Scope and Content
(00 mins)
The informant was born in Bovingdon, Hertfordshire, where his mother was an agricultural field worker and his father a railway worker at Boxmoor Station. After leaving school he became a motor cycle mechanic. When he was about sixteen his grandparents in Leighton Buzzard both became ill, and he and his family moved there to live with them at Kingswood Farm in Heath and Reach (now a veterinary practice). There were plenty of jobs working in the sand pits so he got a job as an engine lad, down Billington Road, working for Garside’s.
His job was to drive with Chazzy Minall on one of the light industrial railway engines and as they approached road crossings, jump off and wave a red flag to stop the road traffic. They started at six o’clock in the morning and they did two trips a day from Billington Road Leighton Buzzard to the Double Arches, near Heath and Reach. Four engines used the same single-line track, two from Arnold’s and two from Garside’s. When it was foggy, it was very dangerous since road traffic would easily run into the side of his train, even though he swung hurricane lamps with red lenses.
The route was Billington Road, down Stanbridge Road (past where Marley Tiles used to be), to Hockliffe Road, to Vandyke Road, over the brook they called the ‘Swing-Swang’, across Shenley Hill Road. past Stonehenge Brick (now Redlands) to the Double Arches.
(05 mins)
Two engines worked the line in the morning, and two in the afternoon. Sometimes they met and had to use various loops, controlled by points, in order to pass each other, since it was single line working. There was some good-natured rivalry. They often pulled twenty skips, on bogies, each containing a ton and a half of various types of sand. When pulling uphill from Hockliffe Road to Stanbridge Road, they would split the train and leave ten wagons at a time and leave the rest in a loop.
In addition to the main line, there were smaller engines with five or six bogies operating on side lines to the various ‘faces’ of sand within vicinity of the pits. They fed sand to Double Arches, from where the main engines would drive under large hoppers from which their wagons would be loaded with sand. Once loaded, the train would then take the sand back to Leighton Buzzard.
Old ‘dobbers’ (manual workers) -George Emsby, Arthur Shales and Bill Turney - would load the sand at the pits, with shovels, into skip wagons. They used to be paid piece work rates. Once the skips were full, the engine would take them up to the bridge and the sand would be transferred into the hopper. Later it would be hoppered into the main line skips and taken to Leighton Buzzard. There, at Billington Road, there were washers and driers (machines). Most of the sand was run straight across the main line bridge to where an engine took it to Dunstable and to all parts of the country. Some was taken to ports, from where the sand was shipped abroad. Because some of the sand from Leighton Buzzard was specialised sand, it was even exported to Egypt.
Other sand was tipped into Sutton’s trucks from Lancashire, which would be there every morning at 6.30am. This was taken to Pilkington’s for glass making. Less good-quality sand went to the building industry.
(10 mins)
Two firms operated in the Double Arches area; Garside’s on the right and Arnold’s on the left. In the days before legalised betting shops, Chazzy Minall would collect bets from workers -sixpence (2 1/2p) each way - and take them on his engine into town to place for them with bookmakers. His betting bag had a device with a clock on it which prevented people trying to place bets after the horses had run. The next day, people were given their winnings (if they had been successful) when he stopped the engine in a loop, down by Stonehenge Bricks
There were two staff per engine, so eight in total, working on the light railway (half working for Garside’s and half for Arnold’s), plus three others doing repair works to the line. The Foreman was Bill Gascoigne. Sometimes the bogies (wheel bases of the wagons) would come off the line at the bends and have to be put back on. There was a metal wedge device which was put on the track up which the bogies would be pushed to get back on line. There were ‘grub huts’ along the line which served as. staff rooms where workers could make a drink and cook food on small ‘tortoise’ stove. No proper toilet or washing facilities. Track workers sometimes had to straighten, or ‘skew’, the line. (Nowadays all the work is done by amateur, steam railway-enthusiast unpaid workers.)
At the time the informant worked there, most of the railways ran through fields and countryside; nowadays most of the line runs through housing estates and past industrial units, with only the far end near Heath and Reach still in the country. In those days, workers would help themselves to two or three cabbages from the neighbouring fields to take home for household use.
(15 mins)
Because there were no shops or canteens for these workers, on site, some workers, for example one called Jack, bought 200 Woodbines from the Post Office in Vandyke Road, Leighton Buzzard and would then sell them off in tens to workers who would promise to pay him on pay day on Fridays. There was a lot of camaraderie among the workers with laughing and joking. Rat catching was one of the unofficial occupations in the old tractor sheds, whacking them with sticks whenever they saw them.
There was no cabin on the engines in which the drivers could shelter or keep warm; only a little wooden hard seat which gave them a sore behind. It was very cold in the winter months and gloves could not be worn for all work. In the summer, a few neighbours living by the line might be friendly and say hello. One lady in Vandyke Road used to give them biscuits or a cake.
(19 mins)
Ray worked for about one year for Garside’s as an engine boy, then moved to Arnold’s and then moved to work a drag line crane digging out sand down a pit. He was taught by Harold Woodhead, how to operate the cranes. The work of loading the skips with sand was hard and never-ending, all day. Sand was dredged down to the water table. Wet sand would be dried in the driers at Billington Road. Two hundred weight sacks (about 110 kilos today?).
