Interview of Gary Titmarsh by Anthony Fisher
Anthony Fisher interviewing Gary Titmarsh transcribed by Valerie Darville
Anthony
Were you born in Enfield, Gary?
Gary
Yes, I was.
Anthony
Whereabouts?
Gary
In Chase Farm Hospital.
Anthony
Where were your parents living then?
Gary
My parents lived in Hoe Lane, well Worcester’s Estate, Severn Drive we lived. When I was born my Dad was not long out of the army so 1951 I was born so he wasn’t actually in World War Two but he was in the Palestinian/Israel conflict. He was in Port Said for the Suez crisis and when he came home from there and he got married they obviously didn’t have any money and we lived in a converted bus in a wood yard in Waltham Abbey. And we was housed in a flat by Enfield Council which my parents thought it was marvellous. It was and that was in Severn Drive right by the New River. It’s off of Pentrich Avenue, Worcester’s Estate.
Anthony
So you really are Enfield born and bred.
Gary
Yes. I’ve never lived anywhere else.
Anthony
What primary school did you go to?
Gary
Worcester’s. And then I went to Chace Boys’ School. I left when I was almost 15, so that would be 1966.
Anthony
You could have gone on further but you told me you had a job.
Gary
Yes, I had a job. My Dad knew someone who was a transport manager of a transport company based in Enfield. It was called E. E. Howell’s; Ernie Howell and he actually bought Redburn’s out so when I left school I worked for Ernie Howell who was based along the Hertford Road, up near Bulls Moor Lane. There was a big yard behind Burchill’s Garage and I had only worked there for a couple of months when he acquired Redburn’s and we moved down to Stockingswater Lane into Redburn’s.
Anthony
So for most of your working life you have been based in Brimsdown?
Gary
Yes, 90% of my working life has been in Brimsdown.
Anthony
In those days what did Redburn’s do? I knew them as transporting pop and rock groups around.
Gary
No, that was Redburn’s grandson. Redburn’s main jobs was Ruberoid, which was very very big, Enfield Rolling Mills, Enfield Cable, a company called John Dowel – do you remember John Dowel?
Anthony
Did they do injection moulding?
Gary
Yes, they made milk crates.
Anthony
Whereabouts were they?
Gary
They was up at New Southgate and at London Coney where the trade park is on the side of the M25. They had a huge factory there.
Anthony
One of the guys I interviewed was a tool maker, or tool designer at John Dowel. They moved up to Derby.
Gary
I didn’t know that. They had a very large factory at London Coney and on Southgate
Industrial Estate.
Anthony
So when did the grandson start Redburn’s transport?
Gary
I would say the 1980s because he was originally in a pop group called Kenny. “Do the Bump” was his hit. He was a bit of a musician and then he had a no. 1 record.
Anthony
I didn’t know that. Did they live in Enfield?
Gary
Yes but I’m not quite sure where. I don’t know if you remember Old Oak Garage on Windmill Hill. Well, Redburn’s, when they sold out, not long after they started up again and that was their depot at the back of Old Oak Motors and their company name was H. E. Dobb’s and Co. and they had red vehicles. That was some time after I had left.
Anthony
So how long were you at Redburn’s?
Gary
Well, it was actually Howell’s. I was there about three years up to when I was about 17 or 18 and then I got another job down Chase Side at H. J. Cox & Co. Where they have just built the new medical centre on the corner, that was originally a lorry garage owned by H. J. Cox and they owned the British Gypsum lorries based over at Erith and we used to do all the repairs to the lorries there.
Anthony
It became Jewson’s didn’t it?
Gary
Yes, it did and there was a café there as well; Ron’s Café it was called. And they had a service van; they had a Landrover and it was a typical service van – the handbrake didn’t work at all, it wasn’t even connected and I was about just coming up to 17 at the time and I said, “Can I borrow your Landrover to take my driving test in?” They said, “You can but the hand brake don’t work.” So I took my driving test about a couple a weeks after I was 17 and I managed to pass first time and just pretended to put the handbrake on and left it off during hill starts. Little did the examiner know that the cable wasn’t even connected but the examiner was a bit confused with all the levers and buttons on the Landrover. I still remember the registration number JOO 767. And when I got my driving licence I done the mechanical side of the lorries, I knew how to repair the lorries inside and out and I fancied doing a bit of lorry driving and I got a job working down at the wharf at Ponders End. John Goode & Sons where the big crane was. Columbia Wharf. We used to unload barges from the docks, Bulgarian jam and ingots of lead, all out of the barges and stuff like that.
