Interview of Mike Chapman by Anthony Fisher
Anthony Fisher interviewing Mike Chapman, 23rd March, 2023 transcribed by Valerie Fisher
Anthony
What is your name?
Mike
Michael Chapman
Anthony
When were you born?
Mike
I was born in 1942.
Anthony
And you were a draughtsman?
Mike
Yes, I was a tool designer basically but I served my apprenticeship at Ferguson Radio on the Cambridge Road, Enfield. I was in the tools and then aircraft panels, we did the European (airline). (inaudible) dashboards. That was at Ferguson.
Anthony
So Ferguson on the Cambridge Road made dashboards?
Mike
Cockpits, yes. In fact, the (lidl?) lights was the first thing I was into injection moulding.
We had a little hand machine which we used to mould the indicator lights for the cockpit itself. And then the actual cockpit was made out of perspex but it was covered in a grey covering so we used to engrave the lettering or whatever through the grave which obviously when it lit up behind it showed through because the grave was missing and it was clear so it said “turn on” or whatever and you printed “turn on” or “switch off” or whatever.
Anthony
Can you remember what aircraft that was for?
Mike
That was for the – there was two of them started with V and I can’t just recall.
Anthony
It was a long time ago. What sort of tools did you make?
Mike
Mainly press tools for making televisions and radios. Basically all the chassis, all the metal parts of a television. The first six months we were put on inspection at the end of the line of the televisions so, of course, they did pick the chassis up and if there was a short or something you got a shock (laughs). That’s where the apprentices started off and after, I don’t know, three or four weeks, you just got a tingle, before it was quite a big shock to the system so that was the main thing so my first introduction to injection moulding on a hand tool.
Anthony
What sort of tool did you inject?
Mike
Just in lights basically, there was more or less the aircraft division, I suppose. They used to make also, out of metal, flare path lights for the flare path for the runway, they had a metal frame all welded up and everything else and we used to put the lights on.
Anthony
You don’t associate Ferguson’s with that; in my mind it was all radios and televisions.
Mike
It was special products, I suppose; that department really I suppose you’d call it. But there was a lot of workers there, I don’t know, five thousand, six thousand people worked there.
Anthony
How did you get on with people on the factory floor? Was there a division between the office and the scientists?
Mike
No, no, there was a good team effort really, in fact we also had a lot of black employees there – they were labourers or whatever – but not all of them and twice a year, three times a year it used to be the blacks versus the whites at cricket, at tennis, and there was never – like there is today. I never knew any fights or any problems.
Anthony
It’s interesting because later on Ferguson’s management became more aggressive and caused problems but, whilst you were there, they didn’t have any problems with each other?
Mike
No, the shop that I was talking about now was probably managers who had been managers, senior managers, and they’d been eased out of their positions so they all finished up in there so they were all ex-managers basically but they were very helpful and very friendly. I used to play for the table tennis team against other companies, played chess against other companies, played badminton with Cliff Richard.
Anthony
That’s another interesting thing at that time, the companies had a lot of sports and social clubs, didn’t they, who competed with or met with other companies.
Mike
That’s right. Everybody, if they didn’t have a sports field or whatever, then they cleared the canteen out, made room for a table tennis table and we’d play Enfield Buses, they used to come in sometimes and say, “I’m on shift now, can I play my three matches straight off, one after the other, so that I can go back. Or the police, they used to do the same. It was a real community really, it was EDWASCO which was Enfield District and Works and I don’t know what the other letters stood for, but you had to be within a ten mile radius, I think, of Palmers Green so the most you had to travel was twenty miles basically but a lot of it was down the Brimsdown area, Cables, Rolling Mills, Belling Cookers.
Anthony
And all this time you were living in Enfield Lock, right down at the end by the Rifles –
Mike
And the Royal Small Arms Factory, yes. My eldest brother served his apprenticeship there which, if you had an apprenticeship there then you were a bit special, having said that, he finished up as a technical director of BA Whatever dealing with the Exocet missiles but obviously he can’t talk too much about that. He’s retired now, he’s 86. My second brother served his time at Enfield Cables which, after you had finished your time at five years, they more or less sacked you and told you to go out and find another job and don’t come back for two years so to gain more experience because there was always plenty of work in those days so they was expected to go back after two years, or hopefully they would, do but to gain more experience outside.
Anthony
How long were you at Ferguson’s?
Mike
I was at Ferguson’s for eight years, I started a pre-apprenticeship Tricity Cookers, opposite the Old Sergeant in Parsonage Lane which I see that you visited (laughs). There was where I first started as a 15 year old, I had to do a pre-apprenticeship first.
Anthony
Where was this?
