Kilmarnock Herald and Ayrshire Gazette
April 14, 1950
On The Waterfront (A regular article at that time)
For a week or more there has been seen each morning, walking around the dock area, a squat, sturdy figure surmounted by a bowler hat. He never appeared to have any particular objective though he gave the impression of having a general interest in everything. He was not a manager or foreman. He was not a shipping agent. In fact he was a stranger in these parts. A stranger - yes. But not all complete stranger! Wasn't he known by some of the older hands around the place. Let me tell you about him.
But first, let me take you past the Eglinton Dock, over the level crossing, past the houses at the Dockgates, and over the old dockgate itself. Turn left and you come to that part of the old dock known as Christie's lie, so called because of the firm of that name which in the old days produced railway sleepers there.
Shiploads of timber would arrive at the Eglinton dock, Deck cargoes were manhandled with the aid of hooks and dumped over-board. Hold cargoes were discharged by the ship's derricks. Made into rafts, the rough timbers were towed round to Christie's lie. There they were hoisted from the water by means of an escalator, now long since gone, cut to size, trimmed up. treated with creosote and what not, to emerge finished sleepers.
The present century was just starting when old man Christie decided to transplant his sleeper works to Tilbury Docks, London, and a squad of Ardrossan men were sent south to show how things should be done. Some of them came home later, some made their homes in London.
Among the latter was John McFarlane. He met and wed a Cockney lass and settled down to rear a family in his adopted home. And now (you'll have guessed it) here he is, 76 years old, a widower for ten years, and family of four sons grown up, revisiting the scenes of his early manhood. For the stocky figure that has been seen around the docks lately is none other than 'wee Jock' McFarlane.
Among the others who made that southward journey fifty years ago were Mattha Pollard, Jock Hale, Bob Donaldson and Alex Peebles 'Wee Jock' thinks he is the only survivor of the band whose names will be remembered by the older school.
Wee Jock' did well for himself and for his family, too. His eldest son, George, after starting social work on a voluntary basis, has attained the responsible position of Governor of a penitentiary prison on the Isle of Wight, with prospects of further advancement. Second son, Jack, is a probation officer in Romford Essex. Reggie is a school teacher in Maidstone. The youngest, Tony, would appear to be the least ambitious; he is an operative in a boot and shoe factory in Gray's, Essex. It is in this latter place that Jock is now living in retirement, a prominent member of the Old Age Pensioners Club, though his hale and hearty appearance belies eligibility for membership of that organisation.
Changes in Ardrossan in the past fifty years?
Says Jock, "The biggest improvement I can see is that they've knocked down that prison wall from the front of Castlecraige."
He has a good word for the Council for the good work which has been carried out there.
The harbour? - "It looks just the same as it did fifty years ago," he contends.
It was within the precincts of the railway station that I spoke to Jock.
"There's certainly no change here," he said and recalled the time that he had been on the job painting the roof. "It doesn't seem to have been painted since," he added jocularly. With a broad grin he pointed to a doorway over which appeared the word 'Gentlemen' - That's where we used to practise our dance steps" he said.
Jock made the trip from London to Ardrossan by bus – 16 hours the journey took and he is returning that way. As If that wasn't enough he took the train to Inverness, then the bus for a further twenty miles northward, to visit his 87-years-old brother, George, in Conon-bridge, Rossshire.
Jock is a grand 'raconteur.' He met a kindred spirit on the train journey to Inverness. "He was a grand travelling companion," he said. But it seems that the fellow traveller enjoyed Jock's tales more than a little, for he cut his stay in Inverness by a day so that he could enjoy Jock's congenial company on the way back to Glasgow.
I don't think I need make any apology for letting Jock monopolise my space this week. Such a grand old man with his memories of the waterfront in days gone by is surely worth it. Before leaving him I was moved to enquire why he always wore a bowler, even on his sojourns in the gale-swept harbour area.
Pat came the answer, typical of the man, "They think I'm a detective and don't bother me."
