Ted Field - THE WORKING LIFE OF A PLANT OPERATOR

DV What happened when you were demobbed?

I did whatever I could to earn a few bob and I scraped up enough to buy a couple of Rushtons and some spares. I think they were ex-RAF. After the war there was a lot of ex-army stuff going cheap. A lot of my mates ran ex-army lorries and there were plenty of bulldozers and other plant. You could buy a D8 that had hardly got any hours on it for £1,000 up at the Ruddington sales. I tried my hand at farming but I was no good at that so I went back to contract work and sometimes I hired my tractors to Doug Hamilton on threshing work. Now he had a Rushton tractor, it was a crawler, and he wanted a new head for it so I said I would sell him a spare