FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Chapter 3 A New Start

If any of his people arrived late … , Roy would be waiting for them, glaring at his watch; and he was as likely as not to send them straight home: no work and no pay.

the hours I expected him to work, from 8.00 till 6.00. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Those aren’t my hours.’ I was taken aback. We’d been getting on fine. What was going to happen now? ‘No,’ he said. ‘My hours are from 7.00 till 7.00. Those are the hours that I work.’ And that’s how Roy Hedderman came to join us as Workshop Manager at Oakfield Road. Roy was a fierce timekeeper. If any of his people arrived late, even a few minutes late, Roy would be waiting for them, glaring at his watch; and he was as likely as not to send them straight home: no work and no pay. Darren Brown was the first apprentice Roy took on in the workshop (he later took on Tony Taylor and Terry Churchill – all of them still with us today). Darren remembers what it was like if you didn’t get to work on the dot. Darren lived on the estate across the road from the workshops, so he used to go home for lunch. On this occasion, he got back two or three minutes late, and there was Roy, glaring at his watch. Although Darren was the first back – all the others, including his brother David, were still over the road at ‘The Royal Oak’ – he got sent home, as did the rest of them. John Tobin, who joined a couple of years after Darren, had an interview with Roy that got off to a bad start when he arrived late, even though he had a reasonable excuse. Roy had fixed the interview for seven o’clock on a Saturday morning, and perhaps John had been a little late to bed on the Friday night, because when he left the house at six-thirty on Saturday morning, he managed to leave both his car keys and his house keys inside the house. Eventually, in desperation, he had to break the window of his front door, so he could climb in and recover them. He was late for the interview, but he managed to get the job, and when he arrived for work at seven the following Monday morning, he was very much on time.

63