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Authors: Paul Rowson
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usual alcohol induced bloodshot eyes when I gave him the news. I had invented an initial estimate which was naively accepted without negotiation and so large profits were assured. However, Elwyn was so unused to this scale of work that he vastly overestimated the amount of tarmac required. This meant that there is a car park outside a seminary in the North West of England with a tarmac layer of such depth that it will be there long after the building collapses and will, in the future, provide a puzzle for both historians and archaeologists alike.
Monitoring my alcohol intake on the payday after the great tarmac debacle so as to be alert when the moment for payment arrived, I had already refused Elwyn’s attempts to buy me drinks and upset my critical faculties. He eventually had paid everyone else and summonsed me to the gents. This had become such an accepted practice that no one ever remarked on how bizarre it was. He dramatically counted out notes and stopped at ninety pounds, which was quite a tidy sum in those days. However I knew the profit margin on the car park job and flounced off in a huff feeling this was scant reward for my selling efforts. The huff lasted just about as long as it took me to get to the bar and recall that I was signing on illegally and had zero bargaining powers.
The day for signing on the dole was, in my case, a Monday at 11am. Inevitably when I got to the dole office, there were huge queues of men several shuffling toward the grilled signing on counter. Whatever the external show of bravado and humour this was a deeply de-humanising experience, not to mention an embarrassing one. Some of the men had clothing covered in paint, building dust and other industrial stains. Such were the numbers of unemployed on Merseyside at this point that there was very rarely a challenge to the ones who had clearly come from a place of work to reaffirm their unemployed status. If a challenge was made by the bored looking drones behind the grill, as it once was to me, the standard answer was ‘decorating at home’.
Even though at the time I never gave this too much thought I was disturbed by it on some level. Men working and signing on were displaying enterprise and ambition, albeit in a way that could only ever ‘work’ in the short time. Put a public school educated government minister in the same life position as those men, taking as read their poor educational background and lack of inspirational role models, and grand larceny of a massive scale to generate income would have been taking place.
Not that the workforce of Langdale Contractors were overly troubled by moral issues. Although genuinely ashamed today of some of the work scams that I was party to then, I laughed it off at the time as par for the course in the building trade. One such ‘enterprise’ still makes me smile today for, although immoral, the outcome did have a kind of poetic justice to it.
We had obtained quite a sizable contract to ‘fix the roof’ at a privately owned nursing home. The owner was a nasty, greedy man who came complete with gold chain and spiv’s Jaguar. He cared not a jot for the old people in his ‘care’ and the place stank of urine. Disgruntled staff looked after deeply sad and unhappy residents. We were there only because the Council had forced the owner to get the leaking roof fixed and he truculently complied. Anything that stopped the money rolling directly into his pockets was regarded as a major inconvenience.
It was a gothic horror of a building, extremely tall and all steep Victorian gable ends. We were replacing a few hundred tiles and were having great difficulty getting on and off the roof and also hooking our roof ladders over the apex in order to move around when we did get on. Needless to say we had added to the already dangerous job by illegally cutting costs and not erecting scaffolding. The one advantage was that with all the gables and chimneys it was hard to spot what work was being done
Monitoring my alcohol intake on the payday after the great tarmac debacle so as to be alert when the moment for payment arrived, I had already refused Elwyn’s attempts to buy me drinks and upset my critical faculties. He eventually had paid everyone else and summonsed me to the gents. This had become such an accepted practice that no one ever remarked on how bizarre it was. He dramatically counted out notes and stopped at ninety pounds, which was quite a tidy sum in those days. However I knew the profit margin on the car park job and flounced off in a huff feeling this was scant reward for my selling efforts. The huff lasted just about as long as it took me to get to the bar and recall that I was signing on illegally and had zero bargaining powers.
The day for signing on the dole was, in my case, a Monday at 11am. Inevitably when I got to the dole office, there were huge queues of men several shuffling toward the grilled signing on counter. Whatever the external show of bravado and humour this was a deeply de-humanising experience, not to mention an embarrassing one. Some of the men had clothing covered in paint, building dust and other industrial stains. Such were the numbers of unemployed on Merseyside at this point that there was very rarely a challenge to the ones who had clearly come from a place of work to reaffirm their unemployed status. If a challenge was made by the bored looking drones behind the grill, as it once was to me, the standard answer was ‘decorating at home’.
Even though at the time I never gave this too much thought I was disturbed by it on some level. Men working and signing on were displaying enterprise and ambition, albeit in a way that could only ever ‘work’ in the short time. Put a public school educated government minister in the same life position as those men, taking as read their poor educational background and lack of inspirational role models, and grand larceny of a massive scale to generate income would have been taking place.
Not that the workforce of Langdale Contractors were overly troubled by moral issues. Although genuinely ashamed today of some of the work scams that I was party to then, I laughed it off at the time as par for the course in the building trade. One such ‘enterprise’ still makes me smile today for, although immoral, the outcome did have a kind of poetic justice to it.
We had obtained quite a sizable contract to ‘fix the roof’ at a privately owned nursing home. The owner was a nasty, greedy man who came complete with gold chain and spiv’s Jaguar. He cared not a jot for the old people in his ‘care’ and the place stank of urine. Disgruntled staff looked after deeply sad and unhappy residents. We were there only because the Council had forced the owner to get the leaking roof fixed and he truculently complied. Anything that stopped the money rolling directly into his pockets was regarded as a major inconvenience.
It was a gothic horror of a building, extremely tall and all steep Victorian gable ends. We were replacing a few hundred tiles and were having great difficulty getting on and off the roof and also hooking our roof ladders over the apex in order to move around when we did get on. Needless to say we had added to the already dangerous job by illegally cutting costs and not erecting scaffolding. The one advantage was that with all the gables and chimneys it was hard to spot what work was being done
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