A career in the construction industry (Part 1)

The truth is - I am hopeless with my hands.

At Colyton Grammar School, I really struggled with compulsory Woodwork and Metalwork - and in Art, I once achieved a five per cent mark in an exam – probably for spelling my name correctly at the top of the paper! I don't have a semblance of artistic ability whatsoever.

However, academically I did well at school. I was always at the top of the class for Maths, near the top for English, average in Science and pretty good at French. So when I had a choice in the third form (Year 9 today) between Technical Drawing and Latin, I chose Latin. That lasted for a year. I wasn't too great at Latin and didn't really enjoy it; my parents intervened and in the following year, with the family business in mind, I dropped Latin and chose a new subject of Engineering Drawing.

I passed all my GCEs and as Maths, Additional Maths and Science were good pass-marks, the teachers were keen for me to stay on into the sixth form. However, it was clear that a career in the construction industry was a realistic route to take. We discovered that I could embark on a four-year course in Building and Surveying at the North Gloucestershire Technical College at Cheltenham. This would be two years for an Ordinary National Diploma (OND) and two further years for a Higher National Diploma (HND).

North Gloucestershire Technical College

I had a great time at the North Glos Tech and met my future wife, Mary, at a college barn dance – albeit that we danced all night and then she was given a lift home on the back of another guy's motor-bike. That didn't deter me and five years later we were married.

The OND and HND course suited me down to the ground, particularly in the latter years when we studied land surveying, quantity surveying and structural engineering. These topics were very mathematical and my ability in this discipline came to the fore.

As I moved towards the completion of my HND, I had to make a decision – back to Axminster and the family business, or out into the big wide world, where salary levels and opportunities would be far greater. I chose the latter – and after a number of interviews, I decided to join the Birmingham based company of C Bryant and Son as a Quantity Surveyor.

Bryants of Birmingham

The Bryant company was founded in 1885 and when I joined them in 1966, they were huge. The company built new council housing to replace the slums in Birmingham, as well as undertaking Civil Engineering and private housing development, becoming one of the largest housebuilders in the country.

My work as a quantity surveyor was within Bryant's council housing department, working closely with Birmingham City Council. In the early days, I usually worked on site, to ensure that a close liaison was established between the builders' surveyors, the city surveyors, site agent, engineers and clerk of works.

Initially, I worked with two large contracts off Bristol Road, Birmingham – one involved about 500 units, with three multi-storey blocks of flats and surrounding terraced housing. The other contract was about 200 dwellings, mainly comprising several blocks of three and four storey maisonettes.

My next contract involved about 750 dwellings for the County Borough of Warley, in Smethwick, right opposite the M&B Brewery. The smell of hops wafting across the site was something to die for. The contract involved two massive 20 storey blocks of flats and adjacent housing. When I look back, I'm afraid to say that we were replacing existing slums with future slums.

We had an interesting occurrence on the site which involved me in a massive claim against the company who had fabricated the foundations for the blocks of flats. As you can imagine, the foundations for 20 storey blocks of flats were complicated, involving massive reinforced concrete structures, on reinforced concrete piles. As each floor level was built, tests were taken to ensure that there was no sinking or deflection. All appeared to be fine, until one block was about three floors high. Some deflection was measured.

There was sheer panic – work had to stop and investigations were carried out. Eventually it was established that the cement used in the concrete, produced on site, was badly stored. The cement had become damp and ultimately caused the concrete piles to fail. All three floors which had been built were demolished, the foundations were ripped up and new piles were sunk, resulting in the block of flats being moved about two feet in both directions.

There were massive claims against the company who had been sub-contracted to install the foundations, not just for the costs of re-building, but for damages claimed for failing to complete the contract on time.

It seemed that Bryants were pleased with my work as I had risen from the position of junior surveyor to senior surveyor. In my first three years I had worked on site and was responsible to a senior surveyor who worked from head office. Now I was to be given my first job as a senior quantity surveyor for a smaller contract of about 350 dwellings at Holly Street, Smethwick, for the Borough of Warley.

However, this contract would be interesting as it would be the first fully metric housing scheme in the country. Very soon I had to accustom myself from feet and inches to metres and millimetres. Nevertheless, not only were the plans in metric dimensions, but we were using metric bricks. The standard brick module in this country has always been: 9 inches long and 4.5 inches x 3 inches in cross section, inclusive of mortar joint. The metric bricks were 300mm x 100mm x 100mm – in other words, 12 inches x 4 inches x 4 inches.

This caused all sorts of problems – not just from a design perspective, but also from a practical point of view. As an example, hod-carriers had real problems. The standard hod for the imperial bricks carries 4 bricks, but a metric hod, carrying only 3 metric bricks weighed considerably more! The labourers carrying bricks on hods up two or three storeys were done for before they had reached half way through the day's work. Therefore, extra costs were incurred in providing hoists to handle the materials.

