THE FLATLEY DRYER

[Stanley]

Nearest I have ever see to that is Stephen Potter's 'Placid Salutation' in his book 'One-up-manship'.

[Tizer]

There was always a white-gloved traffic bobby controlling the traffic at the top of Church Street in Blackburn. He always looked very serious but the story goes that when I was little we were stopped at the junction and I was in the front passenger seat. When the bobby moved his arms I thought he was waving at me so I kept waving back. For once, he broke into a smile!

[Stanley]

Bobbies on point duty were a common sight. Last one I knew was a Glasgow bobby called Big Jock who took care of the junction of Clyde Street and Pitt Street. He sold travelling alarm clocks as a sideline and in return for him letting me park my wagon on Clyde Street while I was in Jimmy MacAll's waiting for a load I occasionally touted his clocks for him. Happy uncomplicated days! We all looked after each other. It was Big Jock who told me about the Glasgow gangs and recommended I read 'No Mean City'.

[Stanley]

Glasgow always fascinated me. To say it had a rich social history is a gross understatement. I used to stay in the Belle Vue on Gallowgate, a working man's hostel were for ten bob a night you got a bed and a free breakfast. The entertainment was watching the Scots at play in Gallowgate each night, boozing, fighting and loose woman, all human life was there. I always parked in the cattle market which was free and paid the local lads 2/- a night to 'Mind your wagon Mister?'. If you didn't pay you stood a good chance of a flat tyre or cut ropes during the night. All right it was a protection racket but I quite admired the kids for their enterprise! My employer, Billy Harrison, was very suspicious about that 2/- but he always paid up in the end. 10p is a small matter now but in those days the hourly wage was only 3/6 (17.5p).



Tanks parked in the cattle market ready to put down the strikers in 1919. I didn't know about this at the time but as I say, a rich history!

[Stanley]

Another thing that fascinated me about Gallowgate was the fact that it was home to the butcher's supply shops. If you wanted a good knife , steel or mincing machine it was the go-to location. I could keep myself amused just wandering down the road window shopping, I have always been drawn to a good knife.

[Stanley]

HNere's my Glasgow story for you, many of you will have read it before but it's always worth repeating!

"After one or two false starts with clearing houses which gave good work but forgot to pay I settled down with two main sources of work, Jimmy McCall at 268 Clyde Street Glasgow and Toby Transport, Rippleway, Barking. I used lots of other houses of course in different parts of the country but these two were my main men and they got to know me and how I ran. They were both honest dealers and it was in their interest to cultivate good drivers like me, it did their business good. I never got on really intimate terms with Toby as I didn’t go into the office very often but rang them and got instructions over the phone. It was a very different picture at Jimmy McCall’s, his drivers were part of the family.
Jimmy had an office in a converted shop in Clyde Street, Glasgow. It was on the side of the river and only a stone’s throw from Enoch Square. There were two desks, one for Jimmy and the other for his clerk, Norman Crerar. In the shop window were two easy chairs and a sofa and the drivers used to lounge in these while waiting for their loads. This was a place for stories, arguments about politics and general good humour, it was the best social club in Scotland without a doubt. I will now have to bore you with some clearing house stories.
Jimmy had his favoured drivers and I soon became one of them. He would always find me a load, I don’t think I ever went away without at least enough work to pay the expenses to get down the country. My favourite load was from the Arran Barytes Company in Dalintober Street, just across the river. The factory was buried in a sprawl of workers houses and the only way in was a low ginnel just big enough for the wagon. The material I carted out of there was powdered, calcined barytes which was used whenever an inert filler material was needed for a product. It was used in paints, tyres and plastics but most of their production went to Cooke’s Explosives, Penrhyndeudrath in North Wales where it was used as a filler in the manufacture of gelignite. This was one of my regular loads and I used to enjoy it.
I always loaded ten tons of the stuff in paper bags. It was very heavy and ten tons was a compact well sheeted load when you’d got it on, no problems about slipping loads or loose ropes. It was very dusty and I used to give the lads in the works 5/- to load for me. I went into a bar next to the ginnel, the Pop Inn and had a beer while they were seeing to me. This bar was run by a lad from Doncaster who had been in Glasgow for so long that the locals called him ‘Jock’ and there was always something going on in there. On one occasion I walked in and there was a fight in progress, I sat at the bar and watched for a minute and then asked Jock if we shouldn’t stop it. He looked at me and said “How long is it since you saw two hunchbacks fighting?” I took a closer look and saw he was right so we settled back to watch what was probably a unique occasion. Another day an old biddy came in with a trolley made out of a soap box on wheels and proceeded to fill it with every spirit you can imagine. Jock told me she was minder for a poker school in one of the houses down the road. He reckoned the game started just before the end of WWII and was still running. Shades of Damon Runyan!
One of the most memorable incidents I ever saw in the Pop Inn was when a very small docker was harassed by another bloke who must have weighed about sixteen stone. The little bloke took it for a while but eventually he reached the end of his rope, he took his cap off and laid it on the bar, removed his false teeth and placed them in the cap and turned to the big man. “You! Outside!” and off they went. We sat in the bar looking at each other in awe and shortly afterwards the little fellow came back in, replaced his teeth and his hat and drank not only his own beer but the one the big bloke had left as well. Nobody said a word, it’s the little ones who are dangerous!"

