Aerial photograph taken 4th August 1981 of the land at the back of the Royal Navy Spare Parts Distribution Centre (RNSPDC). From the 1940s to the 1990s there was an MOD base situated at Allens West in Eaglescliffe. After World War II the base was Metal Reclamation Unit No 2, and was used to dismantle aircraft that were downed in the north of England. It then became the Royal Navy Spare Parts Distribution Centre (RNSPDC), and later the Royal Navy Supply Depot (RNSD) until its closure in January 1997 as part of the ‘Defence Cost Study’. In the distance is Crossley’s Brick Works.
Photograph by John W Chesney, supplied courtesy of Joyce Chesney.
Oh yes I remember Malcolm Lummas.
Still playing with those model trains?
Do you remember Jerry Kell or Malcolm Lummas?
Worked in the 1980-90s
And here’s my memory – as a Radio Operator in the RN I remember quite clearly smiling at this witty reply to a request for a pump that passed through our hands whilst working at CINCFleet Commcen. Probably around 1972
From Lochinvar
To HMS WASPERTON; SPDC EAGLESCLIFFE PUMP NO LONGER MANUFACTURED. ALTERNATIVES OFFERED ARE LEFT HAND HANDLED PUMP UNIT AND RIGHT HANDED HANDLED PUMP UNIT. YOUR 232000Z FEB ASKING FOR PUMP HANDLES NOT UNDERSTOOD. DO YOU REQUIRE 1 IN NO. GREASE PUMP HAND OPERATED LEFT HANDED HANDLE AND 1 IN NO. GREASE PUMP OPERATED RIGHT HANDED HANDLE OR ONE LEFT HANDED? PUMP HANDLE FOR A LEFT HANDED HANDLED PUMP TOGETHER WITH ONE RIGHT HANDLED HANDLE FOR A RIGHT HANDLED HAND OPERATED PUMP.
Some further remarks on my memory of Nuffields. It was a clean open factory with buildings well spread out with grass between the buildings. They had modern canteens which we could use after their own folk had been through. They also had what we called tea cabins, a small concrete cabin, you went in one door along a passage then passed the serving counter and back out the other passage. You got fresh made bread sandwiches and good tea, again as contractors we went in after their own people and I would close the first door then slip the lock on the second door as we left. There were locker rooms and showers, unheard of in most local industry and very handy to a dance mad lad who could go home already cleaned up.
As to £2/10/0 being good money it was super money at a time a tradesman on peice work and overtime (Saturday was a normal working day then) got £11 if he was lucky a lot of them were Dilutees and got a lot less. A pint was 8 pence, cigarettes 5-6 pence a packet the Palais 1/- one shilling. Too young to drink (so I was told) never smoked in my life (a few battles fought over that but I was big and rough), you could not buy clothes on ration or very much else most stuff rationed. Mother got most of the money but handed it back if she knew I did not have enough for a dance the bus and a cup of tea at the dance. “Oh” and fish and chips on the way home at the Avenue.
Peice work was the bain of all our lives tradesmen and dilutees, the labourers got a hand out from their mates on pay day an archiac way of doing things. One of the mates would help me open the boxes of Aluminium plate (he wanted the wood) then give me a hand to stack the light plates ready to cut they were usually six feet by three feet, I would slip him a couple of shillings at the end of the week for cigarettes, he was quite happy with that and probably more than he got off some.
The foreman gave you a job very often repetative as in locker shelves and say a price, you then had an auction between you until you felt you could make the price. My first job would be to look at all the actions needed then make up rigs jigs and even cut out some actions until I had a steady run. The first week you may make time and a third then as it started to go up the Foreman would come and negotiate, sometimes you would say OK others stick your heels in and as my machines were outside Arthur Browns Office he would be out like a rocket if he saw red faces and arms waving usually not mine.
It was a harsh environment and dangerous as well, with plate being moved around and worked on unguarded machines,accidents happened, wipe the blood off and get cracking was the way we went even as a lad. Our work at Nuffields was making and fitting guards to moving machines and often whilst it was moving, there had been accidents among the women workers so they were trying to make it safer for them, by todays standards the place would have closed down as would every factory on Teesside.
A very different working place than todays shop floor, wartime allowed a lot of corners to be cut although the men sang as they worked, you did not see the strained faces you at times see when Camera’s are in modern factories, who was happier, we certainly did not have some of the pressures todays workers have.
Thanks to Frank Mee for his further description of what went on in terms of manufacturing aluminium lockers. I am glad he succeded in geting some sort of reward for his intelligence and aptitude, but the way that they tried to get one over him seems classic, I am pleased you stuck it out . I would guess £2.50 in those days would be not bad at all, when you could get a bag of chips for less than one new pence…
Fred as a sixteen year old inquisitive lad knowing nothing of the process, I asked, I was told it was a continuous process using a lot of electricity and the scrap added was just part of the process. The liquid flowed into moulds on a belt moving as they filled and then on out where the moulds were turned and emptied and the ingots stacked from floor to roof. A box train was loaded each day and vanished to where I know not it was still war and secrets kept.
