Life is Full of Ups & Downs - Part 12

ON REPAIRS - GRACE Building (Continued)

The Big Bang!

With a manually-operated lift, the makeup of the control-board was pretty simple

Apart from a couple of smaller contactors or relays for the door-lock & safety circuitry, there were two large, 480V DC contactors, one for Up and one for Down and which were operated by a solenoid.

Very simply, when the driver operated his car switch then the core of the solenoid was energised and the electromagnetism thus generated pulled the moving part of the contactor inwards and large copper contacts met up with large carbon contacts, the lift motor was energised and the lift moved in the appropriate direction.

As well as the essential Up and Down contactors, safety-circuit relays and fuses the board may also have featured a stepping-solenoid contactor set, which allowed the lift to accelerate smoothly.

A typical 480V DC lift controller of the era

The slate on which all this large, heavy and banging-in-and-out stuff was mounted was around an inch thick and part of the maintenance task was to wipe down any carbon-dust, not just because of cleanliness but also because a buildup of dust could lead to electrical "tracking" between components.

One afternoon, Bobby Coates, whose maintenance depot was Grace Building, was standing in front of one of the control-boards with another mechanic (I don't recall who it was) and they were looking at a crack which was just noticable on one side of the board, starting at one of the direction contacts.

Bobby was probing the crack with a piece of stiff plastic or something similar....whatever it was it was most certainly not electrically conductive....as he and the other bod investigated to see how far it went and to where.

Suddenly there was an almighty BANG! accompanied by a bright green flash which lit up the motor-room. I was on the other side of the room and even from that distance my ears were ringing!

Bobby and whoever-it-was staggered back...fortunately, because it was away from the board and into a recess where a small table and a couple of seats were situated.

They were blinded for a minute or so, also deafened and with carbon dust on their faces and were extremely lucky not to have been burnt.

Naturally the horrible (I hated those things with a passion!) open-air circuit breaker (located on the wall next to the motor-room access steps) for that lift had blown....its BANG! and green arc also adding to the noise and flash produced by the controller.

When Bobby and the other bloke had recovered and the lift was isolated and removed from service it was discovered that the crack, fine though it was, ran from one of the fixed contacts on the Up contactor across to a fixed contact on the adjacent Down contactor and it contained carbon dust...an excellent conductor of electricity.

When the lift driver operated the car-switch 480 volts of direct current travelled from Up to Down, causing a very spectacular short-circuit.

If memory serves, that lift was out of action until the crack in the slate was enlarged, thoroughly cleaned out and filled with epoxy as a temporary repair. I think that at a later date a new, composite (not slate) board was installed.

Life is Full of Ups & Downs - Part 11

ON REPAIRS - GRACE BUILDING (Continued)

I meet Chips Rafferty.

In the era in which we worked at Grace Building it was the Sydney HQ of the Commonwealth Department of Veteran's Affairs. That was only a decade after the end of the Korean War and just on 20 years since the end of World War 2.

As a result, there were many, many ex-servicemen and ex-service women who came into the building. Nothing was done "on line" back then - it was all face-to-face (like banking).

One day I was sitting on an upper floor, above halfway, outside a lift, with the car situated far enough above the floor so that I could access the junction box under the car.

The landing doors were chocked open far enough for me to get access to the planks which ran across from the landing to the counterweight guide-rail bracket on the far wall of the shaft, where they were secured by lashings to the steel bracket. The landing-side ends of the planks were "secured" by a counter-weight filler sitting on them.

Attached to the underbow was a short lanyard with a hook and a spring-loaded keeper thingy on the end, which clipped into the safety harness I was wearing. My task was to strip the ends of wires in the new annunciator travelling cable and connect them to the terminals in the under-car j-box.

There I was, sitting crossed-legged on the end of the planks where they rested on the landing floor (on tar-paper stuff so as not to damage the tiled floor), snipping away with my trusty side-cutters and stripping wires with my trusty strippers when a voice said, "G'day son. Waddaya doin' there?".

I looked up, and then got a crick in my neck by trying to angle my head even further back, and there was Chips, gazing down at me as he rolled a cigarette, the paper (no doubt a Tally-ho) hanging from his bottom lip. The tobacco was definitely Champion-brand, because he was holding the packet as he rolled his smoke.

To anyone my age and a bit older, Chips Rafferty (real name John Goffage - see link) was the quintessential Aussie - tall, lanky, sun-tanned and with a laid-back, laconic air. He was to the 1950s and 1960s what Paul Hogan's "Crocodile Dundee" was to the 1980s and 1990s.

My earliest memory of Chips was seeing him in the "Smiley" movies (1950s), in which he played a country policeman.

 The last movie in which I saw him - and which was the last he made before his death - was "Wake In Fright"....in which he played a country copper once again....but this one wasn't quite as nice as the one in "Smiley".