Mike
That was at Tricity Cookers, Parsonage Lane. They used to make all the prototypes there and
then send it up to Spennymoor, but that was a good thing because the chief draughtsman’s wife used to come in to test the cookers and cook a nice meal which us draughtsmen used to have to taste and it was very nice.
Anthony
And how did you travel there?
Mike
By bike.
Anthony
There must have been a lot of bicycles in those days.
Mike
Yes. In fact, you used to get stopped a couple of times. It never happened to me but you used to have to stop at the main junction of the main Enfield Road and Parsonage Lane and put your foot on there and you used to get fined for standing on their pedals and going straight over. You had to stop and that’s it.
Anthony
So there was a policeman there?
Mike
Yes. quite regular. But that was a good learning curve; that’s where I first had to learn the printing, if you like and I used to be in the drawing office doing “AAAA, BBBB”.
Anthony
Where did you go to school?
Mike
I went to the Price of Wales in Enfield Lock, then Albany School but they introduced the GCE class then when I was in about the second year which I became part of but I didn’t take any GCEs; I left when I was 15, I’d had enough. The French teacher tried to tell me to carry on but I wanted to leave.
Anthony
Where was the Price of Wales’s School? I can’t place it.
Mike
Enfield Lock, just back from the Small Arms Factory, probably a hundred yards from where I lived. It was east of the railway line. That’s where my wife wasn’t allowed to come because she always said I came from the wrong side of the line. She tells everybody. (laughs)
Anthony
Where did you go from Tricity?
Mike
I went and joined the main factory at Ferguson’s. I went in the Tool Model Shop there.
Anthony
Were the companies connected then?
Mike
Yes. The wages were delivered from Ferguson’s by a big Humber car and I used to have to do a lot of running about. We didn’t have a printer, would you believe, at Tricity Cookers so every time a draughtsman wanted a print, me being the office boy, used to go for a sixpenny bus ride down to Ferguson’s to get some prints and when I got back they’d say, “Oh, sorry Mick, I wanted two of those, can you get another one,” and it was nine ‘til five and I thought, “Well, if this work, it’s only an hour longer than school and I’m getting paid.” The chap used to come in a big Humber Super Snipe, if he came at the time I was going to get the bus I’d say, “Can you give me a lift?” and he’d say, “Yes, jump in,” and he used to take me.
Anthony
So the wages were calculated in Ferguson’s and brought along to Tricity by Humber Super Snipe?
Mike
A big car it was, and he was a big chap (laughs).
Anthony
So from Tricity you went to Ferguson’s and then where?
Mike
I was at Ferguson’s for three more years after my apprenticeship and then I moved on to John Dale’s. I went to there as a Press Tool Draughtsman, actually and you could never get anything simpler. OK you had to work out the sizes and the shrinkage was ten thou per inch so when you designed the cap then you designed the tool, you had a ten thou per inch added on to all the sizes so trigonometry was my speciality actually. But then, if it went on the tin shop area, I went on to compression moulding and started drawing up some compression moulds which again was very simple because they have standard plates where moulds fitted in. So you had the outside sizes already there, so you picked the right size for the particular job you were doing and then you had to obviously whatever cap you were designing, you had to work that in to it. Then once I was on that I progressed to injection mould, that is a compression mould.
Anthony
How does that work? The plastic is a powder, is it?
Mike
The plastic is a powder, yes, and you fill – well basically it’s a three piece tool – but you would think it’s a two piece tool, it’s just got a cavity which you fill the bottom half and you’ve got a split line round there, you can see a split line, it’s half and half because, obviously, you’ve got to get it out the mould and you couldn’t do it all in one. So you have a bottom half, then you have a top half and it just compresses it together. But you’ve got a – it’s a long time ago – but I think it’s about two and a half times the weight of that cap that you want powder in; so you’ve got a powder chamber above the hole for the cap and then you squeeze it in and then the flash comes out and that’s all one except the (inaudible) afterwards.
You pre-heat the powder just warm basically and then that’s it.
Anthony
Is there a mechanical or technical difference in this cap because it’s made under pressure?
Mike
No, I think it’s probably a bit more solid, in fact that was made out of urea and I was looking (it) up and the other thing is urea is from formaldehyde which I haven’t put formaldehyde, we just knew it as urea but it was banned actually in about 1992, because of the cancerous effects or whatever, so they don’t used urea anymore which I didn’t know. You’ve got phenolic and then you’ve got urea. Phenolic is for caps that have to go into be cleaned to make them hygienic.
Anthony
I used to buy phenolic caps from a company in West London.
Mike
Yes, that’s phenol and because they are put in heat to clean them up, eye dropper caps and things like that.
Anthony
So when you designed these, it’s actually quite a complex business.