Anthony
You must have delivered to us because we used to order a chemical from B.A.S.F. and they used to deliver to Columbia Wharf and then it was unloaded with the Scotch Derrick and then you must have delivered it to 78 Bilton Way.
Gary
Yes. the main thing we used to do for B.A.S.F. was the white drums of Styropor and we used to take that to injection moulding companies.
Anthony
This was a 200 litre drum, in those days it was a 45 gallon drum, wasn’t it. So how did the Scotch Derrick work? I mean, who operated it?
Gary
They had a driver, well he seemed an old boy to me as I was only young.
Anthony
It must have been quite slow.
Gary
He was very good on that crane, very good. I remember one day, because it all worked by cables and the boss of the firm said, “We’ve got to grease the cables on the crane. Would anybody like to earn themselves a couple of quid and climb up the jib of the crane with grease and grease the cables,” and one lad said, “Yes, I’ll do it.” and what he didn’t realize was that as he was greasing the cable the jib was going higher and higher so that they could get the cable greased and panic set in and he was frozen to the sport. We had the Hell of a job getting him back down. There wasn’t Health & Safety in them days.
Anthony
It used to have to do one thing at a time, didn’t it.
Gary
It was electric, it didn’t have any engine.
Anthony
It’s a listed bit of plant and equipment now.
Gary
It’s gone now, hasn’t it. The company who moved in there a couple of years ago they dismantled it and took it down.
Anthony
That’s a shame, they shouldn’t have done that because it was a listed bit of equipment. Columbia Carpets were there, weren’t they.
Gary
Yes, and it had a big cabin on the crane and the old gentleman who used to drive it he used to have his tea break up there and you’d see the steam coming out of the windows where hew as making himself tea and that, but that’s all he used to do. Ted, his name was.
Anthony
Quite a few barges came up there.
Gary
At the time they were horse drawn barges and they’d have three or four barges connected together and they’d come through the lock there and we’d moor them up, our ones, but quite often the barges would go further up, up to the Rolling Mills and you could see they’d have ingots of copper and all sorts of non-ferrous metals in them. And they used to go further up, I think they used to go nearly up into Ware and Hertford at the time and they was horse drawn and then they changed over to little four-wheeled tractors to pull them.
Anthony
Did motorised, self driven barges ever use to go there?
Gary
I don’t think they could get past maybe Cheshunt. the river weren’t deep enough.
Anthony
How many horses would pull one barge?
Gary
About four, maybe six.
Anthony
Good Lord; it must have been a bit crowded on the tow path.
Anthony
How did they go through the locks? They must have gone round the lock somehow, quite an effort.
Gary
If I remember rightly, they would keep the horses tied on to the barges but really lengthen
the ropes when the barges had dropped down in the locks.
Anthony
So we had deliveries from Columbia Wharf but there were other chemical companies in the area, weren’t there? And the plastic for the injection moulders.
Gary
Yes. John Goode & Sons had the contract for B.A.S.F. because it is a big shipping company which is still going very strong nowadays, they had – I don’t think they called them ships, they were like coasters or something like that which used to leave Ipswich and they used to go over to Holland and go up the river right up to somewhere in Germany where near the B.A.S.F. factory was and that’s why we used to do the B.A.S.F. deliveries. The small ships used to come down the river, might have been the Rhine, across the sea and into Ipswich and John Goode owned Orwell Quay at the time. There are two big Quays in Ipswich; Orwell Quay and Cliff Quay.
Anthony
How long did John Goode last?
Gary
They kept going for a good few years.
Anthony
What did you do next?
Gary
I was lorry driving there for a couple of years and I’d made a few contacts and I bought my first lorry when I was 21.
Anthony
That was very entrepreneurial and brave of you.
Gary
I actually bought it off the fairground at Carterhatch Lane. It was a Bedford TK and the registration number was HMD 655B and I’ve still got the number plates in my shed because at the time they were the old black and white number plates, like stamped out with silver letters on a black background and I wanted to modernise it a bit with new number plates that had come out and I bought the white and yellow plates and put them on.
Anthony
It was a very young age to do that.
