AEJ                    Stories of Troughton & Young                    Revised 26 July 2007

When I came out of the army in 1948, I applied to return to the small firm in Teddington that I had worked for before being called up.  I saw the woman in the office and she told me that by Law they had to employ me for three months.  And then they would "release" me.  I was not as rude in those days as I can be now, and I should have said "get stuffed".

I learnt of Troughton & Young at the Electrical Trade Union ETU branch, and went to the Knightsbridge office and saw the man who hired staff.  I was still a mate, but he took me on and I was sent to a newly-built school in Tunbridge Wells.  The specification put on T&Y was that all cable had to be 600V grade.

There were a number of conduit runs that had four 7/029 cables (they would probably be 2.5mm today.  The foreman had obviously not reckoned on the fact that four 600V 7/029 cables should have gone into 1" conduit.  Everything had been piped with 3/4" conduit.  Had the top brass of T&Y known, the foreman would have got the sack as T&Y required a very high standard of work.  The four cables were pulled in to the 3/4" pipe WITH GREAT EFFORT and a lot of tallow.  It was the only time I saw bodgery during the time I worked for T&Y.

I became the permanent mate of a Welsh electrician and travelled quite a bit during the subsequent months.  I worked in a couple of power stations and was "offered the tools" when I was at Deptford power station.  Most of the work was installing MICC Pyrotenax cable.  We drilled girders and fixed the clips with PK self-tapping screws.  Nowadays MICC cable is almost always PVC covered, but it was bare copper then.    And it corroded fairly quickly in the sulphurous fumes of the power station.   I saw quite a few Odeon cinemas during that time.  I watched a few films from the back of the cinema while waiting for the performance to end so I could start working on the job I was being paid for.

T&Y were totally unionised and I found this a little restrictive, however I am a strong advocate of the closed shop because it stops crawlers from depressing the standards of the rest.  But some shop stewards felt they were little dictators, and they had to curbed.  I am not a fan of Maggie Thatcher, but she did some good things for the British workforce.  Arthur Scargill was the equivalent of Militant Islam in that he wanted everything, and would not consider that there might be two sides to the argument.

I worked at Aldermaston while it was being constructed.  An 84 hour week was the standard and had I not been stupid, I could have saved quite a lot of money.  My stupidity was to be talked into selling some of the scrap lead that occurred at the site.  The foreman sent me back to the office without ever accusing me of anything.  I just put two and two together and reasoned that as I was driving a reasonable car, it was paid for by the proceeds of the scrap lead.  I had already been in contact with a self-employed sparks who lived in Marylebone and I asked for my cards back at the office.  As Tom Webster got more work than he could handle he employed anyone who would work for him.  I stayed with him for quite a while and met some interesting characters in the process.  One charming old lady was the granddaughter of Clive of India.  I got to like China tea as she always offered any visiting tradesmen a cup of tea (China Tea).  Bryanston Square and Montague Square had some interesting residents.  In Montague Square I met an Aussie barrister.  He insisted I try on his wig.  If I met him now, I would have a lot of legal questions to ask him.  But as some of them might be the sort that only a specific case would answer.  For example, is it criminal damage to undo what a local authority has damaged?  n the simple case, I understand that 'criminal damage is rendering a device unfit for what it is intended by the lawful owner, to do.  The case in question is Nottingham City Council have damaged a right-of-way footpath by blocking it to all except slim pedestrians.