In discussions with my quantity surveyor colleagues at Bryant's, I became very much aware that the vast majority of them had one main desire - to own their own company, rather than working hard for Mr Bryant! I had a ready-made company back in a beautiful part of the country – why would I want to remain in Birmingham. So, in 1970, Mary and I made the decision to move back from Birmingham and for me to become a director of R Moulding & Sons Ltd.

During my time at Bryants, the huge conurbations of Castle Bromwich and Chelmsley Wood were being developed, with Bryants carrying out the bulk of the work for the City Council.

During the 1970s, problems arose for Bryants. Summonses for corruption were issued against the company, relating to its close relationship with Birmingham City Council, and certain directors finished up in prison, being detained at Her Majesty's pleasure.

Bryants had confined its housing to its Midlands home territory until 1976 when it opened a southern region, but it was not until the early 1990s that regional expansion began on a wider scale. By the end of the decade, Bryants were building over 4,000 houses a year on a national basis. The company was later acquired by Taylor Wimpey.

Back in Axminster with R Moulding & Sons Ltd

As mentioned previously, when I expounded on the Moulding family, four of the Moulding brothers had come together in the fifties to form the company of R Moulding & Sons Limited, involving Fred, George, Edgar and Cecil. When I returned to the company in 1970, only Cecil remained as a director, together with my father, Tim.

However, my father, mother, sister and I lived in the house adjoining the builders' yard, in the premises in South Street, which are now the offices of Thomas Westcott. Having lived adjacent to the business as a teenager, I was very much aware of the nature of our building business. In the fifties and the sixties, there was a national boom in the construction industry, so apart from large contracts with companies such as Shands, our firm built blocks of council housing at North Street, Foxhill and Millwey Rise, together with a number of individual homes around the Axe Valley.

During this period of expansion in the building trade, R Moulding & Sons Ltd grew to a position where it employed nearly 50 operatives, involving all building trades, other than electricians. The firm was "old school" and in the region in general, the workforce was directly employed. This differed greatly from my experiences in the Midlands, where all trades tended to be sub-contracted. Within our firm in Axminster, we had highly skilled tradesmen, many of whom had been with us for donkey's years, although the firm always had a very positive apprenticeship policy. Several of those who learnt their trade with Mouldings, stayed with us throughout their careers, whilst others moved on to alternative opportunities, working for other firms, or working for themselves.

My very first working environment with the company was being employed as a labourer during my school and college holidays. I remember working on the construction of the new vicarage in Church Street, a new skittle alley at the Axminster Inn and installing fibreglass insulation in the roof spaces of the new houses we were building at St George's Avenue, Millwey Rise.

It was an immediate culture shock for me when I presented myself at the office of the company on my first morning as a company director in 1970, following my four years in Birmingham. Instead of dealing with the cost implications of multi-million pound contracts, I was responding to telephone requests for ball-valve problems and blocked drains!

However, I soon got into the swing of things and found the variety of work interesting and challenging. Uncle Cecil was gradually phasing himself out, although he knew all our customers well, and was able to provide me with the introductions I needed. Not only was Cecil extremely knowledgeable, but he was a former tradesman himself – and I always envied his ability to show a craftsman how to go about a certain operation, he could pick up a trowel and show the bricklayer how he should form an arch, or build stone corbels.

It wasn't easy in those first few years. The construction industry was going into a bit of a slump in the early seventies, following the boom years of the fifties and sixties. There were constant arguments between my father and my uncle. Cecil may have been a good tradesman, but he was more of a "guesstimator" than an estimator and contracts would often be under-priced. However, I was soon able to apply the principles I had learned at college and with Bryants and was able to get us back on track.

Apart from the sundry maintenance and repair works we carried out, we worked almost entirely on contracts, rather than speculating, as we never seemed to have enough surplus capital and had a reluctance to borrow for investment. We were fortunate though, that we had so many loyal customers who put their faith in our company – knowing that we would do a good job for a fair price.

Schools

The firm carried out an extensive amount of work for local schools. Axminster Secondary School (now the Axe Valley Academy), Axminster Primary School and all the primary schools in the surrounding area – both maintenance work and property development. One thing I learnt to do, at an early stage, was to cut glass, which was just as well – as we were constantly replacing glass at the secondary school, where stray footballs had caused the damage, Cutting glass is mainly a question of confidence – firstly, placing the 6 feet x 4 feet sheet of glass on the cutting bench, then a good clean cut with the glass cutter and finally the right amount of leverage and thrust when separating the two pieces of glass.

Hospitals

Mouldings were always on call for carrying out work at Axminster Hospital, where we carried out repairs, re-decorations and major re-fits as required. Our plumbing department was particularly an essential requirement for the hospital and interestingly when our firm closed down in 1994, our foreman plumber had a career change and became head porter for Axminster Hospital. So the hospital had an excellent man for the job and a ready-made plumber on site.

