FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Chapter 1 Early Days

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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