FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Chapter 7 Building for the Future

GOING THE EXTRA MILE

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GOING THE EXTRA MILE

Michael Conway

Profile Press 2014

Going The Extra Mile Copyright © Michael Conway 2014 The author would like to thank the following for the use of their copyright photographs in this book: p22 Steve Nash, Catford Stadium 1994; p28 GNSYPETE (Flickr), Drott B100; p30 The Douglas Post, Beach at Tragumna; p38 Ideal Homes and the University of Greenwich, The Railway Inn at West Wickham; p42 Angela Yeoman, The O&K Walking Crusher at the Torr Works; p45 The Royal Bank of Scotland, photo of Williams & Glyn branch; p47 David Ford, Canterbury High Street; p55 Croydon Council, building work at The Queen’s Gardens; pp56/57 Ian White, photos of the Opening of The Queen’s Gardens; p57 ‘dozymoo’ (Flickr), Reclining Figure; p58 Andrew Dunsmore, Croydon Care Awards 1983; p72 Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea Local Studies and Archives, Portobello Road Market; p76 Solo Syndication and The Daily Mail, aftermath of The Baltic Exchange bomb 1992; p80 Biggin Hill Airport, the runway at Biggin Hill; p82 (photographer unknown), aftermath of The Baltic Exchange bomb; p96 Kent County Council, Mineral Site 21 F.M. Conway; p99 ‘Aconcagua’ (Wikipedia, GFDL), BAUMA 2007; p123 Benninghoven GmbH & Co. KG, Benninghoven HQ and plant; p146 General Electric Lighting, Tower Bridge at night (image courtesy of Richard Chivers Architectural Photography); p150 Eyevine (David Leverton), flooding at Oxford Street 2012; p161 Photo by David Iliff (licence: CC-BY-SA 3.0), Tower Bridge at night; p167 geograph.org.uk, The former Marine Station, Dover; p167 Architectural Products Ltd., Dover Port Marine Cruise Terminal 1.

Going The Extra Mile was compiled and produced by Barnaby Newbolt for Profile Press which is an imprint

used by Jonathan Mantle & Associates. Design by Shireen Nathoo of SNDesign. Printed by Pureprint, Uckfield. Pureprint is EMAS and FSC accredited, and is a CarbonNeutral® company.

Great People, Great Work

Dedication

T his book is an attempt to capture some of the challenges and successes, some of the heartache and the joy of the first fifty three years of F.M. Conway Ltd. To all those people who took part in this story, and who contributed so much to our shared success – this book is dedicated to you with all my thanks. The story of the company has been put together with the help of a number of long-serving (and more recent) members of staff. It represents our collective memory, our working heritage. There has not been time, regrettably, to speak to every single person who has worked for the business. A book of this kind can only ever skim across the surface; there will inevitably be gaps in the story. I hope, however, that when you read the story, and talk about it with your friends and colleagues, you will fill in those gaps together. There is no role within the company, and no person who has worked for it, who does not deserve an equal mention alongside the others. The story of our company is a remarkable journey, and I would like to thank you personally for having joined me on that journey. But we should remember that the Conway journey is only just beginning. Fifty-three years may be a long period in the life of any one person, but it represents only the first steps in the life of the company. So, although this book focuses on our past, I want to use it to welcome you to the next important steps in the history of F.M. Conway Ltd. – the future!

Contents

Prologue

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Chapter 1

Early Days

12

Chapter 2

A Change of Guard

36

Chapter 3

A New Start

52

Chapter 4

Laying the Foundations

76

Chapter 5

Finding a New Home

92

Chapter 6

Putting the Pieces in Place

118

Chapter 7

Building for the Future

146

Afterword

172

A Family Business

174

Prologue

some people coming into the front room for a chat and a cup of tea. The front room was the office, and our home was the company headquarters. That was where I first learned about the business, listening to our main asphalt supplier, Dan Sullivan, who was just as likely to talk about greyhounds as about the business itself. The family business of those days seems a million miles away from the business that we are all part of today. But is it really? I had to grow up, and to learn to see things differently, because I was changing and the world was changing around me. And it was the same for the business. The business couldn’t stand still, any more than the world could stop turning. And in those early days, there was nothing to tell us that our business was going to survive. Many businesses don’t. Looking back over our history, my most vivid memory is of a certain day, nearly forty years ago, when I first experienced the full weight of responsibility for the business on my shoulders. I didn’t know then if either of us would survive. The year was 1976. I was twenty-one years old, and I’d been working in my father’s road mending business for a little over four years. I had trained as a plant fitter, and so I spent most of my time out on site, making sure the machines were working properly. When things were a bit quiet, I would spend time in the office, getting to grips with the paperwork.

