Rolling Around the World: An Autobiography

By Ewan C. Hewitt

This is partly autobiography, partly history of an engineering firm serving the World Steel Industry and partly of its customers. There are chapters about life at Davy-United in Sheffield and chapters about 36 countries where there were significant events. Candid portraits of colleagues and clients, anecdotes, funny stories, and jokes litter the pages, whilst in appendices, there are summaries of family background, growing up at Frinton-on-Sea, Essex, school life, life in the Army and university, a lifelong interest in New Orleans Jazz, jokes near the bone, professional activities, and recent career as organiser of over 80 concerts in Martock Church in Somerset.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Jan 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493140251

Ewan C. Hewitt

Ewan Christian Hewitt was born in 1928 and served in the Royal Engineers 1946–1948, a grateful Government paying him to study Engineering at Cambridge. He spent forty-five years at Davy on custom-designed rolling mills for the World Metals Industries, twenty-two years as Technical or Marketing Director, and five years as Technical Strategist, making 300+ overseas visits to obtain orders and promote new technology, whilst also modernising the firm’s internal operations. Visiting nearly all the countries then making steel, he met many amazing characters and situations. With detailed memories of incidents from up to seventy years ago, he regularly recalls dozens of humorous anecdotes from an eventful life.

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Copyright © 2014 by Ewan C. Hewitt. 307347-HEWI

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Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Cambridge University Appointments Board

Davy Apprentice

Bidding for Rolling Mill Contracts

Improving Davy’s Internal Procedures

Feasibility and Viability Studies

Miscellaneous Anecdotes

MacMillan’s Folly – the Tale of Two Hot Strip Mills

Jokes and Funny Stories

Canada

China

Finland

France and Germany

Greece

Iran

Italy

Japan

Latin America

Morocco

Norway

Poland

Romania

Russia

Scandinavia

South Africa

Taiwan

The Benelux Countries

The United States of America

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Appendix 3

Appendix 4

Appendix 5

Appendix 6

Appendix 7

Appendix 8

Appendix 9

Commentary on the Illustrations

Illustrations

Tables

List of Illustrations

Fig 1 Davy Brothers’ Park Iron Works in 1879

Fig 2 6000ton Wheel Press at Steel Peech & Tozer, Sheffield

Fig 3 Wheel Rolling Mill at Steel Peech & Tozer

Fig 4 Davy Office Block, Darnall Works, Sheffield

Fig 5 Davy’s Darnall Works, aerial view

Fig 6 Davy Drawing Office

Fig 7 Surahammar Reversing Cold Mill, Sweden 1956

Fig 8 John Summers Shotton 80" Reversing Cold Mill 1948

Fig 9 Norsk Jernverk Primary Mill, North Norway 1956

Fig 10 Durgapur Primary Mill, in West Bengal, India 1960

Fig 11 Sandviken Primary Mill, built at high level for future four high operation 1948

Fig 12 Ebbw Vale Hot Strip Mill, built in 1938

Fig 13 Ebbw Vale Five Stand tandem cold mill 1952

Fig 14 Maag Gear Grinder & Gears under test, 1980

Fig 15 Port Talbot Edger under trial erection 1980

Fig 16 Five stand tandem mill under trial erection 1950

Fig 17 Thames Barrier Trunnion on two of which each Gate pivots.

Fig 18 Downcoiler under trial erection

Fig 19 Computer assisted manufacture 1992

Fig 20 Rautaruukki’s first plate mill 1965

Fig 21 Rautaruukki staged layout

Fig 22 Rautaruukki’s second plate mill c1980

Fig 23 Port Talbot Hot Strip Mill Reversing Rougher 1986

Fig 24 Port Talbot Hot Strip Mill Stelco Coilbox 1986

Fig 25 Port Talbot Hot Strip Mill Finishers after fitting QWRC c1990

Fig 26 Lackenby Coil Plate Mill Downcoiler, similar to two at Port Talbot c 1990

Fig 27 Downcoiler with coil being removed

Fig 28 Hot Strip Mill Delay table with pushers for rejects

Fig 29 Encopanels with lids raised after passage of strip

Fig 30 Encopanels with one module lid raised

Fig 31Two strand Rod Mill – Roughing Mills

Fig 32 Twist Free Rod Finishing Block plan view

Fig 33 Twist Free Rod Finishing Block end elevation

Fig 34 Rod Mill Laying head and open coil conveyor

Fig 35 BSC Scunthorpe Four-strand Rod Mill: Stelmor rod cooling conveyors,

Fig 36 Water Curtains for Hot Strip cooling, Surahammars, 1976

Fig 37 Protype Horicast under test at Davy Roll Company mid 1970s

Fig 38 Vidimon Shape Measuring Roll in operation, mid 1980s

Fig 39 Columbus Steel, South Africa - Steckel Mill Rougher & edger, early 1990s

Fig 40 Columbus Steel, South Africa - Steckel Mill Finishing Stand

Fig 41 Columbus Steel, South Africa – Sendzimir 20-high cold mill with door open

Introduction

I decided to be an engineer when I was five, in spite of my father and grandfather both being doctors. My father did not press me to follow in his footsteps, so an Engineer I became.

