well the first job, there was another carpenter and another apprentice, that’s all the first going on. What we had to do then was take off every door in the building, it was a terrific building, and anything that was any good had to be taken out first, beautiful old wooden fireplaces and panelling in the halls and in the billiard rooms had all to be taken out. Anyhow, that proceeded and eventually the thing was down to the ground, cleared really for marking out. So he had me with him, let me put it this way, he had me with him helping him to mark out the new building. That is to say, the general foreman’s responsible for setting out the job you see and someone’s got to be at the other end of the tape, right. Not only that, before you can set it out, you have to put up some rails round the job, wooden rails to get pegs in, get these rails up and until you got these up and you can get some lines on, you can’t put any of these out. So I helped him on all this, which was fine and I hadn’t had much knowledge of plans before, but I was able now to have a good glimpse at ‘um and see what he was getting at, you see and how he got about it and all this sort of thing and the job was set out and Lady Wills, who was then living at Langford Court, she wanted all the walls marked out as it would be on the ground floor, the room sizes, that was done in perhaps whitewash. Then she wanted the next floor up, the walls were about as they would be, which usually came above the ones below but not always and they were done another colour, some pink or something other or blue and then she wanted the next floor again. And that was all marked down and then she come in and said ‘well the rooms would be that size, yes, well I don’t think I want – I think I’d like that altered’. Anyhow, eventually, it was all decided and the job started off. That was to, started excavating then and putting the foundations in, and this was concrete walls, we went down about oh, I think 10 or 12 feet oh quite that, 15 feet. It was upon a high ground. Coombe Lodge is a nice place. And these foundations was brought up, I remember they were two foot six wide, that is, 30 inches wide these concrete walls. All shaped to the bay windows, you know, all the way down, lot of work. And then, the ground floor, you know in time and then, oh yes, the stonemason started then, it’s all bath stone outside. The stone was all worked in our stone yards at Bristol. So the stone gradually come. Of course every stone, every stone has a mark to see where it has to go. There is an elevation got out of the walls and every course of stone is on there. Whether there be, the narrow ones are called ashlers, and then you come along with these narrow stones and then you get the big one, which is called a jumper. And they all got a number, and then, so they all come and the mason started fixing this. They got up to the first floor and Collins made a change in the supervision. Mr. Kerry was sent to Redcliffe Church. That was the first restoration. There has been one since that, but 1931 this is now, you were 29, I was 31. It took two years to pull down the whole place, get the foundations in and get up to the first floor, that is this level here when the change was made. And he went, he was a mason by trade, so he was sent to Redcliffe Church to start this restoration, big job and now we are coming to the interesting part. The general foreman they sent out was an elderly man, he was a Welsh man, C.H. Harris, Charlie Harris we called him. And, now he built, he’d been in charge at the University tower in all those buildings and Wilcox of Wolverhampton was the builders of that, not Cowlins, but Cowlins had several big jobs coming on, St. Monica’s homes over the Downs, you know that, right so Charlie Harris went there from the University and built that. Prior to that he’d built the Central Library down in Deanery Road. That was all his jobs in Bristol at that time but Cowlins got hold of him and you see, a general foreman, he’s got to be a craftsman, I’ll say that now. I’ll tell you later on why things are not as they were. You can imagine on a big contract, take that University tower and all those buildings and he’s got the administration and everything, that is to take the men on, to order all the material as required daily and run the whole job. Well, the first thing you do, you find a foreman of trade, you get your foreman carpenter, your foreman bricklayer, your foreman mason and plumbing is usually let out to a subcontractor and electrical work is let out to a subcontractor but it all comes under you, you see. And he has some marvellous masons there as you can tell from that work on the University tower. They were real craftsmen and they’d come from Wolverhampton and they’d been in Bristol so many years, I don’t know how long that took, several years and they was establishing business and didn’t want to leave. So they stayed in Bristol and came on to Cowlins and went with this general foreman. So when he came after St. Monica’s homes, he brings his gang down you see. That is to say foreman, bricklayer, mason, joiner. By that time I was supposed to be chargehand carpenter at Coombe Lodge. I was getting 2d on hour for that to be in charge of the other carpenters and I’ll say here and now quite frankly, my experience of that class of work wasn’t very great through being brought up in the country, you don’t get the chance to work on that class of work, but I’d kept me eye to the ground, you know and I picked up a lot. So when this general foreman came out, Harris, you know, there was a buzz, so and so would be, you know, put down to ordinary rate and all this but that wasn’t so, he was quite fair with me. I was still kept on because his really foreman/joiner didn’t come at that stage. There is a vast difference in being a carpenter and being a joiner as well. Now, being a carpenter, say a carpenter out here really, that’s okay. You do everything in the house, you help make these windows, put the roof on, hang the doors, make the dresser and all that sort of thing and there it ends, make the staircase. Now if you were in town like with Cowlins, you’d be an apprentice there. You’d have been in the joiner’s shop, on all this hardwood, bank work which they used to do. Tons of banks and all the best work and you would, as apprentice, you’d be on that. But, for a certain period you’d also be sent out on to an outside contract. In the mud when you start off in the muck, concrete, uh – don’t mention it and therefore, he gets both sides of the job. He gets a joiners job he’d learnt where he’d start, daily and then he’d come out and he’d learn the carpenter’s side of the job.

