| I started at Whitefriars in
January 1973, and during my time there I was made redundant twice. Once in 1976
on Christmas Eve, before being asked to come back about 7 months later by Geoffrey Baxter, due to the surge in
demand for the Queen's Silver Jubilee commemorative work. I was finally made
redundant when the company announced they were closing. I still have my reference
signed by Geoffrey Baxter. |
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| There could be 100 to 150 people
working at Whitefriars at any one time, but at the end there were no more than
about 70 people left. Roy Lakin was the top guy, but Geoffrey ran the show, and
gave the feeling of being much more like a Manager than a Designer. |
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| I started work at the bottom, and
learnt on the job. There was no formal training of any kind, nor any apprentice
programs other than learning it from your mates. You could always learn
more, even after 20 years. |
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| I started working on decanter
stoppers. It took an entire hour to complete a decanter stopper and you
could do them in batches of ten with a team of four people. It took far less time to cut the decanter
than it did to make the stopper. Each one was individually fitted to
the decanter and numbered, to ensure you did not mix them up - we had to
scratch matching numbers on the bottom of the stopper and in the lip of
the decanter. My first job was grinding the glass off of the stopper by
hand, taking it from a blob of glass cut from the end of the rod down to the
right rough shape which wouldn't quite go in. You then had a tapered
iron and water and carborundum dust to grind it with. |
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| I worked on stoppers with another guy called Manrod
Petersen - he was an Austrian who arrived fully qualified as a trained and
skilled cutter, but
until there was an opening for that job, he had to start on the stoppers.
You can see his picture here in a guide book published by Whitefriars for
their factory guided tours. |
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| The next stages on the
stopper would be to put it in a wooden chuck and using a kind of metal
strip/clip grind it down. Then you could take the decanter and grind it
into the stopper, which would still be spinning on the chuck, using just
water and carborundum dust. If you let it dry out then the dust would
crack the glass.
Finally you had 3 grades of emery to
grind it down. You would flatten the bottom of the stopper off, and bevel
round the edge before polishing it all over.
I worked in the acid shop for a while,
but I got burnt and I was advised that I couldn't work in there any more.
I think they said I was allergic to the acid. We used to have to fill the
decanters with water, put in the stopper and leave them in a tray which we
then dipped in and then out of the acid bath - Sulphuric and Hydrofluoric.
If you left them in too long, the glass would blister, too short and you
did not get rid of the opaque effect from the cutting.
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| We all did piece work. If you
didn't make anything, you didn't get paid. I had to keep track of my
week's quota in a book, along with how much I got paid for each piece. You
can see in the pages from my book that I was paid about 7 pence to cut the
pattern on a blank sherry glass.
In the cutting shop, there was
always an unwritten pecking order, and you never tried to out-do those above you
in the hierarchy, even if you could.
At the beginning we only had cutting
machines which used carborundum and stone wheels. The carborundum wheel
would cut the rough pattern very quickly (called roughing), where you
would not go as deep or quite meet up to the points of the pattern. Next
the stone wheel would be used to finish it off, very smoothly and
accurately, which took a lot longer and made the glass go opaque (dip it
in acid to get it clear again). There were different size wheels from
about 18" down to less than 6" and we each used to have our own
set. They would wear down until they became too small to use. Later toward the end they
got diamond cutting wheels - cost about £200 for a 6" disk. With
these you only needed to cut it once and it was a lot quicker. Those were
the majority used, but we still
kept the other machines and used them as well.
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| To cut the glass you would
first need to mark it with Chinagraph (like a soft black crayon) at the
top and bottom of the pattern, then you would mark a number of small lines
round the top to show where each repetition of the pattern should go. We
used to each do our own marking by hand and this had to be all in the cost
we got for each piece. You would use a wheel and a wood
tool a bit like a wooden scribe gauge, but without the spike. Towards the
end they got a machine which could do this very accurately, and it was a
guy called Henry's job to just do this marking on the glass before we
would cut it. |
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| The glass cutters did all
their own designs for the patterns on the cut glass. They would give you
half a dozen blank glasses to work on, and come up with some patterns,
then they might choose a couple to go into production. You can see two of
my designs in the 1980 catalogue (C721 and C718). We could make our own
glass and take it home if we wanted, the only rule was it must not have a
production pattern, so we would have to make up our own patterns for this. |
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| This was the only
industry which could not be covered by the abrasive wheel regulations,
because we needed to be able to get at the cutting wheels from all angles,
and could not work on them if they had guards. It was common to get lots
of glass cuts all over your fingers, and sometimes lose your nail.
Sometimes the glass would crack and shatter, but I can't remember any
really serious injuries. Few people wore protective glasses, although
Whitefriars made them available, if they got water from the machine on
them it was impossible to see and cut accurately.
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| The cutting workshop went from one
extreme to the other. It was next to the furnaces, so in summer the hot
air blew straight through the workshop. There were no windows, the
building was completely walled round, with only windows/vents in the roof.
In winter it was almost as bad, you had the water from the cutting
machines constantly over your hands, and it was freezing cold. I have been
to the Dartington factory in North Devon, and Whitefriars was a lot bigger
than that, and also on two floors. Underneath were all the workings and on
top the blowers.
They had an enormous propane cylinder
outside, and once this developed a leak forcing them to evacuate half the
surrounding town.
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| You could never put the
furnaces out, otherwise they would crack, so they were constantly going.
Whenever they needed to change the pots in the furnace, anyone was welcome
to do this. You had to wear lots of clothes and splash yourself all over
with water, but it was still hot. Once you had un-bricked the furnace you
could drag out the pot, then put the new one in (which was made on site)
before bricking it up again. |
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| The commemorative pattern was
put onto the glasses by sandblasting. They did this off site somewhere
else.
The glass with symmetrical bubbles was
done by rolling the hot glass over a board with nails in. When the nails
came out they left a little bubble of air which sealed itself in.
The paperweight millefiori was made
using the thermometer tower, it stopped producing thermometers in the late
60s due to competition from abroad and was used instead for paperweights. Big lumps of coloured glass were
rolled together in pear shaped lumps and stretched out up the tower. It
was made using the same principle as sticks of seaside rock candy. They
would press a button to lower the glass back down the tower 6 feet at a
time. This was dangerous, and I had a friend who was badly injured when
the glass fractured coming down and went straight into his wrist. He did
get back to work though after some time.
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| Cullet was sold in random
shapes by the pound. This was just glass that had cracked off if it was
not cooled properly. I heard of one person who brought their Cullet back
and complained that it had set their sofa alight when the sun had shined
through it, in their window. |
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| There wasn't a tremendous
social life at Whitefriars, at the start there was a yearly trip to
Southend, but that stopped eventually. Some of the lads were practical
jokers, and you always knew you had to be on your guard when the guided
tours showed up. They would tie strings to your glasses so when you picked
one up the whole lot fell on the floor in front of the tour, or they might
take a water spray guard off a machine and leave a nearly invisible fine
jet of water shooting out of the machine across where the tour went.
I kept quite a few things to remind me
of my time there, I have even got my last ever clock-card from both times
I was made redundant, as well as my last ever pay slip - which shows I
worked really hard that last week, and that was a lot of money in those
days!
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