The book begins by describing firms I visited before joining Davy & United Engineering Company, a Sheffield rolling mill builder, in 1952, aged 24. I spent my whole career there, much of it travelling the world for Davy, presenting technical papers or visiting steelworks, seeking orders for rolling mills, or advising on modernising existing ones. Hence the name of this book Rolling Around the World.

I served under 13 managing directors. Maurice Alburic Fiennes ran the firm for my first eighteen years, whilst the other twelve lasted an average of two years each. Maurice was knighted for services to the plant-building industry and to exporting but was forced to resign in 1970 after a contract taken by another part of the Group, Power Gas Corporation (PG), who were petrochemical plant designers, went badly wrong.

PG had become part of Davy when we took over Ashmores, the blast furnace builders of Stockton-on-Tees. PG took an order from Conoco, their first for a complete oil refinery. The £25M contract overran by £12M and virtually bankrupted the group. The project manager watched costs escalate but kept the news to himself, hoping that things would improve, but Sir Maurice, as captain of the ship, had to go. This coloured everything that happened to Davy for the next ten years, even though Conoco eventually took responsibility for most of the cost increase and paid an extra £10.5M.

Over my first twenty-one years, I rose from Graduate Apprentice to Technical Director, a post I held for fifteen years before switching to Director of Technical Marketing till I reached 65. I then became an independent Engineering Consultant to the World Steel Industry, but I was mainly helping Davy’s Paris and Pittsburgh offices to improve their technology.

When I joined Davy in 1952, it employed 3,000 in Sheffield and 500 in Glasgow in engineering and manufacturing plus 200 at a steel and roll foundry at Billingham, on the Tees. From 1960, Davy gradually acquired its competitors in Sheffield, Bedford, Poole, and Middlesbrough. It also acquired firms serving the liquid metal end of the steel industry in Britain, France, and the USA. The names and ownership kept changing too, and whilst owned by Trafalgar House, Davy was joined by John Brown Engineering, Morris Cranes, and Cleveland Bridge & Engineering Company, the resultant group briefly becoming the second-largest engineering contractor in the world (after Bechtel), with around 135,000 employees, serving a myriad of industries. Apart from a year in Stockton, I remained with the Sheffield branch but worked on many integrated steelworks schemes, often involving other members of the group, and spent several months of each year travelling to steel companies the world over.

There are amusing anecdotes about people with whom I worked and some of the jokes that we heard or told during off-duty periods all round the world and some more in the appendix which you may prefer not to read.

I still have all my old passports. Prior to 1983, passports were always stamped when entering into and coming out of every country, providing a record of when and where one travelled. From 1984 onwards, when passports were no longer always stamped, I have a set of diaries that record departure for each country and the return. I made well over 300 overseas business trips between 1954 and 1998. Bulgaria, Indonesia, Nigeria, and the Philippines were the only countries then with a steel industry that I did not visit.

The book starts with half a dozen chapters on various aspects of the mill engineering business, one on the jokes we heard or recounted, and then sections on each country where my visits or contacts were sufficiently noteworthy or have not been touched on in earlier chapters.

In the Appendix, there are chapters about my mother’s family, the Christians from the Isle of Man, and the Hewitt family from southern Ireland, followed by descriptions of my early life, schooling, National Service, and my time at Cambridge studying Engineering. Another chapter deals with my lifelong passion for New Orleans jazz, and there are jokes near the bone – not for the faint-hearted! The appendix ends with a section on professional activities during my career.

My unpublished but privately circulated technical history of Davy from 1830 to 1993 has helped in compiling this memoir, as it has a paper I gave at Professor Jonathan Aylen’s Manchester Conference in 2000 on ‘The history of strip-rolling in Europe’. My 20-page submission described technology transfer from United Engineering in Pittsburgh to Davy in Sheffield between 1935 and 1980. Other authors covered the building of all early European hot strip mills, and the whole has now become a 410-page historical record entitled Ribbon of Fire, edited by Professor Jonathan and Professor Ruggero Ranieri and published by Pendragon.

I greatly enjoyed my career and hope that all readers, whether or not connected with the steel or engineering industries, will find this memoir of an active life both interesting and amusing.

Cambridge University Appointments Board

At the end of the Lent Term in my Final Year, two things happened that greatly influenced my professional life: the Engineering Society organised a three-day tour of Engineering Firms in the Easter vacation, and I was advised to see Professor Van Grutten at the University Appointments Board, regarding job opportunities in engineering.