In 2011, we celebrated the 50th Anniversary of our company. We didn’t go in for great celebrations at the time; we’re not that kind of company. We like to get on with things, and move forward. Our big celebration in that year was the opening of a landmark project: the new Erith Asphalt Plant and the Thames side Conway Wharf and Jetty. The importance of that project was not what we had achieved, it was what the new Plant would enable us to achieve in the future. Even on our 50 th Anniversary, we were looking forwards, not backwards. But there is a value in looking back at your own history, remembering where you came from, and reflecting on how you got to where you are today. F.M. Conway Ltd. is now a market-leading, cutting-edge company that employs well over a thousand people. It has offices and depots across London and the south east of England. It commissions and deploys state-of-the-art plant that is the envy of the industry. It is one of the fastest-growing and most profitable companies in any industry. But it wasn’t always like that. My early memories, and the memories of many of my colleagues, are of a completely different kind of world, and of a completely different kind of business. In those days, family life and business life were so closely woven together that they seemed inseparable. When I was a child at our first home in Penge, a business meeting meant

x

it. He had done as much as he could. He had taken the business as far as he could take it, and now he was starting to let go. He didn’t want to hand over just yet – that wouldn’t happen for a few years – but from that moment, I knew that it would be up to me. And I didn’t know if I was ready for it or not. Of course, he was wrong about the spread rates. As I was about to learn, you need to know an awful lot more than the spread rates in order to run a successful business. For one thing, you can’t leave an empty space at the centre where the boss should be – and with Dad away, there was a big hole, and I would have to fill it. Although I didn’t know it yet, things were already going wrong, and within a year the business would be on its knees. But that’s the way of it. It’s always darkest just before the dawn. I had been thrown in at the deep end. I had a lot to learn, and I would have to learn it quickly. But those are the lessons that stick with you. They make you what you are, and they make the business what it is today. This book is the story of the journey that the business made from its early days – a man, a lorry, and some shovels – to the award-winning company that we know today. Or rather, it’s the story of the first part of that journey, because – as anyone who works for F.M. Conway Ltd. will tell you – our journey is only just beginning.

Well, things had been quiet for about a month, so I was in the office when Dad came in one day waving a bit of paper. He put it down on the desk in front of me. The paper had a whole lot of figures on it. ‘What’s that?’ I asked. ‘They’re the spread rates, son,’ he said. The spread rates told you the area you could cover with a given volume of material. If you laid base course 1½ inches thick, you’d get so many square yards out of it; if you laid wearing course ¾ inch thick, you’d get another load of square yards out of it. And so on. ‘The spread rates?’ ‘Yes. That’s how you run this business. It’s all you need. I’m off.’ ‘Off where?’ ‘Ireland,’ he said. And he walked out. • It wasn’t the first time he had walked out. He had been doing it on and off for some months now. But this time, I had the feeling that he meant it. A couple of years before, Dad had bought a plot of land in County Cork, where he was building a bungalow. The bungalow was nearly finished, and it was taking up more and more of his time. In addition to that, it was clear that Dad’s health was taking a turn for the worse. The business hadn’t been going very well. There had been one particularly exhausting project, and it had taken a lot out of him. After that, his heart was no longer in

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My father built the company out of nothing through sheer hard work and determination. He didn’t know any other way. He hadn’t been through College, or any of that. He knew his trade, and when he gave his word, then he was good for it. He had come from a desperately poor background, and he had lifted himself and his family out of it.

13 This photograph of my father, Frank Conway, was taken shortly after he founded the company. Despite the poor quality of the old, grainy photo, Dad’s energy, ambition, and immense charm still shine through to us today. At the age of 40, he had found himself – and the world lay at his feet.

Early Days 1

M y father, Frank – full name Francis Michael Conway – was born on April 11 th 1921 on a small family farm in Broughderg, a hamlet deep in the countryside between Omagh and Cookstown in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. He was the youngest of seven children, with five brothers – Daniel (1909), Barney (1910), Patrick (1911), Bartholomew (1914), John (1915) – and a sister, Mary (1918). Frank never knew his father, Joseph Conway, who died at the age of fifty, shortly before Frank was born. And he wasn’t destined to spend much time with his mother either. A few months after Joseph’s death, Mary Anne Conway (née Gillen), who was only thirty-seven years old, married again – to a local man called Patrick McGuigan. She moved into his house and started another family. They had two children of their own, and they left the Conway children to look after the farm pretty much by themselves. Life was desperately tough for the young Conways, and so, as was only to be expected, the family gradually split up. The farm wasn’t large enough to support them all, and so they began to look further afield. The eldest brother, Daniel, set off for Canada, and was never heard of again. Barney went to Glasgow to look for work. Bartholomew (Bart) went to join him a few years later. John worked on the railways for a while, and then found a job at a factory in Leeds making road rollers with Thomas Green & Son. Mary married a man who worked at the Docks, Patrick Collins, and shortly afterwards they moved to Sydenham. Frank stayed on at the farm during the war years. Then, in 1948, he decided to join his brothers Barney and Bart in Glasgow. The trouble was that Frank didn’t have any money, and certainly not enough to pay the boat passage across to Scotland. Life on the farm was very hard, and there was no cash to spare for anything. The

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only form of transport that they had on the farm was an old bicycle, which they shared between them. The tyres had perished long ago and, since they couldn’t afford any new ones, they simply took the old ones off, and continued to use the bicycle without any tyres at all. So, when Frank set off to the ports in Belfast, he didn’t have any cash, but he did have something else to help him pay his way. To this

The earliest picture I have of Dad: on a motorbike with a friend (name unknown) sitting behind him.

