FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Chapter 4 Laying the Foundations

Sometimes, large events, which become part of the nation’s history, are also memorable parts of a small company’s history.

got worse, but it wasn’t bad enough to stop me from taking over the controls of the plane for five minutes. Flying isn’t that different from driving a car, really, in my opinion. Jack takes a different view. He sat in the back, his eyes closed, in a cold sweat for most of the journey home. We’d bought Scunthorpe Concrete, but in the end we couldn’t do anything with it. The business wasn’t worth anything, and we had to close it down within a year. S cunthorpe Concrete was, in hindsight, a distraction that we could have avoided. But there are other kinds of distractions that are quite unavoidable. Sometimes, large events, which become part of the nation’s history, are also memorable parts of a small company’s history. At moments like these, everyone in the country seems to drop their quarrels, and simply get on with the job. On Friday April 10 th 1992, the day after the General Election, a few minutes before 9.00 p.m., a bomb exploded outside the front entrance to the Baltic Exchange in St Mary Axe in the City of London. Three people were killed and over a hundred were injured. Because we were now contractors for the City of London, we got a phone call early on Saturday morning from the Chief Engineer. ‘There’s a bomb gone off in the City,’ he told John Nuttall, who was handling the Emergencies. ‘Everything’s closed down. I need everything you can muster up there right away.’ John got on the phone to Jim Manning, who was now Contracts Director, and they called in everyone who could drive, and every machine they had – JCBs, grabs, tippers, everything – and got up there. As the man had said, everything was closed down, and the Armed Forces had cordoned off a large part

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