REG COOK WORKED FOR THE HODGE IN EARLY YEARS, AND HE HAS KINDLY PENNED SOME ANECDOTES AND PEN PICTURES OF SOME OF HIS COLLEAGUES FROM THOSE LONG OFF DAYS.
THEY ARE OFFERED TO YOU STRAIGHT FROM REG`S WELL WRITTEN RECOLLECTIONS, SO READ ON PLEASE, FIRSTLY WITH REG GIVING A BIT OF BACKGROUND TO WHO WAS WHERE IN THE PERIOD.
He is obviously a great personality in himself, now matter of who he has written about, and hopefully more will flow from his pen in the future.
" Dear Editors,
It would seem that historical pinpointing comes both ways. From what you have written it seems that you did not experience those times when everything was centered on Northampton. Elsewhere there was the Cardiff depot, Haydock depot, and there was something on Tyneside.
Two service engineers were based on their territory, Frank Parker for S.Wales and the SW, Charlie Wright for Tyneside, Teeside and mid Scotland. The remainder was divided up mostly by day to day need, but in general Don Cookman did eastern England, Sid Hoult the NW. There were two junior service engineers, Maurice Tobbut and Lyn Hughes who normally went wherever the heat was hottest.
Arthur Allwork was Service Manager, I was Assistant SM responsible for covering any problem in the field either with our own service people or fitters borrowed from the shops. Les Shaw was Service Manager for Cummins Diesel Sales and Service and had a desk in the Service office.
Sales used the existing set ups as bases for their activities, Hal Kelly in Cardiff, Cyril Macklin on Tyneside, and John Cheetham covered SE England both out of 25 Berkeley Square and Northampton, all three having area salesmen. There was also a Used Equipment salesman who was attached to Eddie Beasley but tenuously as time passed by.
I knew nothing of the Regional development until I saw somewhere in Memories that Harry Anderson had gone to be Service Manager in Cardiff. So I started digging and slowly something of an outline emerged. Northampton was a fiercely expensive overhead but regionalisation only divided up the costs, it produced no economies.
During my time the manufacturers represented were - Euclid/Terex, Cummins Diesel, Carlisle graders, Huber-Warco rollers, Cedarapids quarrying equipent, Marion draglines and face shovels.
The accent was on Euclid and Cummins, the others scarcely got a mention.
We also serviced GM Diesel, Leyland and AEC diesel engines when they were installed in Euclid machines.
Best regards, Reginald Cook."
PS: Reg had the nagging feeling that he had missed someone out from his UK service engineer list above, and came back the other day with the missing name, known to almost every Hodgite in the UK.
"When you were pushing me for some more earlier Memories I had the uncomfortable feeling that something was missing on the page I produced, a sort of geographical hole in the head; and there was. In the listings of service engineers of those days I omitted – Les Brind – North Midlands. You remember Les ? "Two engines and a wedding". At that time his superior local knowledge of what equipments were available and how they could be used on that grass verge beside the A1 was invaluable. Without it the job may have lasted another day, maybe two, much to the dismay of the Chief Constable.
Anyway, my apologies to Les." Reg Cook, May 5th, 2016.
Now onto Reg`s pen pictures as promised.
George Richards. Good old genial George - he never refused to go out on a field job, no matter the weather, or the conditions on the job, or the number of nights away from home, or all the other things that you can think of; and he could always find someone to go with him.
One occasion comes to mind, an S21 on the M1 with a flat tyre, Year 1958. It was policy that BH did not do tyre jobs unless the owner insisted, then it was labour at charge out rates and tyres at list price, plus expenses. It had been lousy weather for three days and a local tyre supplier had failed miserably to get a tyre mounted and inflated so we were called in. The basic details were radio'ed in by one of the patrolling service mechanics, "it is a swamp out here, the site agent is in a foul mood, refuses any cooperation, the scraper is at the side of the cut partly overhanging a hollow. The other people tried using the bowl hydraulics to level it up but it is worse now than it was, and all the equipment will have to be carried in, impossible to get a vehicle even close".
George was standing by my desk and I gave him the details plus "here is a req for two O-rings, better take two in case you nip one first time round, two gas bottles also, and take twice the usual amount of timbers just to be certain". A few hours later there was the grating grinding noise of the sliding door of a Bedford half ton pickup right under the window, I was just in time to see George climbing the steps up to the side door of Stores. So soon, what has gone wrong ?
Minutes later he came in to report. "When we got there the agent was all smiles, he got a grader to blade a track for us right up to the scraper and then the sun came out. We were able to get the machine almost level, used lots of soap, and got the tyre up on the rim and sealed at the first rush of gas. After that it was easy, drove the scraper down to the site hut and came home. The O-ring on the machine was good so we used that one. I have put your two O-rings back in Stores and torn up your req. We couldn't recover one of the timbers, it was too far down."