19.39

Q So as a joiner he’d be making all the fittings that goes in the bank.

ARM Oh yes, yes, he’d be helping, you see. As he proceeded to the end of his apprenticeship, which would probably be five years, I was lucky to get away with four years. Usually, it was five years to be apprentice and then when he was sent onto a job, he’d be put with a gang of carpenters and he’d be told what to do and it’s up to him. You need help, you know, not responsible for anything himself, not in the early stages or latterly much but so they came to Coombe Lodge and it’s a great long building, I don’t know. I’ve got some pictures, I didn’t know. There’s three staircases in that building, one each end there is a service one with a lift running up between the staircase going round it, as you know, in this building. There was a main staircase right up the west end which was what we call a dogleg stair, you go up here and you turn and you come back up six foot wide, with beautiful oak panel on either side and so on. But before all this can go on, it’s a concrete staircase. Now, that was what I was given to do, put this concrete staircase in, which had to be very accurate, because when you cast these staircases, in the threads you put what they called oak fixing fillets. If it’s a yard, say a yard wide now, you put three in. They are cast in the concrete, then when the joiner comes along to put the staircase in, he fixes to these fillets, they could be – go straight on and that isn’t the job. You probably might have to put an eighth quarter packing in on them, something like that, but eventually he fixes all this, so it’s got to be spot on.

Q Is he given something to nail into?

ARM Screw, not nailing, screw and um, that’s right, and um so and then the nursery staircase, which was really interesting at Coombe Lodge, it was the spiral one, never seen another job like it, I’ve seen nothing like it. He said to me, this Charlie Harris, he said, Ray, he said, ‘we were nothing’, he said, want to start this nursery staircase, here’s the plans and some of the form work, that’s the timber work to do it with it, was done in our joiners shop, make no mistake about that, because there was a big core went up the middle and all round this core was notched out where the steps come, you know, and then there’s an inner, whatever the thickness of the wall was going to be, there was an outer core and then there’s an inner one on that wall, then over here you’ve got the outside one again, which is solid, when I say solid nothing cut out and then you get the inner one with the threads cut out and in between that you put the risers to either steps. It’s complicated, I know it’s making any sense to me but I did this job and it was all right, it worked out all right and all the time I was gaining experience. Then later on we got right up to the roof and there were three storeys in some of it. Two in the main part I suppose, but they were terrific rooms. I should think the rooms, I can’t remember sizes now, because that’s 50 years ago. I should think the rooms were 35-40 foot long, and about 20-25 foot wide, you know, and that was the main rooms and dining rooms, oh, I won’t go into that. To get up to roof level, here again, I haven’t seen anything like this. The roof eventually was roofed with Cotswold stone slates. Have you seen those, they are very heavy of course, so there was a steel frame put up first and we had to attach all the timbers to it. It wasn’t just a simple job you had, it had to be just so, and we started this and half way through it, I think, when Sir Vernon Wills, who was going to, who was then living at Langford Court, was going there to live, of course he was but he died, I was going to say. The work almost stopped except for us carpenters, two or three carpenters that went on putting the roof on because it seemed that he’d left no lump sum set aside to build this job. He was, I won’t say he was drawing out a current account, but similar to that, you are not told all these things, you see. So they called a halt to it to see where the expense was taking them and at that time, I think eighty thousand had been spent in 1930. Anyhow, things got settled down and eventually away it went again and we finished the job. I was there three years, that was good. As I said I went there the second day I was about the last to leave. I think the building cost about two hundred and fifty thousand in 1930, it’s a quarter of a million, which was a lot of money. All the doors, the skirtings and everything in there was what they called limed oak. That is to say they used to dip this in troughs with all white lime, wet. They boiled this timber and all this white lime got into the grain, so when it dried out you had a greeny tinted oak with white grain in it. It’s what they call limed oak, bit of a craze at that time for the better jobs but that whole job is like that, perhaps I’ll be able to show you one day.

