by Terry Walton
Now I was in the wilderness, because I’d never planned for anything other than university. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, failing the examination was in many ways a blessing in disguise, because if I’d gone away to study my allotment business would have collapsed, a possibility I’d never considered. I had been accepted for Cardiff University, not that far away, but I couldn’t have come back every week and the allotments would almost certainly have suffered. When I came back afterwards as a graduate I would probably have been in a totally different frame of mind.
In practical terms the result made little immediate difference. I still had my allotment empire to look after, I could carry on living at home, and I went back to ’Pandy Grammar in the autumn to retry chemistry. But the shock of failing the exam had jolted me awake, the students I was with were not the friends I’d had all through school, and spending a whole year repeating work seemed a huge waste of time. After about six weeks, I decided I didn’t want to do that.
My father said, ‘Well, what are you going to do then?’
I said, ‘I dunno’ – a typical teenager’s reply, it seems to me now.
Someone we knew was a lecturer at Treforest Polytechnic, as it was then, and he told me there was a vacancy on their Dip. Tech. course in chemical engineering. It hadn’t yet started and I’d be eligible to join it with my two ‘A’ levels. But my heart wasn’t in that either and, although I gave it a go, I very soon left again to look for a job. The vacancy at the pencil factory didn’t seem an obvious choice, but they were looking for a chemist and, as I was still keen on the subject, I applied in November, went down for an interview and that was that: I started straight in at their laboratory.
Royal Sovereign, as they were called, were a well-established, family-run company and quite a large concern, producing very high-class pencils that were distinctively branded in red with a gold tip. They were suppliers to the Queen, so they bore the royal warrant as well.
At that time industrial standards and regulations were beginning to focus on hazards like lead in the paint that coated pencils. Children used a lot of pencils, and often chewed them as well, so the company needed a chemist to check that everything was 100 per cent safe.
My routine job was to test all incoming materials, using the kind of chemistry I had studied for my ‘A’ level. When materials such as paint were delivered, I simply took a sample back to the laboratory and went through a range of tests to eliminate the chance of anything nasty being in the consignment.
But another, more fascinating part of the job was in effect quality control. There were masses and masses of formulae for a host of different types of pencil, and I was expected to go down on to the shop floor, work with the people involved in the different manufacturing processes, weigh out the various ingredients and evaluate them, and then do quality checks all along the line as the product was being made.
Possibly nothing looks quite as humdrum as the commonplace black-leaded HB pencils that we all use at some time for making notes or drawing, and as a gardener I used them regularly without giving them a second thought. I certainly didn’t realize until I joined the pencil factory that there were hundreds of other kinds: cosmetic pencils such as lip-liners, eye-liners and eyebrow pencils for Max Factor, Outdoor Girl, Revlon and all the other main cosmetic companies. There were oval red carpenters’ pencils, fat stumpy black ballot pencils, ‘chinagraph’ pencils for writing on glass and under water, and 450 different shades of coloured pencils – there could be something like 25 shades of green alone. And there was the full range of hardnesses from 6B to 6H in the standard black-leaded pencil.
All the pencils were treated in the same basic way, whether they were cosmetics, colours or leads. They all depended on critical quantities of ingredients, the graphite in the lead pencils and the pigments that needed precise weighing to produce the various shades of colour. At the end of the process, samples of the final batches were brought to the lab for me to check that everything was right before they were shipped.
I soon discovered a ‘lead’ pencil wasn’t actually made of lead – one of the potentially dangerous substances, along with arsenic and antimony, that I was constantly on the alert for – but of graphite, a natural form of carbon that’s lustrous and very soft. To make it hard enough to use, the graphite is mixed with china clay, and the proportions of these two main ingredients determine the hardness of the pencil.
When the factory made up a particular order for pencils there could be 1 cwt (50 kg) or more of ‘lead’ to mix first, and I had to be there with the guy on the shop floor to supervise the weighing of ingredients in huge scales and to make sure they were in the right ratio. They were then transferred with a controlled amount of water to a large rotating drum of pebbles that helped grind and blend the ingredients for a specified number of days. It was rather like a sophisticated version of mixing concrete.
Once the fine slurry was judged to be right, it was pumped out, filtered and dried, and sent through the ‘waltzer’, a machine like an old-fashioned washing mangle, with enormous stainless-steel rollers that crushed the slab into a really fine powder. This was mixed with water once more and then pressed through holes in a die to extrude the long thin threads that you could recognize at last as pencil leads.
These were forced out on to long boards with shallow grooves cut in them, then they travelled past girls who rolled them by hand to make sure they were completely round and cut them up roughly to length. They were then baked dry for several days in the hot room before going to the chopping room, where they were cut to the exact length of the pencil, which might be any shape and description.
All this long process was needed just to produce the lead or ‘slip’, as the internal part of a pencil is known in the trade.