On The Waterfront - Railway Sleepers
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Re: On The Waterfront - Railway Sleepers
Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald
February 12, 1909
A World-Famed Industry - The Making Of Railway Sleepers. ................A few years later fire destroyed this business See here
Messrs: Wm Christie & Coy.'s Ardrossan Branch
A STRANGER might well wonder at the vast quantities of timber which float in Ardrossan harbour, or stand stacked in the vicinity. It suggests business, great business, but whose? There is no flaunting sign-board with ten-feet letters announcing ownership; there is not so much as a name emblazoned over a doorway or gilding a window-screen. Clearly, here is no pandering to the idly curious. If you are concerned with timber, it follows that you must be familiar with this business and know some thing of its enormous extent. If you are not concerned with timber, you may pass on; it is none of your affairs, and the great firm may as well remain innominate. So the unlettered timber-yards would seem to speak.
Yet to everyone in Ardrossan, and to certain people in all parts of the world, the firm of Wm. Christie & Co., Ltd., of Ardrossan, Grangemouth, Grimsby and London, is known to be one of the largest of its kind in Britain. In all likelihood, some of those people in the outlandish corners of the globe have livelier sense of the firm's importance than even Ardrossan people, who see so much of it and yet so little. It is more or less superficial aspect of the business with which the latter are familiar. They may know that the firm makes use of many acres of ground at the harbour. and that on these acres stand machinery and timber worth a king's ransom. But an adequate conception of the dimensions of the business can only be formed with more knowledge and some imagination.
In the main, it is business in railway sleepers - a prosaic business enough, you may suppose, but yet teeming with interest, and not wholly untouched by romance. Its first concern is the importation of red-pine blocks from the Baltic. Here imagination helps. You may picture to yourself the Russian littoral - the busy ports of Riga and Windau and others - and the pine-clad uplands, where armies of peasant workers are hewing down forests where wolves have been wont to roam and do still, and bears black and brown, have yet their habitation. It is an alluring picture, is it not? One can imagine the toiling, perspiring group of ruddy moujiks and swarthier Poles hacking at the tall pines till they swing and come down with crash. Their costumes
are picturesque, their language at once sibilant and guttural, their lives made up of elemental passions and crude philosophy. Gorki might make the description Intimate. And what litter these men make in the forests! Up there on the slopes and plateaux the timber is sawn, stripped and shaped to the rectangle where it falls.
There is skill in the Labour, too. With no better tool than an axe, the woodcutter can shape you as smooth square block as a carpenter's apprentice might do with a plane. While these fellows fell and hew, others drag the logs to the river's edge. make rafts of them, bind them together with mighty iron nails, and the wood is ready for its journey to the coast. At Riga, it may be, a steamer is ready to take four or five thousand tons of timber. Messrs Wm Christie & Co., have two large steamers of their own, and, as long as the Baltic ports are not cut off to seaward from the outer world by miles of impenetrable ice, these vessels kick their way to And from the home harbours, tireless in their business of "fetch and carry." One shiver betimes to think of the work that proceeds on the Russian coast when in the Spring the breaking ice permits steamers to enter the ports. The great blocks still have a veneer of ice on them, and, dripping, glistening, they go hurtling into the holds, there to freeze harder under the influence of chill mutual contact.
At Ardrossan we are familiar with the next stage in the development of the railway sleeper. We have won the Drumxxxxx? and the Ranxx? the firm's steamers -discharge their cargoes in the dock. We have seen the blocks pop over the dock. We have seen the blocks pop over and dive with plunge till an accumulation of them makes it possible to commence raft building after which derricks pluck the blocks out of the hold in bunches, swinging them over. side with the ease of a giant arm. Here, then, is the material for the sleepers. The blocks are nine feet long, and each, sawn lengthwise, makes two sleepers. This is where the work of Messrs Wm. Christie & Co. properly begins. At the Old Dock in Ardrossan, one whole side of which is leased by the firm, the rafts are brought almost alongside the first part of the firm's plant to be employed in the evolution of the railway sleeper. The blocks are pushed one by one into the water, after being probed for nails which would interfere with the sawing. Into the pond where they float.
