FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

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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