[Stanley]

A bit more Glasgow.....

"There were other occasional entertainments. I was sat in Jimmy’s one day on my own. Everyone had got a load except me but there was a chance of one from Arran Barytes later in the day so I was taking it easy. Norman wasn’t in the office that day, there was only Jimmy and me and he was digging into my past. I remember that at one point, I’m not sure if it was then or on an other occasion, he told me I was very unusual and wouldn’t be on the tramp for long. The door opened and a little dark complexioned man in a black overcoat with velvet facings on the collar and a black homburg hat came into the room followed by two enormous uglys in black Crombie overcoats and bowler hats.
Jimmy evidently knew the bloke because they threw themselves on one another like long lost brothers. When they had calmed down, the little bloke asked Jimmy to come out for a beer and, looking at me, asked if I was a driver and if so I should come too. Off we went, Jimmy and the little bloke, the two minders close behind and me trailing along at the back. We went into a little bar under the bridge just up Clyde Street opposite the British Restaurant and Jimmy pulled out a white Linen Bank fiver and ordered beers all round. The little bloke picked up the fiver, looked at it and said it was a long time since he had seen one and could he have it. They were like the old English fivers, big, white and printed on one side only. Jimmy said of course he could have it and the little bloke turned to one of the minders and said “Fix him!” At this point I was weighing up the fastest route to the door. The minder unbuttoned his overcoat, reached inside and pulled a fiver out of the top inside pocket and gave it to Jimmy. I say ‘top’ because I saw that there were four pockets and they all seemed to be full of money and I reckoned there was a matching stack on the other side of the coat, no wonder these blokes looked big! We had the beer and the crack, went back to the office and after saying his goodbyes, the little bloke and the minders left.
As soon as they were gone I asked Jimmy what was going on and told him what I had seen when the minder opened his coat. Jimmy laughed and told me I was lucky, I had just had a drink with a legend, it was Sammy Davis. Now this wasn’t the Hollywood Sammy Davis, this was one half of a pair called Davis Brothers, the other being Jimmy. They were, amongst other things, haulage contractors in London. Like a lot of other private hauliers they had been nationalised after the war when British Road Services was formed on the 6th of January 1948 but bought back their business when BRS was privatised with a change to a Tory government. They were chiefly famous for overloading, running without log-books and generally acting like marauding Vikings. On one memorable occasion the Traffic Commissioners issued a report which said that they weren’t fit to hold a licence for a dog, let alone a haulage business.
Sammy was a dog fancier and was in Glasgow to run a dog at Powder Hall the big greyhound racing track. Jimmy reckoned they would have been running a ‘ringer’, that is a dog which looked exactly like another, better dog and had the same tattoo in its ear. The ringer was run in a few races and did nothing which took the price way out because the bookies knew it had no chance. The sting came when the real dog was run in a race which it was odds on to win but would be rated at long odds by the bookies and punters. The two minders were carrying the stake money and how they worked it was that they had a network of punters all over the city who, if given money, would put it on just before the off at their local betting shop. As the money went on late there was no time for the reports to get back to the track and lower the odds, so the dog started at long odds but with a lot of money riding on it. As soon as the race was over the punters collected the money immediately and waited for the minders to come round, collect the winnings and pay them their commission. By the time the bookies realised they had been had, the lads were on the train and going back to London. Jimmy said he couldn’t be sure of this but he was almost certain that this was what was going on. It strikes me as I sit editing this fifty years later that you could be forgiven for blinking a little and wondering how the little lad from Stockport Grammar School comes to be out drinking with gangsters in Glasgow. To tell you the truth I have often wondered about this myself. I think it must be something in the genes, I know that when I got back home and told my dad about the ringing of the greyhound he knew all about it, he had got there before me!
Jimmy told me that the reason he knew the Davis Brothers was because he once worked for them as a manager of one of their depots. He said that their reputation was well deserved but they were good people to work for as long as you did things their way. He told me that when they were nationalised the brothers threw a big party in their London Depot and brought everyone who wasn’t actually working in to join the celebrations. At some point one of the brothers climbed onto a table and announced that all debts were cancelled and if they ever got the business back they would take all their old drivers on again. During the ensuing round of applause a man came in and tugged at the speaker’s trouser leg. He bent down to get the message and immediately straightened up and screamed at the audience that all bets were off, the debts stood and they could blame it all on the thieving git who had just stolen the van from the yard loaded with exhibition furniture for the Kelvin Hall show in Glasgow! On another occasion the police rang to ask whether the driver selling bedding to the workers leaving Shotton Steel Works was doing it with his permission. Needless to say he wasn’t and was collared by the cops.
There was one other story that had a happier ending. One of their drivers loaded one day out of Coatgate steel works with two large steel plates weighing ten tons. When he sheeted the load down he realised that he had to all intents and purposes got an empty flat. He went round to a bloke he knew and got a nice little earner of twenty 45 gallon barrels of fish glue for a destination near where he had to take the steel. When he unloaded the glue he found he had a bit of a problem, one of the drums had been leaking and the sheet was soaked with glue. He decided the only thing to do was go to the depot and make a clean breast of it. His manager evidently thought a lot of him because he gave him two options, he could either have his cards immediately or he could scrub the glue off the plates and sheet in his own time and oil them up afterwards. Jimmy said the bloke took the scrubbing brush option but it took him over a week to get the plates clean enough to deliver. I think he had perhaps learned a lesson."