Gary
Yes, 21. But at the time there were hundreds of small owner-drivers and haulage contractors
based in the Lea Valley because we were taking cucumbers up the markets; there were hundreds of lorries round the Lea Valley just doing cucumbers. There’s only two places in Britain where cucumbers grow, isn’t there and the other one is Humberside up near Beverley.
Bush Hill Park was all greenhouses. It wasn’t in my time. I’ve only seen the pictures in old books. All down Southbury Road was greenhouses too.
When my parents moved from the flat we lived on the Worcester’s Estate, just round the corner into Hoe Lane I remember moving in and that was – I was about 11 – so that was in 1962, and Townsend & Collins had just built new houses and we got a new house because my grandfather came to live with us because my grandmother had died and the council give us a three bedroomed house and I always remember there was a big spot in the garden, my Dad was digging it trying to get stuff to grow and it wouldn’t grow at all and he dug down a bit and there was a great big concrete bunker where originally all the steam engines had been placed to heat the greenhouses and all they’d done was filled it in and put a foot of soil over the top of it. The steam engine wasn’t in there, it was the bunker where the ash and all that had been but it was really thick concrete buried in the ground.
Anthony
Did he get it out?
Gary
No, he put a few more feet of soil over the top. Apparently Hoe Lane was one big greenhouse, it’s called Myers Green and Myers was name of the nurseryman.
Anthony
So the nurseries spread out well from Crews Hill and that area.
Gary
Well yes, they were at Forty Hill, wasn’t they, Glebe Nursery what used to specialise in growing chrysanths. Still there now. Hasn’t got any greenhouses or polytunnels now. Clock House which was a flower growing nursery before it became a garden centre selling cut flowers.
Anthony
You certainly know a lot about the area. I suppose you find it interesting.
Gary
I do, and Crews Hill you had two or three really big English cucumbers growers – Mr Collins, Thompson’s who are now the big garden suppliers of soil and that. They were originally greenhouse people. There was hundreds of acres of grass in Crews Hill.
Anthony
Why did it go, do you think?
Gary
When I bought my first lorry as I said, I used to take the cucumbers to Birmingham market three times a week and what was happening was that we were having a few bad weather cycles and the nurserymen were having to heat their greenhouses to carry on growing in the early part of the season and the latter part of the season but the Dutch produce was starting to come in at the time and apparently the Dutch government used to subsidise their nurserymen’s heating so we couldn’t compete with the Dutch.
Anthony
I think the Dutch still do.
Gary
I think they do, yes. I have been round the greenhouse, it’s still there. A couple of years ago I went over there and looked all around, very impressive. It’s close to Rotterdam, actually.
Anthony
How long did you deliver cucumbers for?
Gary
About two years. The cucumbers is seasonal, it starts usually second or third week in March and it usually goes on to about mid-October depending on the weather and at the time the produce wasn’t coming from Spain, we didn’t get many imports, it was coming from Holland. And then a few other things I was doing in the winter; I used to do turf to fill in the time and that got so busy that I give the cucumbers up because it was mainly nights driving up Birmingham market and the turf was really busy. At the time I think they were building the M25. The turf was harvested in Buntingford, Ware, Brookman’s Park had big turf fields and then if you’d had a very dry summer and they couldn’t cut the turf we would go down to near Rye on the marshes, on the Kent marshes where they could do turf all year round because you didn’t have to water it so much.
Anthony
I wonder if that is why Rye Grass is called Rye Grass.
Gary
I think it is.
Anthony
Still with the Bedford TK?
Gary
No, I’d got a bigger lorry by then because turf is heavy.
Anthony
It has always struck me what a fine physique you have, Gary. Did you do weight lifting?
Gary
No, when you were doing the cucumbers you had to drive round to the nurseries and then load maybe from four or five nurseries around Roydon, Crews Hill, and then you’d have to go to the packing shed and carry all the boxes out to the lorry and stack them all on the lorry and then drive the lorry in the evening up to Birmingham market which was open at midnight and then handle it all off again. It was a good work-out. Then drive home and hopefully get home about 6 o’clock in the morning and then start again at 1 o’clock the next day and do it all again.
Anthony
What was the next stage in your life?
