The Ramblings of a Twenty Five Inch Man

By E J Gill

The Ramblings of a Twenty Five Inch Man are the stories of an Ordnance Surveyor. Set in the seventies these are the incredible experiences and encounters that happen to Chris our young surveying hero. From his hilarious but gruelling training in Southampton to map making in the field these stories tell of the last days before digital mapping changed forever the way maps were made. Escaping from the red brick factories and claustrophobic carpet town of Kidderminster in the Midlands where he grew up to join the Ordnance Survey he hopes to find a life of fresh air,
freedom and travel. Instead he encounters Russian Spies, the S.A.S. and the most colourful of characters. Dangerous animals, terrain and weather are all in a days work as are being shot at, shelled and imprisoned by a madman with a machete. Written with warmth and humour his story is set against the blossoming romance with his girlfriend Jane. Funny, sad, traumatic and incredible these stories begged to be told. You will never look at an Ordnance Survey map the same way again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: E J Gill
• Release date: Oct 17, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466007284

E J Gill

Elizabeth Jane Gill has had a media career for over twenty five years but also taught A level Psychology for a number of years. The Ramblings of a Twenty Five Inch Man is her first published book although she has been writing all her life. She was born in Worcestershire but has lived in Shropshire for many years enjoying the country life. She is currently working on the sequel to 'Ramblings'

Book preview

CHAPTER 4 Cake and Ale

CHAPTER 5 Bull’s Eye

CHAPTER 6 Finishing line

CHAPTER 7 Homecoming

CHAPTER 8 Herring Boxes

CHAPTER 9 A Greek Summer

CHAPTER 10 Return to Sender

CHAPTER 11 God’s Earth

CHAPTER 12 Board Game

CHAPTER 13 Stalked

CHAPTER 14 Bedpans

CHAPTER 15 Name Game

CHAPTER 16 A Winter’s Tail

CHAPTER 17 Christmas Dinner

CHAPTER 18 All Creatures

CHAPTER 19 Duck Eggs

CHAPTER 20 Written in Stone

CHAPTER 21 Things That Go Bang

CHAPTER 22 Up in Smoke

CHAPTER 23 Old and New

CHAPTER 24 No Mans Land

CHAPTER 25 Target Practice

CHAPTER 26 Dogs Dinner

CHAPTER 27 Lunch Mate

CHAPTER 28 Luck of the Draw

CHAPTER 29 Arrival

CHAPTER 30 Tales from the Snug

CHAPTER 31 Found and Lost

CHAPTER 32 I Spy

CHAPTER 33 Adrift

CHAPTER 34 Crackpot

CHAPTER 35 Down to Earth

CHAPTER 36 Shake and Wake

CHAPTER 37 Departures

PREFACE

The Ordnance Survey is probably the oldest and greatest mapping agency in the world. Publishing maps at one inch to the mile it began its work at the beginning of the 19th century in Kent. The earliest scale of six inches to the mile began in the 1840’s where the O.S had reached Lancashire and Yorkshire.

A national survey was started in the late 19th century at twenty five inches to the mile. This meant that town and countryside was surveyed and mapped in exceptional detail at these very large scales. These maps were periodically updated and this is the scale I first started surveying at in the early 1970’s.

The Ramblings of a Twenty Five Inch Man are my stories of my first years with the Ordnance Survey. I joined the O.S. forty years ago and these stories tell of the last days before digital mapping changed forever the way maps were made. Surveying with the Ordnance Survey forty years ago meant walking every inch of the map you were making in the field. Ariel photos were used as a guide and an aid but every surveyor had to check, re measure and re draw what he saw on the ground. Every fence, hedge, building or feature had to be verified and physically measured. Usually an Ordnance Surveyor had the clearance to go to areas where the general public do not and cannot ever go to. This meant in some cases going to the most unexpected, remotest and sometimes most dangerous of places - and almost always on your own. These were the days before health and safety regulations and mobile phones!