[Tripps]

Jimmy said he couldn’t be sure of this but he was almost certain that this was what was going on.

The kindest think I can say about this story is it is almost certainly total 'fake news'. I speak from a position of some experience in the game, and it's Powderhall not Powder Hall.

[chinatyke]

Makes a good yarn though.

[Stanley]

David, Sorry, but you're wrong and it happened Just as I recounted it. You don't forget experiences like that. All right I spelled Powderhall wrong, big deal! As I said, my Dad understood it and explained the finer points to me. He knew because at one point he was both an illegal off-course bookie and a racing greyhound owner...... Failed at both because he made all the mistakes!

[Stanley]

At the risk of triggering my friend David's crap detector again, here's another clearing house story.....

"One of the constant themes of conversation in the social club at Jimmy’s was traffic. By this we didn’t mean volume of vehicles on the road but what we were carrying and where the traffic was moving. It strikes me as I write this that sex and football hardly ever figured in the conversation. This is not typical in my experience of almost every other work situation I have been in, I don’t know whether it was Jimmy’s influence but it never happened. What did happen was that some marvellous tales were told. This was before the days of mass TV and we had to have ways of making our own entertainment, sometimes we manufactured the tales ourselves, we made them happen.
We were sat there one morning in Jimmy’s having a cup of tea and a bacon buttie from the Church Army restaurant down the road when a bloke came in and said that Gassy Gascarth had been killed on Shap. Gassy was one of the club, an owner driver, he had a six wheeled Seddon and we all liked him. There was a stunned silence and then another owner driver called Taffy Hughes who lived near Gassy suggested we have a collection, get a wreath and he would take it back down with him. Everyone chipped in and Taffy went out and bought a wreath. He did very well and we were all sat there with this enormous floral tribute when the door opened, Gassy walked in, took one look at the wreath and asked who had died! We were in shock and all started talking at once. It turned out that the wagon that had gone off the road on Shap was exactly the same model and colour as Gassy’s so the mistake was explained. There remained the question of the wreath! Taffy took it back to where he had bought it from and tried to sell it back to them but they weren’t having any. He came back and Gassy said that he knew what to do with it. We all climbed on the back of his wagon, complete with the wreath, and drove off to the Necropolis the big cemetery in Glasgow. We parked near the gates and waited for the first funeral that came down the road. Gassy waved the hearse down and placed the wreath on the roof. The startled undertaker jumped out but by that time Gassy was back in the cab and we were moving off. “Floral tribute from his mates” he shouted through the window. As he drove away we could hear the undertaker shouting “It’s a bloody woman and she didn’t want any flowers!” but by this time we were long gone. When we got back and told Jimmy what we’d done I think we all thought he was going to have an apoplectic fit. He laughed so much that he stopped breathing and started to go blue so we patted his back and got him a whisky from the bar down the road. I have an idea that Jimmy used to tell his mates some wonderful stories in the bar of an evening."

[Stanley]

Looking back, my time on the tramp was one of the hardest periods of my life, it was a rough game and you had to be 'flexible', many rules were broken including hours booked on the logbook. This was before the spy in the cab and it was a game of fooling the Traffic Commissioners. I was never caught out but got very close to it at times.
But there were compensations! You were going somewhere new every day and handling every sort of load imaginable. You soon got to be an expert on loading, roping and sheeting. Here's a bit from me memoir about this....