Gary
The next stage, I went back on the cucumbers again and my Dad had been working for Tesco’s, driving a lorry, and he wasn’t very happy there because of a lot of early morning starts and he come in with me and we bought another lorry and there was a company on the A10, there was a Little Chef there and it backed onto the railway where they have built the new newspaper place, South Villa Nursery. S & V Salads it was called, Elite Salads, and we needed somewhere to park the lorries and we arranged to park there in their greenhouses on the condition that we do their deliveries for them and that was delivering cucumbers and lettuce to the supermarkets which were coming on. The markets were declining and the supermarkets were expanding. I would say that was the late ‘70s.
Anthony
Tesco’s were in Cheshunt then, weren’t they?
Gary
No, Tesco’s had separate warehouses for their fruit and veg. They had Hainault and Romsey, near Southampton. And Sainsbury’s had Hoddesdon and Basingstoke. We used to serve all those places, late afternoon they would pack the cucumbers during the day and then in the late afternoon we would leave to go to the supermarkets. Elite Salads were a co-operative of three big English nurserymen. The site was Co-operative Society land at the time, they owned all that land there.
Anthony
Opposite there is a massive film studio now. Sunset Studio.
Gary
That where the Sunset Studio is was always a beautifully well kept field, Oyler’s. Everybody used to say how nicely ploughed and how neat it used to look and then a few years ago it sort of got left. It was a farm, a growers, and I think they used to do cabbages and stuff like that. And then we progressed after that in Edmonton was Libby’s who used to do quite a bit of staff and they asked us if we could do some transport for them. They did Libby’s corn beef, Libby’s orange juice in small jars and they had their own railway siding. it wasn’t there when we worked there because the railway siding to unload the corn beef during or after the War. The actual building is still there now in Pickett’s Lock and is a cash and carry.
Anthony
The corn beef was made and packed in South America, was it?
Gary
Yes and then come in via the docks –
Anthony
In tins already.
Gary
Yes. I don’t think it came into the London Docks, I don’t know where it came in but it used to be loaded in trains and they originally used to fetch it in by train into their distribution depot.
Anthony
The North/South route wasn’t built then, was it?
Gary
No. When we was working there they was actually building the North/South route; that was 1979/80.
Anthony
So were you and your Dad independent contactors?
Gary
Yes, we were haulage contractors and then at the time Nestlé’s bought Libby’s and we used to do Nestlé’s products as well. That lasted for a few years then unfortunately Nestlé’s shut all their regional distribution depots and opened one huge depot in Leicestershire to serve the whole of the country.
Anthony
What did you do then?
Gary
Work was a little bit cut-throat at the time; I went to Taylor Transport from Birmingham had opened in Enfield and were struggling because they didn’t know any local businesses and all that and I went there, became a director and managed to acquire quite a bit of working with my contacts. It was in Jeffrey’s Road. We had the unit right on the new road. That was 1984. It’s a double glazing place now.
Anthony
I thought you and I had met when I was at AMEL, it might have been because I left AMEL in 1984 and went to work for Concorde..
Gary
I met you when we was at Taylor’s, we used to take stuff up to Birmingham for you. We had a vehicle leave every day from Birmingham to Enfield, then return to Birmingham, and you had some customers in Birmingham. It was for Roval. The majority of stuff we used to deliver for you was truck wash for TFR.
Anthony
I remember now. We had some big customers up in Roval because we served the engineering industry and they gradually left Enfield and moved up to Birmingham. If you joined Taylor’s in 1984, I had left AMEL or OCS then and gone across the road to Concorde until 1988 so during that early time you were delivering for Roval. That’s right. And then I started my company in 1988, based in Roval.
Gary
At Taylor’s what happened was we were quite busy there and just out of the blue a gentleman came walking in and he was the Enfield Independent and he said, “Do you think you could help us, we’re having trouble unloading our lorries from the printer to distribute to our people for the Independent and it’s very important that they go out on a Wednesday because our main competitor is the Enfield Advertiser and we want to beat them out every week.” So I agreed that they could send the vehicles in but it wasn’t as straight forward as planned because you’d get a lot of hold ups in the print industry and the lorries would turn up not at 8 o’clock in the morning and they would be held up until 4 or 5 o’clock in the afternoon and the stuff still had to be distributed.
Anthony
Was it well paid though?