Q So did you take it out and let it dry before you used it? ARM We didn’t do that. That was all done in Bristol. When it came to us it had been kiln dried again and was ready for fixing. But the skirtings was 12 inches by 2 inches thick at the bottom and then of course there were a lot of moulding and the staircases and all, was the same in all the panelling up through the main hall, just the same. Well, I needn’t dwell on this job, because we shan’t get very far. So the men began to dwindle away back to Bristol, so this Mr. Harris, he was going to start another job in Bristol. It’s the bottom of Colston Street. If you walk up towards Colston Street passing what used to be the tramway offices, perhaps you don’t know that. Well, you walk up Colston Street, at the start of Colston Street and you turn, and before you come to Colston Hall, there is a building there, I think you get your driving licence there now or something, I don’t know, that was Bristol Gas Company offices. Now that was rebuilt except on the Pipe Lane side, which is Victorian front, we rebuilt it all. I say we because he said, I’m going there he said, if you care to come in with me, if you care to come on that job you can, but you go at your own expense you see, you don’t get paid, no travelling money. Well, work wasn’t all that plentiful then, you know, I mean, three years on that was unheard of out here for a job to last three years, if one job lasted six months on one particular building so when you have a charge hand over the labourers, he’s called a ganger. Well, there was a man at Blagdon, he was a ganger, man up there. He was also invited to go in, so we went in together and we worked on this job, Bristol Gas offices and as I say, except for one wall, the whole lot was gutted. And we rebuilt it all with two hundred odd clerks working there all the time, moving um backwards and forwards and that was my first job in Bristol. That was two-year job. Money side of it, I don’t really remember, but the only thing I know, I remember quite vividly, at the back was a car park. Well there used to be a pub on the corner, I don’t know if that’s there now, bet that’s gone but we had a big crane over there up on, big what we call 30-foot legs and the base of the crane was 30-foot up high. And all that was waste ground, which we had for a storage yard and everything, and this crane used to work from there lifted all over the street into this block, you see, the only way to serve it. So two years there and Mr. Harris was getting on you see and he didn’t wanna be, he didn’t want the worry of being a general foreman because, you take 30.00 it from me, it’s not all that simple, I’ll come to some of it later on. He was offered a clerk of works job. Before he went, he spoke to the Cowlins directors and said, suggested that they give me a chance as a foreman you see. So they did and I was given the job out St. Anne’s Board Mills, you don’t know much of Bristol, no? Well it’s out East Bristol, go back past, follow the river out. What we call the Feeder and the river. River Avon runs past, which is part of the Imperial papermaking place. This was an extension to a powerhouse. Wasn’t so large as it was complicated but I go mad, I did really. When you got responsibility, you feel, why the hell did I get into this. Anyhow, we’d done that job and…

Q So you were in charge there, not only with your own trade, carpenters and joiners, but everyone.