Anyway....back to Grace Building and me looking at Chips rolling his cigarette.
All I could manage to blurt out was something along the lines of "G'day Mr. Rafferty! I'm connecting wires", to which he replied, before walking around the corner, "Well, don't fall down the shaft, son".

I was so gobsmacked to have actually spoken to the man that I didn't even think to ask for his autograph!

Life is Full of Ups & Downs - Part 10

A Random Memory - Tools.

A bit of random reminiscing.......which may occur more often as they pop up from time-to-time.

Back in those days it was the practice for management to fund the purchase of a basic starter tool-kit for the new apprentice.

I'm unsure of what may have been in such a kit for a new Mechanical Fitter, but the Electrical Fitter's kit included (from memory) a pair of insulated pliers, a pair of insulated side-cutters, a wire-stripper, an insulated flat-blade screwdriver, a medium-size un-insulated flat-blade screwdriver, a hacksaw (for cutting steel conduit), a shifting-spanner and a metal toolbox.

There may have been some other odd & sods (multigrips, perhaps?) but that was essentially the kit.

Arnold's had an account with Blackwoods, who used to have a city store down near Sussex Street, I think, so that was where we went to get our tools, armed with a chit from management.

So sometime back in 1964, after I had finished my six-month grind at tech college and when I went "on the tools", I went off to Blackwoods to get my own personal toolkit.

The quality was top-shelf.....there was no cheap Chinese crap flooding the markets back then, no Bunnings or Home Hardware or Mitre 10. Hardware stores sold quality merchandise and what you bought, if looked after and treated with a bit of respect, would last a lifetime.

Tools bought 53 years ago, still in great condition despite much use.

Would you believe that after 53 years (as of this year, 2017) I still have, and use, three of those original purchases; a pair of Swedish "Berg" electrician's pliers, an American "Crescent" shifting-spanner and an Australian "Stanley" electrician's screwdriver.

The others have disappeared over the years....some borrowed and never returned, some just misplaced (wire strippers & side-cutters) and never rediscovered.

But the above three items are as good as the day I bought them, despite having been used many, many times, particularly when I was servicing/restoring my own cars.

The pliers have no nicks in the cutting edges, no slop in the hinge and all the insulation is intact. The shifter is in equally-good condition and the Stanley screwdriver still has a perfectly-flat edge on the blade.

It's true; they just do not make stuff like this anymore or, if they do, it now costs a fortune to buy.

Life is Full of Ups & Downs - Part 9

BUCKINGHAM'S and GRACE BUILDING ANECDOTES from DAVE RUTTER.

I thank Dave very, very much for not only providing the correction to what I had written about car-switch directions (see Part 2) but for also supplying the following bits of hilarity!

Apart from just editing the format for use herein, I haven't modified the information at all.

DAVE at BUCKINGHAM'S.

Roz.

A correction to Roz's proper name. Her name was Rosalie, not Roslyn.

For more than forty years, whenever Garth brought the subject up, Dave could never get him to understand that it wasn't "Roslyn". I obviously had the same problem.

The Ziehl-Abegg motors.

Dave says.....
"They were the quietest motors I have ever come across. In all my time with EPL they used a number of different brands of AC motors both single speed and pole changers such as Rotos, Bruncken and I can’t recall the others but they were never as quiet is the Ziehl-Abegg units. I even suggested to Ralph Ledwidge at one stage that they should install a flashing light in the machine room when any of them were running. That idea fell on deaf ears."

Arnold's Schwarzenegger.
Straight from the horses (Dave's) mouth.....
"Kurt Gahler and I were the first two to start at Buckinghams and Flange [George Farham], Ken Rousham and Alan Andrews followed to help with some of the mechanical work. Then the rest of the mob came along.

Young Kurt Gahler and Dave Rutter. (I don't think this was at Buck's.)

During this time, at lunch times I started to lift some test weights with the aid of a piece of 1-¼” conduit, one weight on each end. One lunch time Flange started to gee me up to try and lift 2 at each end.
Being young and invincible I fell for the bait.
Anyway, I got the weights up past my chest and on the way up in the air when I got the staggers and started dancing around the roof. (This was always done on the roof just outside the machine room).

Eventually one arm must have got tired or I lost balance and one weight on one side slid off the conduit and over the side wall of the building to the lane below. The remainders I just dropped to the deck.
Right below was a large butchers van delivering meat to the food section in the ground floor of Buckingham's.
We all just scarpered, but not before seeing the test weight embedded into the cobblestones about 6 inches from the tailboard lowered to the deck to allow the drivers to wheel the carcases off.

A few hours later we found the weight just sitting on the footpath up against the wall of the building.
Not a single word of it was mentioned to us.
From then on, Flange and Kurt nicknamed me the Strongest Boy in Arnolds.
Only last year I caught up with Kurt who now lives down at Busselton and the first thing he said when he saw me was “Here he is, the strongest boy in Arnolds”."