"I once went into Twentieth Century Transport in Newport and they asked me if I could load shooks. I said yes of course even though I hadn’t the faintest idea what they were talking about and they sent me to a yard at Briton Ferry. All I can remember about the place is that it looked interesting because they were breaking ships there, mostly quite small old tramp steamers, I’ll bet it would have been an interesting place to rummage round in but I had other fish to fry. I drove into the yard and asked where the shooks were, the old bloke who was in charge looked at me as though I was daft and asked me if I knew what they were, I decided the best thing to do was tell him the truth. He took me across to what looked like a big pile of firewood. I found that shooks were wooden barrels knocked down into their constituent parts and bundled with string and they were the most awkward shape I’ve ever seen, I couldn’t see how to stack them. I offered the old bloke 5/- to show me and he refused it, he said he’d help me for nowt. I soon saw there was an art to it. We stacked away and I roped at regular intervals as we progressed and in the end I had a respectable load on which the office bloke said qualified as ten ton cap. I had a cup of tea and a pipe of baccy with the old bloke and thanked him, he said that no thanks were needed there was no shame in admitting ignorance. I forget where I took the shooks to, it was a fat renderers in Scotland somewhere but when I got there the manager came out, looked at the load and said he’d never seen shooks loaded better. He brought two of his drivers to see it and told them that was how he wanted them to do it. I wasn’t very popular with them but it wasn’t down to me, it was because I’d asked the old bloke in Wales.
Another time I was in Newcastle on Tyne and when I went into J&H Transport they said there was a ten ton load of greaves for Paisley, right up my street, it got me back to Jimmy’s in Glasgow. The bloke in charge said “Have you got an old sheet?” I wondered why he’d asked but said yes that was no problem and off I went to the address he had given me.
Now there are always areas in every city which normally you wouldn’t want to go into and this was one of them. As I proceeded downstream along the south bank of the Tyne I passed a succession of scrap yards, car breakers, rubbish tips and the like. I came to the place I was to pick up the load and saw a terrible sight, there were huge piles of what I later found out was butcher’s offal which was partially cooked and then left to rot, this broke down the fibres and made fat extraction easier. My load was already bagged and the smell was awful, it wasn’t a violent smell but was corrupt and insidious and you couldn’t get rid of it. The place was riddled with rats as well, they were running over the bags as we loaded them. I couldn’t get rid of the smell until one day I was at a chemical works and they dipped the sheet for me in a tank of hot water and bleach. It fell to bits afterwards but at least the smell went. I burned my overalls.
When I got to Paisley I found that the greaves were rendered down and the fat was ‘refined’ and made into lard for cooking! I back-loaded out of that place with forty gallon drums of what was described on the notes as ‘Best No.1 Scotch Pale Skin Oil’ for Crosfields at Warrington. I asked what it was used for when I got there and they said either toilet soap or margarine! The thing that struck me was that the walls of the yard at Paisley were covered with notices warning you against the danger of contracting anthrax. One thing that sticks in my mind about Paisley was the fact that there are some lousy jobs in this world. The place where I tipped the greaves was a large concrete apron partially protected from the weather by a steel frame carrying an asbestos roof. It was a large area, there was no problem driving a wagon in and turning in one lock. All round the outside were the lids of large pressure cookers