Well, I left you last week with an article which was Part 2 of my account of G.A. Harvey’s Greenwich Metal Works in Charlton. At the end I suggested – as a sort of homework – that you watch a short film on YouTube called ‘Dodging the Column’. Did any of you see it? I hope that if you did, you enjoyed it – it’s not really supposed to be funny, but somehow it is.
The film is quite short, only 10 minutes, and tells us the story of how a 130 feet long distillation column was taken to Grangemouth refinery from Harvey’s factory in Charlton. It was made in 1952 and the journey apparently went all the way up the A5 including through the centres of St Albans, Manchester and Preston. It’s a great film – but I guess it is a ‘dramatic reconstruction’ of a real journey in 1951.
In the Harvey’s works magazines which Geoff Brightly gave me there is a report of a journey like this a year earlier, in 1951. It doesn’t say anything in the magazine about the film but it give some detais of the 1951 trip and there are lots of pictures. The 130 ft distillation column set out for Grangemouth at 8am on the morning of Sunday 28th October 1951. In the 1952 film this is one of the best scenes and shows an area very familiar to many of us. The column comes out of Harvey’s entrance into the Woolwich Road –which is all different to what it is like now but still remains quite familiar.
We see the column is coming out of Harveys in to Woolwich Road from an area which is now a car park at the Woolwich end of the new buildings, the fitness studio – this entrance would have been at the far eastern end of the Harvey site – past the coffee shop and the fitness studio. In fact there is now a hut alongside the London and Kent Electrical shop which looks suspiciously like one of those on the Harvey site in 1952. I would really like to go into the background of everything you can see in the film – but this piece is far too long already.
In the film, across on the other side of Woolwich Road are a group of men and boys watching what’s going on. Behind them are some prefabs – they are on the site of Hartwell and Phipps Houses, flats. The terraced houses which were originally on this site had been destroyed in wartime bombing and prefabs were put there until they were themselves replaced in 1954. I don’t know who Hartwell was, but Jack Phipps was a Labour Patty activist whose portrait once hung in the local Party offices.
The film shows a bus stop outside the prefabs and there is now a bus stop nearby outside the Rose of Denmark Pub – and now it’s a much grander bus stop with a shelter and a seat. In the film the bus stop has a sign on it with some writing. I’ve blown it up, and up, and up to see what it says and it is not legible even so – but I’m quite sure that it included a big ‘53’. Clearly this is nowhere near anywhere on the 53 bus route which then went between Plumstead and Chalk Farm via Blackheath Standard. But apparently the 53 only started in 1952, so is this an advert for it or something?
What we see at the very start of the flm is a man climbing at the bus stop with a hammer and bashing the bus stop sign hard –he is pushing it round so that the column can get out into Woolwich Road and straighten up.
The article in the Harvey’s Magazine says that the column was 130‘6“ long and had an inside diameter of 8 foot and weighed 40 tons. The transport company which took it was E. W. Rudd, Heavy Haulage Services, Special Traffic, Pickford Division, British Road Services – and in effect the whole film is a publicity shot for British Road Services. Who were they, might you ask? I suspect most people will not know that back in 1947 all the lorries and heavy haulage were actually nationalised – so it was easy to make a film and be proud of their achievements. Rudd’s were based in the East End and had been part of Tillings, the big bus company originally based in south London. The traction for the column’s journey was provided by two 45 ton 100 hp Scammell tractors pulling two trailers approximately 60 foot apart. Scammell were an east London and Watford manufacturer of heavy haulage vehicles who worked closely with Rudd.
The drivers of the tractors were Bert Burns and George Bird and H.J. Skipp, B.E.M. was in charge of the load. I assume they are the men we see in the film. We also learn from Harvey’s that the News of the World on 25th of November 1951 awarded them with The Order of the Knights of the Road, which the paper sponsored.
The film goes on to show us incidents in the column’s journey to Grangemouth but there are a lot of discrepancies. In the Harvey Magazine account it is said the only snag was at Eamont Bridge in Penrith where the end of the column got stuck on a dip in the road – but that isn’t in the film. They have an entirely different set of snags – see the man climbing the tree, and also a gang of men who have to pull the column round sharp corners manually, and have circular metal plates to put under the wheels when the road surfaces are difficult.
The SABRE web site is really for road enthusiasts and its readers obviously know a lot about them. A look at their online discussion on the film is very interesting indeed. They point out that the journey in the film is not in sequence – the trip through the Potteries comes after the have tackled Shap! (even I noticed that!). Someone else asks why they are on a B road in the Potteries and wonders if they took the A6 out of St. Albans by mistake.
SABRE readers are ok with them getting the A5 to Birmingham –‘a long straight road’ but they then ask – How did they get from there to the B5077 outside Crewe? In fact, why they are there at all? Did they get lost, they ask, between Stratford and Stoke? Did they take the A51 from Stoke to Nantwich? They query if that is actually Manchester in the film – ‘whereabouts in Manchester’, they ask? They are ok with the A6 to Carlisle but where after that? They guess A68 might be a bit windy so they suggest they were on the A74.
There’s a bit in the film where they break for the night. One SABRE contributor says that his grandfather used to do these runs. When they stopped at night they would be picked up by bus for a night’s sleep and a load to take back to London in the morning. Another local crew would take over the next stretch to Grangemouth– and so on all the way. But in the film ‘our’ crew go all the way.
There are other enthusiast groups who have had a look at the film and commented. In particular on a motorcycle enthusiast page one of the contributors has noticed in the fiom that a two second clip shows a police motorbike. They identity this as a1951 Triumph Twin Speed – the original 1937 version of which had ‘taken the world by storm’ but by the time the police got them in 1951 it was only a ‘very desirable motorcycle’. (But big bike fans never die!)
Film web sites give some details about the director and producer and some of the commentators and so on but don’t give enough information to lead to much in the way of conclusions…
Clearly I think the discrepacies of the trip between that in the Harvey magazine and the SABRE contributor’s comments imply that the film is actually a work of fiction – but I don’t think that matters, it’s still very entertaining. It’s quite famous too – I actually have a copy of it on a DVD as part of a compilation of British Transport films and I was first introduced to it in an industrial history meeting in the 1980s.
The journey was 417 miles to Grangemouth from Greenwich and they claimed that they did it two days ahead of schedule. Eventually we see the column being raised at Grangemouth refinery. I remember going on a visit to Grangemouth in the 1990s and I wondered then if there was any way of finding out if ‘our’ column was still there, but were told that these columns are replaced very regularly and that one at 60 years old would be long gone.
What the people on the SABRE website ask is why they didn’t take it by water? Much more sensible. Apparently people give various reasons why – for example saying that no ship was big enough. This is clearly nonsense and there are loads of loads of pictures in the Harvey Magazine of other columns being taken off by water. Two years later a column which was much bigger than the one that went to Grangemouth was taken to Venezuela for a refinery there and that clearly didn’t go by road. In fact it went from the Thames on a ship called the Loch Ryan.
I have so many pictures of the column being transported and I‘m sorry there won’t be space for more than two or three.
I seem to have used up most of my space this week on the column and I still have more and more stuff about Harveys. I have put on the GIHS Face Book page this week some info about how they made the big bowl for the Goonhilly receiver station Antenna One..
