Once Industrial Bury..? 14 4 2 (11) Reposted 25 1 22

So it was I returned to my Scandinavian employers this English student whose supervisor had told him he could return whenever he wished: a diligent laboratory technician who could turn his hand to most of the daily business of making pulp and bleaching it, with a background of paper-making, and also a ready on-the-spot teacher of English in one of Scandinavia's biggest Research Centres of the P and P industry.

Back home struggling to get his Higher National Certificate in part-time education was a different story: not a true student in the sense of attending college full-time but at the same time having to work for a living and fit the studies in as best he could...with an increasing number of diversions such as those attending his meetings with the fairer sex..?

And returning to England after his second successive summer in Scandinavia life became more complicated, eventually abandoning his formal education of being hired by a science-oriented employer who was prepared to sponsor the part-time day release course, his having flunked a year and now was required to repeat the whole for re-sits of the 3 branches of physical organic and inorganic chemistry. So instead he began his course of chemistry studies late in the year and thought he could attend College on the 1½ days per week course whilst holding down a night-time 11 hour shift job as a Stenter Dryerman for the Bradford Dyers Association: a machine which applied finishing chemicals at one end as the rolled cotton goods were fed through a pick-up mangle then feeding them into a drying oven secured by clips to stretch the cloth to a pre-determined width, the machine operator supervising the whole operation as the goods were re-wound post-dryer in Industry number 4.

Industry 5 followed in rapid succession after an interlude of “un-employment” whilst our seriously over-worked bumpkin took his re-sits in the beginning of May, and then to fund his next visit back to Scandinavia: entering employment, which incidentally was represented by the third segment of the town shield, after paper and cotton, that is an anvil when our star became one of a group of 2 steam-hammer anchormen for the smith who was forging 25 ft maybe 8 m lengths x 12 inches 30 cm square bars of wrought iron to fashion the dog-leg in crank shafts for ship diesel engines at Webbs Forge Bury…This job was of only a month’s to 6 weeks' duration beginning at 7 30 am till 5 30 pm 5 days per week or 5½ with over-time, and in former days was facilitated by the company giving employees “beer tokens” to use in the Public House “The Help Me Through” across the street from the forge a distance not 100 yds or 90 metres which held the town record for the amount of beer drank (by Webbs’ Smiths) at 14 barrels the UK barrel holding 36 gallons or 288 pints, an unbelievable grand total of 4032 pints!  

Have a good day everybody..! hope you didn't get to feel too thirsty with this segment..?

       

pics: top 2 courtesy of Bury Archives: bottom my sun-rise this day at 6 08