ARM Well, it was mostly concrete work and brickwork and in a powerhouse, it is a complicated job because, when you put the first floor over, it’s a concrete framework you see and the brickwork comes up in between as an outside of the steelwork and with all the cable holes and trenches left for floors all exactly where they want. It was all planned, you see. And the Imperial used to prepare their own drawings and it was on linen then. The only job ever I, the only people I ever worked for was the Imperial Tobacco Company, who did their plans on linen, you see, afterwards it was paper. You can imagine what it gets like after months of use, having replaced. So at that time, 1932/33, 36 rather, Bristol Aeroplane Company was beginning to wake up in 1936/37 and Cowlins had the job to build their main office block up at Filton, you know it? Square job. The only office block that they had before was Filton house, which was a nice old Victorian house, or Georgian, whatever it is, you seen it now, just before you get to the office block. That’s all they had as an office block. So Cowlins had a general foreman up there and it appeared it wasn’t going very well, so Mr. Harris, he was finishing these flats by then, as Clerk of Works and they got round him again and they so say to be Clerk of Works out at this Filton office block. He sent for me, Harris, to come up there as foreman carpenter, you see. So I got to Filton and that is 18 miles from here, but by this time, a ganger from Blagdon was also working at Filton, not on that job but further on at aerodrome. But was able to take me in, so that made it much simpler but that wasn’t straightaway because I remember still using the railway to Bristol and to the centre and paying five pence to go to Filton on the tram and five pence back.

Q And six miles from the Station?

ARM Yes, well it’s a long day especially when you work Saturday afternoons to four. Anyhow, we um, one peculiar thing about this office block is that it was a steel frame building and all the steel was surrounded in concrete, columns and walls and concrete floors of course, concrete staircases, three of them, seven blocks, seven stories high, it is there. And the one at the back, I remember this vividly really, was a complicated staircase because the lift ran up through the middle of it and the walls of this lift didn’t go from floor to ceiling, they only went about three to four feet above the stairs all the way round, you know up that side and inside. And then it was a wire cage and you could see the lift going up and down eventually. So we hadn’t long started this, we’d come from the basement up to perhaps, above the first floor when the contracts manager came, his name was Mr. Scull, John Scull. Now, I better just deviate a moment. When you work for a large firm and William Cowlins was the biggest firm in the West of England at that time, there was a general foreman on the job or, yea I’ll leave it at that, a general foreman. Over him, is a contracts manager. A contracts manager may have another three or four contracts and over him is a director. Now if the board of directors muster about six or seven plus the chairman, count him out. So you’ve got the general foreman, you’ve got the contracts manager, you’ve got a director who comes occasionally on the site, but whose contracts manager is in contact in the main office. Well that’s how it worked. So Mr. Scull was the contracts manager and he came over to me one afternoon, been round the staircase and said ‘Ray’, he said, ‘Sir Stanley White was a big man, he was Chairman of Bristol Aeroplane Company. He said Sir Stanley wants this staircase up in 11 days. He said so ‘I want you to put on a nightshift’. He said ‘what about it’? ‘who’ve you got, you can leave here at night’. Well, by that time when Harris brought his men from Blagdon, of course I knew a lot of them and they were damn good joiners, better than I was at that time, anyhow, because I’d never seen that class of work till then. So, this chap, his name was Frank Waglon, he was older than I was by, I don’t know, 10/15 years, I should think, but he was a good chap, he didn’t swear like me. So I went to him and said, he was working on the staircase, he was really the charge hand carpenter on it, cos I had 80 carpenters there to look after. I’ll tell you why in a moment if we’ve got time. So I said ‘Frank, could you work a nightshift?’ ‘Yes’, he said, ‘I should think so’. So I said right all about it, you know, it had to be seven days a week, seven nights a week. And we were going to work in the day seven days a week. So he wants it up in 11 days, it was some going, I’m telling you, because what happened, I’ll just deviate again, when you do one of these buildings, you go up with the floors and the walls and columns and all that and you leave ghastly great holes in the floor where these staircases do go up and they do come on afterwards. So, you see, the floors was up and the roof might have been on. If it was, water usually poured through it down on top of you and all the dam place, so anyhow, so he said ‘yes’, he’d take charge at night. I no sooner went and told John Scull, who was standing about on the floor talking to Sir Stanley White when Frank came back to me and said ‘you tell Mr. Scull, if he lets us work from eight in the morning to 10 at night, Saturdays and Sunday, 11 days through only but one Sunday in it mind, we’ll get it up there’. Oh gosh I said, all right, that’s providing I stayed there with him you see up till 10.00 o’clock at night. Well, we did and we did this job. I think Frank got in 104 hours that week, mine was about eighty something I think. But he got 104 hours in. I’ve never known anyone get so many hours in as that again. And we got that thing up. But that was one of the things that stood out in my mind about this block, you know, I could go on rambling about each individual block but we’d never get anywhere. So eventually this block was finished and – so the BAC began to take on these men. There was a terrific amount of work going on. BAC was nothing really when we went out there in ’36. It was, they had the engine works at Patchway,