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DAVE at GRACE BUILDING.
Anyone can blow a fuse.....but this was a blown power station!!
Dave's words.....
"That was some place to work. There were 4800 people employed in the building and probably 80% were young women. I just loved working there. [As did we all! BK]

One incident of note apart from the improved love life was when Larry Evans and I were running some wiring in the machine room next to #3 the passenger lift. We were in the machine room pushing a 60 ft spring steel snake into a conduit and despite my telling Larry on numerous occasions to be very careful because there were exposed items of switch-gear everywhere, he typically was not paying close attention and giggling as he very often did and he allowed the snake to touch the two 480 volt terminals on the tappet switch.  They fused together and all lifts that were running stopped.

We immediately prised the damaged snake from the terminals and raced down and got anyone in any of the lifts out.
I then went down to the basement and checked the fuses and breakers to discover there was no 480 Volt power to the building. The White Bay Power Station had dropped out!
[You read it here first, folks! BK]

White Bay after Larry & Dave blew it up!

White Bay supplied all 480 Volt DC to the city. So, effectively it meant any of the older lifts still running on 480V DC anywhere in the city had stopped, with the possibility that there were passengers stuck everywhere.
We disappeared. Our passengers were all out and all the fuses and breakers in our building were set and ready to go. Problem belonged to somewhere else!!!!!

I never ever let Larry forget this incident though. I often wonder what he is doing these days."

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I am indebted to Dave for providing these snippets of Arnold's history and freely admit to bursting into laughter when reading the tale about White Bay! I had never heard that one before; he kept it pretty close to his chest for all those years.😀

Life is Full of Ups & Downs - Part 8

ON REPAIRS - GRACE BUILDING (continued).

Returning to the subject of Grace Building and memories of working there.

WG Watson's and Three-phase conduit.
Arnold's had an account at the trade-supply business of WG Watson, who had shop-fronts in Clarence and Kent Streets. The premises ran through from one street to the other.
From Grace Blg. it was just a two-block walk up the road to the Clarence Street frontage.

The Clarence St. facade of the WG Watson building, which ran through to Kent St.

(Incidentally, in a funny little twist of history, the building which housed WG Watson was the former "Grace House", a warehouse and repository for the Grace family business (Grace Brothers)....the same family which built Grace Building.)

I think my memory is working (and no doubt if I've got this wrong then Dave Rutter will correct me!) in that one day someone was asked to go to WG Watson's with a list of stuff that was needed.
So he hands it over the counter to the sales bloke, who runs his eyes down it and then starts bringing the bit's and pieces to the counter......boxes of connectors, conduit saddles, that sort of thing.

He finally turns to the Arnold's apprentice and without batting an eye said something to the effect of "Tell your boss that we won't have any three-phase conduit in until Monday".

Life is Full of Ups & Downs - Part 7

AT TECH FULL-TIME - I move from Gosford to Sydney.

Before I continue with life at Grace Building I'll add a bit about moving from Gosford to Sydney to live.
When I first started work with Arnold's I stayed with my grandparents in East Gosford.

My grandparents home was where that office building now sits. Much quieter back then.

This required a very early start to what became a long day, not arriving back in Gosford until about 6:00 PM.

This couldn't continue because (a) I was tired even before I started tech and (b) I had no social life. An 18-year old living with rather conservative grandparents did absolutely nothing for my social life. I became irritated and my irritation and frustration annoyed my grandparents and the relationship started to sour because of it.

So after a month or so of commuting between Gosford and Sydney I moved into a boarding house at 120 Forest Road, Arncliffe, which my father, bless him, had located for me.

120 Forest Road, Arncliffe, as it appears today. The house has not changed at all.

Because I just did not have the time (nor a car)  to be able to scout around, he had actually driven down from Kendall, spent a few days in Sydney (stayed at Adam's Hotel, in Pitt Street....now the site of the Hyatt and where the Marble Bar is located) and took the time and effort to check out a few places. He picked me up one afternoon after work, we looked at two and I opted for the one in Arncliffe.

This establishment was run by a Miss Jean Taylor and her boyfriend/fiance, Brian.
When I moved in there were about a dozen male boarders, of varying ages and with different jobs.

I shared a room with two great guys - Dennis and Mike. Dennis worked for the Commonwealth Dept. of Immigration and Mike, a Kiwi, was a drummer in a band.

(If you look at the photo, above, we had the room behind the bay window on the left of the entrance). 

The rest of the gang included an interstate truck driver, a boat-builder, an apprentice aeronautical fitter with QANTAS, a trainee policeman, a telephone technician with the PMG, a used-car salesman, a storeman and that's where my knowledge of who did what runs out.

Commuting between Arncliffe and Central station allowed me a totally different social life to that before the move from Gosford.

Remember that at this time I was attending Sydney Tech full-time...five days a week, for six months and had not yet gone "on the tools" with Arnold's, so now when Tech finished on a Friday I could spend an hour or so playing pool and snooker with my classmates or having a drink at the pub on the corner (the Agincourt...still there today).