Most days I would walk ten to twenty miles – sometimes before I even started to survey my allotted area and always carrying heavy equipment. Nowadays every centimetre of the country has been photographed. On Google Earth for example you can look in comfort and warmth from a sitting room chair at the remotest of places simply on a computer.

Forty years ago I visited deserted, ghostly places that had not been seen by another human being for decades and places I cared not to go to again!!

I joined the Ordnance Survey in the hopes of finding fresh air, freedom and travel. I got some of that – the fresh air in abundance but I also encountered Russian Spies, the S.A.S. and a variety of colourful characters – often wielding a shotgun or worse! Dangerous animals, terrain and weather were all in a days’ work as were being shot at, shelled and held captive! Some days my life was literally at stake!

Who would believe a map makers life could be so difficult?

Funny, sad, traumatic and poignant these incredible but true stories are set in the early seventies against the blossoming romance with my later to be wife - Jane. These stories deserve to be told and after reading them I am sure you will never look at an Ordnance Survey map the same way again! Chris Gill

*****

The Ramblings

of a

Twenty Five Inch Man

*****

CHAPTER 1 Beginnings

‘Thwack!’ Something thudded down on the back of my head! As I staggered backwards down the path of a house I had just knocked on the door of, I turned and saw a little old lady. She had been waiting at the bus stop just outside the house as I had walked passed, and now she was attacking me!

‘Thwack’ again, on my shoulders this time.

‘You wicked young man!’ ‘Leave him alone!’

‘Leave that poor dog alone’

I tried to hop backwards down the path but the dog was still attached to my ankle.

‘Stop kicking him I say!’ ‘Do you hear me?’

I heard her all right! This dangerous old woman was shouting down my ear and battering me with her umbrella, her silly woollen hat bouncing on her head as she did so. Not only that but a mad Jack Russell was trying to get its teeth into me! It had leapt at me the second I had knocked on the door and instantly bitten into my trousers, and was now chewing through my socks. Thick socks - surveying socks. This was my first day ‘in the field’ on my own as a fledgling surveyor with the prestigious Ordnance Survey in Southampton. It was still only 8.45 in the morning and this was my first house visit. I had to survey it and ‘put it on the map’. And this was just one of dozens I was supposed to do that day.

‘Look at him kicking that poor dog’ she shrieked.

She had now turned to the queue that was building up by the bus stop and drawing attention to me. Not that I needed anymore, as the snarling, growling little horror was causing quite a lot of interest anyway!

‘Tut- tut’

Some of them muttered in sympathy with her as they stared at me and shook their heads. The truth of the matter was that I was only trying to shake the wretched animal off my ankle as I lurched backwards. As soon as I had reached the top of the path the vile creature had come bounding out from the side entrance, claws scraping on the concrete as it ran up and instantly and entirely unprovoked attacked me. There was no sight of its owner or anyone else to help my predicament. The O.S. van that had dropped me off had long gone with the other fledgling surveyors. They too were on their way to some unknown fate! The dog was snarling louder now, lip curling back over its visible yellow teeth, eyes rolled back with only the whites showing as its teeth sank deeper. As I reached the metal garden gate I made a swift but determined batting motion with my surveying board at the dog flinging it yelping back up the path. The old woman shrieked. I slammed the gate shut and exited up the road to more ‘tutting’ and murmurings by my audience. I stopped a little way up the road out of sight of the bus queue to look at my torn trousers and see what damage my ankle had suffered. Luckily, less than my pride as it turned out! The thick socks had prevented any major damage and I only had superficial scratching.

‘Look after your socks and boots boys!’ we had been told on our first few days of training.

‘They look after your feet and your feet are your job!’