Gary
Yes, this gentleman from the Enfield Independent said, “Look, I don’t care what the cost is, we must beat our competitor.” It was well paid but unfortunately, my co-directors didn’t like the idea of it, they wanted to stick with what they knew because it was sometimes out of hours and it clashed with their work so, at the time, I saw a warehouse come up for rental in Stockingswater Lane so I sold my shares back to the Taylor family and I opened a warehouse in Stockingswater Lane and started distributing (from) the warehouse there. I started off doing the Enfield paper on a Wednesday and the Haringey paper on a Friday, which was enough and within six months we was doing Enfield on a Wednesday, Barnet papers, Finchley papers, Hendon papers on a Thursday; on a Friday we was doing the Haringey then we did the Muswell Hill and Crouch End. It finished up we used to do about twenty or thirty editions of newspapers a week but, at the time, the leaflets were booming. We started off doing a couple of thousand leaflets a week with the newspapers and that boomed to four million a month by IKEA books, Wick’s books, thousands and thousands of leaflets would go in the newspapers.
Anthony
How did that work? Where did the leaflets come from?
Gary
The leaflets would be delivered direct to us from the printers, sometimes it would be what we called “full coverage”, it would be all the papers we were actually distributing a leaflet in them.
Anthony
Which you put in?
Gary
No, we would deliver to the agents – like private houses – we would deliver their leaflets to them on a Monday or Tuesday or hopefully two days before their papers arrived and they would sort all their leaflets out and take them to the kids who put them in the papers and put them through the letter boxes. But sometimes they would have sixteen or twenty different leaflets to insert. The IKEA books were so big and heavy that they used to have do those – they called that “solus” – it would have to go out on its own. That was my speciality, doing for the regional newspapers and I done that for twenty years. I called the company Headline Distribution, which I thought was quite a good name but the internet was just starting to take off and a few people had warned me and said, “Look, be careful because the internet is going to kill the regional newspapers” and, sure enough, I could see the decline coming.
It just so happened that I’d taken a twenty year lease out on the building and the landlord was actually Mr Hunt, used to be a building company down Chase Side, Hunt & Co and it was the son of the original Hunt, Charles Hunt & Company. It had a couple of skip lorries and builder’s lorries, used to do quite a bit of local building and he said to me, “Your lease is up and it’s due for renewal and we’re putting your rent up from £7.50 a square foot to £12.50 a square foot and it’s take it or leave it.” So I thought to myself well, he’s sort of threatening me here; he’s putting me in a position; so I thought hard about it and I thought, no I need to step back a bit and I advertised it to sell and it was sold within a few weeks to someone who was already doing newspapers over in west London who wanted to expand across to north London.
Anthony
So that was very fortunate then and he, whoever it was, had the problem of decline.
Gary
Yes. Unfortunately, he only lasted about two years; the decline was severe in those two years because you’d get the Enfield paper and it would be nearly a hundred pages and it would have a motoring supplement in it, it would have a job supplement in it, it would have all the local news, it would have a property section in it and it would be near enough a hundred pages, ninety five to a hundred pages and then that was declining and declining and I notice now that it’s down to about eighteen to twenty pages if you’re lucky and it’s a combined Enfield and Haringey and Tottenham newspaper now. It covers whole areas.
Anthony
Where did they get them printed in those days?
Gary
Well, it was originally the newspaper company was owned by Reed who are the employment people. They were heavily into publishing years ago and then got sold out to Reed El Selva which I think El Selva was American and then that got sold out again to a company called Newsquest who are still going now, American, and I think now are the owners of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. They are very big in America.
Anthony
Where was the building that did the printing?
Gary
They had a big printing plant in Brighton, a big printing plant in Southampton, another one in Worcester, none in London and the main printing plant we used to deal with was in Colchester.
Anthony
Which explains why, sometimes, the delivery was unreliable then. So when you sold that business, Headline Distribution, what did you do then? What year was it about?
Gary
That was about 2008 maybe. The people next to us in the industrial estate – I had about eight heavy goods vehicles and about five vans on the newspaper and leaflets and the early part of the week we’d be a little bit quiet and there was a company who used to do sound proofing products, soundproof flooring and wall boards and all that and they were in the next unit. And we used to do a bit of transport for them and they had the same problem as me, they didn’t like the idea of the landlord saying your rent is going up, take it or leave it, and they said to me, “Look, we’ve a big warehouse round the corner, just off of South Street, Woodall Road, we know you’re selling up but would you like to keep one lorry and come and work for us and do our deliveries?” and that’s what I done.
Anthony
And that’s about when you met Fisher Research.