40.00 nothing like you’ve seen it now, if you have seen it, nothing like it. Because I don’t know how many was employed in Bristol Aeroplane company when I went out there, but when I left there in 1938, there were 30,000 there on three shifts, 10,000 men a shift. That’s how it grew, because we’d done a million pounds worth of work between ’36 [inaudible 40.30] sand for concrete in Bristol. It comes out the Bristol Channel, brought up into Bristol Docks and then delivered to you in lorries, that’s jobs in around the town. Well, some are eight miles out, it don’t matter but you see, because concrete and them sort of jobs is what you call, goes in four two in one. So we had four tonne of chippings, two tonne of sand and a tonne of cement. That’s the right strength you want for most jobs, what we used to do, but sometimes different. Aluminium hut, house, bungalow and to my mind it was the best that was ever produced.

Q As a pre-fabricated

ARM As a pre-fabricated place, because they are still standing now down Shirehampton. So when you go down to Shirehampton he said, the BAC wants their first prefab put up by Monday, this was Wednesday, because General, I forget his name now, General somebody or other, he was a 1914/18 General I suppose, you know, give ‘im a job, he’s coming to open this prefab, and it was at Shirehampton and I went down there and prepared these foundations. Had to put a couple of pipes in for the, so that they turn the tap on, so that the sink would work and the bath would work, and all that, although one connected up to nothing and um, that was on a Wednesday, on the following Monday, he came and the house was up and the corporation brought all the turfs, they laid out the lawns, they’d brought paving stones for the paths, they brought little fir trees in tubs. Oh, they did it properly but hour after he’d gone it was all stripped and anyhow, I stayed there a while, and we put up a dozen or so of these houses. They used to come in three sections made a bungalow, middle one with the front door you see and part the hall, whatever it is, I don’t know what it was and anyhow, it came in three big sections on lorries and straight onto the slab, bolted up, and within no time they were liveable.

Q So they made them at BAC?

ARM They made them at Weston and Cowlins, they were the main erectors. We had a big gang all round London putting these up and well, there was other big gangs of course, cause there’s all different types of prefabs going up and, so I just um, I done that. Oh yes and down at Ashton Vale, I might be jumping the gun a bit, it doesn’t matter. I hadn’t finished with prefabs then, because I was sent there to put up 280, I think it was. Our company were called and they were steel frame ones. Oh no, they weren’t, they were steel frame but they were oblong. It was quite a span roof but they were cold and that and there was a prisoner of war camp at Ashton Gate, and I had 140 German prisoners and just me charge hands over each gang, that’s how we did put them up. I didn’t have to pay them you see and we had 46 and ….

on damaged job on the river off Temple Way. The wall, the bombs had dropped right on the sea wall and it had all been blown into the river and we had to drive some piles in there and do that and half way through that, this same contracts manager came to me and he said, want you to come over to Mardons at Temple Gate. They was rebuilding a new press shop. They had a lot of bomb damage there. And we never even finished that when he come again and he said, of course this didn’t all happen in five minutes, this was months apart. He said ‘the foreman that went to the Council house after the war in 46’, he was one of their older general foremen, which was quite in order, they would send there. Anyhow, he’d been losing a lot of time through illness, and he was ill then and that wouldn’t do you see. So they said ‘I don’t think this Jim Patton is going to be any good at it much longer to come back there, Mr. Scull said he’ll like you to go over there’, which was just right for me, it was right up my street and I went there in August ’49 I think and I was there till the opening by the Queen, 1956, seven years.

Q As general foreman?