How right he was! It was something I would think of often as I polished my boots with dubbing to waterproof and preserve them. At £25 a pair - £25 we had to pay – looking after them was essential. It was 1971 and £25 then was enough to buy a car – well the beaten up sort of car I could afford to drive! But those same boots lasted me twelve years. They travelled many thousands of miles with me as I tramped hill and valley, mountain and stream. They took me to the remotest parts of Wales, and later to the crowded dirty streets of the Black Country. Farmyards, Manors, remote little cottages, forgotten tracks and tiny roads with grass growing down the centre were all in a days work. All had to be surveyed and mapped. Every inch had to be quantified and accounted for. Every fence and path, building and field, mountain or allotment had to be measured, drawn and mapped. For that was to be my job!

CHAPTER 2 Escape

I had always loved maps. In my grandfathers shed at the bottom of his garden, nailed high up on the wall, hung an old print of ‘The Chart Room.’ As a child I loved going into his shed. Above the ramshackle jumble of flowerpots and tools, old boxes and wooden truggs, were neat rows of apples. Lined up and perfectly spaced out, the green and red, the shiny and the russet apples sat primly on sheets of newspaper. Some were wrapped in paper, but all had been checked and approved by my grandfather before being stored there ready for use by my grandmother at a later date. The smell was always wonderful in the shed, a mixture of onions, apples and an indefinable ‘old’ smell. But it was the print of the mapmakers in their ‘chart room’ that always captured my attention.

As a child, the men looked ancient to me, bewigged and dressed in silk coats as they gazed over the maps on the table, head in hands. Some maps were discarded and scattered on the floor. A gentleman entered the room bringing even more maps into the room cradled in his arms. Piles of books lay stacked up beside the table, and other men were attentively reading. What were they looking for? Where were they going? Would they take those very maps with them – and even more puzzling who had made the maps in the first place? It all held a mysterious intrigue for me. Years later I realised the same had not been true for my grandmother who had unceremoniously dumped the print in the shed. My grandfather, unwilling to take the final step of throwing it away altogether, had hung it above the shelves of apples where it had remained, to grace the shed walls for many years. In my final months at college, with the reality of the real world looming large and the prospect of having to get a job, I met with my careers advisor. I had assured him I did not want an office job, or a ‘boring’ job and I certainly didn’t want to stay in Kidderminster!

Kidderminster was the centre for all carpet making. Row upon row of red brick factory buildings lined the roads with their grim and grimy windows behind which thousands of carpet workers earned their living. Walking to school, and later college, I would hear the clatter of the looms and smell the dyes of the wool that hung in the air. The river too would be stained with the colours of the dyes that poured into them from the factories. A rainbow of colours, purples, reds, yellows and blues that swirled into the water. Further down the river the colours merged into a sludgy greyish purple. Sometimes when I was late home from school I would be caught up with the workers streaming out on the gates on foot or bike.

The other major employer in the area was the sugar beet factory at Stourport. When the wind blew across the town the air would smell of burnt treacle pudding from the steam from the processing plant. But none of these ‘careers’ filled me with any hope. I wanted freedom, open spaces and to escape from the claustrophobia of the red brick factories and the town. A week or so later my careers advisor presented me with a list of ten or so fitting careers. Top of the list was the Ordnance Survey. I knew they were mapmakers. My father had always used them when we had gone on holidays or walking.

‘That’s it!’ ‘That’s the one.’ I said immediately pointing to the top of the list. The realisation that I could actually be involved in making maps for a job seemed too good to be true. And of course it was! For what I envisaged, and what was to be the reality were far from the same thing as I was to discover in the coming years! But for the moment the promise of what I thought would be green fields and blue skies beckoned. So one sunny day in the summer of 1970, I found myself travelling to Bristol in my rattly old green Morris Minor for an interview with the Ordnance Survey. My application and exam results were apparently acceptable, and now they wanted to see me in person.

After a lengthy talk about the O.S. I was asked to identify some symbols from their maps, asked a few general questions and then finally asked, ‘Did I like walking?’ and strangely it seemed to me at the time

‘Was I afraid of cows?’

