Castle Aching

[Regularity]

11 hours ago, drmditch said:

You remind me of a lovely Douglas Adams line, about a small asteroid inhabited by one old man who repeatedly claimed that nothing was true -

But was later discovered to be lying.

I was thinking of that: it’s known as the “liar paradox”. There are ways to interpret it that make it not a paradox, but we rapidly get into the realm of specious semantics.

[Compound2632]

This has got me curious as to how the larger contractors operated. I suspect that they may not have been very highly capitalised, simply hiring in equipment and labour for each contract as required, though there would have been a core commercial and engineering staff.

[webbcompound]

20 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

This has got me curious as to how the larger contractors operated. I suspect that they may not have been very highly capitalised, simply hiring in equipment and labour for each contract as required, though there would have been a core commercial and engineering staff.

 

They certainly appear to buy locos for specific projects, then rapidly sell them on. As far as labour is concerned I would think that was the normal employment pattern for navvies who moved from contract to contract

 

Edited June 24, 2020 by webbcompound

[Nearholmer]

Not far different from now, I think, in that some of the larger ones had established "plant yards", where kit was re-grouped, restored/repaired, and made ready for re-deployment, but smaller ones barely had a permanent base.

 

There was a huge market in secondhand kit, through the imaginatively titled (weekly IIRC) newspaper "Machinery Market", and big contracts justified the purchase of new kit that was paid for entirely by the one job and could be sold at the end, or kept for re-use.

 

I'm not sure there was so much of a hire business for kit as now, although there was clearly some, as Boulton's Siding testifies.

 

People were again like now: "on the staff" commercial, engineering and other key specialists, including "ganger-men" and some specialist labour, but the rest a pool of guys who would he taken-on either as "one man subbies", or by any period ranging from a single shift upwards, with or without their own tools (these are the guys who are nowadays self-employed one-man bands).

 

The other thing to note is that the "firms" weren't all anything like permanent. Heads would get together and create joint ventures to bid for particular jobs, just as they do now, so you will see the same names cropping-up in multiple different combinations in records of railway construction for instance. Messrs A, B and C might bid together against Mr D on one job, but on the next A&B would be bidding against D&C, their key staff shifting about with them,

 

The way of resourcing and organising "capital work" that seems to have risen in the late C19th, and then disappeared by the 1980s, was the use of Direct Labour Organisations (DLOs) by councils, public utilites, railways etc. Under that model, the utility or railway would provide all the engineering, supervision, and plant, and source the materials, and would take on labour in the same way that a contractor would. It cut the contractors out, but I think it fell out of favour because too much of the labour force ended-up "on the books", becoming an under-productive cost drain when there were no projects going on.

 

Having a civils contractors yard on a pre-grouping layout would provide excuses for all sorts of interesting stuff, in just the same way that an agricultural contractor would.

 

 

Edited June 24, 2020 by Nearholmer

[Compound2632]

11 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

The other thing to note is that the "firms" weren't all anything like permanent. Heads would get together and create joint ventures to bid for particular jobs, just as they do now, so you will see the same names cropping-up in multiple different combinations in records of railway construction for instance.

 

The entry for Joseph Firbank in The Oxford Companion to British Railway History (J. Simmons and G. Biddle, eds., OUP, 1997) states that "having failed to find a satisfactory partner, he depended on the assistance of his nephew, Ralph Firbank, and eldest son, Joseph Thomas."

[TheQ]

47 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

This has got me curious as to how the larger contractors operated. I suspect that they may not have been very highly capitalised, simply hiring in equipment and labour for each contract as required, though there would have been a core commercial and engineering staff.

often as a contract neared its end the Navvies would leave, to get on a contract just starting. Many were also farm labourers and go home to see the family and work on their local farms at harvest and planting time..

[wagonman]

30 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Not far different from now, I think, in that some of the larger ones had established "plant yards", where kit was re-grouped, restored/repaired, and made ready for re-deployment, but smaller ones barely had a permanent base.

 

There was a huge market in secondhand kit, through the imaginatively titled (weekly IIRC) newspaper "Machinery Market", and big contracts justified the purchase of new kit that was paid for entirely by the one job and could be sold at the end, or kept for re-use.

 

I'm not sure there was so much of a hire business for kit as now, although there was clearly some, as Boulton's Siding testifies.

 

People were again like now: "on the staff" commercial, engineering and other key specialists, including "ganger-men" and some specialist labour, but the rest a pool of guys who would he taken-on either as "one man subbies", or by any period ranging from a single shift upwards, with or without their own tools (these are the guys who are nowadays self-employed one-man bands).

