Homepage
Old South Bank
The 1940's
The 1950's
The 1960's.
The 21st Century
Victoria Street School
Cromwell Road School
Princess Street School
St. Peter's RC Schools
The Boys Clubs
Military Service
Leisure
The Achievers
The Characters
Slaggy Tales
Ex - Pats Index
Maps & Aerial Pix
Reunion News
The Pubs and Clubs
Smiths Dock & Gala Days
Remember...?
The Entertainers
More Slaggy Tales
Some Slaggy Islanders
Pub and Club Activities
Ex-Pats Gallery
Other Schools
Religious Establishments
Reunion 2002 Pics
More Slaggy Islanders
Special Articles
The 1970's
Smith Family Album
Bert Earl
Yet More Slaggies
Farewell
Reunion 2003 Pics
Don Albitis
The Trolleybuses
Terry Larkin
South Bank Football
Blackpool Excursions
South Bank Tomorrow
For All Ex-Pats!
Remember When
Reunion 2004 pics
The Bowden/Howards
Reunion 2005 Pics
Rix Pix 2005
Tears for South Bank
PLUGS
This Is Your Life
Clan McManus
Chard Reunions
50th Anniversary
Reunion 2006 pics
Williams/Bottrill/Hughes/Whitehead's
Reunion 2007 pix
Work
2008 On...
The Artists
Contact Information for South Bank Nostalgic Society
Links for South Bank Nostalgia Society
Guestbook
|
1. Cargo Fleet Men
 | Cargo Fleet men - no date or names
Doug Allwright wrote in to identify a blast furnace:
... you can see the blast feeder pipe and the bottom of a blast furnace. The man on the extreme right looks like my grandfather Jack Allwright before his moustache thickened. He was a blast-furnace keeper by trade.
By the way Oscar Allwright was my father's uncle as was Pastor Joe Ingledew who married Oscar's sister.
The last bit refers to The "Old" Mission on the Remember...? page.
Then I got an e-mail from Terry Brown who added: Great site lots of fun looking at old pictures, the group of men at cargo fleet blastfurnace the man on third left is my grandad, Benny Murphy. His daughter Joyce is my mother, father was Dave Brown. Now deceased.
|
|
2. Cleveland Works
 | Number 6 Mill Roller Gear in the 1930s rolling Tram Lines
Photo by Jack Wright of Redcar
Jack Wright was a metallurgist on Teesside and his hobby was photography. There are a few photos on this page taken by Jack during his visits to the steelworks which, hopefully will give an insight to the inside of "the works" which were often referred to by the workers as the black hole of Calcutta"! Jack died in 1962.
|
|
3. Hot Stuff
 | High temperatures near molten steel
Photo by Jack Wright of Redcar |
|
4. Tapping the furnace
 | Molten steel pouring into a ladle
Photo by Jack Wright of Redcar
On the back of Jack's photo is the following information:
Sunday, March 29th 1936.
Exacta camera - f2.8 1/25th second exposure.
70tons of molten steel poured into a ladle from the furnace. All available furnaces on Teesside are now working to full capacity and are having difficulty in coping with the demand for steel at the present time. This is in contrast to the depression of a year ago.
He doesn't name the works other than to say "a large steelworks on Teesside" but I think it must be Dorman Long. |
|
5. Dormans
 | The new plant at Dorman Long's with Eston Hills in the distance
In the fifties Dorman Long took on a massive project which started with the removal of an enormous slag tip, the first of Slaggy Island's landmarks to go. On the cleared land they built a huge coal handling plant, coke conveyors and coke ovens and a huge gas holder in the drive to become the biggest complex in Britain. |
|
6. Gasholder
 | Dorman Long's "Waterless Gasholder"
With the slag tip gone Smith's Docks can be seen in the background. |
|
7. Lightning Strike!
 | Lightning strikes the gasholder
On the night of July 24th 1971 a fierce electrical storm raged over South Bank and a flash of lightning set fire to the gasholder prompting fears of a catastrophic explosion.
In an unprecedented display of teamwork, staff and management isolated the gasholder from the gas distribution system before bringing the fire under control and averting a major disaster. |
|
8. Hot Work
 | "Me Father werks down The Wearks!"