A ‘yes’ and a ‘No’ seemed to satisfy them, and the interview was over!

A fortnight later I opened the letter that said I had been accepted. But my joy was short lived as there wasn’t another training course until the following spring, so until then I had to get a temporary job. And of course, the easiest and seemingly only temporary job I could get was in one of the carpet factories! For the next nine months I became one of the workers I had seen on my way home from school – flooding in and then finally out of the gates with all the others as the claxon bid us farewell for another day.

Spring eventually came. It was two hundred miles to Southampton from my home, and also my girlfriend Jane. My trusty, but decrepit old Morris was replaced after Christmas with a grey Mini Van which was slightly newer, and a bit nippier to travel to and from Southampton every other weekend or so.

That May I said goodbye to my parents and phoned Jane to say I was finally on my way. We had been going out for eighteen months or so but she didn’t share my enthusiasm for a job so far away. Three years younger she was still at college. We promised to write and phone.

‘I will be back quite often.’ I told her.

I set off for Southampton with the address of some digs the Ordnance Survey had arranged for me in my pocket, and a few hours later I pulled up outside a row of dingy looking terraced houses. Number Three, there it was! My new home. A similarly dingy looking woman, with wiry hair and spectacles like bottle tops, met me at the door. She stared at me through her spectacles and wiped her nose with a hanky. I walked in through the front door, but I was met by an overpowering smell of cats, as two of them shot passed my legs and out into the small front garden.

‘Your room is upstairs on the right.’ she told me as I heaved my old leather suitcase into the hallway.

My room was a small box room with a wardrobe and single bed and just about enough floor space to walk in and out. As I lay on the bed looking round my new surroundings my new landlady opened the door and brought in the first and only cup of tea I was to get in my room! A drop glistened on her nose, hovering above the cup in her hand. It was to be a familiar sight in the weeks to come – her constantly runny nose. She didn’t have a cold, just a constantly dripping nose. It was to be a source of fascination and horror to me as she got my breakfast in the morning and dinner at night - the drip on her nose. Would it fall on my dinner as she passed me my plate? Could I grab the plate off her in time? Had her nose already dripped into the pans on the stove or into the cat’s dishes that she kept on the draining board? And was that why they always looked so sickly? There was no one else to share my questions with, as I was her one and only lodger. She looked at me disapprovingly as she handed me the tea.

‘No shoes on the bed now. ‘You’ll dirty the covers.’ As I drank my tea, I looked at the bed covers in that dingy room and I wondered how anyone would ever notice!

CHAPTER 3 Countdown

Unlike ‘Number Three’ the Ordnance Survey offices were large and airy. In fact they had only been built a couple of years before in 1969. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh had opened the buildings with a flourish of pomp and ceremony. Large enough to accommodate the surveyors and draughtsmen they also printed all the maps here too. The buildings looked like a hospital with large fluorescent-lit rooms and corridors, and what at first seemed like a maze of rooms that was a challenge in itself to find your way around!

I had travelled down on the Sunday, and once I had arrived at my lodgings I had felt at a bit of a loose end on the afternoon and wondered why I had been so keen to get there so early!

I took a short walk along the road to the telephone box and rang Jane. We talked until the few sixpences and shillings I had ran out. Then I walked a little further to see what Shirley, the area in Southampton I was staying at, had to offer. That took about all of twenty minutes!

When the Monday morning eventually arrived I was glad to be finally starting work. Up early, I arrived at ten to eight – a pattern that was not to be repeated much in my latter career! There were sixteen of us in our particular training group that May. It was the usual mixture of young men not long out of college or sixth form. Female equality had certainly never reached the doors of the Ordnance Survey. There were no women trainees. Some of the trainees were enthusiastic, some awkward, others over keen and some seemed to think they knew everything there was to know already! One lad I noticed was in this latter group. Steve was constantly chattered about what he knew and had done at school and ‘Of course surveying was simply a matter of mathematics!’ and how he had achieved top marks in his A’ levels maths!