 

The other thing to note is that the "firms" weren't all anything like permanent. Heads would get together and create joint ventures to bid for particular jobs, just as they do now, so you will see the same names cropping-up in multiple different combinations in records of railway construction for instance. Messrs A, B and C might bid together against Mr D on one job, but on the next A&B would be bidding against D&C, their key staff shifting about with them,

 

The way of resourcing and organising "capital work" that seems to have risen in the late C19th, and then disappeared by the 1980s, was the use of Direct Labour Organisations (DLOs) by councils, public utilites, railways etc. Under that model, the utility or railway would provide all the engineering, supervision, and plant, and source the materials, and would take on labour in the same way that a contractor would. It cut the contractors out, but I think it fell out of favour because too much of the labour force ended-up "on the books", becoming an under-productive cost drain when there were no projects going on.

 

Having a civils contractors yard on a pre-grouping layout would provide excuses for all sorts of interesting stuff, in just the same way that an agricultural contractor would.

 

 

 

Most DLOs were attached to Housing or Refuse departments and were usually kept busy. They were abolished under 'Thatcherism' from the '80s on, not because they were inefficient (some were, some weren't) but because they failed to provide profit opportunities for the Tory Party's sponsors.

 

 

 

[Compound2632]

Trying to find evidence of J.T. Firbank MP's political activity:

• he was one of 41 cross-party members who signed up as Parliamentary Advisers to the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies in, I think, 1901;
• he, along with Kingston-upon-Hull's other two MPs, unsuccessfully petitioned the Home Secretary for Hull's elevation to city status in 1897 and again in 1901 and 1903;
• Hansard has over 500 references: he was a member of a select committee appointed to control the arrangements for the Kitchen and Refreshment Rooms of the House of Commons from 1901-5 and was annually named in bringing in a bill to prohibit the sale of intoxicating liquors in Sundays.
• In 1897, he (by means of a surrogate) asked a parliamentary question fishing for censorship of Indian newspapers that was described by J.G. Swift McNeill as the "most vicious  Question in a Parliamentary sense, reflecting upon a whole class of the Press, that had ever been presented to the House of Commons."

[Nearholmer]

The classic council DLO was only one instance of that method of organising, and latterly the classic council DLO was largely a "revenue works", rather than "capital works", organisation anyway. I'm talking here about capital works DLOs.

 

Its a subject that is so politicised that it’s hard to find dry history, but the chapter in here gets close in places https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_zTUDgAAQBAJ&pg=PA85&lpg=PA85&dq=council+dlo+history&source=bl&ots=d4Djj5Ae-3&sig=ACfU3U3CNrCpzvw6MQuD1dikPWKpmOoH-w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjRsuGNz5rqAhVyqHEKHRyoCCY4ChDoATAFegQIBRAB#v=onepage&q=council dlo history&f=false

 

But, I have a feeling that utilities, or the utility side of public works, might have used DLOs before the house-building side, and Stephenson resorted to it for a period during the building of the London & Birmingham, because the little local contractors didn’t have the organising power. We’ve discussed that here before, I think. I’ve also got a dim memory, possibly false, that the GWR used direct labour to build some of the “cut offs” c1900.

 

 

 

 

Edited June 24, 2020 by Nearholmer

[Tom Burnham]

7 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

JTF were also doing other light railway work at the same time, I think, under the direction of both H F Stephens (Paddock Wood) and A C Pain (Lyme Regis) as well as elsewhere. Did they do the Vale of Rheidol for Szlumper’s brother by any chance??

 

Stephens was just resident engineer for the Paddock Wood & Cranbrook - the main engineer was E P Seaton, a consulting engineer who did a lot of work for the Metropolitan Rly (where HF Stephens had originally been an engineering apprentice).  The local manager for JTF on the Cranbrook contract was an engineer called George Throssle or Throstle who had previously worked for JTF's father.  Throstle's father, John Throstle, had also worked for Joseph Firbank (senr) and was an executor of his will.

 

The main contractors for the Vale of Rheidol were John and Frank Pethick of Plymouth.  JTF did some work on the Cleobury Mortimer & Ditton Priors Lt Rly (engineers E R Calthrop and then W T Foxlee, both known in light railway circles).

 

The Szlumpers are an interesting family, incidentally.  Fingers in many railway pies.

Edited June 24, 2020 by Tom Burnham

[runs as required]

I’d forgotten all about Direct Labour Organisations although they featured prominently through the 1950s - my years as an architecture student, later a “Civic Design*” post grad, in Liverpool.

