[BITList] Acrophobia

[HUGH]

Colin,

I've always had a healthy respect for heights, unlike my father, who didn't turn a hair painting tower cranes in shipyards. I cannot visualise standing on the edge of a drop without a shudder, though reality is sometimes different.  There was a barrage balloon station on the foreshore not far from where I lived during WW2, and we used to walk down and look at goings on.  I always got a vivid and frightening impresssion of the height the balloon went up, and I can still get a flavour of it, even at this distance in time.

When I started my apprenticeship, in Kincaid's Arthur Street works, the tallest things there were the triple expansion engines for the Scindia Line, if we discount the fuel header tank for shop tests of small diesel engines (accessed via a wobbly steel ladder).  It was a few years before I even knew the latter existed. Though I had clambered around ships on the ways while working as a gateboy in Lithgows East Yard, I was terrified by the view from the triple expansion engine top grating, and through the grating, but I soon became blase about it.  My journeyman, Mulholland, had fallen off at one time and landed in the crouching position, so like a large pigeon (they often flew through the shops) that his mates christened him The Doo.  He was also missing most of a finger after using it to check the alignment of the bolt holes for a guide bar that moved down before he could withdraw.

It was a shock to my system when I saw my first big diesel in the shops.  While in the apprentice school I had joined my classmates on the sea trials of the Regent Leopard (28/12/49), which had a 4-stroke Kincaid/B&W diesel, and that was the first big diesel I ever saw, but in its proper context it didn't strike me as all that big at the time, and I don't recall any height problems.  The first really big one I saw in the shops was up on high blocks, so one had to crane back to see the top pistons. This was K227, a 7 cylinder, 750 bore, 2-stroke opposed piston for Alfred Holt's Bellerophon. It was all painted in silver getting ready for shop test, and I'd never seen anything as big (see attachment). I was doing my year in the Finishing Shop, accompanying my journeyman on an expedition to do with the controls, so we only went up as far as the bottom plates.  Later, working in that one of the two erecting shops, I got so used to heights that I once fell asleep on night shift lying face down on an I beam holding into a No 4 air driven drilling machine with a fair drop under me.  I was supposed to be taking some of the weight of the machine and operating the feed screw with a spanner while Charlie Thomson, the journeyman, smoked and kept an eye on progress.  The hole we were drilling was one of a number being drilled up through the bottom flange of the beam.  Some things were worse than heights. Standing under a bedplate hanging from a crane, filing rough edges before getting it landed on the blocks, was always a hairy experience - hard hats and dayglo jackets wouldn't have helped.  Also, standing under a monster crank unit casting fresh out of the furnace - 2 cranks, 1 crankpin and 2 eccentrics - wiping the bore for the journal with a rag that caught fire, removing last minute rough bits before the crane took it up to be dropped onto the journal awaiting it then let cool to shrink it on.  Happy days.

Hugh.

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