 |
| A
hard day’s grind: boilermakers hard at work during
the rebuilding of a 1909 American Case traction engine
for an Austrian client in January 2000. |
‘The crackling of
the rapidly-melting welding rods, the intensely bright blueish-white
lights of the electric-arc and the choking smog that filled the
roof void some 50ft above the floor combined to create the quite
awesome and frightening atmosphere of Phoenix Boilerworks. Being
highly sensitive to ‘atmospheres’, I found the operations
within the twin boilershops fascinating, and working within that
special environment filled me with a spine-tingling complicated
mixture of fear and tear-jerking pride, for I had fallen in love
with Phoenix Boilerworks. It had become my second home.
‘It was 1958, and I had been working at Phoenix (at Heywood
in Lancashire) for just three months. I had left school aged 15
back in July. Phoenix had taken me on as an apprentice boilermaker
and I inevitably found the work extremely heavy and exhausting.
I was expected to work five and a half days a week, amounting
to some 55 hours, with the job itself being extremely dangerous.
My wage amounted to the princely sum of £2.17s. 6d. After
tax stoppages, I was lucky to take home about £2.5s.3d.’
Thus wrote Alan McEwen in his enlightening book Chronicles of
a Lancastrian Boilermaker, published by Sledgehammer Engineering
Press in 1998. That love affair remains as passionate now as it
was 44 years ago. It tells something of what happened in Alan’s
life in the years up to 1968 when he established his own business,
to 1973 when H.A. McEwen (Boiler Repairs) Ltd. was registered
and to 1977, when Alan and Maria McEwen bought the premises at
Farling Top, Cowling near Keighley in West Yorkshire where the
business is now located. It’s a fascinating tale, told in
Alan’s relaxed but warmly enthusiastic manner.
There are many sides to the man and his business and the activities
associated with the construction, maintenance and, nowadays, the
removal of industrial boilers. This generates the major part of
his turnover. Owners of road and rail locomotive boilers , steamboats
and fixed steam engines, particularly those privately owned or
in heritage or museum sites, are quick to seek out and use his
expertise.
Alan also has a deep interest in industrial archaeology, particularly
that associated with the cotton mills of his native Lancashire
and the woollen mills of his adopted Yorkshire. That includes
everything associated with the combination of steam and running
water on which the mills were so reliant, and he is currently
researching for another book that will explore the fascinating
subject of the chimneys through which the smoke from the coal
that was burnt to convert the water into steam passed, before
depositing its soot – and much more – on the industrial
and residential buildings in which life was lived to the full,
whatever that might have meant at the time! Entitled Smokestack
Britain: An illustrated study of industrial chimneys and the industries
they served, Volume 1 will deal with northern England and be published
later this year.
The railway gave Alan approximately two or three days work each week, but he could only go there at night because the electricity was available to them at the cheapest rate during those hours, and they sought to avoid the purchase of power at any other time. If he had to work during the day, then he could spend up to say six hours on his own inside a firebox in the freezing cold with perhaps snow on the ground! There was nowhere else to go to make a living, so he had to stick at it because he’d abandoned a good job at Phoenix.
“I also started to look around me, and then realised that there were still a number of chimneys standing, and so there ought to be a boiler under each. In fact at the end of the 1960s there must have been 30 Lancashire boilers in Keighley and the surrounding area alone, so I started to knock on doors to see if the owners had need of a boilermaker to tackle any job, no matter how small. As it happened, work was available, and my readiness to attend at any time for whatever purpose was appreciated, and my reputation was built on that – in other words, service. And now, of course, we are ready to go anywhere.”
