At the risk of straying off the mining theme for once, may I respond
to Mary Mills' comments,about Bells Asbestos on the Greenwich
peninsula, which she made in the context of the Havelock mine
and Turner & Newall.
In 1955-57, in between working for a tunnelling contractor driving
haulage roads for the National Coal Board, and going out to
India to mine copper, I spent 2½ years in the engineering
department of Turner Brothers Asbestos (part of the Turner and
Newall group) in Rochdale (now Greater Manchester). The TBA
factory in Rochdale was probably the town's largest employer at
that time, and was, I think, the largest works in the Turner and
Newall group.
We received lump asbestos from the company's mines in
Canada and southern Africa (including, no doubt, Havelock),
reduced the lump to fibre, blended the fibres with cotton and
then put much of it through the principal textile processes --
carding, spinning and weaving. A portion was not spun but
blended with rubber or resins, and the range of products was
quite wide. We supplied the material for Ferodo brake pads;
made a variety of V-belts; gasket materials; asbestos cloth for
insulation, such as boiler coverings; and rope-like sealant
materials for pushing into steam engine "stuffing boxes",
where the piston rod emerged from the cylinder. These
"ropes" were made in a small department housing
ear-shattering plaiting machines, the department rejoicing
in the name "Greasy Plaiting".
I have no recollection of hearing about the post-1935 Erith factory,
although I did associate the Bells Asbestos name with some
mines in Canada, and one of our trade-marks was "Bestobell".
Other Turner's factories which I knew of were at Hindley Green,
near Wigan, and one at Dungannon in Northern Ireland.
I joined Turners soon after my spell with the tunnelling contractor
where the work had inspired me to write the poems which Mason
Coggin kindly included in his "Rhymes from the Mines" book.
My only verse about Turners went like this:
We spin rock here - would you believe it?
Then, as though that weren't enough,
We next proceed to plait the stuff
Or even weave it!
But I digress. Some of the work was akin to mineral processing,
but the mining was far away.
Tony Brewis
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