It's fair to say that without the Steelworks there would have been no South Bank and in the days before ICI they were the biggest employers in the area followed by Smiths Dock.
|
|
9. Casting Ingots
 | Filling ingot moulds with the liquid steel
I worked at Cargo Fleet Iron and Steel Works five times, mainly as a crane driver, each time for about twenty two months. They seemed to operate a policy of paying people off before they had been there for two years to save paying redundancy and it happened too often to be a coincidence.
When I worked as a spare hand (crane driver) I was even called on to pour molten steel into ingot moulds as in the photograph. It was easier than you might think thanks to the directions from the floor.
Incidentally, an old ingot mould was placed in a square on Bolkow Road as a memorial to better empoyment in the last bit of Old Grangetown. |
|
10. The Steelplant
 | Fettling on the Steelplant
I also did odd shifts on the steelplant where I was called on to pour molten steel from one ladle to another and quite enjoyed the experience - except for "The Story"!
The old hands quite enjoyed telling the tale about the man who got his son a job on the plant. When the furnace was tapped the molten steel flowed into a big ladle and before the crane hoisted it up it was the boy's job to step forward and scatter anthracite on the top of the liquid steel to form a skin.
According to the tale the boy stumbled and fell into the molten steel and as the flesh melted from him he struggled to get out, holding his hand out to his father. The horrified father realised his son was finished and stepped forward with a long pole and deliberately pushed him under to shorten his suffering. An horrific tale.
Some years later I worked at Dorman's Cleveland Works for five years and was told the same tale purported to have happened there!
I subsequently learned that the same story is told in all steelworks around the globe! |
|
11. Slag Waste
 | Running off the slag
The waste product of steel making is slag which was run off into moulds and hauled off to a tip. These tips tended to grow into small mountains and at one time practically surrounded South Bank giving rise to the nickname of Slaggy Island.
Of course this was in the days when the only use for slag was to crush it and caste it into cobbles to pave the back alleys.
|
|
12. The Crusher
 | Hard Labour!
It was discovered that slag was an excellent material for road foundations, once broken into manageable sizes. This was a job done by hand (and hammer!)in the early days before machinery could cope with the extreme hardness of the slag in the Crusher. This use of the slag hardly made a dent in the slag tips until the advent of the motorways and this, plus the invention of "slag wool" for insulation, altered the South Bank skyline dramatically.
This story brought back memories for Michael McLoughlin over in Oz:
"Looking at this picture of those workmen slaving on breaking up the boulders of slag. The photograph may have been taken at the Cleveland Slag Roads Company which was behind Grangetown Station. I worked as a junior clerk in the site office there and one of my tasks was to weigh the slag in the bogies - the bigger the amount of slag the men smashed into pieces their individual pittance of a pay was slightly increased - we would call it a bonus these times."
|
|
13.Clay Lane Iron Works
 | Frank Gollogly is on the right of this trio
Photo from Steve Gollogly in Canada
A photo of Steve's father Frank "down the works" -but no date! |
|
14. My Worst Job
 | Cargo Fleet Iron and Steel Works
Here is an old postcard of Cargo Fleet works though why anyone would buy one is beyond me. It's quite an old pic and I include it because of the bogies in the foreground with pans on board.
The worst job I ever had was "on the lime" which was on the steel plant and meant filling those pans by hand (shovel) with lime. The bogies would be shunted into a shed siding alongside a line of wagons filled with lime. We would have a couple of bogies each with six pans on each which we called "Queen Marys" after the ship because they took some filling! You would drop the side door of a wagon down onto the pans, climb up and start shovelling, wearing a little mask to protect your lungs. The effort required made you sweat as did the heat from the lime itself, getting hotter as you dug into the centre of the wagon. The lime dust would settle on the wet areas where there was friction such as the neck (collar) cuffs and burn.
On the plus side you couldn't half knock the beer back later in "The Ruin" outside the works back gates!
I remember one day when we were in the cabin and we were all moaning about the job and saying we should put in for a payrise. I got some toilet paper and wrote out a "request" for more money citing the reasons and conditions of the job. I then signed it and had a hard job to get anyone else to do the same, although a few did. The general feeling was that we would all be sacked. So what? It was a lousy job!