A Sort OF Endless Chain Elevator is projected, and on to this piece of machinery which works on the same principle as a dredger, the blocks are fed by a boy with boat hook. The chains work round, and block succeeds block up the incline to the level of the sawing machine, where they are received At the rate of ten minute. You may well believe, if once you see it, that the sawing plant is of the latest description. It is steam driven, and it is fitted with the cunningest contrivances for regulating the speed at which it will receive the blocks and at which it will saw them up. Enormous power is in it. A block slides into place, the spinning saw gets a tooth into it, and in few seconds the whole length of the wood is out and two sleepers have been made. Thus block after block is passed through the saw, each pushing its predecessor up an inclined plane to a height whence they are conveniently loaded, as they come, into waggons awaiting them outside the sawing mill. The waggons now carry the sleepers to another part of the works where is more plant of various sorts. First, there is the planing and thicknessing machine, An amazing, high-power contrivance which puts a flat bed on the sleepers almost before you have time to see how it is done. This machine lets you hear something of its potency. It screams as it works, a scream of power. And powerful it looks. Bedded solidly as becomes a thing of such strength it itself taken hold of sleepers as they come, and disposes of each with one sharp yell. The log comes out with a clean, immaculate surface, admirably prepared for the iron chairs where the rails sit to form the permanent way.
The sleeper gets a rest at this stage, unless there be special need to have it adzed and bored or cut shorter for narrow gauge railway, for all which there is another machine. The adzing is to form a depressed bed for the chairs and the boring, of course, for the fastenings. The ingenuity of this machinery is not for description by a lay pen. As we have said, the sleeper now rests for a while. It is gathered with its fellows and stacked to dry. Gigantic stacks of sleepers are the most conspicuous objects near Ardrossan harbour. At the present time almost 400,000 sleeper are getting into condition in Messrs Wm. Christie & Co's yard. The sleepers are built up, tier on tier, sir spaces being left between each, and each tier running in the opposite direction from the one below, so that the wind blows through with ease and the timber dries rapidly. The stacks are roofed over too, so that rain does not reach them to any appreciable extent. It is imposing to walk down the aisles formed by these towering pagodas of red pine. Half a million sleepers may not be stacked on a few feet base. Once dry, the sleepers are ready for the final process, which is perhaps also the most important.
Close by the stacks are enormous creosoting cylinders and tanks, and houseful of strange machinery. The cylinders are 7 feet in diameter and 80 feet long. Each of them holds about 600 sleepers, which are loaded on trolley and worked into the cylinders by wire-rope haulage. When a cylinder is full of sleepers, the doors at the ends are closed and clamped down with enormous wrought-steel clamps, each of which is capable of withstanding strain of 50 tons. Then commence the introduction of creosote to the cylinder. Vast quantities of the oil are contained in tanks immediately below the cylinders from which, first of all, the air is exhausted. This, of course, draws the create up to fill the vacuum, but is still not sufficient to complete the process. When as much oil has been sucked into the cylinders the extraction of air permits, more oil is then forced into the cylinders by means of a piece of American pumping machinery. This plant, like the rest, beggars inexpert description. One has only to see it is operation to be impressed by its power and its ingenuity. Besides the tanks of creosote under the cylinder there is a large stock tank from which the first named are replenished when required, and an Ingenious indicator shows to a gallon how much oil to being forced into the loaded cylinders.
This is, of course, very superficial account of an enormous and deeply interesting industry. It is also a description of only part of Messrs Wm. Christie & Co's business. At London the firm has even a larger plant, mainly electrically driven. At Grangemouth it has more sawing plant, and at Grimsby Docks sawing and creosoting plant. There is no other firm in the same line of business efficiently equipped, and none when operation have been so world-wide. Besides supplying most of the Railway Coys. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, Messrs Wm. Christie & Co have shipped sleepers abroad in large quantities to India and Ceylon, to the Cape and Natal, to the Soudan and Egypt to British Honduras and Chili, to East Africa and Uganda, and we can imagine that the rails on which Mr Winston Churchill travelled when he saw five lions stalk majestically by were laid on sleeper either from the Ardrossan or the London works of Messrs Christie.