which were installed in the basement below, each of which was used to render down a certain kind of offal. There was a man on the floor who loaded the different cookers and when he had identified what you were carrying he directed you to the correct cooker and loaded the material in through the lid. A lot of the stuff came in on tipper wagons from the slaughter houses, they would tip their load and he would sort it out with a large wooden rake. Rops (intestines) would go in one hole, bones in another and so on. I thought it must be the worst job in the world and asked him how long he had been doing it, he told me he had been on the rendering floor for eight years! I was beginning to realise that society is supported by a large number of unsung heroes who, for various reasons, do jobs that nobody in their right minds would want to touch with a barge pole. Come to think of it, carting greaves was one of them!
Greaves weren’t the only animal by-products I carried. At various times I have carried deep litter chicken muck in bags, hoof and horn meal, bone meal and ‘protein granules’, the latter being any animal remains that can’t be dealt with in any other way than reducing them to a dry powder which is compressed into pellets. I have carted all these at one time or another into Preston Farmers for incorporation in animal feeds. At the end of the century we have realised the dangers of doing this but as early as the 50’s all this offal was going into feed for cattle. As long as the laboratory analysis of the protein and mineral content was correct, it went in. We are told now that this was the root of the introduction of BSE to cattle and great efforts have been made to ensure that it can’t happen again. Great stuff, but just ask yourself, where is that offal going now? The answer to this question fifty years later is that most of it goes into pet food. How long before we have the equivalent of BSE in pets?"

[Stanley]

I don't know what the regulations are these days but in the past trades like rendering were a well kept secret. If people had seen what was going into their 'Pure Refined Dripping' they wouldn't have touched it with a barge pole! I often wonder what is going on today that we don't know about.
Thinking about the comment Maz made about my left overs.... I remember in the old days that a permanent feature of the counter at John Williams, the grocer on Heaton Moor where I lived then, was a partially stripped wooden barrel of Danish butter, it was lined inside with greaseproof paper and butter was 'knocked up' into pats on the counter by the staff. It and the cheese on the slicing plate made of marble with a cheese wire cutter never left the counter, they stayed there until they were finished, the only concession to protection was to cover them both with a cloth at night. Different standards and we survived with fewer ailments like allergies than we have today. I wonder if there is a clue here somewhere?

[chinatyke]

I don't know what the regulations are these days but in the past trades like rendering were a well kept secret. If people had seen what was going into their 'Pure Refined Dripping' they wouldn't have touched it with a barge pole!

At a company I worked for we used many tonnes of tallow which we processed for use in the textile industry. Our preferred supplier was Cumpstey's at Kendal, who supplied us with pure white tallow. We used to send one of our own trucks to collect full loads of it. One day a driver took his wife along for the ride. Whilst they were loading our boxes a skip type vehicle pulled in to the works yard and emptied its load down the intake grid. The smell was horrendous and our driver's wife asked him what it was. He said it was the raw material for dripping. After finishing loading they gave the driver the customary perk of 2 paper packets of pure beef dripping. His wife immediately threw up. Needless to say she wouldn't allow the packets in the cab and I claimed them when he got back!