The Agincourt on the corner of Harris St and Railway Sq. Very handy to Sydney Tech.

Weekends suddenly became an enjoyable, fun-packed two-day festival compared to those I'd spent in Gosford and although disposable income was rather meagre after buying a weekly ticket and paying board, at least I was able to take a girl to the pictures and have a few drinks.

Yes, life became FUN!

I really could add several chapters just on my life whilst staying at that boarding house.....and I'll do that as this series rolls along.

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Life is Full of Ups & Downs - Part 6

ON REPAIRS - GRACE BUILDING (Continued)

Scrap copper wire.

Because the old lift annunciator system was being renewed this meant that all the original VIR (vulcanised india rubber) insulated wiring was being replaced with modern stuff........and there were miles of the steel conduit and wiring to be pulled out.

Naturally some means had to be found to dispose of all the useless copper.

There was a scrap-metal disposal place down at the bottom of Elizabeth Street, in the bit between Campbell and Foster Streets.

It was just a small yard squeezed in between two buildings and I'm pretty sure this is where it was located:-

The location today. Nice to see that Golf House is still there after so many years.

Golf House was there back then. It had an animated neon sign on the roof depicting a golfer chipping a ball onto the green; the golfer would swing his club and the ball, a series of lights arching over to the green, would light up in sequence. Aaah! The days when the rooftops around the city were filled with colourful neon signs.

There was also a pawn shop nearby and further up the road, towards Central, was the large Tooheys brewery complex.

Tooheys in the left. In 1965 the trams had disappeared from Elizabeth Street.

This photo is from 1961, when tram-line removal was at its height.

Anyway....back to the subject - copper wire and its removal and disposal.

As we removed the old stuff we'd store it away, accumulate enough to fill a couple of sugar bags and then we'd lug it down to the scrap metal place, sell it to the bloke and the proceeds would go into a kitty which would then be used to pay for lunch & drinks every so often at the Forbes Hotel, a pub over the road from Grace Building. All the crew shared in, including the maintenance guys.

The Forbes on the left and Grace Blg. on the right. Very handy!

Now the scrap metal man would give us more if the old insulation was removed and he just received the bare copper wire....which we would pound down into lumps (almost ingots!) so more could be carried in one trip.

To remove the insulation by hand was a pain in the neck but a solution was found. I can't recall who came up with the idea but it was a beauty!

Down in the basement, towards the back (Clarence Street side) was an incinerator, the chimney of which passed right up through the building and exited above the roof adjacent the goods lifts motor room.

The incinerator was used by the cleaning & maintenance staff to burn waste paper and stuff and was certainly ideal for burning old rubber & cotton insulation off copper wire.

All went well; each time a load was ready to be delivered to Mr. Scrap Metal, we'd take it down to the basement, get the incinerator going and feed in the coils of wire, gradually adding more as the previous coil lost its insulation.

Once the burning off had been done and the metal cooled down it would be raked out, taken back up to the motor room and pounded into lumps, ready for transport. (This was a real enterprise, I can tell you!).

However, one day, when a batch of wire was ready to be incinerated, the job was put in the hands of Larry Evans, a first-year apprentice.

It was lunchtime and whilst Larry went down to the basement, others of the team were sitting in the sun on the rooftop when suddenly a large cloud of black smoke puffed out of the chimney and, several minutes later, a sooty-face Larry appeared at the motor-room door but without the copper.

Apparently what he'd done, so as to accelerate the process, was to throw "a bit" of paint thinners onto the fire! The result was a WHOOOSH! of flame which had the effect of not only blackening Larry's face but also of burning off some of the soot which had accumulated in the chimney!

How to Destroy a Flagpole.

If you have another look at the photo of the roof of Grace Building as it is today you'll see the edge of the roof has a sort of "battlements" appearance.

Along that side of the roof, more towards the turret at the far corner, was a timber flagpole. (I think there was a matching item on the Clarence Street side as well).

The new wiring work we were doing included the installation of new steel conduits in the shafts and the largest of these was 2-inches in diameter.

Back in those days we used to "set" conduits when running them, whether up & down lift shafts or in motor rooms to controllers and floor selectors; the conduit was always bent and arranged very neatly.

It was an acquired skill to bend conduit without kinking it - if there was a kink, which pinched and therefore narrowed the tube - then pulling wires through it became very difficult.

Also, there were restrictions on how many and what size wires could be carried in the various conduit sizes, which ranged from 5/8" (the most common) up through 3/4", 1", 1-1/2" and then 2".

To "set" the small conduits we used a length of timber......a bit of "four-be-two", about 3 feet in length.

Towards the top end was a hole, drilled to comfortably take a 5/8" or maybe even a 3/4" conduit.

The piece of conduit to be curved would be inserted through the hole then gently bent to the required shape, making sure that no kinks occurred.

(In hindsight, this procedure was the greatest time-waster and must have added many hours to repair and installation contracts).

