Scotland
The Carlisle job lasted about 18 months and from here I went to Fort William to work for Balfour Beattie & Co Ltd. The work was on a tunnel which I believe is about 17 miles long and about 14 miles in diameter, shaped a little like a horse shoe. The tunnel is built to take the water of Lough Treig to Fort William. It falls 72 feet from end to end and is shaped roughly in the form of a letter S in plan. Gerrard Thompson sent for me to go to Fort William. He was a fitter and looked after two or three camps.
The tunnel was commenced at both ends and ten different places along it's length. A shaft was driven down at each of the ten places, and on reaching the required depth the tunnel was driven off in both directions to meet a mile or so further on. The engineers were very accurate because there was very little discrepancy at any of the meeting places. The shafts were known as Intakes. I was at Intake 1, which was the next to the valve shaft at Lough Treig.
We lived in wooden huts and the life was very rough. I had 1/3d per hour and we worked 10.5 hours per day, six days a week. We sometimes had to do a double shift if someone was sick. This meant starting at 8 o'clock in the morning until 6pm, then an hour and a half for a meal, and 8pm till 6:30am, an hour for breakfast and then 8am till 6:30pm. One gets very tired, this didn't happen very often and just as well. We often did a Sunday shift which we didn't mind a great deal.
There was nothing to do in camp and it was hardly possible to go anywhere. Our camp was 1000ft up the mountain and only a track led to the nearest road, about four miles away at Tulloch. I was at Fort William about 18 months and I think I only went to Fort William one weekend. I remember walking to Spean Bridge one Sunday morning where we could have a drink.
Although the life was very rough, only three boards and a straw bed, poor food and no comfort, the place away up in the clouds was a lovely spot. A small river ran past the camp where one could bathe. Crystal clear and loaded with trout. Deer on the hills and black cock in the heather, and the golden eagle sailing high above the mountain top quite often. Some good comradeship and a lot of Scottish generosity.
My stay in Scotland working for Balfour Beattie & Co. was really my first taste of the rougher side of life. Our beds consisted of wooden boards and five low trestles. Three boards each 9" width laid flat and one turned on edge at the front to keep the two blankets from falling off, and the straw filled bed from slipping. The floorboards were worn and had shrunk and it was usual to awake in the snowy weather with quite an inch of snow all over the floor. The sheds were some four or five feet off the ground at the lower side to keep them dry. They were built on a steep mountain slope, lined with 0.5" tongue and groove match board and felled outside. There was a coke store to each section hut and free coke. The labourers' huts had a partition and were rather like a hospital ward - a bed and a little locker.
Our hut, which housed the black squad as we were called, where fitters, electricians, tunnel foremen, carpenters and any other tradesmen were divided into various cubicles. The biggest having four beds, my own had three. Later when I reverted to carpentry I could have had a single one, but I preferred to bed down with Johnnie Cameron, a "spark", and Billie Paterson, one of the winding engine men.
The canteen food was pretty grim. The bathing arrangements very meagre and we cleaned our own huts, which meant they weren't very well done. However the wages were good at 1/3d per hour and only 21/- for board. We were a long way from any habitation and there was little else to do but work. We did 10.5 hours a shift, nights and days, and always did six shifts and often seven and occasionally 8 per week.
We had a binge every weekend, when one of us was detailed to go to Fort William and buy some luxuries like pork chops or steak or kippers or anything they might find. Fort William was 15 miles away and a three mile walk down the mountainside to Tulloch Station. A number of us would meet the last coach back on the Saturday night, and provided the men who had been out for the day were not drunk and had caught the coach, we struggled up the "Brae" with whatever they had brought, which always included a number of bottles of whisky. Everything was cooked on the coke stove, or perhaps if the head cook was in a good humour and again I should add stone cold sober, then he might do the cooking for us on the Saturday night, which never finished until the daylight on Sunday morning. Whether or not you had to go to work on that day you could expect no sleep, but you were at least fed well.
The mountain air and the river water, things that one can never forget. The air particularly, when one stepped from the cage after being drawn from the bowels of the earth after a night shift, at 6:30 in the morning. The tunnel was always cold and most often wet, and if there had been any blasting or shot firing, the air was so thick one could not see more than a dozen yards to the next dim light bulb or the swinging lamp of an approaching fellow worker.
The air then after 10.5 hours down there was really wonderful, even in winter when the snow lay thick and an icy wind tore down the track of the little river. The first few lungfulls were quite something. In summer, and the summer I was there was one of the best I can remember, it was even better. The bright sunlight after the dismal cold working, the hunger of an 18 or 19-year-old stomach. The shining turbulent river crashing down the steep mountain side and the envious looks of the day shift men as they waited to go down to start their stint, and the bright sky above, and the knowledge that the day was yours, to do with what you wished.
In the summer we swam in the river where the dredger had made a deep hole about 40 yards across and 30 feet deep. It was very very cold but wonderfully refreshing. In winter we read or played cards or played a gramophone. We had all kinds of records of every kind of music.
We could buy one or two kinds of chocolate or biscuits or tinned fruit from the canteen, cigarettes and tobacco, but nothing else. No alcohol at all which was a good thing, and only on Saturday or perhaps Sunday would anyone be worse for drink. I drank hardly at all so drink never troubled me, or has it ever for that matter.
The generosity of the Scot I ought to mention. I found them quite the most generous people I had ever met or ever have since.
When I arrived at the camp on a bitterly cold night, I had my case carried for me by a Johnnie Fotheringham over the two or three miles of mountain track from Tulloch Station, on a November night after travelling all day from St Bees. The snow lay thick. We found Johnnie Cameron who was to be one of my room mates all the time I was in Scotland, laying in the heather about two hundred yards from the camp. He had spent the day at Fort William. He was fast asleep and drunk of course, with a bottle of whisky in each of his two jacket pockets and another half empty grasped in his hand.
After a struggle we wakened him and got him on his feet. Before he would move we had to have a wee drop, and we finished the half bottle between us. From here I carried my case, and Fotheringham more or less carried Cameron. We had to cross the river by the narrow gauge railway bridge, and it was a pretty rough bridge with many good holes between the sleepers and the river rushing past about twenty feet below. One light at each end of the bridge which must have been thirty or so feet long. We managed after many frights and reached the warmth of the camp and cubicle, which was to be my place of abode for nearly two years.
Cameron was laid on his bed and covered with his blankets and went to sleep immediately. There were a number of other men in the hut. A grand smell of pork chops cooking. Tea in tin cans seemed to be everywhere and very soon I had met them all and had become an honoured guest. Gerrard Thompson was there and Johnnie Davidson, two St Bees men. I never had such a tuck in. I'd had very little since about 7am that morning and here it was nearly midnight.
I had five shillings in my pocket and the clothes I wore and very little else. I could have been a millionaire and I would not have found a better welcome.
I was pressed to their whisky, which they drank from enamelled pint mugs, and ate the pork chops and fried bread mainly with their fingers, sitting on one of the three beds. There was only one little home made table about two feet square, and it was pretty rickety. To me in my hunger it was a banquet. The whisky I refused mostly, but I had to drink some or offend them.
The next day Sunday when Cameron awoke and after he had taken nearly half a cupful of whisky, to steady him up as he put it, I found him a gentle creature.