We also carried out all the work for St Mary's Hospital (formerly Box House residential hospital for patients with severe mental difficulties). I soon became a familiar visitor to the hospital – so much so, that on one of my regular visits, one of the "Box House boys" greeted me with "Hello Mr Moulding – we don't mind you coming in here – you be one of us!" Praise indeed.

Axminster Surgery was another health institution where we worked regularly and built one of the major extensions back in the late seventies. Readers of "Moulding's Memories" will recall my tale of architect Freddie Kett, who had designed the two storey scheme, but in the original plans, had omitted to design in the staircase.

Churches

The firm worked on a number of local churches, including Axminster Church, the Methodist Church and churches at Kilmington and Membury.

One of my first assignments was to manage the builder's work in conjunction with the installation of the new zinc roof covering at the Minster Church, which was being installed by specialists. All the original lead was stripped from the roof and taken, under strict supervision, to the weighbridge at R J Luffs (on the site now occupied by the Safar Indian restaurant). It was then taken to a registered scrap dealer as the receipt for the sale of the lead, went a significant way towards the cost of the new zinc roof covering.

Following the removal of the lead, our tradesman were involved in repairs and reinstatements of roof timbers, stone masonry and rainwater goods. The original lead roof covering was very thin in places, but in extremely good condition in most areas.

There is no doubt that the problems encountered by the church needed to be addressed, but it seemed a shame to remove fine leadwork, which had been in situ for decades – and to replace it with modern zinc, which I believe has caused problems in recent years.

The building trade has always had characters who played jokes on unsuspecting colleagues. Before I came back to join the firm, we were involved in the installation of a new organ for Axminster Church which required extraordinarily deep foundations as the new organ was exceedingly heavy.

In those days, one of our employees would regularly take his lunch break in the Axminster Inn, where he would sink a couple of pints of cider, before returning to work. As the lunch break approached, in digging the foundations for the organ, some bones and skeletons were discovered, including a skull. When the workman returned from the pub and approached the site where the foundations were being dug, a colleague hiding at the bottom of the foundation pit, held up the skeleton on the end of a broom handle and "waggled" it around! The workman who had supped his cider at lunch-time immediately disappeared from view and didn't return to work for a week, vowing to lay off the cider! (If you're going to ask the question – yes, the skeleton found below the organ was conveyed to the ecclesiastical authorities for their historic records – and work had to be halted for several days).

Post Office

Our firm worked for the Post Office, which included "Christmas Pressure" work, carried out three weeks or so before Christmas, in order to prepare the sorting office for Christmas. This involved the provision of additional work stations, ec for those who operated the sorting office procedure.

The sorting office badly needed modernising, to make the work space more efficient. In the early seventies we were provided with plans, to enable us to estimate for the necessary work to install a range of new modern cabinets, compartments and other office furniture to bring the system into the modern era.

Whilst perusing the site and considering the work involved, we were asked by the staff what this was all about. Following our response and showing the staff the plans, we were told that they didn't know anything about this, they hadn't been consulted, they didn't want any change and it would never happen… and it didn't!

Another incident came about at the post office when our firm was redecorating the whole of the premises internally. Our foreman painter was working in a small kitchen adjacent to the rest area and had covered the kitchen units and small cooker with dust sheets. During the break-time, one of the staff wished to heat up some soup on the cooker and discovered that it was covered in a dust sheet. Within seconds, the staff were all called out on strike. Our foreman painter just couldn't believe it. He returned to the builder' yard absolutely fuming and red with rage. "If they had asked me, I would have moved all my stuff – so that they could use the cooker," he said. "We are workers, they are workers – why can't we work together?" Our foreman was such a placid bloke. I had never seen him in such a state.

Banks

We worked regularly for all the banks in Axminster, except for the Nat West. We were regularly working in Lloyds Bank, the Midland and Barclays.

Our firm carried out major refurbishments for Barclays Bank in West Street and in a previous edition of "Moulding's Memories Streets of Axminster", I mentioned that we built an extension to the Midland Bank, between the existing premises and the Old Bell Hotel. This coincided with an attempted break-in, which was thwarted, although the crooks could have just put a boot into an old concrete slab and they could have lowered themselves straight down into the vault.

One of our major contracts in the eighties was the total refurbishment of Midland Bank, Honiton. This was a tricky job as we were building an extension at the rear of the bank, which was squeezed in between two adjacent properties. One of these properties was an estate agents and people working in that office were understandably not happy about pneumatic drills and hammers disturbing their work. Negotiations took place and agreements were made for these machines to only operate between 1.00 pm and 2.00 pm or out of office working hours. This worked OK but caused a few programme difficulties.

My career in the construction industry (Part Two) will be in the next edition of "Moulding's Memories"