From the slip factory the leads went over to the woodworking plant to be turned into proper pencils. Canadian pine came in as flat, solid pieces that were cut into slats, each the right size to make six or seven pencils. These were ‘thicknessed’ and grooved, the leads were automatically fed in, glue was spread on the surface, another slat would come out on top, and they were clamped to dry as several pencils in a rectangular block. Once the block was dry, other machines shaped the hexagonal, round or oval profile of the pencils and then cut them individually from the block.
The whole process often took weeks, and yet once everything was up and running the factory could turn out finished pencils at the rate of a couple of hundred gross an hour (quantities in the pencil business are always multiples of a gross, or 144).
Then the pencils had to be painted. The paint coat was built up from several films of cellulose lacquer only microns thick, the number depending on the quality of the pencil: an average could be four or five, but a top-class pencil would have anything up to ten coats, each followed by a long journey down a conveyor belt to allow time for it to dry.
Even then a pencil wasn’t finished, and still needed to be given its distinctive livery or cap, and to be printed with the grade and brand. A pencil’s decoration was important for sales and identification, and could be quite elaborate. Staedtler, who eventually took over the company, produced black-and-red-striped pencils with a little black and white crown at the top end, while the more upmarket Norris brand had yellow and black stripes topped with a crown, the colour of which varied according to the hardness of the lead.
I found all this out after I had been with Royal Sovereign as a chemist for a year, when the management decided they also wanted an engineer who understood the various processes. So they sent me back to college on day-release to do an ONC in production and mechanical engineering. I did well in that and went on to do an HNC, all the while working my way round the different manufacturing stages on the shop floor.
Finally they bought out a company in London who specialized in making the extra-small pencils for diaries. These had plastic caps on the end to make sure they didn’t fall out and get lost. The machine that made them duly arrived, and then they said, ‘Right,
now what do we do with it?’ So I was given the task of learning all about injection moulding, setting up the machine and making all the diary caps.
I found it all fascinating and more than just a job, but the pressures were becoming ridiculous. I was at college two nights and one full day every week and studying to get my qualifications. Everybody was on bonus at the pencil factory, where there were rigid targets because large amounts of other people’s money were at risk if things weren’t running well.
My allotment business was in full swing and occupying much of my spare time, not that I minded having to go up there so often. Far from it: at the end of a shift in the pencil factory I could hardly wait to get home and cast off my working clothes, impregnated with the distinctive smell of the factory. I’d change into my old homely things and go along to the allotment with a sense of relief and anticipation.
It was great to breathe in the fresh air once more and admire the familiar surroundings. The allotment changed so much with every season, especially when its brown lifeless appearance over winter gave way to hope and expectation as the first promising green shoots of spring started to appear.
And I’d got myself a girlfriend. I went out with my group of friends one Saturday night (8 April 1967, as Anthea always reminds me), and we ended up in the National Union of Miners’ club in Tonypandy. I was sitting there, drinking and chatting and reading my Football Echo, when two young brunettes, one of them tall and slim, came walking towards our table. They asked if the two seats at the end were taken, we all quickly said no, and they duly sat down. Very soon I noticed that Tudor John, one of my friends, was deep in conversation with the taller girl.
‘You’ve clicked there all right,’ I congratulated him.
‘No,’ he said, ‘she lives next door to me!’
He and I swapped seats. Now, in those days any entertainment in the clubs was usually preceded by a few rounds of bingo. And I said to Anthea (although I didn’t even know her name at that stage), ‘Will you mark my bingo ticket for me while I finish reading my Echo?’
She gave me a strange look, probably thinking that was the worst chat-up line she’d ever heard, but did as I asked. As usual we won nothing. The game ended, I offered both girls a drink, and they replied in unison that they’d each have a vodka and orange, at which I nearly fell off my seat: I wasn’t used to buying anything other than beer, which was very cheap in the clubs in those days.
We chatted occasionally during the show, and at the end I offered to walk her home. Before we parted we agreed to go out together the next night.
‘Where shall we meet?’ I asked.
‘On Pandy Square,’ she said. This was a popular meeting place for young people from the area.
‘No need to walk down there,’ I said, ‘I’ll pick you up at the end of the street.’
‘Oh … you’ve got a car!’ she said, quite taken aback, because this was exceptional among youngsters in the valleys during the sixties. I mentally thanked God for the results of all my hard work on the allotments.
So we met again that Sunday night, she got in the car, and I had to admit straight away that I couldn’t remember her name.
‘Anthea,’ she replied. ‘And you’re Walter, I presume?’
‘No. I’m Terry,’ I said.
‘But all your friends were calling you Walt.’
‘That’s my nickname,’ I explained.
After that stumbling start we were on our way.
I drove us to the Vale Country Club, some twelve miles from where we lived. During the evening various friends started arriving until, by eleven o’clock, the place was packed. Then the lights dimmed, the curtains at the side of the room opened, and out came this young lady in a robe with a tape deck – there were no fancy sound systems then. She also had with her a large laundry basket.