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Going the Extra Mile

day, we don’t know the full story, and he himself must have told several versions of it. What we do know is this: when Frank arrived at the port, he had a sheep tucked under his arm. He sold the sheep, then and there, at the port to pay for his ticket on the boat. It’s not entirely clear where the sheep came from. In one version of the story, he kept the sheep hidden in a secret field away from the farm, fattening it up until he was ready to go. In another version, he ‘borrowed’ the sheep from a field somewhere along the way to the port. Whatever the truth of the matter, at some point in 1948, with the help of the sheep, Frank arrived in Glasgow. We know very little about his life in Glasgow. He had come in search of work. Perhaps, like many others before him, he had come over for the annual potato picking on the big farms in Scotland. But whatever work he did find, it was clearly not what he was looking for, and after a couple of years, he decided to move south. Both he and his brother Bart, whose young wife had died very suddenly of a weak heart, went down to Sydenham, and moved in with their sister, Mary, and her husband, Patrick. Bart was an excellent kerb layer, and worked with Frank in the early days of the company. There is still some of his work over in Wallington, where he laid some sets by the railway bridge. He was a hard worker, and was said by his friends to be ‘a heavy man on the beer’. Frank was a hard worker, too, and a quick learner. And he knew his own mind. Soon after he had moved south, he found the first of the things he had been looking for. In June 1951, Frank spent the evening at ‘The Harp’, an Irish club in New Cross. There he met a girl

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Frank Conway and Norah (Noreen) Fitzmaurice were married on September 1 st 1951, at the Church of Our Lady & St Philip Neri, Sydenham, only three months after they first met at ‘The Harp’ in New Cross.

called Norah Fitzmaurice, who worked at a hairdresser’s round the corner. They got on famously. And she must have known her own mind, too, or perhaps Dad was particularly persuasive, because three months later, on September 1 st 1951, they were married at the Church of Our Lady & St Philip Neri, Sydenham.

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Going the Extra Mile

They found a house for rent nearby, in Wells Park Road. And that was where, in September 1953, their first child, my elder sister, Annette, was born. I came along a couple of years later, and my younger sister, Margaret, a year after that. By this time, Norah and Frank – Mum and Dad – had bought their first house at 149 Croydon Road, Penge. This house was to become the first office and headquarters of F.M. Conway Ltd. But that was still a few years off. D ad was a road mender. I don’t know where he learned his trade, perhaps with Barney and Bart in Glasgow, or maybe when he came down to London; but road mending was the trade he had turned his hand to. His first job was with Roads Reconstruction Ltd., based in Maidenhead, where he became General Foreman. After a few years with them, he left and joined Allmacadams Ltd. (now part of the Colas Group) working for Dan Sullivan, a fellow greyhound enthusiast who became a great friend. It was itinerant work, so Dad was away from home a lot, which wasn’t ideal for a man with a young family. Besides, he was ambitious and was always looking for something better. In 1959, he went into partnership with the three Hart brothers who had set up their own business in Croydon Old Town. This didn’t last long. The Harts worked hard, laying drives, doing heavy gardening work, etc. But Dad had set his sights higher. He wanted his efforts to lead somewhere; he wanted to be part of a business that would grow and develop. There

149 Croydon Road was my first home, and the first headquarters of F.M. Conway Ltd. The front room was the company’s only meeting room and office. People came in and had a cup of tea in the kitchen with my mother, and I’d listen to what was going on.

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And so, in 1961, he made the bold decision that was to shape not only his own life, but also the lives of all the rest of the family.

was only one way to be sure of achieving this. And so, in 1961, he made the bold decision that was to shape not only his own life, but also the lives of all the rest of the family. Without telling Norah what he had in mind, Dad went out one day, sold the family car, and came home with a pick-up truck, and some shovels. At the grand old age of forty, he was doing what he must have dreamed of doing for years: he was starting his own company. And that’s how F.M. Conway Ltd. was born.

Dad setting off to work in the first Conway van.

Mum was appalled, of course. Why was he taking such a risk at their stage of life? They had three young children, and a sizeable mortgage. Where was the money for all of that going to come from? She couldn’t sleep for weeks. But Dad was determined, and within a couple of months he had landed the new company’s first large job. Significantly for the future of the company, the job was not with a private developer, but with the Local Authority. Some new houses had been built just outside the village of Banstead along two adjoining roads: Kenneth Road and Chalmers Road. The roads were little more than gravel tracks – no kerbs, no drains, nothing. The Council wanted Dad to do a complete job on them: put in the drains and the soakaways, put down the kerbs and pavements, lay the roads, and lay the drives to each of the houses. It wasn’t a big job by today’s standards, but it was a massive job for a new company with no cash in the bank.

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I was only six at the time, but this is one of my earliest memories. I remember going on that job, and watching excavators dig trenches and lay pipes. I would come home, and play with my toy diggers, and fill up dump trucks like many boys my age.

Myself, my older sister Annette, and my younger sister Margaret on the sofa (black and white) and in the garden at Croydon Road (colour). The other picture shows Dad making hay. He and his brothers were good with a scythe, but ‘Party’ (Patrick) was the best and quickest, even with a pipe stuck in his mouth.

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Bob Adcock remembers going in for his tea at 3.30, and coming out twenty minutes later to find ten more lorry loads of hot asphalt waiting for them.