[Stanley]

Our tapers at Bancroft used tons of it China...... Of course, in theory it should be perfectly OK after the high temperatures but what I wonder is if the maggot's fat qualified as beef dripping? Exactly the same situation at the rendering plants I have seen, we called them miracle factories, crap in at one end and pure fat out at the other......
My butcher renders his own dripping but he uses his own waste while it is fresh.

[Tripps]

My butcher renders his own dripping but he uses his own waste while it is fresh.

I'm pleased you posted that - I've been trying to decide if I'd imagined Mr Garlick rendering chunks of fat in a big pan at the back of the shop, then ladling it into paper bags to cool and solidify. Seems not.

Hard to imagine a world without a bottle of oil next to the cooker. How did we cope?

[Tizer]

I was a bit put off by the words `uses his own waste while it is fresh'.

[Stanley]

"All water used in this restaurant has been passed by the management"
"The motion was laid on the table"
" Eric broke the window with a stool he remembered seeing in the corridor"
[Editor's note: Stop this immediately!]

At the rendering plant at Penrith the skips sat in the yard waiting to be processed were covered with flies and seething with maggots. I did wonder at the time if they were like Greaves and letting them fester for a while made the process of 'protein extraction' easier. I never used tinned dog food again after seeing that.

[chinatyke]

Maggots are good protein also. Part of the daily diet supplement in many parts of the world.

[Stanley]

I'll pass China....... and on the flies as well!

[Stanley]

We weren't big on pets at home and the only food I can remember buying was food for my flock of Hamsters! I had quite a few and was a source if anyone wanted one. I can remember the day three of them escaped including my favourite Hercules, a black male. My mother wasn't amused even though we never saw anything of them again.
I loved watching them stuffing their cheeks with anything that they fancied including knitting wool for bedding. Amazing how much they could stow away! Looking back, they had plenty of cage room and were very active. I was good at looking after them and cleaning the cages out and I think they had quite a good life, I hope so.

[Stanley]

I've been watching the programmes on Missing Parsons (persons of course but that would make an interesting series!). It reminded me of when my mother went missing for about 3 months just after the war. A very strange time and many of my memories are blocked or unclear. We never knew exactly what was going on but had a succession of minders. I don't know what my dad did about it either but years later as things unfolded and became clear it was obvious that what had been a happy childhood for us was at times very difficult for both my mother and father. It all turned out right in the end and when I see this modern culture of 'being open' with your kids I see the point but some things are better dealt with by shielding the kids until they are old enough to understand and form a judgement. In my case, now I know what many of the problems were, and they were huge, I have nothing but affection and warm memories of them both. I think this indicates that their strategy worked!

[chinatyke]

It reminded me of when my mother went missing for about 3 months just after the war. A very strange time and many of my memories are blocked or unclear. We never knew exactly what was going on but had a succession of minders.

Is that a euphemism for running off with her paramour?

[Stanley]

No, she was under stress and just disappeared herself. They were hard times just after the war.

[Stanley]

"They were hard times after the war"...... That got me thinking and indeed they were. The country was stoney broke and of course the ending of war contracts immediately meant that work dried up. Demobilisation was managed far better than after WW1 but even so, returning soldiers put many women out of jobs where they had suddenly become experts in jobs they could never have considered pre-war. There were shortages of everything, rationing had to be continued until well into the 1950s and queuing at shops when there was a delivery was still common. The unifying influence of resistance to oppression had gone but under the Labour government with policies that led to the NHS and made a good start on site clearances and house building there was a sense of hope for something better in the air. That came down to us kids and we were all very aware of it. Looking back it was not a sad time for many of us but of course there was always the people who had lost loved ones in the conflict and the added burden of men returning home and getting nasty surprises like kids they hadn't fathered but luckily that never impinged on us. Thank God we didn't have Spanish Flu to give us a double whammy as after WW1!