Gary
Yes, I come round there and I used to do little part time for you because, at the time, there was a company in Tottenham/Edmonton on the border there, Langhedge, who used to do my maintenance on the vehicles and opposite was a company called Langhedge Chemicals, which is Mike Fouracre and my fitter said to me, “See that chap opposite, he’s looking for someone to do deliveries.” and I used to do one or two deliveries a week for Mike at Langhedge and then Mike said to me, “Oh, the people I deal with are looking for somebody to do deliveries for the.” and I said, “Well, who is it” and he said, “Fishers.” and I said, “Oh! Anthony Fisher?” and that’s how I started with Fishers.
Anthony
I remember in the early days you were always talking about this soundproofing. In fact, you
got me a short chunk of it – very, very heavy.
Gary
It was very good stuff; the Rolls Royce of soundproofing stuff. What they done, they had a big warehouse over at Wimbledon, south London, what they used to do all the southern England distribution. It was part of another big company as well, it was a firm called Hillout (?) and Cockburn. It was a group of companies, they owned a double glazing firm up in Birmingham and they owned a firm in Clacton what used to make all the window fittings, Nico it was called, quite a famous firm that’s been there donkey’s years and over at Wimbledon their factory was making all the window fitting and sliding door fittings and Trim Acoustic, the sound proofing people were part of that group and they decided to shut the Wimbledon depot and move it up to Huntingdon, a big warehouse because the rent was going up and up in London and they opened the big warehouse in Huntingdon and then they shut Enfield deport as well and moved it all under one roof in Huntingdon. And that’s when I come on to Fisher’s full time.
Anthony
Fortunately our turnover was such that we needed it. So over the years you have seen a lot of change in the regulations. Were there any regulations at all when you first started? Apart from having a licence.
Gary
No regulations whatsoever, no. I remember I think I paid – my first lorry the Bedford TK what I bought off the fairground, I think I paid £125 for it and to buy that I had a sheepskin coat what I sold, a pair of riding boots what I sold and I think I was about £20 short and my girlfriend’s father lent me £20 so that I could go and buy my first lorry.
Anthony
Did you marry your girlfriend?
Gary
Yes.
Anthony
He spotted a good thing (laughs).
Gary
And the first bit of money I got come in I immediately paid her dad back straight away. My own father didn’t want to know. he said, “No, if you haven’t got the money to start a business, you shouldn’t start it.” I said to him, “Well look, you’ve got to start somewhere. I’ve got the chance.” He said, “No, no, no, you need some money behind you.” which you do really.
Anthony
You can do without. I was similar to you I didn’t have any money but so long as you’ve got the passion to do it and that’s what you want to do, you can do it as you’ve proved.
Gary
So the majority of my working life has been in Brimsdown and around Brimsdown and a few years based in Waltham Cross when we was working for Elite Salads. Brimsdown has been I would say 75% of my working life.
Anthony
Did people know each other then?
Gary
Everybody knew each other, everybody knew everybody else’s business.
Anthony
The owners knew each other and the workforce knew each other. because you’ve got some stories about the bicycles, haven’t you?
Gary
Yes. Howell’s/Redburn based down the bottom of Stockingswater Lane, a couple of hundred yards up from their workshops and yard was the exit point for Enfield Rolling Mills and about 5 o’clock at night there used to be a good couple of hundred cyclists would come out of there at the end of work and one day the police were called because the cyclists come out and the security guard had stepped out to stop him and he’d fell off his bike and couldn’t get off the floor because he had all copper sheeting wrapped round his body under his clothing where he was stealing copper out of the Enfield Rolling Mills.
Anthony
There were the Rolling Mills, Delta Metals, Standard Cables –
Gary
Yes, which was all in the same site. You had Enfield Cable, Enfield Rolling Mills who changed their name to Delta Enfield – they had a wharf on the River Lea. As I said, ingots of copper used to come up the River Lea And the barges used to pull up there. Their wharf I always remember it because it had a canopy halfway over the River Lea so that they could unload in the pouring rain, they could always unload because when the barges arrived with copper ingots they had to unload it and make sure none was left overnight otherwise the copper might go for a little walk.
Anthony
As well as people knowing each other there were a lot of social clubs, weren’t there?
Gary
Yes. One social club that stands out was – by the entrance to the Royal Small Arms was a pub called “Rifles” but I think it was called The Enfield Small Arms pub and at the side of it and the back of it was a very good weight lifting gym and it was quite famous.