When it came to laying the road, Dad ordered the asphalt through his friend Dan Sullivan; and he needed a lot of it. It arrived in a long procession of ten-tonne lorries – fourteen of them were all due on the one day. It was going to be the hardest day’s work that they had ever done. Dad’s gang that day (F.M. Conway’s first gang) included himself and seven others: Maurice Sullivan, Mick Sullivan, Mickey Leiden, Alfie Hoolihan, Joe Garry, Patsy Moran, and Bob Adcock. Now, gravel asphalt is particularly hot to work with. And in those days, there was no standard protective clothing. Some professional road menders wore clogs, but most used their own boots. Mickey Leiden always used an old pair of shoes with holes in them. He would cut out some pieces of cardboard, put a small piece inside each of the shoes, and wrap a larger piece around the outside, tying the whole thing up with string like a brown paper parcel. Well, two layers of cardboard were nowhere near enough for that job. Towards the end of the day, the hot asphalt was coming through those holes in his shoes. The only way he could keep going was to stick his feet in the bucket of water they used for brewing the gang’s tea. By teatime, they had laid 140 tonnes of asphalt, and were pretty much ready to call it a day. Bob Adcock remembers going in for his tea at 3.30, and coming out twenty minutes later to find ten more lorry loads of hot asphalt waiting for them. That day they laid 240 tonnes of asphalt! A couple of days after they had finished, Dad was phoned by Dan Sullivan wanting to know why he had ordered the asphalt from him but not the machines for laying it. ‘What machines?’ Dad asked him. ‘We couldn’t afford machines.’ They had laid the whole lot by hand! That was a monstrous day’s work.

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M y other early memories are of people coming into the front room at Croydon Road to have a cup of tea with Mum. The front room doubled up as the company office. I remember Dan Sullivan sitting there, talking to Mum. He had what I thought of as a ‘grumpy’ voice; only later did I find out that he had cancer of the throat. He and Dad went out quite a lot together, mostly to watch the dogs. Dad had a greyhound called ‘La Pasada’; and Dan kept a racing dog of his own, too. I can’t say that I paid much attention to what was going on with the business, although I was happy to sit in the front room and listen to them all. I was too young to understand any of what they were talking about. But it did leave a strong impression with me – an impression that has lasted and grown with the years – that the family and the business were deeply rooted in each other. Even in those early years, I was beginning to understand what it meant to be part of a family business.

Catford Stadium twenty years ago – it’s now closed. Dad was a regular visitor to the Stadium. On one occasion, he and Noreen went there with Sid Leach and his wife, Katie. Sid was a fitter who doubled up as a chauffeur for my father. That evening, Sid was driving them all in Frank’s new green Jaguar. As he drove through the entrance to the Stadium, the wind blew the gate smack into the wing of the car. There was no money wasted on the dogs that evening.

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Dad also had a lorry … It was an ‘A’ type Bedford with a split windscreen, a wooden body, and a set of tyres that were worn almost completely bald.

B y the mid-sixties, it would be fair to say that the company was established. We had annual contracts with the Councils in Wallington (now Sutton), and Beckenham (now Bromley), mostly for the reconstruction of footways. Turnover was now double what it had been for the first few years – we were about to move into six figures for the first time in the company’s history. We could justify a proper office of our own; but more importantly we needed more space for the plant. So, in 1965, Dad bought our first offices and yard at 32 Ancaster Road. Of course, most of the plant that we had at that time was hired, generally from Dan Sullivan. But, in addition to the pick-up that he’d bought in 1961, and a couple of rollers, Dad also had a lorry. He’d got the lorry from Alan Hart in lieu of the £35 that Alan still owed

This picture hung for many years in the JCB Boardroom, until it was given to me by George Greenslade. The lorry is an ‘A’ type Bedford: the same kind that Bob Adcock was driving in the early 1960s, although this isn’t a picture of that same lorry.

him from the days when they worked together. It was an ‘A’ type Bedford with a split windscreen, a wooden body, and a set of tyres that were worn almost completely bald. Bob Adcock was put in charge of the lorry since he had very recently passed his driving test. (In those days, there were no special tests for driving lorries, and there were no vehicle M.O.T. tests either.) The lorry lasted well, though it gave Bob one bad fright. He and Matt Fury were coming back from a job at Knight’s Hill. They had a very heavy

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Going the Extra Mile

load of wet clay in the back of the truck – much more than they should have had, but they didn’t want to make two journeys if they could get away with one. Coming down Anerley Hill, Bob put on the brakes, but nothing happened. He tried changing down through the gears, but the lorry wouldn’t stop moving, and they were approaching Waldegrave Road where a bus was picking up passengers. Bob yelled at Matt to take hold of the handbrake while he himself stood up and put his full weight on the brake pedal – but they couldn’t stop. Fortunately for everyone, the bus moved out in time, so no one was hurt. But that was what it was like in those days. You ran it to the limit: you had to.

Conway men on various jobs in the 1960s. (Top left) John Fenney, (unknown), Colman Flahery, Jok Cruickshanks, and Bob Dean. (Bottom

left) Tom Muudy and Jok Cruickshanks at

Wallington Park, Stafford Road, in 1963/4. (Right) Jok Cruickshanks and Dick Crane at Stafford Road, Wallington in 1964.