I can only assume the rest of the process happened elsewhere.
We used a lot of Aluminium in our trade and it all came from Canada in lovely boxes which the lads fought over, at a time of no new furniture you could use some of that wood.
The Aluminium was made into ships lockers and sent in bulk to local shipyards to be built into the boats.
As a lad my job was to shear the plates to size for the shelves using a foot operated guillitine then hand bending those shelves with up to six or eight bends forming front and back and making them rigid to slip into the lockers the men made.
My wage 13/4 thirteen shillings and four pence but they put me on peice work, using my head and making jury rigs I got that up to £3 a week when the men on a base week only got £5.
They cut my price, I refused, got sent home until Arthur Brown arrived on the second day gave me a lecture on the Foreman alaways being right, “not when he agreed a price and did not allow for a young lad with brains working things out”. Arthur said be happy with £2/10/0 and go back to work, I liked Arthur so did and discovered the lads running out of shelves to finish their lockers and get paid had threatened to hang the Foreman from the top floor. Trouble was my middle name.
Just on a technical point. A smelter is a furnace of some type which is used to produce a metal from its ores. In the case of an aluminium smelter, it is an electrolysis process in which an electric current is passed through a molten mixture of aluminium oxide and aluminium fluoride (cryolite). The pure molten aluminium is drained off from the bottom of the electrolysis bath at about 750°C.
It seems that what was being done at Eaglescliffe was a sophiticated remelting operation of good quality scrap. It would be interesting if Frank could tell us more about the procedures as there is a variety of different types of alumnium alloy. Casting and forging alloys used for engine parts, like pistons and supercharger casings, are quite different to the duralumium type grades used for airframes.
The Nuffield Factory at Eaglecliffe was from the beginning an Aluminium Smelter, they cast Aluminium ingots in thousands. Scrap Aluminium was certainly used although it was only part of the process. From the beginning due to censorship we were never told exactly what they did there.
Crashed airframes arrived by train from all parts of Britain and not just the North, I went in with my mate just before the war in Europe ended and had a wonderful time scrambling through some of those airframes, some were still in the boxes they had been shipped across the Atlantic in and proved to be not suitable for RAF use.
When the war in Europe ended the Americans decamped, some to Germany but many back home they still had a war in the Pacific to fight, they left masses of equipment which in time arrived at Nuffields for the reclamation of exotic metals all of which we had to import, masses of Lacomin and Allison engines were being smashed up for the metals they contained, the Allison looked much like a Merlin although there the comparison ended and that led to the urban myth that Merlins had been buried in the dumps around the factory, it never happend as Merlins were by then being used in Tanks and all types of heavy military vehicles detuned and called a Meteor. Up to me going in the Army I was in that modern factory many times and it got busier after the war as they reclaimed metals, I also know by a couple of friends working there it was still busy into the 1950’s. Hundreds of men and women worked there during and after the war, people thought it a good place to work compared with some of the satanic mills around the area at the time.
I remember undertaking Public Order Training (tactical riot shield training and the like) here in the early 1980’s whilst I was a member of Cleveland Constabulary’s Special Operations Service (SOS). Freezing cold in the winter in spite of the petrol bombs !!
Also used to do the same at the old Whessoe’s fabrication sheds off Yarm Road. Happy days!
Is it John Trattles once of Norton scouts at the Mill? I worked at the MOD 1973-82 before transferring to Derby
where I still live-also my brother moved to another part of Derby and like me married a Derby girl.
Hi Dave
Yes it is I, late of 1st Norton Scouts! and I do remember you, along with contemporaries like Rodney Allen, Derek Atkinson, Andrew Newton, Dave London,Ken Twiss, and great leaders like Norman ‘Skip’ Huckle and his son Ron and Arthur Stafford. Happy days! Currently living in Dorset.
What year would this have been?
“Dismantle aircraft that had been downed”— there weren’t many of those in the North East but in 1946-7 I recall clambering around mounds of dismantled Halifaxes and Lancasters which were no longer needed by the air force.
Now that this Royal Naval Supply depots been closed, I think it’s safe to mention that when nuclear weapons were being delivered to Naval bases up north, the vehicles carrying them were parked quite often overnight on the service roads inside this depot. I lived in Eaglesciffe at the time just 1000 yards from this depot, and it was discomforting to think what those trucks contained. The road convoy carrying them comprised of: First a Police car with maybe a motorbike outrider, followed by two army trucks, sometimes three, then the weapons carrier which looked like a 5000 gallon petrol tanker, then another fire engine, then two more army trucks, then a Police car, and maybe at the rear another police officer on a motorbike, the whole convoy was about 200 yards long. I’m certain the local papers knew what they were carrying for public policy reasons never reported it, thank God we have never had to use them. For those interested they were not armed and were as harmless as a packet of soap flakes, if I worked at the depot I might have been tempted to scribble on the bomb casing “Greetings from the People of Stockton-on-Tees.” but this would almost certainly have been a Court Martial offence!
Would this be Robert Bearpac Wilson, if so you will remember Jasper 26 years and a ISM medal.