Anthony
Did you go in there?
Gary
No, I didn’t, no. You had the Granville pub in Brimsdown. Do you remember the Granville?
Anthony
Yes, I do. The Granville was in Duck Lees Lane.
Gary
Then the Isaac Walton just over the railway line and the Alma and do you remember the café just over the railway line? There was one each side.
Anthony
There was the Black Cat this side, John his name was, he was a friend of my Dad’s. I can’t remember his second name. He used to wear a wig.
Gary
It was jet black, the wig and it was an ill-fitting wig as well. We used to go in there, even if we wasn’t hungry, just to look at his wig.
Anthony
It was a good café though, it had good stuff.
Gary
Yes, and it had a goods yard behind it. It was a coal yard originally. I think a builders’ merchants took it at some time and they had bricks and all that in there, but I remember it as a coal yar.
Anthony
The Black Cat is still going and it’s quite a good café.
Gary
Just a bit further up was all the railway sidings. Do you remember the railway sidings?
Anthony
Across the road, I do.
Gary
What would lead into the power stations and lead into the Small Arms. Because originally the road didn’t go through. Bilton Way didn’t go through, did it. But you could actually get across there if you didn’t mind risking bumping over all the railway lines.
Anthony
Roval, during the War, had a factory in Bilton Way, a warehouse, and I don’t know whether that’s where we are now. I must find a directory, a street directory, of that time if I can to see where Roval was because there weren’t that many companies there.
Gary
Roval was where Fisher Research is now, at 78 wasn’t it?
Anthony
When my father joined in 1946, they were on the Lockfield Avenue old fire station but they also rented a platform at Turkey Street station and they had a premises on Bilton Way which I didn’t know until I read the old Minute Book.
Gary
They had something on Turkey Street Station?
Anthony
Yes, during the War they used to make plating plant as well as doing the plating.
Gary
There was a small industrial estate up in Turkey Street Station, industrial units which they turned into a car park.
Anthony
My father always told me it was on the platform. They left before you were born. At that time the trains weren’t running so when they wanted to start running the trains again of course they had to vacate it.
I certainly remember the bicycles, there were hundreds of them, weren’t there.
Gary
About a quarter of eight in the morning hundreds of them would arrive and then five o’clock you’d hear the siren go and hundreds of them would come out. Do you remember hearing the machine guns rattling away? Being tested.
Anthony
You could hear them in Enfield Town.
Gary
Clear as day. I say to people nowadays when I was a kid or a young man you could hear the machine guns firing away, clear as anything. They say, “What do you mean, machines guns?”
I say, “From the Small Arms factory, down at Enfield Lock, test firing the machine guns and Bren guns what they used to make.”
Anthony
I think the Bren gun was developed there.
Gary
My Granddad worked there. My Granddad was a tool maker; my Father’s father.
Anthony
What did your wife do? Or her parents do?
Gary
My wife, her parents, her father worked at Belling’s in the electro plating department, he was a foreman or manager there and my wife when she left school worked for Reeves in Lincoln Road; the people who used to make the paints.
Anthony
I know; a friend of ours used to work there.
Gary
Reeves, and that got bought out by Windsor & Newton over at Wealdstone.
Anthony
I used to love the smell driving passed there.
Gary
Reeves were a well known company; they used to do a good quality product. Of course, behind Reeves was Thorn’s, Thorn Lighting where they used to make all the fluorescent tubes which became G.E. and my Mum worked in Thorn’s offices and it had like, fountains, out the front and it was quite a nice building on the corner of Southbury Road, where Morrison’s are now. My Mum worked in the post room there. She worked for Sangamo Weston on the A10. They used to make electric meters and Sangamos got bought out by Schlumberger and moved out of Enfield and went to Felixstowe. Next to Sangamos was Simmons, used to make the copper stuff and then you had Belling & Lee and Pickford’s a big heavy haulage company on the corner.
Anthony
That must be across the road to where Ocado or Waitrose are now. Because they were there on the corner and then they moved into Southbury Road, at least I think they did.
Gary
Belling & Lee and Belling’s were two different companies.
Anthony
One was a design company for research and Belling’s was the one that made the cookers.
Gary
They invented the electric bar fire. Copper coiled round the ceramic then electric currents run through it and it heats up.