The Engineering Society Tour

I booked on the Engineering Society Easter Tour. There were around 20 final-year students, and we were going to visit Sheffield, Derby, and Loughborough by coach, visiting two firms at each location. In Sheffield, we spent the morning at United Steel Company’s Rotherham site, the bulk steel producer known as Steel, Peech and Tozer; we spent the afternoon at Davy & United Engineering Company, builder of rolling mills and forging presses. See Figs 1 to 6.

I had not previously seen steel being made, so the visit to the 1 mtpa open-hearth melting shop, where we saw molten steel being poured into rows of ingot moulds, was a spectacular eye-opener. We then walked down the hot mill line, watching 24 square 5-ton ingots being rolled in 13 passes into 12 blooms on the Davy reversing primary mill, passing on to the Brightside secondary reversing mill for 7 passes, and then running on to a Morgan six-stand continuous billet mill, making 3" square billets, cut to 30 feet lengths by a steam-operated flying shear. These mills made a great impression. Later, we moved to the railway wheel, tyre, and axle plant to see 12-sided ingots being sliced into blocks which were heated in a rotary furnace and then forged into wheel blanks on a Davy 6,000-ton press before being formed into the final shape on a wheel-rolling mill prior to being machined to size. Several of United Steels’ senior managers and new Graduate Apprentices acted as guides and explained the processes to us.

At Davy, we were shown the machine and fitting shops, where we saw rolling mills being made and assembled. The large machine tools, working on pieces weighing up to 150 tons each, looked very modern, and the whole place was very clean and orderly. Several of the guides there were Cambridge graduates, and they did a good job in explaining the excellent training opportunities offered by the firm. I was very impressed. As every plant was custom-designed, and much of the work was for export, a job there seemed to offer great interest and experience as well as foreign travel. Michael Dowding, the Engineering Sales Manager, advised us all to see Professor Van Grutten before we went down after our final exams.

The following day, we spent the morning in British Rail’s Engineering Workshops at Derby, seeing steam locomotives being manufactured or reconditioned and hearing about the engineering involved in signalling, track layout, and train operation. Whilst interesting, this did not impress me as a career opportunity. The afternoon visit to the Rolls Royce Aero-engine factory was a very different matter. We spent time in the works, where we saw parts being machined, assembled into complete Avon or Dart turbine engines, and then undergoing full power tests in wind tunnels. The cleanliness of the machine shops and the high quality of the work was impressive. I had taken an interest in planes ever since I went on a twenty-minute flight with Sir Alan Cobham’s Flying Circus, which came to Holland-on-Sea, near Frinton, around 1938, so Rolls Royce also seemed a good career prospect.

The final day involved visits to Brush Electrical Engineering and Morris Cranes. We saw electric motors and generators being made at Brush, together with switchgear. The visit was of interest because during my eight months with Paxmans in Colchester, prior to getting in at Cambridge, I had worked on reconditioning ex-Royal Navy diesel engines that were then coupled to Brush generators to produce emergency power for the National Grid. The general impression at Brush, however, was of a firm starved of capital investment, with much of the factory and offices looking rather outdated. Herbert Morris was a different matter, with a mixture of dockside cranes and overhead travelling cranes being made in a very modern facility, but for me, the products were not particularly inspiring.

I went home after the tour, thinking that Davy or Rolls Royce would be good for training opportunities and career prospects. However, during the Easter vacation, I talked to two of my father’s patients: Jack Hillary (whose two daughters I was particularly fond of), who owned a firm, designing chocolate-making machinery and who strongly recommended I ask to visit Cadbury, and George Cohen, who owned the 600 Group of engineering companies, who suggested that I visit K&L Steel Founders, one of the Group which made mobile cranes. He promised to arrange an introduction for me once I had taken my exams.

The Appointments Board

Professor Van Grutten was very friendly and was clearly au fait with a whole range of companies who looked to him to steer new graduates to them to undertake Graduate Apprenticeships that would qualify for Associate Membership of the relevant professional bodies. The firms he suggested I should go to were Rugby Portland Cement, British Timken, Imperial Tobacco, Cadbury, and British United Shoe Machinery Company. I expressed little interest in his first suggestion and mentioned how impressed I had been with Davy. He agreed that they were a very good firm and said he had sent several engineers to them over the previous five years. He included them on the list of five firms that he wrote to on my behalf. All five invited me for interviews, and I arranged visits during a six-week period from mid-June. All five offered to meet my travelling expenses and all asked during the interviews as to which other firms I had been invited to. I was quite open about the arrangements and the likely timescale of responses to their job offers. All clearly knew the way Van Grutten operated and of his excellent range of industrial contacts.

