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I've been lurking for five years.....

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awemawson:
Well I never !

I was at Boarding School in Bedford and one of our school visits was to the Britannia ! Just down the road was Smiths scrap yard (down the side of the railway line) that I haunted on Saturday mornings - all sorts of good stuff chucked out for me to scrounge. That must have been in the early 60's - how time flies !

mtf70:
What do they say about a small World :)

The gatehouse is the only part of Britannia that still remains.

I used to have a look at our scrap heap when I was on late shift. Fitter I worked with whilst I was on foundry maintenance was an expert at looking for useful bits, at home he had an old round head Student that he'd re-scraped the bed on and an ML7 that he'd bought new instead of a car so he walked to work.

I cycled the 12 mile round trip until I learned to drive so I started with an ancient Drummond 4" round bed which was pretty rough.

Smiths is still there but now called EMR.

I spotted a bit further down the Midland Main Line almost 20 years later as I grew up in Stewartby once the London Brick Company village of the largest brickworks in the World.

How time does indeed fly - finished my apprenticeship 30 years ago this year..... how did that happen?

awemawson:
So you grew up near The Chimney Corner pub!

There was so much oil in the clay that the brick works used that not only was there a foul stink, but the kilns once up to heat didn’t need any more fuel!

Up to 1959 I had lived in Leeds with my parents. Father was HM Inspector of Schools, and that year he (and we!) were moved to Bedford where he was primarily to advise on education and language for the large immigrant community of Italians who didn’t seem to mind the heat of the brickworks! We were living on the Kimbolton Road.

In 1969 he was head hunted to be Principal of a Teacher Training College on the Kings Road Chelsea but I stayed on at school as a boarder, only enjoying the flesh pots of Chelsea in the school holidays

So many misspent youthful days were passed at the Smiths scrap yard and also Cox & Danks - happy times (with little parental supervision!) And I kept the school workshops equipped with lathe tools found in those yards and the science lab with oddities (many from Texas Instruments on Manton Lane that had gone to scrap)

Are you still living in the area?

mtf70:
Chimney Corner wasn't too far away and certainly had a Sunday roast or two in there as kids as my parents knew the owners.

I spent six months at the London Brick Company (LBC) before I started school and there was certainly a diverse range of nationalities working there and I have to say I never found a problem with any of them and chatting with them as a 17/18 year old opened my eyes to different cultures.

Same when I started at George Fischer and there was a point when I couldn't go into Bedford without seeing someone who I recognised from either of those places. When I ended up on shifts in the machine shop our team of two fitters and two setters could have been one of those tales of the Englishman, the Italian, the Caribbean and the Indian but all of us good mates and British.

My parents still live in Stewartby and both worked for LBC at some time my Dad completing almost 30 years before being made redundant after it was sold in the mid-80's.

He would have the same with seemingly random people greeting him in the street and if you asked who they were my Dad would just say 'I used to pay him out' from the days when he went up the yard on payday to distribute the wages; my Dad would probably recall what job they did too so quite sad that he has the early onset of Dementia.

The Oxford clay has a certain texture and aroma and when they used the methane from the landfill site to help maintain firing temperatures in one of the kilns the bricks had an even more distinctive flavour!

The Dad of one of the lads in the same apprentice year as me worked at Texas and I spent a while based out of Manton Lane when I worked as an external Technical Sales Engineer for Cromwell Tools; sad that after Cromwell was sold the Bedford branch was closed since it was the first branch to be opened as the company grew.

I'm not too far away these days but if I had lived where I do now in my spotting days I'd be watching Deltics rather than Peaks as I traded the MML for the ECML. A little further along the old Varsity line if you like.

Took a day off yesterday to pick my Mum up and take her to the Dentist in De Parys Avenue, then went up Kimbolton Road for a Screwfix visit whilst she was having her appointment.

Lucky enough to still have both parents with my Dad in his 80's and my Mum in her 70's; they've lived in Stewartby for over 50 years now and in the present house since 1974.

Bedford has changed a lot and much is not for the better but I think with a little careful planning the rich cultural and industrial heritage (soul) of the town could be revived as it is not gone but merely sleeping below the surface.

This has been quite an enjoyable and unexpected trip down memory lane for both of us I daresay :)

awemawson:
Screwfix on Kimbolton Road  :bugeye: Good heavens it was rural when we were there, then they built huge estates of houses spreading from the park / cemetry up to Manton Lane and behind everything to the west of Kimbolton Road I think they did the same either side of Putnoe Lane - I remember ranging over fields for hours when I lived there as a child in the summer holidays.

My friend lived in the remains of Cauldwell Priory off Kempston Road (not far from Britannia Iron Works) - I think that there was only one wing left but lovely grounds, large mature cedar trees iirc  - that now all demolished and is housing  :(

I barely recognised the place when I was last there some years back - a second bridge over the  Ouse (well there always were two - the Town Bridge by the Swan Hotel and the Suspension  Bridge by the boating lake) but only one road bridge. We used to row 'fast starts' in an eight from one to the other with the coach on a bicycle with a megaphone yelling at us  :clap:

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