The music started and she removed her robe, revealing that she was somewhat scantily clothed. She began to dance around the floor and then opened the basket, drawing out an enormous snake, which she draped round her neck as she gyrated to the beat of the music.
The look on Anthea’s face is imprinted on my memory to this day. I apologized profusely, but we still remained there until late. By the time I got her home it was 2am: her father was standing on the doorstep, arms folded and looking menacing. I dropped her off and quickly asked when I could see her again.
‘Next weekend,’ she replied before going in to face the music.
Despite that embarrassing beginning of our relationship, we were engaged in July 1967 and got married a year later, on 20 July 1968 at St Andrew’s Church in Tonypandy.
* * *
Wedding flowers
AT 5.30 ON THE MORNING of our wedding I was up at the allotment. Several days before, Anthea had decided she wanted yellow roses for her bouquet and her bridesmaids would carry posies of sweet peas. So there I was on that pivotal day in my life, cutting all these flowers, which had to be perfect. I picked the very best, some of the loveliest blooms I have ever grown, and took them to the florist in Tonypandy who regularly bought her flowers from me. She had to make up these arrangements and deliver them to Anthea’s parents’ house by mid-morning.
I then went back home and got myself ready to meet up with my best man, John, and walk to the church a mile away in time for the wedding.
When Anthea came through the church doors with her bridesmaids, all carrying their beautiful floral arrangements, I could feel a lump in my throat as I thought how I’d been able to supply these special flowers for this special day, from my own allotments. Plus a touch of professional pride that, just like the vegetables I sold to my customers, they were only a few hours old!
* * *
Before that important day, the Royal Sovereign pencil factory was taken over by Staedtler, another famous name in the industry. All the original family members were replaced by a new management team sent from Germany, and this meant a complete change for us.
One day I fell out with the new management. I was trying to get a job finished in the polishing shop when the new second in command came and wanted the tea machine sorted out. At the time it didn’t make sense to me that I was busy on an important production process and yet he was insisting I stop what I was doing simply to fix a tea machine.
This was in the summer of 1968. Anthea and I had got married in July, shortly after the factory shut down for the annual holiday, and we hadn’t been back long. My whole life had changed: we were living with my mother-and father-in-law, we had recently signed up for a new house that was being built, I was about to go back to college in September to finish the last year of my HNC course, and I was working with a new management team with a different way of doing things.
And that day I just blew my top and told them to stick their job.
* * *
Terry’s Tip for May
French climbers
AS AN ALTERNATIVE to runner beans, especially on exposed sites, try growing some climbing varieties of French beans, which may prove more successful as well as often coming into bearing earlier. Climbing French beans give a heavier yield from a smaller space than their dwarf counterparts, which have never been popular on our damp hillside because slugs can reach up and nibble the ends of the pods, while the heavy Welsh rains tend to make them dirty.
Runners need bees to pollinate them, and in wet windy conditions there is often a heavy drop of flowers that can cover the base of the plants with a rich red carpet. French beans, on the other hand, are self-pollinating and so every flower will form a bean, and even though they don’t bloom as prolifically as runners the eventual crop is often heavier.
There are two main types of French bean varieties: those with broad flattened pods and those with round fleshy pods, which I prefer because they tend to be less stringy when mature and seem to freeze better. When I first tried climbing French beans I grew a variety called ‘Hunter’, which cropped extremely well, hung a long time on the plant without going tough, and was slow to run to seed.
The pods are flat, however, and not as popular in our household as the fleshier round kinds, and so I changed to ‘Cobra’, a top-class round variety with all the qualities you’d expect. They’re so good that many other allotment members have been converted to this variety.
* * *
Anthea’s Recipe for May
Gooseberry Fool
(900w microwave method)
AS SPRING TURNS to summer, gooseberries start to swell up and look promising. Although still hard and green, they can be used for cooking, and picking the biggest thins the rest of the crop, leaving the remaining berries about 2–3 in (5–8 cm) apart to make good-size dessert fruits when they become fully ripe. The thinnings are ideal for this recipe.
1 lb (450 g) gooseberries, topped and tailed
2 tbsp water
3 tsp cornflour
¼ pint (150 ml) milk
1 egg, beaten
¼ pint (150 ml) double cream
4 tbsp sugar
Put gooseberries and water in a large microwave-safe bowl and cover with clingfilm, leaving a slight gap at one side. Microwave on high for 6 mins, stirring every 2 mins.
Leave to stand for 5 mins. Then press the fruit through a sieve to remove pips and make a smooth purée.
Blend cornflour and milk in a small dish, microwave on high for 1 min, stir, and then continue cooking until visibly thickened. Beat well after cooking.
Add the hot sauce to the purée and stir in the beaten egg. Put aside and leave to cool.
Whip cream and sugar in a basin until thick, and then gently fold with a metal spoon into the cool fruit mixture. Spoon the fool into 4–6 sundae dishes and refrigerate for 2 hours before serving.
* * *
CHAPTER SIX