Whilst my dad was probably happiest working with soil and plants, for his entire working life in Belfast he worked with metal. As I said in an earlier blog, when my dad came up to Belfast from the country during WW2 he started to work for R.J. McKinney, and he continued to work for them until 1975 when they were taken over by Smith Mills Ireland Limited, rising to the role of foreman plater.
During the war most of their work was on air-raid shelters and other steel-framed structures that were hastily erected in various contexts. When things settled down after the war their work diversified. All across Belfast and beyond you can find fences and garden gates with plates on them marking them out as being produced by McKinney’s Engineering, but their lasting contribution to Northern Irish life is largely hidden by a cladding of bricks and concrete, because most of the work my dad was involved with was heavyweight structural steel, and with some pride he pointed out some of the buildings he worked on, especially those with a degree of challenge, not least the aerial array on the top of what was then Windsor House, but is now the Grand Central Hotel. I went outside to take a look at it when invited to one of the launch events in the Penthouse Bar, raising a glass to my Dad’s technical ingenuity that has stood the test of time. Allegedly the first design for it by the architect and structural engineer had proved inadequate for the job, but my dad redesigned the bracing and fixing points by hand. It didn’t endear architects to him. Nor did a later job (when he was working for Pilot Engineering) where they were again (allegedly) set the almost impossible task of producing a steel frame to support a swimming pool at the top of the old Gallagher’s Factory which was being converted into what is now the Yorkgate shopping and cinema complex. I don’t know whether such a pool ever materialised or was filled with water to test my dad’s handiwork.
He was the personified epitome of the so-called “Protestant work-ethic.” As I said before he was never at my school prize days; nor did he attend any of my school rugby games... he was always working (mind you, with one exception he never attended any of my theatre performances either, but that’s more to do with him never attending theatre of any kind... something that is true for many in the Protestant working class sadly). It was his (and my mum’s) hard work that made my access to education possible. Work was what defined him and indeed there is no doubt that his retirement, after his 70th birthday, precipitated a rapid decline in his physical and mental wellbeing. And even before that, the first time I saw any sense of vulnerability in him was on being made redundant by Smith Mills Ireland in Mallusk, being without employment for the only two weeks of his working life, before getting a job with Pilot Engineering off the Boucher Road, a company founded by people who previously worked under him. With them he continued to work in structural steel projects across Northern Ireland, including the refurbishment and extension of Mark's and Spencer's in Belfast into the old Belfast Water Office. This project meant that they then did other M&S refurbishments including their store in London's Oxford Street, necessitating my Dad and others going to work in England for periods of time to supervise the erection of the steelwork, the only prolonged periods my Dad was away from home without my Mum apart from a couple of Orange/Black lecture conferences in Glasgow.
My dad didn’t bring his work home with him, but he did bring his skills (and a fair amount of raw materials... offcuts and discards from much larger jobs that he found a use for). He built a garage at the bottom of the garden, complete with a steel trussed roof, with a steel framed carport in front of it and the greenhouse I mentioned previously to one side. However, to my memory no car ever sat within that garage... there wasn’t enough room. It was bunged with tools and bits of wood and metal and tin boxes filled with nuts and bolts and screws and nails, old and new. He never threw anything away that could potentially be used in the future, and when I ended up clearing out the garage when he finally moved out (and no matter what my brothers say it was largely me) whilst many of the tools went to the Irish Methodist Container Ministry to help others overseas, I kept a large number of the tins of bits and pieces and still have them, rummaging in them from time to find exactly the right size of nut for an ancient bolt.
He could do amazing things with metal... but was a bit “make do” when it came to wood. In one of the eulogies last Tuesday one of those speaking described how his father in law painstakingly created a nest of three coffee tables over a long period of time. It brought to mind my mum’s nest of coffee tables, which were relatively cheap, flimsy affairs made from MDF and relatively lightweight legs. After a couple of years they became a bit wobbly. My Dad’s solution was to brace them with steel brackets which he cut to size and glued and screwed to the underside, invisible to the casual observer, until you tried to lift them an discovered that they were deceptively heavy. They didn’t wobble again however, until finally the cheap plastic laminate on top gave way and we dumped them when we were clearing the house.
As well as the tins of odds and ends I kept a number of my dad’s tools including the sledge hammer he once threatened to use to demolish his own greenhouse with to bring to ground three schoolboys who had climbed on top of it to gather apples from our neighbour’s tree. I also have the shovel which he had repaired by replacing a broken wooden handle by welding on one a homemade one constructed from tubular steel – its heavier than the sledgehammer, and makes me feel like I have done a full work out if I have been out using it to clear snow. And I also have the heavy ball-pein hammer which he put in the saddle bag of his scooter during the early days of the Ulster Workers Strike incase anyone tried to stop him going to work – he was politically unionist, but his work-ethic trumped everything, and perhaps knowing his temperament and loyalty none of the strikers ever tried to stop him... He only came out of work when the power went off. I didn’t, however keep the oxy-acetylene or electric arc welders that he had in his garage, although he did teach me how to use both, when we were refurbishing my older brothers’ old bikes for me and my younger brother to ride... He never actually taught me how to ride a bike (i had to learn that for myself) but he did teach me how to weld one...
I also helped him with welding during a brief period when he developed a “cottage industry” making trailers for various people using old car axles, although he only ever let me do a few of the less important welds. He also had my friends and I paint each of the trailers in a trademark shade of metallic blue... He produced about 12 of them over the course of a year, although I don’t think he made much money out of the venture as he didn’t really factor in the cost of the electricity when he fired up the arc welder... It was my mum who dealt with all the banking and domestic bills (a division of labour which proved to be a shock to his system when she pre-deceased him and he had to come to terms with what running a house really cost). Over the years I would see a number of those trailers with their distinctive colour still on the roads. Anything my dad built didn’t fall apart easily.
I don’t know where he got the distinctive paint for those trailers, but I have my suspicions about the source of my dad’s most notorious paint job. One year my mum took my brother Sam, myself and my Aunt Lily to visit another sister, my Aunt May, in London over in July, only to come home and find that dad had erected scaffolding at the front of the house and was painting the trim of the house a bright gloss yellow, somewhat reminiscent of 2 large cranes that dominate the skyline in Belfast. He may not have worked in Harland and Wolff’s but he certainly knew people who did... My mum wasn’t impressed, but, in the words of Magnus Magnusson, he had started so he would finish... Although he nearly didn’t... At one point when painting the side of the house he stepped back to admire his handiwork and stepped off the edge of the scaffold, falling onto the hedge at the edge of the garden... two feet further and he would have killed himself... By this stage I had been pressed into service as his assistant and was standing at the bottom of the scaffold witnessing the whole thing... His response was to pick himself up, climb back up the scaffold and carry on regardless... I learned a number of things from this brief episode.
1) How to erect and take down scaffolding quickly, a skill I later employed in the theatre a number of times.
2) Yellow is not an attractive colour on a house.
3) To have a respect for health and safety at work... A lesson my father never really learned...
Shalom
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