No, this is NOT what we used back then!

It was nearly impossible to bend 2" conduit using the "timber with the hole in it" method.

For a start, a larger piece had to be found and it usually required a couple of blokes to do the job.

So when one of the lads had to put a bend in a length (I think conduits were 12 feet long) of the heavy stuff one time, he went looking for somewhere/something to assist and found it in the form of the flagpole.

The timber pole was mounted to the "battlements" by a couple of sturdy steel brackets and there was a gap between the timber and the masonry which nicely accommodated a steel tube 2 inches in diameter, allowing the operator plenty of room to get comfortable leverage.

It was a "Goldilocks" situation - just right!

So the exponent of conduit-setting inserted the conduit up to the point where he wanted the bend to start, got on the other end and began to heave on it.

Next second there was a loud KERR-RACK!.......and a split ran up the flagpole from bottom to top!

Needless to say, lift mechanics hastily vacated the scene and an alternative method had to be found for bending 2" conduits.

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Life is Full of Ups & Downs - Part 5

ON REPAIRS - GRACE BUILDING
Another major modernisation on which I was involved was at the Grace Building, bounded by York, Clarence and King Streets.

I don't recall if this was immediately after the Buckingham's job or not but it certainly sticks in my mind as the job with the most memories and the longest time I spent on one site.....almost a year, in fact.

The York & King Sts. corner of this magnificent Art Deco building. (Click for full -size)

Grace Building is now the Grace Hotel (click the link for historical information) but in my day it was a Commonwealth government building and was home to the Department of Veteran Affairs and was Sydney's largest Commonwealth office.

Arnold's were contracted to modernise the annunciator systems across all the lifts....and there were many of them, all car-switch-controlled and with just one being capable of switching from manual control to automatic.

All were 480V DC.......those horrible copper/carbon contactors banging in and out on slate panels, drawing green electric arcs as the Up or Down contacts opened!

If memory serves correctly, there were six passenger lifts at the front (York St.) of the building, with two opposite the other four, and at the rear, where the loading dock was situated (Clarence St.) there were two goods lifts.

The lift drivers were all ex-servicemen, many of whom had physical disabilities of some sort; I do recall at least one of the drivers having only one arm.

The entry foyer in York Street was magnificent, the walls lined with Florentine marble and with a soaring mezzanine between the ground and first floors. Under the stairway to the first floor was a small hole-in-the-wall kiosk which sold tobacco products and snack foods such as chips and chocolate bars, lollies...that type of thing.

Off the end of the the entry foyer was a hallway which led through to the Clarence Street entry and the goods lifts.

There was a post office on the King Street side of the ground floor.

Sadly, although there are many photos available online of the building as it now exists I could not find any as it was in the 1960s.

My time at Grace Building is filled with anecdotes, accidents and incidents, so in no particular order, here we go............

The Great Olympic Shot-put Contest.

Because the job we were doing involved the installation of new lift-shaft wiring and new travelling cables, large holes had to be bored in the machine room floor to take the conduits down to the half-way junction boxes. This work was carried out by another contractor and the method they used left a circular concrete coring which was the thickness of the floor....about 9 inches in length and 3 inches or so in diameter.

At this point perhaps I should list those who were working at the building. I can't remember every name because people came and went over the lengthy course of the entire project but the following names readily come to mind:-

Dave Rutter, Garth Brook, George Farham, Ken Rousham, Ray Johnson, Larry Evans and an Ernie something-or-other.

The building was also the depot for a maintenance run for Bobby Coates and his off-sider, so they were there usually around lunchtime.

We had unrestricted access to the roof area outside the motor-room and although it is not seen in any  photograph available today, there was a light-well which ran down from the roof to (I think) the first floor. At the bottom of this well there was a cyclone wire screen which prevented any falling objects from hitting whatever was underneath....maybe it was the top of the foyer, I'm not sure.

Current roof arrangement, looking south towards the King & York St, corner.
The light-well was to the left of those potted shrubs.

One day we decided to have a shot-putting event.

I think it was prompted by the fact that the Tokyo Olympics had only recently been held (so this must have been in early 1965).

The concrete cores were considered to be ideal for this event, so one of us (I can't remember who it was...truly, I can't) picked up a core, went into the dramatic pose of a shot-putter ready to launch and "pushed" the chunk of concrete into the air......and it arced directly into the light-well and could then be heard bouncing off walls before it eventually landed with a loud, echoing, metallic BA-DANG-CLANG! on the wire screen at the bottom.

Several overall-clad shapes could then be seen moving very, very quickly from the scene, back to the motor-room and scattering to various parts of the building in an effort to get as far away from the roof as possible!

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Life is Full of Ups & Downs - Part 4

ON REPAIRS - BUCKINGHAM'S

The first major repair/modernisation job on which I worked was  the Buckingham's department store (colloquially referred to as "Bucks"), on the corner of Oxford & Riley Streets, Darlinghurst, which is now the site of Oxford Square.

