After Cliff was fired by the miserable WH on January 7th 1936 he moved back home to his parents and started his second stint at the mine. Once again this is partly in his words, partly in mine from his notes. ~ Ian
Cliff was still keeping up his diary. He didn’t look for a job immediately, he says: in fact it was a month before he got regular work. Instead the first thing he did was solder a broken part for his motor bike, which continued to bother him for the next few weeks: a replacement spark plug (which he then accidentally damaged); a crook magneto; trouble with the points; leaking petrol tank; dented mudguard… He repaired it and cleaned it and painted it.
On the 10th he spent much of the day at the Waro mine, where his father was working on a new access road, and asked the Mine Manager Mr Brady for a job. Mr Brady told Cliff he’d look out for him, but it was the 29th before he told Cliff could start work the following week.
Meantime Cliff did odd jobs — helped his mates pick up timber for the mine, painted his Uncle Jack’s roof, milked Jack’s cow, cleaned out his Mum’s shed, helped her make blackberry and apple jam, cut the hedge.
He also played tennis (badly — he still wasn’t wearing glasses), went to the Hika baths, talked to his mates, some of whom had work at the mine, played cards with them and also with Mr McIlroy. He went to the Methodist Sunday service, and to the beach with a couple of busloads from the Church.
Monday 3rd February came round, the day he was supposed to start work, but he couldn’t because three days of heavy rain had suspended operations. It was another week before he got his first shift.
§
Bob T gave Cliff his first driving lesson. His father was one of very in Hikurangi to own a car, and one day the two of them drove it down to Sandy Bay and Matapouri. Bob drove of course, but on the way home insisted that Cliff have a go. He stopped at the bottom of the cutting (the winding road through the hills between Sandy Bay and Hikurangi) and showed him how things worked.
“I’d never sat in the driving seat of a car before, so felt a little apprehensive, particularly because of the steep winding road ahead. With Bob sitting alongside I got the car into low gear — luckily low gear — because as soon as we got going Bob climbed out of the car and positioned himself on the front bonnet, and stayed there until the top of the cutting.”
§
His first shift at the mine was on the afternoon of February 10th. The men he was working with were driving a tunnel — building a “set” to reinforce its roof and walls. Every 4’ (1.2m) or so wooden poles were set up on each side of the tunnel, with reinforcing beams wedged in place to bridge between them, top and bottom. Battens were placed side by side between these structures to support the roof. Depending on the conditions these might be required for the sides and floor as well. This particular one was a bit low on one side but efforts to rectify the problem weren’t successful.
They were working on the fan shaft. The concrete structure that enclosed the fan was still visible more than fifty years later, south of The Rocks and east of the road between Waro and Hikurangi.
Cliff was tired the next day, even though he reckoned his was the easy job — hauling the skips up with a crab winch and tipping out the dirt.
When he wasn’t working Cliff was still enjoying his social life, catching up with friends, playing tennis and the rest. His bike was still giving trouble. The gears were jammed and a cog was broken.
The job in the tunnel was more or less over in a week. From then on he did odd jobs painting, cleaning out the fitter’s shop and the bath house, working on the boiler maintenance, and helping the brickies re-brick them, installing conduit pipe for the electricians…
On Friday March 6th he wrote that he’d “begun boring the boiler tubes and got the machine jammed but managed to free it. I’m still dirty and can’t get myself clean.”
§
He was thinking how hard you had to work for your money. On March 5th he worked five eight hour shifts, plus an extra five hours, plus another two more at double time. At 1/3d per hour that should have come to £2/18/9, but he only received £2/17/6. Short paid by an hour.
He had to work an hour or more to buy a gallon of benzene for his motor bike, and three quarters of an hour to go to the pictures. A new gear box for his broken bike cost 19 shillings and it turned out a part was missing. “Went to pictures.”
§
Working on the big boilers was a job Cliff remembered well. These generated steam to power a generator that supplied electricity to drive the winches and pumps used to dewater the mine etc. There were three of them to renovate and repair. Cliff writes:
The boiler job was quite interesting. Bert was re-bricking the boilers and I was his labourer. Bert was a good man to work with and in that job I did feel useful.
