Apprentice Days

Just a short reminisce which might be of interst to our members, I started my apprenticeship at Boldy and son’s General and Textile engineer’s in Jan 1962 and had some happy years learning turning ,milling, gear cutting and fitting, all in an atmosphere of old fashioned almost Victorian surroundings, with ancient belt driven lathes planers millers, shapers and slotters ect,but the skills passed on from the old timers who worked on the shop floor at the time of my apprenticeship was to stand me in good stead in later years.

The very first morning  I started was a dark cold  frosty new years day morning 1962,yes no holiday then for new years day, I made my way down  the heavily cobbled yard past the Garage which was part of the company  and reported to the Forman’s office at 7 15 am prompt for the 7 30am start being keen and to make a good impression I made sure I was early only to be told by the Forman that apprentices start at 8 am and that I was to make myself scarce while the right time came, the Forman, whose name was Frank promptly guided me to the small boiler house which was used for heating the place and told me to make myself comfortable on one of  the various benches against the walls, this I did and was soon comfy my mind drifting away listening to the sound of gently escaping steam and a sizzling safety valve on top of the heavily lagged boiler, my mind was drifting back to just a few months before when before I left school   I went job hunting hoping to get a job on the railway, the sound of the gently  escaping steam took me back to when I entered Maningham shed to seek out the shed Forman  to enquire if there was any possibilities  of me been taken on as a cleaner then fireman, I found the Forman in a small office in one corner of the roundhouse and after explaining to him what I wanted to do he politely told me that there was no future in the Bradford sheds, and that includes Low  Moor Shed, the only place I was likely to get taken on was Leeds Holbeck,and that was as an apprentice  fitter, With that I thanked the Forman and left the shed and promptly made my way to Low Moor Sheds, only to be told the same thing, my world came crashing down on me as this was the only thing  I ever wanted to do, in retrospect if I had gone to Leeds, as my mate did I would have most likely ended up as a diesel fitter like he did, this would have meant I would still have worked on the railway, perhaps this is what I should have done as the last thing I wanted to do was to work with machine tools. I was brought back to reality when a short stocky figure appeared at the doorway to the boiler room calling my name, it was one of the  Boldy  Brothers, Harry was his name and he was thee main man in the works, the first thing I saw was that he was dressed in a brown warehouse coat and wearing the biggest flat cap on his head I had ever seen ,my granddad always wore one of these but never as large as this one I bet he never got wet in the rain, it was like  one which George Formby wore in one  of his early  films.

 I was taken into the main workshop and introduced to the Forman again and the other Boldy brother called  Alf,   Alf was the youngest of the two and he was well into his seventies then, Later I was to find out that Alf was always good for cadging a cig off, he used to always carry around a flat tin full of the biggest and fatest cigs you could get, I think they were for the navy, where Alf got them from I never new but he always had them and all the years that I served my time there I never saw him smoke.       The main workshop was crammed with machine tools, castings on the floor, round and flat steel bars all over the place, overhead shafting with large belts flapping about all above your head. It was like stepping into a time warp, I do not think anything was modern apart from a couple of capstan and turret lathes which looked newish to me. The left side of the workshop was taken up with the fitters benches, as was the bottom end while to the right was the gear cutting section, the far right was taken up by a huge ancient centre lathe of which as my apprenticeship progressed I was to do battle with this monster.

Next to the boiler house where I was dreaming of being a fireman, was the blacksmith shop, welding bay, cyanide hardening plant and a large muffle furnace. Back in the main shop I was   introduced to the chief gear cutter as I was going to start working with him, I always thought that I would not start my apprenticeship proper until I was sixteen and that I would be a general dogsbody until then ,but no, unknown  to me at that moment  I was to be thrown in at the deepend The chief gear cutter was called Tommy Nelson a crabby old sort , straight away he reminded me of Mr Pastry   (Richard  Hern)  with his drooping moustache and round glasses, also I noticed something strange about his hair, he had large bald patches all over his head and to me I had never seen anything like this before and I thought to myself that I don’t really fancy working with him as I might catch something from him, I did not want to lose my new Beatle Haircut, not a  god start I thought. I later learned he suffered from alopecia, something I had never herd of before. Later we apprentices would make life a misery for poor old Tommy, with (excuse the pun) ribald comments about his patches and cartoons of him on the walls in the loo.His sidekick was a jovial chap called Harry Myers he was a very nice chap and got on with everyone. Some of the The gear cutting machines were highly specialized and as I was later to learn Tommy Nelson was a real expert, especially setting up and using the Gleason Bevel Gear Generators, if you have never seen these type of gear generators in action before you would be amazed at them the way two sets of reciprocating cutters generate a bevel gear, and to see them been set up it is quite an eye opener. The other gear machines were the fellows type and the others being the internal ring gear cutter, which was used to cut the internal gear for the large dam comb rack’s After being shown around I was taken into the workshop office which was raised up above the shop floor, from this vantage point the Forman could keep an eye on every part of the workshop, especially us apprentices. It was at this point that it was decided to start me off in the turning department, at this point in time the only lathe I had used was a wood turning lathe at school woodworking classes, so metal turning lathes were unknown to me, I was totally ignorant in there use. I was introduced to one of the older apprentices who was called Paul, we became good friends, and as we were both into motorcycling and immediately we had a common interest. The chief turner who was in overall control was Norman Wilcox, who was part of a Harmonica Combo at the time called the Gary Wyne Combo; they did the club turns and at one time appeared on Opportunity Knocks. Sadly one of the combo Tony who played base harmonica died suddenly and the combo disbanded, but the founder continued as a duo with his wife Jena and called themselves Jena and Gary Wyne, a very good club turn indeed. Norman was  centre lathe turner of the highest skill, one of the old  school but not old in body, he served in Palestine in 1947 and was in the royal Engineers as an NCO,there was nothing Norman did not know about centre lathe work he was brilliant and passed on a lot of his experience to me which I have been ever so indebted to him, he taught me over the next few years to cut just about every kind of screw thread  in existence,  as at Boldy’s it was rare for a thread  to be cut using a die or tap ,if it could be machine cut that was the way we had to do it. Over the next 12 months or so things changed dramatically, I was involved with all the different machine tools, fitting, milling ect and made some good friends

 Museum Pieces

Some of the machine tools I used while serving my apprenticeship Boldy and Son’s would not have been out  of place in the industrial museum at Bradford Moor, in particular one machine I sometimes had to use ,this was a travelling head shaper manufactured by Joseph Whitworth,it was belt driven from a countershaft onto a large crank axle on top of the machine so instead of the box bed of a modern machine traversing left to right  the whole ram traverse while the boxbed stayed put, the stroke of the machine was  I think about  four foot and the traverse was  something like six foot. It was a very old machine but did good service, the only thing about this machine as many others in the shop was that there was not very good guarding on the machines in general, you had to be very careful. Health and Safety today would immediately close the place down.