The Interwar City Engineer Sir Lancelot Kaye’s “cottage estates” in a broad semi-circle around “Queens Drive” Liverpool  (IMHO some of the best housing ever built in Britain) as well his ‘Bullring’ flats that appear above the spectacular Exhibition model of ‘Lime Street 1946’ were DLO built – as I believe a lot of the C20 reservoir projects in the north were by Local Authorities.

 

In my first qualified job for BR(E) CCE’s in Kings Cross, much of our work was carried out by the Region’s District Engineers' DLOs. The DEs would all turn up to report to the CCE on Friday morning then liaise in the Chief’s various drawing office sections over drawing board lunchtime to mid-afternoon sessions before returning to Peterboro/Ipswich/Doncaster/Sheffield etc

 

“My” R&D Group had a love/hate relationship with the DEs because the GM (Gerry Fiennes) was loath to to use Contractors for ‘minor works’.  The DEs were forever proudly substituting and re-using worn or lifted rails and other redundant s/h kit in place of the drawing office carefully chosen “nominated’ specified items. 

On “front of house” station improvements the (mostly ex LT Designers) could get their way to achieve a ‘Brand’ look for the Region using an external Contractor - even though any subsequent re-furbishment or repair would always have (an easily spotted) homely improvised DE’s look. 

 

* Civic Design as a name for T&C Planning became archaic as the “Public Realm” was increasingly privatised and ‘gated’ after 1978 to be merely ‘Regulated’ by LPOs ... until now with the "new normal"?  

 

Edited June 24, 2020 by runs as required
substitution of predictive txt's 'indigenous' for my 'improvised'

[Tom Burnham]

I have a book on my shelves "Joseph Firbank - The Railway Builder" by Eric and Margaret Colling, published in 2011 by Roundtuit Publishing of Durham.  I think I bought it at the Shildon museum.  There's quite a lot about the various descendants.  They say "Lacking the 'boldness of vision' of his father, and given the relatively difficult trading conditions in the early years of the century, it was perhaps inevitable that Sir Thomas's company was not successful despite the opportunities for diversification. It was subject to a compulsory winding up order and went into receivership in July 1906 while it was engaged on a contract for the Great Western Railway."  JTF's estate was valued at only £621 when he died in 1910, compared with the £348,528 of Joseph Firbank's in 1890.  Perhaps JTF had made provisions for some of his family before his death, but all the same it's unimpressive.

[Donw]

Based purely on what ohes have postted I have gained an impression that he simply wasn't up to running the whole show in difficult times. Perhaps under his father he had been focused on actually carrying out the contracts but not involved is the estimation of likely costs and pitching for contracts where  you had to be pretty accurate about you estimates to get the price right. I wonder how many of us could have done the job. Get your estimates badly wrong  and you are not just working for nothing you may actually be paying out more than the contract will earn.

 

Don

[Nearholmer]

Ah, that explains the “what” very clearly, And some of the “why”, and it does sound as if the Park Royal generating station may have been the death of it.

 

Many thanks for filling-in the blank space.

[Compound2632]

Just now, Donw said:

Based purely on what ohes have postted I have gained an impression that he simply wasn't up to running the whole show in difficult times. Perhaps under his father he had been focused on actually carrying out the contracts but not involved is the estimation of likely costs and pitching for contracts where  you had to be pretty accurate about you estimates to get the price right. I wonder how many of us could have done the job. Get your estimates badly wrong  and you are not just working for nothing you may actually be paying out more than the contract will earn.

 

He was too busy meddling with House of Commons catering to be involved at such a level of detail, is my impression.

 

The business ran smoothly so long as there were plenty of railway contracts but in the early 20th century those dried up and the firm failed to see that coming or do anything about it - an all to common story, aka. Buddenbrooks...

[Tom Burnham]

The Collings point out that other large-scale railway contractors diversified into other aspects of civil engineering, which went on apace, but Firbank didn't.

 

Arguably there was quite a lot of railway civil engineering going on during the 1900-1914 period, but (apart from the rather specialised area of London tube railways) most of it consisted of expansion and improvement of existing routes, rather than completely new railways through open country.  Often on a "cost plus" basis rather than tenders based on detailed plans and quantities, and you would need to liaise more closely with the railway as you'd be working on an operating railway.  

[runs as required]

Wherever I worked - almost always as an "in house" salaried (rather than "Consultant" status) job runner, we certainly knew who the really hostile Contractors were and tried our damnedest to keep them and their ever antagonistic contract challenging profit maximising specialist managers at bay. 