When there were thunderstorms, it could be hair raising along down in the pit, being soaked and worrying that the jib of the crane might attract lightning. But in icy weather, there were the delights of the wildlife all around – rabbits, birds, fish swans. Some times Ray would take a loaf and the fish would feed out of his hand, during the tea break. He usually worked at Double Arches but sometimes, on Sundays, would go down with Sid Capp to Nine Acre (the Compo) pit, which provided an abrasive, grey sand, believed to be used in household products such as Vim or Ajax..
The pay was poor so he asked to change his job and work on a bull dozer, clearing topsoil before excavating sand. A worker called Yatty had a large bulldozer, a Rustan Bizarus with a bucket as big as the front room of your house. Dumper trucks cleared the soil and Ray made ramps which provided access to and from the pits in the Eastern Way area. The frozen bulldozer had to be started up on a winter morning and the drivers had to sit on this cold machine all day so they wore big overcoats. It was very cold with there being no cabin
They worked from six in the morning until seven at night on week day, and until four o’clock on Saturdays and midday on Sundays (six and a half days a week). The pay was about £20 a week, which was quite good money. They were paid in cash on Friday afternoon in pay packets.
(26 mins)
Sometimes, Ray would be so cold that he would return home trembling, because he had been out in the open on top of the hills, such as Twelve Trees at Shenley Hill. Working until seven o’clock meant working in the dark with the bulldozer’s light on, sometimes in blizzards in the winter. Ray stayed on the bulldozers for about two to three years, from twenty or twenty-two years old. He had three young children so felt he had to stick at it because they needed the money. The fun he had with his colleagues helped to keep him going.
(30 mins)
Arnold’s main offices, plus engine sheds, were in Billington Road but there was a small office at the Double Arches. Garside’s also had similar offices and workshops at Billington Road.
Ray left Arnold’s when he was twenty-two and moved to work for Boss Trucks, the large forklift truck manufacturer in Leighton Buzzard. He started work on the flow lines, building the trucks, then became an Inspection foreman and ran the Inspection Department overnight. Later, aged twenty-eight, he joined the sales team and moved away from the engineering side. From there he moved into sales for Grundfos Pumps in Linslade, from where he eventually retired.
Looking back to the time before he worked in the sand pits, when his wife, Maureen’s mother and father worked for Beds Silica Sand Mines, the sand industries, Beds Syndicate, in Heath and Reach, used to hold parties in the village barn for their workers. Workers used to be taken down by coach to Reigate, Surrey, for a large party at their Headquarters. At the time Ray worked for George Garside’s, all the firm did, socially, was to sponsor Heath United football team and buy them a new kit, thanks to a Mr. Delafield, who lived on Heath Road.
Heath and Reach folk took the sand industry around them as natural. It was a living on their doorstep, a job that was easy to get without filling in lots of forms and having interviews, like today. A lot of the work around Leighton Buzzard was in quarries. The employers were sticklers for time-keeping. If you did not keep to the working hours, you were sacked and someone else took your place. Most people wanted to keep their jobs and so kept to time.
Workmen would sometime arrange their own social events, such as a day out by coach to the Royal Ascot horse race meeting. They enjoyed a few bottles of beer in the back of the coach.
(36 mins)
One or two workers over the years dropped down dead on the job with heart attacks. They were put in one of the trucks on bags of sand and taken by train to meet up with an ambulance. Some men worked there all their life, for over forty years, with no facilities such as toilets or water laid on.
One of the interesting aspects of the work was the unearthing of items of archaeological importance. Archaeological people, both professional and amateur, would say such things as “There’s a Roman villa over here somewhere”. Fossils were always being turned up and when you split them open you could see fish and large snail-like creatures. At other times, the pits were used by film makers, filming advertisements for such products as Mars Bars or cosmetics.
Ray’s brother, Roland, worked with Maureen’s (Ray’s wife’s) Uncle Harold up at Stone Lane Quarry on the drag line crane. Roland ended up as a manager in Oakham, Leicestershire. The rest of his family had nothing to do with the sand industry.
(40 mins)
Pratt’s Pit, down Billington Road, was later filled in and houses built on the site.
Fred Webb, who lived at Thomas Street, Heath and Reach, was a foreman and very conscientious. Workers were allowed ten minutes to cook a breakfast of sausage, bacon and eggs in a little tin on a small ‘tortoise’ stove. After exactly ten minutes, Fred would come along and bang on the ‘grub hit’, shouting “Come on out, you devils, Come on out! Get out now, else you’ll get a whip across your back”. He was in jest but everyone had to come out.
The young men who worked the trains had fun with rival crews and also took advantage of the country stretches of the line. Jack Major, heading for the Monday’s Hill Pit, would stop the train in a loop or sidings and spend quarter of an hour collecting mushrooms from the fields and even setting snares for rabbits for his Sunday dinner. In these breaks there was time to enjoy the many different plants and flowers but for the vast majority of the time it was very hard work.
(45 mins)
End of interview
Summarised by Stuart Antrobus (20 January 2009)