A photo of "Bucks" taken in the 1920s

The work that Arnold's was doing was the replacement of the (three?) lift motors/gearboxes etc with new units. This was the first contract to use the new Ziehl-Abegg lift motors (that link takes you to current technology, of course!). I believe that these had been decided upon by John Inglis due in part to their ability to handle high temperatures as a result of the windings being glass-coated.

I can recall several blokes with whom I worked at Buckingham's.

At this time I was assigned to be the apprentice assistant working with Dave Rutter, so we were part of the electrical team. There was also Garth Brook, another electrical apprentice and I think he came under Dave as well.

Dave Rutter circa 1964

Fitters included George "Flange" Farham and Ken Rousham, with Trades Assistant Ray Johnson.

There were one or two other bods who seemed to come and go as needed but I don't remember faces or names.

By-the-way....George was nick-named "Flange" for a rather distinctive physical characteristic, usually hidden from sight and only brought out when the need arose. 😉

There are quite a few memories which come flooding back to me when I think of this job, so in no particular order........

The Lunchtime Sleep.

It was a regular and common practice for the crew to go across Riley Street to the pub which used to be there (still is, I think) for lunch on Thursdays. After the normal half-hour had expired the apprentice would return to the job with instructions to say to any supervisor (Tom Moffatt or maybe Ralph Ledwidge) who might turn up that the men were down the shaft and  "I'll just nick down and get them".....in which case he'd race across to the pub and warn the men.

This didn't happen often because if Tom or Ralph were delivering the pays around that time then they always knew where the blokes would be so they just went straight to the pub.

But on one particular occasion, when I was the designated cockatoo, I was resting my head on a pillow of cotton waste as I stretched out on the motor-room floor in the sun coming through the door.

I fell asleep.

The next thing I know is being nudged by the foot of  Geoff Neville, the Sales Manager, who had brought a prospective customer to see the new Ziehl-Abegg equipment. The nudge was accompanied by Geoff telling me to go over the road and tell the men to get back to work.

I really thought I was for the chop but he never mentioned it again until many years later, when we were both working for Otis, and we were able to share a laugh about the incident.

An Arnold's Electrician, Roz and the Plasticine Phallus.

A certain electrician struck up a relationship with a girl by the name of Rosalie....or "Roz", as she became known. My only memory of Roz is that she wore stockings which had patterns of little beetles running up the back of the legs. This was, may I remind you, the height of Beatlemania and it was whilst we were working at Buck's, in 1964, that the Beatles arrived at Mascot on a very wet & windy day. I remember watching it live on a TV in the electrical-goods department of the store.

A lovely day in Sydney for the Beatles arrival

Garth Brook and I used to refer to a particular electrical connector known as a Ross Courtney (see print advert, below) as "Roz's corsets"....which irked the certain electrician, particularly when he was with the young lady and Garth or I would say something like "Aaah.....certain electrician, we've run out of Roz's corsets"!!

Ross Courtneys looked nothing like Roz's corsets.....I hope!

Anyway....the certain electrician and Roz were a bit of an item for a while and there was one time when he was chatting to her on the top floor outside the lift entrance.
Roz had her back to the opening and he was facing her when slowly descending from behind and above Roz appeared a large plasticine penis, gently swinging to and fro as it was lowered. This was being accompanied by much giggling and muffled laughter from the machine room immediately above as George, Garth and Bruce tried to control their hysterics!!

I can't recall the outcome but have a feeling that the certain electrician was not overly amused!

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Footnote #1
You may be wondering why a team of lift mechanics had plasticine in their inventory.

Well, John Inglis was monitoring and recording the temperatures of the new lift motors and the most suitable method of mounting the thermometers to - and keeping them on - the motor casings was with plasticine. So there was a plentiful supply....certainly enough for George Farham to get creative!

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An Injury.
An incident which I will always remember occurred when we were unloading a new machine bedplate at the Buck's loading dock and then rolling it - on it's edge - through the passageway to the empty goods lift shaft, where it would then be chain-blocked up the shaft and into the machine room, through the  gap between the RSJ's.

We had half-a-dozen pairs of hands supporting and rolling the concrete-filled bedplate on lots of short lengths of 2" steel conduit. When one piece appeared at the end, then one pair of hands - mine - would pick up that roller and move to the front so as to place it on the floor, in front of the bedplate, where it would then become the next pipe to take a share of the weight.

No sooner had George (Farham) warned me to be careful than SCRUNCH!......the middle finger on my right hand also shared the load, trapped under the piece of conduit as the bedplate rolled slowly forward.

The end of my finger, from tip to the first joint, split open like a burst watermelon and blood went everywhere.
I didn't feel any pain initially but boy!...when it kicked in, it did in a big way!
Fortunately Buckingham's had a sick -room/first-aid room with a permanent nurse on the staff and she very quickly assessed the damage, disinfected & dressed the wound and bandaged my hand.
I went back to work. - NOT placing rollers!....never went off sick......and turned up for work the next day.