Not surprisingly these morphed into the UKs volume House Builders the Government depends upon for its housing policy.

 

It has been most depressing to see how much the total of all professional fees has gone up from about !3 % of estimated pre contract project price (for something like a new university campus) to between 25 - 30% before contingencies.

 

Incidentally such a campus usually included an "Estates yard" with DLO workshop provision.

Before Lockdown, I was shown round Rugby Public school's new buildings - these include an impressive newly built Estates Officer's Department with DLO workshops for carrying out fairly extensive remodelling and alteration work.

They prefer where possible to avoid external Contractors to control costs - and I was reminded that Public schools do have Charity status.

[wagonman]

When Network Rail was created out of the ashes of Failtrack they promised they would take the bulk of their work in-house with the twin aims of improving control and reducing costs. It doesn't seem to have happened though...

 

A rolling programme of electrification using their own labour would be better than the ludicrous situation we have had recently with schemes cancelled half way through and operators forced to use inefficient and expensive bi-mode trains instead.

[Compound2632]

1 hour ago, wagonman said:

A rolling programme of electrification 

 

Well, that would require long-term planning and long-term financing... Suggesting that sort of thing would get you branded a Marxist in the present climate, so it's probably worth it just for the badge of honour.

[uax6]

4 hours ago, wagonman said:

When Network Rail was created out of the ashes of Failtrack they promised they would take the bulk of their work in-house with the twin aims of improving control and reducing costs. It doesn't seem to have happened though...

 

A rolling programme of electrification using their own labour would be better than the ludicrous situation we have had recently with schemes cancelled half way through and operators forced to use inefficient and expensive bi-mode trains instead.

 

The biggest problem that the railway faces is its management. They are mainly career management crawlers, generally spending no more than about 18 months 2 years in any position, (just about long enough to c*ck up and then move on leaving someone else to sort out the mess, but not enough time to actually learn anything from being there), and not actually having any clue how to manage anything. The 'we must use the cheapest quote' seems inbred, as they do not understand that being cost effective isn't just about the lowest quote.

But these are the management skills that are bred on any management course, contractor good, direct labour bad..

 

Andy G

 

  

Edited June 25, 2020 by uax6

[wagonman]

4 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Well, that would require long-term planning and long-term financing... Suggesting that sort of thing would get you branded a Marxist in the present climate, so it's probably worth it just for the badge of honour.

 

As some wag sprayed on a wall of the Odéon in Paris in May 1968, "Je suis Marxiste – tendence Groucho".

[ianathompson]

2 hours ago, uax6 said:

But these are the management skills that are bred on any management course, contractor good, direct labour bad..

 

The best laugh that I heard of in these circumstances occured on Ely North Junction when they were doing some remodelling.

It might have been before your time with Notwork Rail as it might have been under Fail Track.

 

Some management (it was in the days when we had proper ones) got wind that the contractor was pulling a fast one (as usual).

They were charging for 20 workers to do the job.

So, in the middle of the night, unannounced the said management turned up to see how many workers there were.

The total was 12.

Now we get to the punchline. The contractors told the foreman to do the job with 16 so they could charge for 20.

The foreman and his mates decided to sting the contactors and do the job with 12.

 

Still, in the days before recorded telephone lines I can remember one PICOP handing back a possession at around 05.00, as per the WON.

"Where are you?" I said, "So that I can fill the form in properly."

"On the North Circular!" came the reply.

"I'm sure I misheard you. I'll put that down as Queen Adelaide" I said.

And THAT was when there was SOME control.

 

Ian T

[Northroader]

Saturday night possessions, getting cables in at Wemberlee or Marrowlebone, falling asleep bombing back home on the M4 after handing back possession, how did we survive?

[Compound2632]

1 hour ago, ianathompson said:

"Where are you?" I said, "So that I can fill the form in properly."

"On the North Circular!" came the reply.

"I'm sure I misheard you. I'll put that down as Queen Adelaide" I said.

 

The pub near Teddington station?

[jcredfer]

5 hours ago, uax6 said:

 

But these are the management skills that are bred on any management course, contractor good, direct labour bad..

 

Andy G

 

  

 

Management principles so ingrained in the US that they even extend the principle to their military...  they outsource to other countries to get on with the job.  So much so that they have not only never won a war on their own (as far as I have managed to glean from proper history books} but have been known to turn up late for major conflicts - and a minor one in their own territories, where they arrived 4 days after it finished.

 

NB.  My comment makes no adverse reference, what-so-ever, to the troops themselves, who have been as valiant as any others, worldwide, to get he job done.

 

Julian