Anthony
The same principle as for lights. The first one was wound in a shed behind the Hop Poles.
Gary
Yes, a shed at the side by the car park with blue doors on it.
Anthony
The council took it down, they should have kept it or if they had to take it down, re-erect it somewhere.
Gary
Belling actually invented that, did he?
Anthony
He did, the first one. He wound it himself. When you and I first started working in Brimsdown it had the highest concentration of industry in all of Europe and look at it now.
Gary
There’s no finished product is there, apart from yourself – Fisher Research and Chela (pronounced Kayla).
Anthony
There’s a few; there’s Rimex.
Gary
They do the chequer plate stainless steel cladding. They’ve been there many years, I used to
work for them.
Anthony
A very successful company. Then there’s the two bakers, Wright’s Flour Mill and Gregg’s, there’s a brewer –
Gary
There’s a couple, there’s Beavertown and Camden Brewery.
Anthony
Where’s Camden Brewery?
Gary
You know where Ford’s used to be ? Autolite? They’re there, on the river.
Anthony
Then there’s the flour mill by there and every now and then I drive around Brimsdown just to be nosy and there’s a cake maker by Rimex, I noticed.
Gary
Wright’s Flour have opened a big new premises over in Harlow. A very modern, very big place but their mill is still working.
Anthony
So there are about twelves manufacturers of finished products and only two of us are not food. There’s Rimex and us, all the others are food or drink.
Gary
Years ago Enfield was a hub of manufacturing, wasn’t it. Ruberoid was such a busy place and I remember standing out the front of Redburn’s garage and seeing lorries going in to Ruberoid from Devon, Manchester, all over the country so they’d come down from their own areas with a load and then go into Ruberoid and go back to their area with a load of roofing felt.
Anthony
Now it’s Amazon, isn’t it. I don’t think I’ve been to where they are, I don’t know how big it is.
Gary
Ruberoid’s was a big area and in Stockingswater Lane, as you come out of Redburn’s and drive left to come up Stockingswater Lane, was where they used to store all their old cardboard for making the roofing felt and that had its own fire engine in there because it had a tendency to heat up and catch fire. It had its own fire brigade there and an old vintage fire truck which used to go round.
Anthony
What is that big new warehouse up by the B.P. garage towards the reservoirs? A huge one.
Gary
That’s the brewery, that’s Beavertown Brewery.
Anthony
Yes, Beavertown Brewery, then you come towards Bilton Way and there’s another building which looks like Beavertown Brewery.
Gary
Is that the sofa workshop? Sofa distribution warehouse. And there’s all new ones being built there.
Anthony
Buttle’s (behind Fisher Research) has been bought by developers, they are going to put a new unit on there. They have said one unit but I am hoping it will be multiple units because that’s what Brimsdown needs.
Gary
Brimsdown needs something for start-up businesses.
Anthony
All the film studios in Enfield will want small businesses to make things for them.
Gary
Specialist carpenters and stuff allied to the film industry. I think Enfield is going to be like Elstree or Boreham Wood was years ago. It’s going to be the hub of the film industry.
Anthony
There’s about six studios and in Waltham Cross the Sunset studios; it’s going to be as big as Hollywood by the look of it.
Gary
The old Sony building –
Anthony
That was burnt down in the riots, wasn’t it .
Gary
That is film studios and there’s, as you come down Bullsmoor Lane and cross the, Hertford Road, GLS, which is Tesco’s home delivery warehouse, but half of it is another film studio.
GLS was Greater London Supplies originally in Tottenham Hale. They’ve moved up north somewhere. I used to go in there with the latex gloves from B.M. Poly Co at Lincoln Road when they started. Do you remember Poly Co?
Anthony
No. Oh, yes, I do, I remember the name, definitely.
Gary
They have moved up out in the middle of Lincolnshire somewhere.
Anthony
We sell biodegradable butyl gloves, those blue gloves. I don’t know where they come from.
Gary
Malaysia or somewhere. The bosses of Poly Co where two managers from Polylina.
Anthony
They were in Brimsdown.
Gary
Polylina used to make the dustbin bags and refuse sacks and went on to making the latex gloves but it wasn’t very profitable and the two chaps started up Poly Co and the HIV hit and the gloves were booming. Everybody wears them now.
Anthony
Well, that’s an hour and five minutes, Gary, and it’s been very, very interesting.