Do you know, I never had to go to a doctor and that split healed perfectly, without leaving a scar.
From that day onward I always paid heed to George Farham's cautionary advice.

Fun with Electricity.
The new machine room layout had the modern controller cabinets (in place of slate panels and horrible 480V DC contactors) aligned down the middle of the room, so that if one was standing at the doorway (at one end) then the controllers blocked some view towards the other end.

One day Ray was using a drill, up the far end of the machine room, and the extension lead ran down to the 240V outlet near the door.
I can't recall who exactly was involved (other than Ray) but someone was standing near Ray and was holding the extension lead and the other wag was at the 240V GPO - out of sight of Ray but able to be seen by his partner in crime.

When Ray operated the drill for a couple of seconds, the one at the door would turn the switch off and, at the same time, the one holding the lead and standing next to Ray would squeeze the lead as if it was a water hose. Ray would naturally look up to see why his drill had stopped, just in time to supposedly "catch" the bloke holding the lead as he let it unkink!
Ray reacted without thinking about it and told him to stop it!!!
The one at the door would then turn the power back on. Of course, when Ray put his finger on the trigger again the drill would work.

This had him totally bamboozled for a couple of rounds and it was only the fact that both apprentices burst into laughter which gave the game away! 😃

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Footnote #2
I cannot remember exactly how long we spent at Buckingham's carrying out the modernisation.
I do recall being there when the job was completed and we moved onto other work.
Sadly, in 1968, only three or four years later, Buckingham's was razed to the ground in a spectacular fire and it was only through the diligent efforts of the NSW Fire Brigade that more buildings weren't consumed.

Buckingham's goes up in flames, Anzac Day, 1968.

The above photo became very famous, snapped at exactly the moment the wall collapsed.

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Life is Full of Ups & Downs - Part 3

ON SERVICE

I only did about six-months on Service (maintenance) and none at all on Installations (new equipment into new buildings).
The rest of the time that I spent "on the tools", as we used to say, was on Repairs - repairs and modernisations to existing units.

Although I worked with Brian for much of the time on maintenance I also worked with another bloke, a Paul something-or-other who had his own Austin (Morris, maybe?) ute...a dark-green item. It was a vehicle run in the western suburbs and I think Paul lived in or near Campsie, because I recall being picked up by him at Campsie station on several occasions.

I found maintenance boring.....cleaning & filing big copper contacts on 480V DC control boards; wiping carbon dust off the panels; using the multi-coloured cotton waste to wipe oil off sheaves, gearboxes, motors, bed-plates; adjusting door-lock rollers so that the cams would move them correctly.....and so on.

A typical control panel of the era. Note the copper & carbon contacts.

The most interesting times were when we serviced water hydraulics.

There were a couple which Brian and I had on our run.....down in the Rocks area, I think.....but most were serviced by an older gentleman by the name of George Sproule.

I remember Brian introducing me to him on a site in either Kent or York Street.

These things fascinated me.

They were controlled by pulling a rope which passed through the floor and roof of the lift car, the rope running over pulleys located at the top and bottom of the shaft and terminating at a lever which operated the valve.

The car was  suspended by ropes to the hydraulic piston, the cylinder being fixed to the wall of the shaft

A simple graphic arrangement of a rope-suspended water-hydraulic

The water necessary to operate these devices - and for hydraulic wool presses in the various wool stores - was provided by the Hydraulic Power Company, in Pier Street. (Classified as being of Historical Significance).

Around this time (1964/65) the Hydraulic Power Company was in the throes of closing down and quite a few water-hydraulics were being converted to oil.....more of which I will describe in another chapter.

After spending time on Service I then went to Repairs, and that's what I loved and where I spent the rest of my "on the tools" part of my apprenticeship.

More....much more.....to follow in the next chapters.

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Life is Full of Ups & Downs - Part 2

ON SERVICE

When I finished the six-month's of tech college, and entered the Arnold's workforce, my immediate "boss" was Brian Baxter. He was a maintenance electrician and I became his apprenticed assistant.

If I recall the hierarchy correctly, Brian reported to Tommy Moffatt, the Service Supervisor and Tommy came under Ralph Ledwidge, the Service Manager. I think that's right.

The Service Department had a bloke by the name of Jack Challenor overseeing the admin side of things and there were a couple of secretaries/clerks working with Jack; I think Paula Tulk was in that section.

Brian and I did a maintenance run which took in an area around Martin Place and beyond.

I can recall Mercantile Mutual, which was in Pitt Street, near Martin Place, and also Washington H. Soul Pattinson, further up Pitt Street, closer to Market Street.

The building ran through to George Street

It was in my first week of working with Brian, doing maintenance at Mercantile Mutual, that I came close to seriously injuring him.