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J im Manning, who would eventually become a Director of the company, joined as a tea-boy, pipe layer, and manhole builder in 1966. His first job was on a Spot Tender for the London Borough of Lewisham at Sydenham Hill. It was one of the biggest jobs the company had at the time, about nine months’ work for a five-man gang, widening and reconstructing an existing road including drainage and new footways. The sub-base they used was hardcore that came

Four members of the Conway gangs in 1964. From left to right: (unknown), Bob Adcock, Michael McLaughlin, Peter Donnelly.

from demolition sites around the area, blinded with ashes. There was dust everywhere; it went into the houses and into the cars, but nobody complained. They didn’t in those days. Not even about the ‘accommodation works’, which involved the gangs going into people’s gardens to knock down and rebuild their garden walls. All the heavy work, such as taking out kerbs, was done by hand using crowbars and picks. Any hard concrete was broken with a steel wedge, not unlike a large chisel, one man holding the wedge with a pair of tongs, and the other man hitting it with a fourteen-pound hammer. It was hard physical work. In those days, two men were expected to load a five yard lorry in half an hour; and a man who could load from either side, ‘left hand or right hand’, was paid extra money. At this time, the Conway workforce consisted of a little over twenty people: two five-men construction gangs, and two five-

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Going the Extra Mile

men tarmac gangs. Masonry work (kerbs and paving) was generally done by Webster’s, a sub-contractor to the Council. At first, Dad supervised all the work himself, with help from the leaders of the gangs, Michael McLaughlin, Peter Donnelly, and a couple of others. But as the work expanded, he took on his first agent (supervisor), Tim Hyde, and he bought his first machine, a Whitlock – a bit like a JCB but not so good – still, better than doing it all by hand. The hard part was finding a good driver, and they were lucky to find Gerald Sawyer who stayed with the company for many years. M eanwhile, the business was continuing to grow. In 1969, with an annual turnover of around £175,000, the company acquired a new office at Avenue Road in Penge. The office space at Ancaster Road had always been cramped, but we

A Conway lorry in the yard at Ancaster Road. The entire yard – F.M. Conway Ltd.’s main depot – wasn’t much bigger than what you can see in the picture. This is where I had my first do-it yourself driving lessons.

kept the property as a depot for plant. It had a good yard. And to me, a young teenager, with everyone away at the new office in Avenue Road, the yard seemed the ideal place to get some driving practice in. My first driving lessons were there – with myself as instructor and pupil – in a light blue Ford Escort that was kept in the yard. I must have put several dents into that van, but Dad didn’t seem to notice, or if he did, then he turned a blind eye. Perhaps the

yard wasn’t quite as big as I had imagined it. One of the people who moved into the new offices at Avenue Road was the other Director of F.M. Conway Ltd., an accountant called

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Dad took advantage of the extra office space to set up a second, smaller company, Penge Plant Hire

Michael Grogan. I remember him as a very nice man; and to me in those days, he cut rather a heroic figure. Every morning, he would make the journey from his home in Coulsdon on a tiny moped, even in the coldest, darkest, wettest days of winter. He never owned a car. Dad took advantage of the extra office space to set up a second, smaller company, Penge Plant Hire (PPH). PPH was never seen as a main revenue earner, but it was a useful way of bringing in a little money from the plant when we weren’t using it ourselves. At that time, PPH was run by John Wolf and John Farley. In 1970, Dad won the tender for a big job at Throwley Way. Sutton Council wanted to extend the road, create some new footpaths, and a whole range of extra work. The work was divided into four phases and would continue over the next three or four years. The agent for this job was Major David Lourie, an ex-army man with a moustache, a pipe permanently stuck in his mouth, and a fierce temper – ‘he’d spit on you rather than speak to you’ the men told me later. He didn’t approve of drinking on the job, although he could never completely stop it happening (and it was common practice in those days for the men to spend the lunch break in the pub, if there was one nearby.) The Major had warned one of the men, Mickey Lloyd, a couple of times already. So, when he came over to the men with the wages, and found Mickey sitting on the kerb, trying to get the top off a bottle of Guinness, he was not happy. ‘Mr Lloyd, you’ve had a warning,’ he growled. ‘I know,’ said Mickey, still trying to get the top off. Then, off it came with a pop, and hit the Major in the face. He just turned away, the pipe clenched between his teeth, and stalked off.

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… occasionally he’d gesture to Gus, kissing his fingers in the air to show what a sweet job Gus was doing. And Gus would go really mad. We had to keep an eye on him after that.

To deal with the extra work, Dad bought a new machine, a Drott B100. He also had a new driver for it, a young man called Gus Smith who had joined the year before (and who is still with us today). Gus was an excellent machine driver, and Jim Manning recalls what happened when the Engineer from the Council came to watch the progress of the work: ‘We were doing road widening, and levelling all the road. And the Drott was making a lovely job of the road. And the Council bloke stood there watching, and occasionally he’d gesture to Gus, kissing his fingers in the air to show what a sweet job Gus was doing. And Gus would go really mad. We had to keep an eye on him after that.’ (Incidentally, that Drott was stolen some years later – just after Sid Leach had reconditioned it – from a car park in Elm Grove. We found out later that it had ended up in South Africa.) Harry O’Driscoll came onto the Throwley Way job a couple of years later in 1972, first as a labourer, and then as a roller driver. He remembers doing his ‘roller road test’ along Ancaster Road. Bill Slade, a plant fitter, was supervising him. (Bill was an enormous man, over six foot six tall, but it was his hands that everyone commented on – they were huge.) Harry hadn’t yet done a driving test for a car, and was more than a little nervous, partly because the brakes on the roller didn’t work. ‘What do I do if I need to stop?’ he asked. ‘Put it in reverse,’ Bill told him, which he did – not managing to stop the roller, but achieving his first ‘wheel spin’ on Ancaster Road.