I took our "petition to our Union man Percy Fenton and he was of the same opinion but I insisted that we wanted it putting in to the management.
To our surprise we got half a crown rise and I was a hero! Two shillings and sixpence (12.5p) - which would buy two pints in The Ruin!
Actually I can't remember what scale it was on. Hourly, daily or per week. It wouldn't have been hourly but may have been per shift, although it was probably per week.
A couple of weeks later I got a move on to the cranes but the lime men always gave me a cheery wave. |
|
15. The Co-op Bakery
 | Girls from the bakery having a cool down and maybe a fag
Photo from Jimmy Collins
l-r: ?, Kathy Nixon, Mary Davis, Betty Nixon, Connie Morten, Sheila Philips, Lilian Bedford.
It wasn't only heavy industry that provided jobs. The Co-op employed a great number of people, particularly girls, in their shops and their bakery which fronted onto Anne Street with a side entrance in South Terrace. I still remember the smell of their bread (but Sands's was better!).
|
|
16. Welfords
 | Wonderloaf workers!
l-r: Mrs.Gel, Mrs.Storey, Mrs.Makin, Kathy Bullock, ?, Debbie Smith, Mrs.Smith, ?.
Photo from Denyse McLeod (nee Bullock). |
|
17. Canteen Break
 | Taking a welcome break in the canteen
l-r: ?, Elsie Kidjer, Mary Smith, Doris McWilliams, Kathy Bullock, Mary Makin, ?, ?.
Photo from Denyse McLoud (nee Bullock). |
|
18. Dormans Loco Men
 | Walter Congerton second left in front of a Dorman's loco
Photograph from Pauline Bunyan (nee Congerton)
Pauline Bunyan (nee Congerton) ex South Terrace and Maxton Road now lives in Whangarei, New Zealand with her husband Alf. Pauline's sister Ann is married to South Banker Les Binns and they have been in New Zealand since 1974 and live twenty minutes away from Pauline in Little Munro Bay. Their brother Tony also lives in the area.
After settling in Whangarei, their parents joined them but sadly have since passed on. Pauline has sent two photographs of them for the site. The first is of her father Walter who worked at Dorman Long and is pictured here alongside one of the locos. She doesn't have a date but it was probably taken during the war.
|
|
19. Wartime Women
 | TRTB Ladies Football Team 1942-43
Photograph from Pauline Bunyan (nee Congerton)
It is well documented that during the war women did many of the jobs previously only done by men -but they also got involved in sport. In this photograph from Pauline Bunyan her mother Rita Congerton (nee Bunn) is fourth from the left in the top row of the 1942 team of the Teesside Railless Traction Board.
|
|
20. Clippies Break
 | Three clippies taking a break at the depot in 1958
Photo from Marion Wyke (nee Smith)
l-r: Margaret Burke (Surrey Street), Marion Smith (Bevanlee Road) and Winn Sullivan (Keir-Hardie Crescent) take a breather sitting on a coke bunker at the Trackless Sheds.
|
|
21. ICI
 | Jimmy Graham with his mate Ron Robinson looking out of a plant window
Photo from Jimmy Graham |
|
22. Works Outing
 | A trip of Dorman's workmates to Batley Night Club 1973
Photo from John Larkin
This trip on 24th March 1973 must have been just after I left Dorman's and while most were from Grangetown there was a touch of South Bank among the workmates.
l-r: Sammy Hughes, Ronny Moy, John Larkin, Billy Harrington, Eric Livingstone, Chad Harrington, ?, Charley Wilde, ?, Kenney Hinchley, Maxie Parker, Bernie Whealan, Jimmy Dawson. |
|
23. The Brickies
 | Geoff Williams, Jimmy Turner and Freddy Floyd
Photo from Ray Ward via Marlene Dales
Ray had passed two photo copies to Marlene for me, this one showing Geoff Williams, Jimmy Turner and Freddy Floyd. At a guess I would think they were probably working on the Normanby Hall estate. |
|
24. More Brickies
 | Geoff, Jimmy and fred with two workmates
Photo from Ray Ward via Marlene Dales
I don't know they other two - just Geoff, Jimmy and Freddy. |
|
|
