FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

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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