The Drott B100 – which was state of the art in the early 1970s – is now a collector’s item.

Also in 1972, while the job at Throwley Way was still going on, Dad took on another large job in Tonbridge. It was for a large estate, and involved about three thousand square metres of construction for new

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Chapter 1 Early Days

So, Sid let her know that Gerald had a girlfriend down there. And Katie used to drive down every day, and sit there in the car, keeping her eye on him.

roads and footpaths, and final surfacing for the whole estate – over twenty thousand square metres. Not only was this quite a lot to take on, at that time, it was also the first metric job that he – or Tonbridge – had ever done, which made life considerably harder for everyone, especially for men who were used to measuring with their boots. But, in spite of the new machines, a lot of the work was still done by hand. Bob Adcock, who was the Drott driver on the Tonbridge job, recalls being the only man on site when a delivery arrived: ‘All of a sudden, this artic came in with a load of pipes. I was scared out of my life. There was nothing there to unload them; they all had to be handled off. They were nine-inch concrete pipes, and six feet long. The driver got up on top, and I had to stand on tiptoes to reach up for them as he passed them down. One slip with one of them, and they’d kill you. We unloaded all of them, and not a crack or break in one of them.’ George Staples was the agent for this job, George Stevens was the foreman, and Gerald Sawyer drove the other machine, the Whitlock. Gus recalls a joke that Sid Leach, a fitter, played on Gerald. ‘His wife, Katie, could be quite jealous. And there were women everywhere on that job in Tonbridge. So, Sid let her know that Gerald had a girlfriend down there. And Katie used to drive down every day, and sit there in the car, keeping her eye on him.’ By 1973, with the success of Throwley Way under his belt, Dad must have been feeling that things were going pretty well. Turnover for the previous year had exceeded £350,000. He decided to sell 149 Croydon Road, and buy a new family house for us, a mile and a half away at 3 Ravenscroft Road. He also decided to buy a plot of land where he

Bob Adcock in the 1990s driving one of our new trucks.

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Going the Extra Mile

From the beginning, it was a disaster. Work started early in the following year, and everything that could go wrong, did go wrong.

could build a retirement bungalow for himself and Norah. He wasn’t thinking of retiring at this point, but his health hadn’t been good for

a while, and the idea of taking it easy must have been somewhere at the back of his mind. So, he and two friends, Joe O’Brien and Joe Conmy, bought a patch of land at the southwest tip of Ireland, in the village of Tragumna, just outside Skibbereen in County Cork. They divided the plot of land into three strips, each large enough for a house and a small patch of garden. And that’s where Dad started to build his bungalow.

The beach at Tragumna.

The third thing he decided to do in that year was the most ambitious, and calamitous, thing of all. He put in a tender for the largest job that the company had ever undertaken. Angel Hill was a deep cutting with houses on either side of it. Sutton Council wanted to widen the road at the bottom and put up new retaining walls on both sides. It was a massive job and, on the back of the other good work that Dad had done for them at Throwley Way, the Council decided to award it to him. From the beginning, it was a disaster. Work started early in the following year, and everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. Concrete prices shot up from £8 to £15 a metre: extra costs that Dad could not claim. And, as soon as they had taken the old parapet walls down, and cut down the trees along the cutting, it started to rain. It rained without stopping for three weeks. The rain washed away the banks, so that the houses and gardens at the top started to creep forward into the cutting. The whole cutting had to be sheet piled,

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Work at Angel Hill in 1975. This job nearly destroyed the company. As soon as we started to dig, it began to rain. It rained for three weeks, and the houses began to slide forward. It cost a fortune to put right.

and putting everything right cost a fortune; money that Dad could not afford. On top of this, for reasons of his own, Dad had decided to bring in a new gang from Liverpool. He had them living in a caravan next to the cemetery. They were a rough lot, both at work and at play. At one point, the foreman tried to get Peter Donnelly (a Conway man) to use the digger to lift a cable out of the ground. One of the Liverpool men had already failed to cut through the cable, which was as thick as

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Going the Extra Mile

He would come home in the evenings, depressed, and tell Mum that they’d lost everything, and that it was all over with the company.

his arm, with a hacksaw: luckily for everyone, the blade had snapped before he cut into it. When Peter did eventually dig up the cable, with the foreman yelling at him to get on with it, there was a terrific bang, and the lights went out across half of Sutton. Dad was furious. He went down to the pub, where the gang regularly spent their evenings, and sacked the lot of them. He put Jim Manning in charge of the project, and from then on things went forward in a proper manner. But the price he had to pay was enormous, both in terms of money, and in terms of his own health. ngel Hill came close to destroying the company, and it exhausted Dad. He was an emotional man, and he didn’t enjoy pressure; and now the pressure was on big time. He would come home in the evenings, depressed, and tell Mum that they’d lost everything, and that it was all over with the company. By the next morning, he’d be all right again, and the panic would be over. But Angel Hill took the heart out of him, and he started to spend more and more time away, travelling to Ireland to work on the bungalow in Tragumna. And that meant that nobody was keeping an eye on the business. Inevitably, things got worse. When Dad started to disappear, he left everything in a muddle. At the new house in Ravenscroft Road, the rates hadn’t been paid, there was no licence for the TV: nothing had been done. And at work, things were no better. I was on the tools then, I was still a fitter. I remember going on site at a school in Sidcup. One of the machines, the Drott, had broken down, and I was sent out to fix it. When I got there, there was a sign up on the gate, and the name on the sign wasn’t Conway. I knew that the gang A

