FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Going the Extra Mile

… 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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