Mike
It is actually because the problem was we were trying to make it look all the same but it’s not all the same because of the draw, you’d have draught angles on it so what it is a split line round here so that’s the bottom half and this is the top half.
Anthony
The mould’s in two halves.
Mike
Yes. Now, what happens is that the grooves what go round horizontally they are going to have a draught angle on them to get it out the mould because if you went straight in, you couldn’t do it. So, this way the vehicle ones can be as deep as you like because of the line of draw, if you like, but the other ones you will see the draught angles but we had to make them look the same but how they make the tools as well is basically they make a hob so you will get a hob which is sort of parallel with this machine on the end of it and the same the other side, you’d get another hob for that one, and they actually just press it – I forget what tonnage it is – into the mould.
Anthony
I see. So you have a hardened steel hob –
Mike
And a softer metal.
Anthony
So the mould is formed by the pressure of the hob into the softer metal.
Mike
That’s right. And the same as that you’ve got to withdraw that so that’s why you’ve got to have a draught angle because you’d never get the thing out again.
Anthony
And they’ve got an internal thread as well.
Mike
That’s right so I mean we call it a two-piece mould but it’s not because you’ve got a threaded insert pushed in to the upper mould, all moulded the same together, but you’ve got the insert there already in and then a rubber wheel – this is all very highly chromed, all the moulding surfaces are very highly chromed so that it comes out easier like a lubricant and the rubber wheel just winds it off; as it goes round it winds it off. On the other one which is a (inaudible) press which is another moulding thing you have a cog milled on to the top of it so it over (inaudible) with racks. Racks go in and out and in and out to unwind it on this particular one which is done on an (inaudible) press. They actually unwind it with a rubber wheel.
Anthony
Presumably you have to visualise before you can draw it.
Mike
Oh yes, you have to visualise all the angles and everything else. All they tell you is that they want it to be about an inch diameter.
Anthony
Does someone (else) design it?
Mike,
No, that was me. I designed it.
Anthony
So you are an artistic designer then. Someone comes and says I want a nob for a bottle.
Mike
We’ve done them from acorns, “We want it to look like an acorn,” so to be honest in those days we used to design probably about forty six caps a year, telephones, chess pieces all that sort of thing. Now if you look at an Avon catalogues they are all plain caps. I was looking the other day at one of them and someone collects all these and they didn’t have a football one but they had several different ones in their collection.
It is moulded in white and when it comes out it is rumbled, that is it is rumbled in a drum. Then it goes in a metalliser machine. Up in Derby we used to have it done outside, we had our own metallising plant and I had to go dressed as a driver and deliver some bits to a company that was doing it, just to get an insight as to what it was all about basically and they showed me round their factory. Anyway, what they do they put it in a flamer first of all just to degrease it basically and it just goes round and it warms it up and then it goes into a vacuum chamber. I think there was a photo of me putting it into the chamber but it was about six reels of these loaded up and what you do, you put it in the vacuum chamber and then in the vacuum chamber there’s some tungsten filaments along the centre and you put sticks of aluminium in those and then you put it in the chamber and then when the chamber becomes a vacuum, I forget how we did it now – there was dials you put on – and then you fired the current through the filaments and then the aluminium melts and being a vacuum it all falls in a straight line so every cap then comes along with a coating of aluminium. It comes out silver. If you want a silver cap all you do is put a coating of clear lacquer on it. If they want gold you put it in a spray booth and spray it with a gold lacquer. It’s done automatically.
Anthony
So that gold colour is actually a gold lacquer? And to check adhesion?
Mike
You had to put it in the rumbler to rumble the flash off, same sort of thing but they use number 8 wood screws, why number 8 I don’t know. I think it was an inch long number 8 and then you put a bit of sellotape on and snap it off and it mustn’t come off although some do.
Anthony
So what was the run? You say you did those on a hand operated –
Mike
No, no. That was the aircraft thing. This was automatic. Twenty thousand, something like that. It would be about a minute, minute and a half cycle time. Something like that. I think it’s about twelve tools that went round so the powder went in one stage, then it came round – it heated first of all, then it came round – and then it pressed it. About twelve bottom tools and twelve top tools and this thread part is pressed into the top tool.
Anthony
This was at John Dale’s in Waterfall Road.
Mike
Yes. There’s a park opposite where we used to walk round in our lunch hour and then they’ve got the Great Northern Cemetery and we used to walk round there some lunchtimes.
Anthony
Whereabouts was the factory in relation to that?
Mike
If you went down to the right there was a branch of Standard Telephones and John Dale’s was near the top of the road by the roundabout. As I say, the park was opposite, we used to play a bit of pitch and putt on there and also which is a good thing that I didn’t know but they had golfing days at John Dale’s as well. West Brom was their head office.