Next I was introduced by Ben to the large drum of one of these boilers. The drum was a long oval-shaped steel container 18 to 20 feet (5-6m) long. Underneath and connected to it were the boiler tubes, which were heated by coal fires beneath them. Ben removed the oval manhole cover from the top of the drum and gave me my instructions. I was to remove the hard lime deposits from inside the drum using a hammer and a cold chisel.
“How do I get into the thing?” I asked. The hole looked far too small.
“Easy,” said Ben, and demonstrated by getting down through the hole himself, and then showing me what to do.
Ben was fairly deaf, and so am I now, and no wonder. The noise inside that drum was deafening when the hammer and chisel were applied. I could reach the top of the drum provided I knelt and stretched upwards — it was out of reach if I sat. Kneeling on that curved steel to reach the highest surface, hour after hour, day after day, was sheer torture. Trying to sit on the sloping sides of the drum for a change nearly always resulted in me sliding on my backside to the bottom.
It was one hell of a job. Scale and dust particles got into your eyes, up your nose, in your ears and in your mouth as you breathed. Your clothes were covered in it.
But that was the least of my worries. Hammer, hammer, hammer, bang, bang, bang. Day after day. It was deafening. I was very glad to be able to sweep up the last lot of dust and scale and see the end of that job.
The next job was cleaning down the boiler tubes. I can’t remember how I did it, except the problem of maintaining my balance as I stood on the 4 inch (10cm) diameter tubes to clean them. They ran below and parallel to the boiler drum that I’d been working in. They were in several layers with four or 5 inch spacing between the tubes.
Below the tubes was the furnace area. As can be imagined coal fires produce an incredible amount of very fine black soot. Cleaning the tubes was like cleaning a very dirty chimney from the inside — a chimney above a cold, coal-burning fireplace. I recall that it took six weeks to remove the last of the black grime from the pores of my skin.
The last job on the boilers was to clean out the tubes. This was done with a power driven scaler that rotated around inside the tubes. We didn’t ever get all the scale off. I remember getting the scaler jammed inside one of the tubes, and that was the end of the job for me, as far as I can remember. God knows how they manage to free it.
I wouldn’t like to give the impression that life was all misery because it wasn’t. There was very good companionship, the enjoyment of good company and the satisfaction of earning money for the household. There were nights at the pictures, tennis, swimming at the old Hikurangi baths and trips with others to Whangarei and to the beach. Few of those pleasures were available on a farm.
§
Some of Cliff’s companions at that time became longtime friends, or names that featured in the stories he told: Walter Young, Bert Stringfellow and Jimmy Orr among them. John McIlroy was a regular visitor to the household to play cards. He and Cliff’s Dad were both keen on racing pigeons, which were raced most Saturdays. John McIlroy was the man whose boat we (Dad’s kids) went out fishing in at Oakura.
§
The boilers also provided heat for the bathroom and showers. There were probably 12 cubicles in the bathroom, each with two shower fittings. I remember having to clean out the bathroom once. It was in a filthy state. Miners and their clothes are covered with black coal dust when they leave the pit, and it accumulates very quickly in the bathroom.
For years we, and most others, didn’t have a bath or bathroom at home, so the mine bathhouse was used frequently whether we worked there or not. Womenfolk were excluded because of the lack of privacy, although I did arrived there on occasion to find a lookout at the door and women inside showering.
Otherwise we use the old tin bathtubs at home, in front of the fire in winter.
It was Bob T and his father’s job to fire up the mine boilers, which I found interesting. These two were very enterprising. Mr T manufactured an immersion heater from a piece of wood and some coiled wire spring. He did emphasise that this needed to be in water before you switched it on. It was of course illegal, but with electricity not arriving in Hikurangi until 1939, we were happy, thanks to this, that we could boil the billy in no time.
§
From mid-March until the beginning of July 1936, when Cliff worked his last shift, there were no more than a dozen days’ work at the mine. As the work dried up he spent time around the section at home and in the garden.
By then both he and his Dad were out of a job. Jack started work on an addition to the house and Cliff took up a gorse cutting contract for Colin and practised Morse code. He was “more than a little depressed.”