Now that is what you can call Field Service.
The next contribution……
Frank Parker. Frank was not too well known in the Northampton works because he lived and worked on his territory in South Wales.
When he started he did a two or three weeks familiarisation in Engine, Chassis and pump shop, plus a day in Service to get to know how he should handle documentation, but for the greater part he worked alone and unknown to most.
Personal contact was the daily 'phone call and the rare Service meeting in the Hunsbury office.
He was in his early fifties with years of experience with large machinery, most of it with major contractors and his abilities were never in doubt. Neither did he moan about the sometimes wretched conditions of the job (it rains a lot in South Wales and the South West); and no "it's already Friday afternoon, and this will take at least a day to fix !"
Whenever he had a warranty or chargeable job he would 'phone in for a job number, explain what it was, collect the parts that he needed from Cardiff depot, and get on with it. With time Doug Nichols (Parts mgr Cardiff) came to appreciate that with Frank the paperwork trail was always complete. If some parts had to be over-nighted express from Northampton he ensured they arrived on time because it was Frank who was asking.
Frank had a routine, work all week, write his weekly reports Friday night, mail them Saturday, and they would be with me usually Monday, Tuesday morning at the latest.
Then came the Monday morning of the shock, Arthur Allwork took the call, it was Frank's family, Frank had died of a heart attack the previous Friday evening, sitting beside the fire, writing his weekly reports.
What could anybody say, people get hired, fired, they leave, but to die on the job was new to us. Later someone said, possibly Doug Nichols, "Poor old Frank, all of his life he has worked on that mountain (Maesgwyn) or all around it, and now he lies buried in the shadow of it"
His service van had been collected earlier and then his family asked if we could help in selling his tool kit, they needed the money.
Everything was picked up and brought to Northampton, a large and a small toolbox, a wooden box with all his parts books and manuals, just like they had been in his service van, three pairs of overalls laundered and neatly folded, and ten wipers similarly.
How do you go about setting up shop and selling used tools ? Jack Hudson cleared two racks in his warranty store and we laid it all out. The three torque wrenches went back into the Tool store and luckily for us the Snap-On Tools salesman offered to help us with descriptions and pricing.
Us was Harry Anderson and myself, both doing what we could in betwen getting on with our proper jobs.
We opened one lunchtime and at the end of the week most had been sold. The parts and workshop manuals had also found homes with various people who wished to update their own library.
Finally amongst the oddments were Frank's duplicate notebooks including the one with the final unsent memo, the writing becoming more and more indistinct until the scrawl ended in an undulating line across the page.
Now that touches the heartstrings, we dont mind admitting it !!
The final (for now we hope) contribution from Reg.
CECIL DRIVER. In the late Fifties, Cecil was to Northampton Service what a standard database is today to any mid-sized company. During the last war (1939-45) construction machinery had been imported as and when possible and as a great mixture of makes and models.
In the post war period this process began to be more systematic and the concern of a small number of specialist importers. It was in this period that BH was formed.
The legacy of the unstructured importation was that existing fleets of machines were in the UK and largely undocumented. Some were known about, others not. In terms of parts provisioning or service support it was a very haphazard arrangement which led sometimes to machines left standing awaiting an urgent and expensive air freight of parts.
It was decided to set up machine records - one file per machine showing - make, model, serial nbr, engine nbr, delivery inspection report, 30 day and 60/90 day inspection reports, build records, field service reports, campaign change reports, owner, location at a date, buck slips, and any other piece of paper that was relevant to the history of the machine.
To begin with Cecil had to set up the files to make the records, then while dealing with the current inflow of reports, he had to painstakingly work back through all previous paper- work, filed according to any system that had seemed logical at the time, but which did not suit the needs of today.
Within a few months the system was beginning to show its usefulness with more and more people making reference to it. Warranty in particular made extensive use of serial nbr. data for it was not unknown for users to claim a component that had failed on a machine out of warranty as being from a machine still under warranty.
In principal the system was open to anyone who needed information - service, field engineers, parts, warranty, sales, even management. Inside the office it was understood that Cecil had a need to know, there was no manager waving a big stick at us to keep him informed but several times a day you would hear "Cecil, you might want to look at this".
Cecil would arrive beside your desk, his pencil behind his ear, and evaluate what you had found, and you would wait for the danger signal. "Very interesting, I'll just make a note of that" signalled the urgent need to cover every piece of paper on your desk with hands, arms, elbows, even forehead, because Cecil would make his note on anything that was conveniently to hand.
Well thats it for now, but hopefully, we will encourage Reg to keep contributing, despite as he says, being in his middle 80`s now, because we have found this stories to be so clear in recollection, to the degree that if you were`nt there, you felt like you must have been, or wanted to be.
Many thanks Reg, and apologies for having taken so long to publish your excellent contributions…..long may they keep coming.
The Editors.
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