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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