Telegraph poles and other forms of protected timber are turned out by the firm we understand, indeed, that a quantity of poles will shortly be erected at Ardrossan for the National Telephone Company and the Post office. To Ardrossan this large industrial concern means a great deal, for much depends upon it, Although it, fortunately, is independent of the ebb and flow of merely local trade.
February 12, 1909
A World-Famed Industry - The Making Of Railway Sleepers. ................A few years later fire destroyed this business See here
Messrs: Wm Christie & Coy.'s Ardrossan Branch
A STRANGER might well wonder at the vast quantities of timber which float in Ardrossan harbour, or stand stacked in the vicinity. It suggests business, great business, but whose? There is no flaunting sign-board with ten-feet letters announcing ownership; there is not so much as a name emblazoned over a doorway or gilding a window-screen. Clearly, here is no pandering to the idly curious. If you are concerned with timber, it follows that you must be familiar with this business and know some thing of its enormous extent. If you are not concerned with timber, you may pass on; it is none of your affairs, and the great firm may as well remain innominate. So the unlettered timber-yards would seem to speak.
Yet to everyone in Ardrossan, and to certain people in all parts of the world, the firm of Wm. Christie & Co., Ltd., of Ardrossan, Grangemouth, Grimsby and London, is known to be one of the largest of its kind in Britain. In all likelihood, some of those people in the outlandish corners of the globe have livelier sense of the firm's importance than even Ardrossan people, who see so much of it and yet so little. It is more or less superficial aspect of the business with which the latter are familiar. They may know that the firm makes use of many acres of ground at the harbour. and that on these acres stand machinery and timber worth a king's ransom. But an adequate conception of the dimensions of the business can only be formed with more knowledge and some imagination.
In the main, it is business in railway sleepers - a prosaic business enough, you may suppose, but yet teeming with interest, and not wholly untouched by romance. Its first concern is the importation of red-pine blocks from the Baltic. Here imagination helps. You may picture to yourself the Russian littoral - the busy ports of Riga and Windau and others - and the pine-clad uplands, where armies of peasant workers are hewing down forests where wolves have been wont to roam and do still, and bears black and brown, have yet their habitation. It is an alluring picture, is it not? One can imagine the toiling, perspiring group of ruddy moujiks and swarthier Poles hacking at the tall pines till they swing and come down with crash. Their costumes
are picturesque, their language at once sibilant and guttural, their lives made up of elemental passions and crude philosophy. Gorki might make the description Intimate. And what litter these men make in the forests! Up there on the slopes and plateaux the timber is sawn, stripped and shaped to the rectangle where it falls.
There is skill in the Labour, too. With no better tool than an axe, the woodcutter can shape you as smooth square block as a carpenter's apprentice might do with a plane. While these fellows fell and hew, others drag the logs to the river's edge. make rafts of them, bind them together with mighty iron nails, and the wood is ready for its journey to the coast. At Riga, it may be, a steamer is ready to take four or five thousand tons of timber. Messrs Wm Christie & Co., have two large steamers of their own, and, as long as the Baltic ports are not cut off to seaward from the outer world by miles of impenetrable ice, these vessels kick their way to And from the home harbours, tireless in their business of "fetch and carry." One shiver betimes to think of the work that proceeds on the Russian coast when in the Spring the breaking ice permits steamers to enter the ports. The great blocks still have a veneer of ice on them, and, dripping, glistening, they go hurtling into the holds, there to freeze harder under the influence of chill mutual contact.
