Photographs showing an automatic sewing machine putting together bags intended for Sulphate Ammonia. The third photograph shows the bags being branded ready to be distributed out.
Picture Stockton Archive
A Pictorial History of Stockton-on-Tees
Photographs showing an automatic sewing machine putting together bags intended for Sulphate Ammonia. The third photograph shows the bags being branded ready to be distributed out.
Looking at the pictures on show I would like to point out that the filling of the bags on the belt was a three man or women job. The first operator would fill the bag from the spout, the second operater would top turn the bag to present it for the sewing machine then the third operater would stitch the bag.
The bags were either made of hessian or thick paper of which you could get 4 ply paper bags or 6 ply paper bags. These bags were very rough and at times the operators finger ends would be bleeding with the constant rubbing when filling all day doing 300 tons either into storage or onto lorries or into rail box wagons.
This must be an early set of pictures, not a woman in sight. In my time it was mainly women doing the branding packing and sewing. The bags look like the doubles or two hundredweight double bagged, the girls put one bag inside another then loaded from the hopper which weighed the product, then along the line to the sewing machine that stitched the top. Those bags would be mainly for China and India who would not have the one hundredweight plastic bags. The bags then ran to the chute that dropped them to the loading bay, there a gang of men stood ready for the bag to drop on their shoulders and the short walk into the covered rail wagon and stacked, they walked round in circles always a man meeting the dropping bag and as the long train of wagons was shunted through the sheds often worked overtime. The double bags would be a special order although, be it one or two hundredweight, a single man still caught, carried and stacked it.
Those loaders were in a closed shop that was hard for others to join, they were very well paid so there was always a waiting list of labour, some had been at it for years and had bent spines dropped shoulders and muscles like cords from the constant drop and carry.
The girl baggers could handle the two cwt bags as well as they could the one cwt’s. It was not unknown for bags to hang up or fall from the line, a girl would lug it upright a lift with her knee and a twist it would be back on the line and down the chute. When checking some work near the chute I heard a cry (cannot print it here) and three two cwt bags were on the floor before the line stopped. One of the young maintenance lads (lothario) dashed forward to heft the bags back on the line, the girls stood and watched grinning and no wonder, he huffed and puffed and in the end the girls took pity on him and threw the bags on the line and carried on, one very red faced lad vanished down the stairs.
When you consider there were a whole floor of bagging lines loading one train of trucks after another being slowly shunted through the shed that was a lot of product being shipped out, most went to the docks for export.
The whole product starting as air, water and coal plus anhydrite at the end. Gassification, scrubbing, compression, convertion then the NH3 being mixed with Anhydrite dried and stored before bagging and shipping out, ICI certainly left its mark in Billingham.