ARM Yes, site agent then. Well, story of the unicorns. A young sculptor, he wasn’t old but yes he, Sir Vincent Harris, Vincent Harris the architect and he gave this young sculptor the job of doing these unicorns. Now, during the war Vincent Harris, as I said before, designed the furniture and all lots of other jobs during the war and on the plans then, there was a steel tracery going all along the ridge about probably about three-foot high, cast iron maybe or something and that’s how it was going to be done but he had second thoughts during the war, so unknowing to the municipal buildings committee, that’s what they were called, because it was called the municipal buildings while we were building it. He designed and thought about these unicorns and they did not know they were being made or anything about them, so one day these unicorns arrived on a long low-loader, covered up with tarpaulin sheets. We knew they were coming and the, they, one came to one pavilion, naturally they did and one to the other and in the bottom of this pavilion we’d fixed up these narrow gauge rails like you see in that gantry there but only just that and the platform and as soon as they came in the sheets was ripped off, the unicorns was lifted up onto this trolley and wheeled in and sheeted down and that was done each end and nobody really, if they’d twigged anything about it, they didn’t know what was happening. So brought into the pavilion on this rail here you see. Now it’s bronze, made of bronze. So while it was in here it had two coats of Post Office red paint. Now the reason for that is when you apply the gold leaf it brings out the brilliance more, you know about this. Now from here to the top of the horn is 12 foot, you see. So there’s the unicorn in each pavilion and all sheeted down and kept very secret till eventually, the architect, before they went up, he had to tell the municipal committee, you know, there was a hell of a row going on but he assured them it was going to cost less than if he’d done another job and that just about saved his bacon.

Q What did people say, did you hear lots of comments from people in the street?

ARM Well, I think they liked them, you know. The trees I told you was all round the green. They lined all Park Street and all along by the Cathedral and in November it was the most dismal place you could think of. That’s about the only picture you’ll see with the trees, I think.

Q So you cleared all the trees down and made it open as it is today.

ARM That’s right and lowered the ground four feet and now, when they’re up there, they’re not a pair, now we’ll say, that is the Park Street end. Now he’s got his right or fore foot up, now when he’s been re-rolled he’s got his opposite foot up because it was done off of one model. Now you look.

Q Um. Did the students do the first time?

ARM What, the Cabot? Threw the bucket of dye, blue dye over John Cabot but the most dangerous thing they did, there was no scaffold up there, it was finished 50.00 but there was no scaffolding up there, it was all finished. Now, if you’re a little way up the main entrance road way looking back to the, towards the library end, if you look up, there’s a valley goes up in the roof you see. Now these students, they took a belisha beacon off, by that crossing where you go across the road, this big yellow glass thing. They’d taken it off, in the dark, at night, they went up through this valley, the lead rolls gave them some grip, you see. They went up, they go up on this thing and they put that belisha beacon right on top his arm. (laughter) When we arrived the next morning there was the damn thing right up there.

Q How did you get it down?

ARM The same way as they put it up.

Q And all this was before the opening ceremony?

ARM Oh, months before, yea, months before.

Q So who met the Queen at the opening ceremony, you and?

ARM Um, John Scull, who was the director of the job and F V Allen, me and the foreman/painter and the (?51.10) driver got drawn out the hat. Now there’s our two cranes.

Q ?

ARM No they’re steam cranes, see they got the boiler. Now those cranes could reach right over the building and drop anything they wanted at the back, but ‘course the crane driver, he has what he’s called a banksman. See the banksman he guides them, he does everything. He just drives this thing up and down or around and about guided by a banksman.

Q So the banksman had to tell him whether he was (yes) (both talking at same time)

ARM We had a walkway along the top of this building, look, you see the guardrail, see and he’d be up there, you see.

Q So because it was a curve it was really tricky.

ARM Oh yes, it was, because starting on the ground floor or the basement there was a corridor you see, runs through the length, except for the main entrance, there was a corridor running the length of the job. Well what we had was a, what they call a master, master um rule, there was a piece of timber about that wide and it had a brass plate and it was got out to the correct radius and on the centre of each corridor, this was scratched round, a line scratched on the floor and all these walls and everything was taken from it, you see. The measurements to the front of these walls, the measurement to the back walls, anything at all, everything was done from this centre line.

Q And it was like that until they put, finally put the marble floor…

ARM Whatever the flooring was, yes, whether it was lino in the offices above or what…

End of tape.