He wanted to get on the roof of the lift car to then move down the shaft, checking the guide rails and cleaning any oil/grease.

The lift was controlled by a car switch and Brian had shown me the procedure so I was in the car and Brian then manually (sticking his fingers in the two door locks...one top, one bottom) closed the door lock circuit and instructed me to take the car down, which I did.

He then climbed on the roof and closed the door behind him, which closed the door lock circuit in the normal way.

I can still hear Brian, on the car roof, saying "Take it down, Bruce".

I put the handle over and the car went up.....Brian screamed out "STOP!!!!" and I let the handle go.

Because he had been standing upright, Brian had come into contact with the steel-work at the top of the shaft under the machine-room floor but fortunately he suffered no more than a banged head, with a resultant large lump and a headache.

I, in the meantime, was a quaking mess inside the lift car, thinking that I'd either killed or seriously maimed the man.

What had happened was that I had either forgotten, or Brian hadn't told me, the "Golden Rule of Car-Switches": *down direction is towards the door opening, up is away from the door opening.

A typical car switch

[*EDIT 20th. July 2017: My thanks to Dave Rutter for contacting me with a correction to the above; I had the directions reversed. Come to think of it, that is exactly what happened when I nearly killed Brian].

After getting off the roof of the car and giving me an earful Brian recovered his composure, I stopped shaking from fright, he apologised for yelling at me and we went up to Coles in King Street for morning tea.

A typical 1960s Coles cafeteria but not a lift mechanic in sight!

Coles was the place for all companies lift mechanics working in the city to have their morning-tea break - at around 10:00 AM it was full of uniformed (predominantly overalls) males!

In fact, it was such a tradition that on Thursday's (pay day) Tommy Moffatt would wander in with our pay packets - small brown envelopes which actually contained cash. He knew we'd be there and he didn't have to go chasing around the CBD sites to dish out the pays.

There were no espresso machines back then, no baristas, no specialty coffees....none of what we take for granted today.
After being given the order by the group around the table, the apprentice then queued at the counter with a tray, picked up plates of scones, jam, cream or whatever from the shelves and then small stainless-steel pots of coffee or tea & milk, paid the cashier and then juggled the whole lot as he made his way back to the table.

Looking back from the vantage point of 50+ years, it really was a different time.....a simpler life and, knowing what I do now, perhaps even a more pleasant one.

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Footnote:
With reference to the correction to the car-switch directions (*above), Dave added the following anecdote:-
"Larry Evans almost got my legs chopped off getting that point wrong. It was really my fault for sitting with my legs dangling in the shaft whilst asking him to take the car up. Nevertheless, it cost him a belt across the ears when I got out"!

Life is Full of Ups & Downs - Part 1

A NEW LIFE

When I joined Arnold's at the beginning of 1964 I did so as a fresh-faced 18-year old apprentice Electrical Mechanic with Arnold Elevator Services.

I had been interviewed in January by none other than Mr. Gregory himself, after applying for the position of Electrical Fitter with Arnold Engineering & Lifts - the vacancy having been notified to me by the (then) Commonwealth Employment Service office in Taree (our home was at Kendall, about 33 miles north of Taree).

However, as things panned out, a week after returning to Kendall I received a letter from Mr. Gregory advising that the position with AE&L had been filled but that there was a position for an apprenticeship with AES, the service, repair and installation arm of the company and if I wanted to accept the spot to please advise by return mail. (I still have that letter, would you believe?!)

So without any hesitation I did so and a week or so later found myself on the North Coast Daylight Express heading south for Gosford, to take up temporary accommodation with my grandparents until I settled into the job and had time to find suitable digs in Sydney.

I've headed this chapter "A New Life" because it really was for me.

From January 1956 through December 1963 I had been a boarding-school student in Sydney in what was basically a protected and somewhat sheltered life. School holidays were spent in the coastal country of the north coast, so even though I lived in Sydney for those eight years, I didn't really "live" there, if you follow my drift.

So to be exposed to the real world at 18 years of age was a huge eye-opener and education for me.

Because I had completed the Leaving Certificate I was able to take advantage of a shorter apprenticeship than if I had started at fifteen. The normal term was five years but I had a three-year indenture and one reason for the shorter period was due to the fact that the first six-months consisted of full-time attendance at Sydney Technical College in Broadway.

For five days a week I was back at school, which was a real downer; I did not want to be "back at school" after just leaving it!

But we managed to struggle through it.

"We" includes a guy by the name of John Stimpson, who had nothing to do with Arnolds but who was part of the small group of full-time apprentices who regularly played pool in the

pool-hall in Railway Square after tech on Fridays.

Still there after 50 years. Photo taken in 2013.

After the six-months daily attendance at tech I became part of the regular AES workforce. Tech was now one day a week for the following eighteen months, so life became much more interesting.

I was initially assigned to Brian Baxter and his maintenance run in the city.......and suddenly life became not only interesting but also FUN!!

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