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Chapter 1 Early Days

When he came into the office on that day in 1976, and handed me the spread rates, it was his way of signalling a change of guard.

who was working there should have been on another job for us in Barnet. I wrote it all down, and I went into the office at Avenue Road that afternoon and told them. The office manager told me to shut up and go and do my job. So I phoned Dad in Ireland that evening, and told him something was wrong, and he needed to come back. He flew back, and we went up to the school the next day, and he sacked everyone, including the people in the office. Dad stayed on for a few months: long enough to close down the Avenue Road office, and move everything back to Ancaster Road. But he’d had enough. And that’s when he came into the office waving the bit of paper with the spread rates on it. M y father built the company out of nothing through sheer hard work and determination. He didn’t know any other way. He hadn’t been through College, or any of that. He knew his trade, and when he gave his word, then he was good for it. He had come from a desperately poor background, and he had lifted himself and his family out of it. He knew the value of money: when he had a couple of quid in his pocket, he was a rich man. Provided he had enough for a few pints, to go out and see the dogs, and maybe put a few quid on the horses – that was all he wanted. And perhaps he had achieved what he had set out to. When he came into the office on that day in 1976, and handed me the spread rates, it was his way of signalling a change of guard. The spread rates were what he knew: he could measure up a job to within a barrow-load by pacing it out with his boots. But things were changing, and he knew it. His way of working – hard work and hard play – could take us only so far.

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Going the Extra Mile

And the Guinness went to Mickey’s feet, and he started to dance in his big hobnailed boots.

And they were wonderful times, in their own way. There is a story about Dad and his gang at one of their first jobs at Marlow Road in Banstead. They were digging some deep soakaways, using plywood platforms as stages for the digging. In the afternoon, the children came out from school, and stood and watched the digging. Well, one of the gang, Mickey Lloyd, had been to the pub and had a few beers. He was from County Mayo and he liked a bit of dancing. And another of the gang was a musician, and he borrowed a fiddle from one of the children, and he tuned it up, and started to play. And the Guinness went to Mickey’s feet, and he started to dance in his big hobnailed boots. And there he was dancing down in the hole on top of one of the ply sheets, when Dad came up and stuck his head into the hole and asked, ‘Am I too late for the show?’ And they answered, ‘No, Frank. It’s all right. Mickey’s the first turn.’ It would never happen like that now. It couldn’t. When Dad disappeared in 1976, things couldn’t have been much worse. The only work we had on the books was a job for Waltham Forest Council that Dad had priced before he left. The job was to construct a subway at Cathall Road. I had been in the company for four years, I had trained as a plant fitter, and I knew as much about constructing subways as I did about cups of tea. But we needed the work; it was all we had. And it was like Angel Hill all over again. The job was simply out of our league. We had to take on local labour, and they – including the foreman – spent most of their time in the pub. We were bleeding money. I remember getting together on a Sunday morning with our accountant, Jack Basch, to go through the numbers.

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Chapter 1 Early Days

We spoke about what we’d do when we went broke, which seemed inevitable, and what Plan B might look like. But it was clear at that point that we didn’t have a Plan B – and our Plan A wasn’t so brilliant, either.

To make matters worse, in June of that year, Dad had a heart attack. Luckily, it was only a mild one, but there was no question of him being able to help out for a few months. If the business was to survive, it was up to me to find the way. I didn’t know what to do, but I did know this: we couldn’t go on like we had in the past. We had to do things differently. And above all, we needed to win some jobs.

One of the early Chaseside diggers (in Conway green, of course) still has pride of place outside our offices in Dartford today. Gus Smith did a road test on this machine when he joined Conway’s.

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2

It was my father’s strength, energy, and determination that had guided the company through its infancy. But it was going to require a different set of skills, and a different vision, to guide the company into its adulthood.

Dad supervising a job in Erskine Road, Sutton, in the late 1970s.

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A Change of Guard 2

T he following year, 1977, was a struggle. We came to the end of the Cathall Road job, but we were saddled with debts, and we only managed to get through thanks to the odd job that we picked up here and there. The office had moved back to Ancaster Road. The space, which had seemed cramped a few years before, was now quite sufficient for the few of us that were left. There was myself, Brian Cook (a supervisor), and my sister, Annette, who had just joined us. We took on one new person at the end of 1977, John Corcoran, who came in as the Hire Manager for Penge Plant Hire. In 1978, Mavis Paterson came to work on the Sales Ledger. But the truth of the matter was that, in those days, we all mucked in to do whatever was needed – which is why we had such a job to make heads or tails of it all, as our new accountant Jack Basch always liked to remind me. Jack was right, of course. But things were much simpler in those days. Not only did we all know everything that each one of us got up to (in our private lives as well as our lives at work), but we also knew everything that our competitors were getting up to. On Friday afternoons, we would leave the office (smelling strongly of fish and chips – we always got fish and chips for dinner on Friday, from Marlowe Road) and we would troop over to ‘The Railway’ at West Wickham. And there, of course, we would talk about work. One of our main topics of conversation was how much money the business had (or hadn’t) made that week: a matter of vital concern to all of us at that time. By the end of the evening, we had generally worked out to within a pound how much our turnover was. It really wasn’t complicated in those days. So, although our office systems certainly needed to be improved,

‘The Railway’ at West Wickham where we spent many a Friday evening going over the events of the past week, estimating the money coming in versus the money going out, and making plans for the future.