Avon never came actually one a week, they would probably be three in one week then if you counted them up over the year (there might be forty six). They used to have runs of about five thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand, quite big really.
Anthony
I don’t know what size they are now but they were a very big company.
Mike
You always used to get them knocking at the door, didn’t you, with catalogues. When we get the catalogue through our door the only thing I look at is what the design is and they’re just pain old coloured ones really.
Anthony
When did you leave Enfield?
Mike
I left Enfield in 1975 because the company the company moved up to Derbyshire. Altogether I did about thirty years, I suppose. I got a clock, one for fifteen and one for twenty five or whatever. The company closed actually. I used to put work out to some smaller companies if we didn’t have enough capacity and one of them approached me when we closed down because they’d already got some tools of ours and I’d become a director and I was a director there for ten years and then the chap, who was actually ten years older than me, he’s in his 90s now if he’s still alive, he will never sell up. I was going to buy the company but it grew that big that it was too much for me but the thing is we used to do a lot of work for Metal Closures for Absolut Vodka, you might have seen Absolut Vodka caps, twenty five million a year we used to do of those and, of course, when I joined them, then Metal Closures, who were the head office, said, “Would you be interested in taking (inaudible)”. The company got worth more and more and more and so it was out of my hands really. And then I did a lot of costing for Shire’s bathrooms which were making all the ball valves and the syphons etc and I did lots of costings for them for about two months then we took on all their work as well so that was all injection moulding.
Anthony
So when you retired you were still designing for injection moulding?
Mike
Well, I was running the factory basically, the MD if you like, and then before I joined that company a friend who I used to play snooker with regularly had a tool making company and they wanted to go in for injection moulding and so I sold him one of our machines, of John Dale’s, for them to make a start really and then they offered me a job at the same time as the other firm and I said, “No, I’ve already got a gentleman’s agreement to join the other one,” so I couldn’t. So when we sold that other one, the other chap said, “Well, it’s ten years ago, what about you joining us now? We’ll get some machines and start again.” So I was there until I retired, another ten years or whatever it was. I’ve been very fortunate in the positions that I’ve got really and to think of my upbringing in Enfield Lock (laughs). It’s like my brother, he became Technical Manager of British Aerospace and did Exocet missiles and was picked up by military personnel and goes to France and discusses (things) so we had quite an upbringing down there really. All my friends after I started my apprenticeship – only because my brothers did – after all, that was the normal thing to do – the others all went on building, earning about £9 an hour and I started off on about £3.12.6 I think it was but after serving my time and everything else I did quite well.
It gave us a good future and we’ve been to lots of places, have had lots of holidays. My son got married in the Bahamas and we were fortunate enough to be able to go over there and my older brother, he was in the Masons; I mean, I’m not in the Masons but I was approached several times to join them and, in fact, the golf club I belong to now is a big noise in the Masons and he approached me but I said, ”No.” We’ve had some good Ladies Nights, brilliant, and he was in the Chair. We’ve had a good life.
Anthony
I’ve been really surprised learning about Ferguson’s making things for BOAC.
Mike
We went there on an apprentice visit to look at the ‘planes and I was amazed that if you touched a wing the wing on the other side moved. They’re that flexible, I suppose. I enjoyed it at Ferguson’s, there was a very good social life; I played a lot of sports for them. Cliff Richard’s dad used to be in the accounts office and Cliff used to come along for badminton. He was in the Transport department, I don’t know how long for – six months or something and so I played badminton with him as well.
When I left there I went to another little firm which was a mistake and I haven’t mentioned that at all but I stayed there for about three months and I realized it was a mistake and I left.
Someone who had served their time at BSA joined the same day as me and we got there at 9 o’clock, the pair of us, and at half past ten he walked out and he said, “If you’ve got any sense, you’ll come with me.” and I thought, “I’ve got to give it a try,” but, no.
Anthony
Which company was this?
Mike
That was Actin’s at Tottenham. You’ve got the coils for presses and they used to make the straighteners, what you used to straighten the coil up before it went into the press. He was an old boy; very friendly and everything. I worked at Ferguson’s and I mean the collet pencils were two a penny and your leads and I went up there and he used to give you one lead at a time and when you went for one he’d say, “What have you done with the other one?” “Well, I’ve used it,” you know, it was crazy. I don’t even think about that one. I know I left without any other job, I just couldn’t stand it at all so that was it. He was a strange chap, in his late 70’s, I think. I had boxes and boxes of leads from Ferguson’s, six 8s, four 8s, two 8s and all sorts but there, one lead at a time.
Anthony
Thank you very much, Mike, it’s been very interesting.