The first weeks passed fairly easily between a mixture of talks, demonstrations and general training on equipment. I think we took a week to train on using the drafting pens and ink!

In later years those same inks were banned altogether as being carcogenic! The ease of the first few weeks was deceptive though and we were lulled into a false sense of what the work was really going to be like. The umbrella incident with the dog had been my first attempt in the ‘field’, but it was only a taster of what was to follow in the months and years ahead!

Usually we were taken out in groups in an old Bedford van and dropped at various locations around the city to practice our surveying skills. The first weeks had been fairly easy, - all houses or shops. In other words as ‘maths boy’ Steve pointed out all squares and rectangles.

We usually watched with a mixture of interest and trepidation as our colleagues were dropped off, wondering where our particular drop off point would be!

This particular day, which was unusually hot and sunny even for mid-summer, we had already stopped at yet another housing estate to drop off half our vanload of trainees. We were now heading out of the city towards the outskirts.

‘Oh we are obviously heading for somewhere better than the others!’ Said Steve who apparently knew it all.

‘We will be going literally into the field today – ha ha’ he chuckled.

‘Here we are lads!’ Our driver had turned round and was grinning widely at us.

‘Breath of fresh air this’ll be for you today’ he said with another laugh.

We weren’t yet in the country, but some back roads had led us to some iron gates and an ominous looking concrete roadway beyond them. We were met by a man who seemed to be in charge of something or other. He walked us towards our destination for the day, but we knew by then where we were, for the smell had already hit us. It was the sewage works!

Steve seemed a little quieter now as we were given a guided tour. There were huge pipes about three feet wide seemingly everywhere. Every so often a disgusting glugging, sloshing noise would be followed by a huge amount of raw sewage pouring out of the pipes into the holding tanks. A type of netting collected all kinds of unimaginable things including condoms, sanitary products and god knows what undistinguishable things from entering the filter beds. The solids and liquids were then separated and huge rectangular areas of this solid mush were laid out to dry.

The smell of course was dreadful! It was worse than anything you could imagine. You would walk from one area to the next hoping it would be slightly better, but it was always slightly different and slightly worse! Flies too, were everywhere. A cloud of them would fly up as you walked passed, and land in your hair or on your face.

We were amazed to see that several of these vast rectangular patches were completely covered in tall green plants. Closer inspection showed them to be tomato plants. They were the lushest, greenest, healthiest plants you have ever seen, and not only that, they were covered in hundreds, if not thousands of large red tomatoes. Our tour guide saw our faces.

‘Oh those!’ ‘Go straight through you they do – tomato pips!’ ‘Can’t filter them out!’

‘Best tomatoes you can ever get though!’ he said proudly as if he had grown them himself for a country show.

‘You don’t mean you eat them?’ piped up Steve looking horrified.

‘Well,’ our guide coughed ‘Hm – not err.. technically, no!’

There were of course, lots of people going about their jobs at the sewage works, either walking about or driving lorries or trucks. There were too, the manual workers whose jobs you didn’t care to think about, with shovels and forks in their hands!

After the ‘tour’, we set about our tasks of measuring and plotting and drawing onto our maps. Steve was now being uncharacteristically quiet and it seemed to have eluded him what the main purpose of this exercise was. The filter beds were very, very large circles and we had to survey them!

Measuring things in the Ordnance Survey was not always easy, especially as we nearly always, I was to find, had to work on our own. This task was partly to test us in this skill. In later years we would very occasionally have the services of a ‘labourer’ who would carry things and hold a pole or the other end of the tape, but mostly the life of an Ordnance Surveyor was a solitary one! As I looked around, I could see one or two of the others struggling to juggle the large drawing board, tape and other bits of equipment we had. One lad had made the