At Ardrossan we are familiar with the next stage in the development of the railway sleeper. We have won the Drumxxxxx? and the Ranxx? the firm's steamers -discharge their cargoes in the dock. We have seen the blocks pop over the dock. We have seen the blocks pop over and dive with plunge till an accumulation of them makes it possible to commence raft building after which derricks pluck the blocks out of the hold in bunches, swinging them over. side with the ease of a giant arm. Here, then, is the material for the sleepers. The blocks are nine feet long, and each, sawn lengthwise, makes two sleepers. This is where the work of Messrs Wm. Christie & Co. properly begins. At the Old Dock in Ardrossan, one whole side of which is leased by the firm, the rafts are brought almost alongside the first part of the firm's plant to be employed in the evolution of the railway sleeper. The blocks are pushed one by one into the water, after being probed for nails which would interfere with the sawing. Into the pond where they float.
The sleeper gets a rest at this stage, unless there be special need to have it adzed and bored or cut shorter for narrow gauge railway, for all which there is another machine. The adzing is to form a depressed bed for the chairs and the boring, of course, for the fastenings. The ingenuity of this machinery is not for description by a lay pen. As we have said, the sleeper now rests for a while. It is gathered with its fellows and stacked to dry. Gigantic stacks of sleepers are the most conspicuous objects near Ardrossan harbour. At the present time almost 400,000 sleeper are getting into condition in Messrs Wm. Christie & Co's yard. The sleepers are built up, tier on tier, sir spaces being left between each, and each tier running in the opposite direction from the one below, so that the wind blows through with ease and the timber dries rapidly. The stacks are roofed over too, so that rain does not reach them to any appreciable extent. It is imposing to walk down the aisles formed by these towering pagodas of red pine. Half a million sleepers may not be stacked on a few feet base. Once dry, the sleepers are ready for the final process, which is perhaps also the most important.
Close by the stacks are enormous creosoting cylinders and tanks, and houseful of strange machinery. The cylinders are 7 feet in diameter and 80 feet long. Each of them holds about 600 sleepers, which are loaded on trolley and worked into the cylinders by wire-rope haulage. When a cylinder is full of sleepers, the doors at the ends are closed and clamped down with enormous wrought-steel clamps, each of which is capable of withstanding strain of 50 tons. Then commence the introduction of creosote to the cylinder. Vast quantities of the oil are contained in tanks immediately below the cylinders from which, first of all, the air is exhausted. This, of course, draws the create up to fill the vacuum, but is still not sufficient to complete the process. When as much oil has been sucked into the cylinders the extraction of air permits, more oil is then forced into the cylinders by means of a piece of American pumping machinery. This plant, like the rest, beggars inexpert description. One has only to see it is operation to be impressed by its power and its ingenuity. Besides the tanks of creosote under the cylinder there is a large stock tank from which the first named are replenished when required, and an Ingenious indicator shows to a gallon how much oil to being forced into the loaded cylinders.
This is, of course, very superficial account of an enormous and deeply interesting industry. It is also a description of only part of Messrs Wm. Christie & Co's business. At London the firm has even a larger plant, mainly electrically driven. At Grangemouth it has more sawing plant, and at Grimsby Docks sawing and creosoting plant. There is no other firm in the same line of business efficiently equipped, and none when operation have been so world-wide. Besides supplying most of the Railway Coys. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, Messrs Wm. Christie & Co have shipped sleepers abroad in large quantities to India and Ceylon, to the Cape and Natal, to the Soudan and Egypt to British Honduras and Chili, to East Africa and Uganda, and we can imagine that the rails on which Mr Winston Churchill travelled when he saw five lions stalk majestically by were laid on sleeper either from the Ardrossan or the London works of Messrs Christie.
Telegraph poles and other forms of protected timber are turned out by the firm we understand, indeed, that a quantity of poles will shortly be erected at Ardrossan for the National Telephone Company and the Post office. To Ardrossan this large industrial concern means a great deal, for much depends upon it, Although it, fortunately, is independent of the ebb and flow of merely local trade.