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Chapter 2 A Change of Guard

Plant in the yard at 32 Ancaster Road. Penge Plant Hire Ltd. was a subsidiary company that Dad started to make money from the plant when he wasn’t using it himself. Even in bad years like 1978, when the company’s fortunes were running at their lowest ebb, there was some kind of wage increase. However, inflation had been running at over 15% since 1974 and was going to remain at well over 10% for three more years to come.

they were not our first priority. Getting the work in was a much more urgent matter. We didn’t have enough of it; in fact, we had next to nothing. Turnover, which had peaked at £700,000 in 1975, was now down to below £300,000.

I was using the few jobs that we did have to get to know the men. I had recently taken on a new foreman, Alan Hart, who had been one of Dad’s business partners fifteen years before. Alan was a good asphalter, but had quite a temper, and he was handy with his fists – in fact, he was an accomplished amateur boxer. He was known to the men as ‘Jaws’

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Going the Extra Mile

We had to make use of the summer holidays to re-lay the hard surfaces at a number of these schools. We would have to work quickly, but that was OK: it was life or death for us.

because of the faces he would pull when he was displeased, which was quite often. Bob Adcock recalls an incident in Sutton when a young man, a newcomer to the gang, was impatient to get on and finish the job, so he could get home: ‘Alan used to go wandering, and every time a lorry came round the corner, this young bloke would call ‘Oi!’ to get Alan back. So Alan told him: ‘Don’t keep calling me!’ Well, it happened again. And the third time it happened, the young bloke called ‘Oi!’, and Alan hit him, and knocked him into the wheelbarrow.’ Alan worked for us for several years, and was a good worker; but perhaps he just wasn’t cut out to be a manager of people. T hen, in 1978, we struck lucky. If 1977 had been our worst year, then 1978 was one of the best, for me at any rate. First, I met the girl who was going to become my wife, Kim. Second, I put in a Spot Tender for work at some schools. It was a really big programme of work, and it was pretty much our last shot. We were up against it. If we didn’t get it, we would go under. But we did get it. It was my first successful tender, and it set us on the road to recovery. We had to make use of the summer holidays to re-lay the hard surfaces at a number of these schools. We would have to work quickly, but that was OK: it was life or death for us. Dad came back from Ireland to help out. We put the two surfacing gangs together under our most experienced foreman, Michael McLaughlin. We had eight weeks in which to do all the schools, and there wouldn’t be time to take a single day off. Michael whipped the gang into a frenzy, and they set to work. They laid thirty tonnes every day for eight weeks: more than 1,500 tonnes of asphalt, and they did it all by hand. The lorries came up each morning from Foster Yeoman in Frome

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Chapter 2 A Change of Guard

Jim Murphy on our first roller. This is the earliest picture I have of the company’s working plant, which shows the company name and address, and which proudly displays the new Conway Green!

(sixteen tonners in those days) and were usually waiting for us when we arrived. We got to know the drivers very well, and they were nice blokes. They did the hundred-mile drive every morning; then they would climb out, and brew up the tea ready for when the gang arrived. It was a friendly atmosphere, although the constant pressure of the work did cause some tense moments. Gus Smith, who usually drove the Drott, had been roped in to work with the gang on the laying. He recalls how, on the few occasions when the drivers from Frome were running late, Jim Murphy was sent to phone Foster Yeoman to find out when the lorries were due. ‘But if the load was coming late,’ Gus

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Going the Extra Mile

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF ANGELA YEOMAN

The O&K walking crusher at Foster Yeoman’s Torr works. Foster Yeoman was a great ally at a challenging time for us. Their attitude of trust and co-operation was a model to me of the benefits of working with a family company.

told me, ‘Jim wouldn’t dare to tell the gang: they’d have killed him. He wouldn’t come back until the load was actually coming in. Then he’d appear, walking casually through the gates with the load.’ And we got to know the people in the office at Frome, too. Cash was really short, so paying for the asphalt was skin-of-the-teeth stuff. They would phone at the end of the month when the account was due. As often as not, I hadn’t had time to put the invoice in; so I’d have to ask for a couple more weeks. They’d say: ‘Yeah. No problem.’ Then they’d phone a week later to ask if I’d put the invoice in, and I’d tell them I was waiting for the money. And when it arrived, I’d call back to tell them the money was on its way. That was how business was done. It taught me a real lesson about trust, and the importance of knowing who you’re dealing with. That’s one of the great advantages of working with a family business. The work at the schools, and the total dedication and commitment of the gangs, saved us. At last, we could pay off our debts, and even put some money in the bank. But it also led to something else, which was just as good. Through the contacts we made on that job, I learned that the Term Contract for the Borough of Merton (the long-term contract for highway maintenance) was coming up for tender. So, just after Christmas, at the beginning of 1979, I put in a tender for the Merton Term Contract. And then I got married.

Kim and myself on our wedding day. We somehow manage to look cool, calm, and collected – but it was baking hot outside!

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