British Timken in Northampton

They had wonderful manufacturing facilities and offered me a starting salary of £525 per year, but I did not quite see myself working for a firm mass-producing thousands of almost identical products, especially as I thought their US owners probably did most of the design and development work. I did not appreciate the design challenges involved in the very large custom-designed bearings that I was later involved with during my time at Davy. One of the interviewers was Norman Brown, Captain of the Northamptonshire County Cricket Club team. He was disappointed that I was not a potential recruit for Northampton; at least four members of the team then worked at Timken, major sponsors of the club. In spite of that setback, I was given an offer, and I promised to reply within four weeks.

British United Shoe Machinery Company

They were located in Leicester, and my sister Yvonne rang a friend from the ATS, who was living there with her recently acquired husband, to ask if I could stay. I arrived from Northampton in time to be given a tour of Leicester, and we had a delicious Indian meal in the already-started ethnic area of the city.

The next morning, I duly reported to the Personnel Department of BUSMC and was given a tour of the works and shown several finished shoe machines undergoing shoe-making tests. I was amazed by the complexity and the number of simultaneous operations that each machine could undertake. All the machinists were on piecework, and the pace of work was impressive. Back in the Personnel Department, I asked about their training programme for graduates and was told, ‘You will start in the Machine Shop, and after a quick introduction to one type of machine, you will undertake normal production on that machine until your output rate reaches the bonus-earning level before we move you on to another one. You will do this on each type of machine tool before joining the Design Office for a year. You will then have a short spell in each commercial department before your first appointment.’

I was taken aback by this approach to Graduate Training and said I could not see the point of having to reach the same productivity level as those whose full-time tasks were manning the machines. I ventured the opinion that a future designer only needed to know what each type of machine tool could do and what it could not do so as to avoid designing components that could not be made economically. This did not go down well, and it was clear I was talking to someone who did not know the purpose of a proper Graduate Training Scheme. They had already offered £650 per year for the first two years, but I did not want to risk being stuck on individual machines for months, trying to reach the required proficiency, so we agreed to disagree. I stayed with my new friends a second night before taking a train to Nottingham.

Imperial Tobacco in Nottingham

Imperial Tobacco were looking for graduates to train for positions in their maintenance department as Development Engineers, but it seemed they usually bought their new equipment from firms like Mollins who did virtually all the design work themselves, so development seemed to consist of identifying a problem, outlining a solution, and calling for bids from Machine Builders. They were offering £600 for the first two years, but they did not offer a tour of the factory, so I had little idea of the processes involved in making and packaging cigarettes and felt I would have to ask to come back again before agreeing to join them.

Cadbury at Bournville

I was told right at the beginning of the interview that they were looking to take on two Cambridge Graduates and that, other things being equal, one would end up as Chief Engineer at Cadbury in Birmingham and the other would reach the same position at Frys in Bristol. I was given a short tour of one of the production lines but did not meet anyone from the engineering side of the business. They too offered £600 per year and said the workshop-training period would be at Chubb, the safe-makers, who also made some of their machinery.

The atmosphere was good and the prospects excellent, but I was a little worried that if one’s face did not fit, the only option might be to move to Rowntrees. I did not know enough about Chubb to reach any conclusion on the completeness of the workshop training. I decided to talk to Jack Hillary in Frinton if they were still at the top of my list after completing my visits.

Davy & United Engineering Company in Sheffield

I and another Cambridge graduate, who did not join Davy, were invited to spend three full days with them so that we could see several of the firm’s products in action. On the first day, we toured their modern Darnall Works and the head office at Park Iron Works, where the machine shops dated back to the end of the nineteenth century. I talked for two hours to Bill Bailey, head of the Proposals Engineering Department, a man who had spent much of his career working in the steel industry in South Wales, whilst he explained the procedure of bidding for projects.

That evening, we were taken out to dinner in a private room in The Peacock at Rowsley. Those present were all Cambridge men: Michael Dowding, Engineering Sales Manager (whom I remembered from three months earlier), Cliff Sturdy, in his fourth year with Davy and then in the Sales Department, Stephen Baker, recently joined from the family steel firm, Baker Bessemer, and Angus Thomas, who was then near the end of his first year as Graduate Apprentice and whom we had met that afternoon working in the Iron Foundry. After a splendid dinner, during which we were being vetted for our social skills, we repaired to Michael’s home in Bakewell, where we met his wife, Rosemary, prior to having a session of Poker or Liar Dice to see how well we could bluff.

The second day was spent learning about the Graduate Training Programme, visiting Firth Vickers’ stainless steel hot strip rolling line, and going to Steel, Peech and Tozer, where we saw the bar mill as well as those mills I had walked through three months earlier. We were told we would spend the next day in Scunthorpe, seeing the whole steelmaking process, from iron-ore handling to plate and section rolling, so I dressed in my oldest clothes, green corduroy trousers, and a sports jacket that had leather elbow patches and leather ends to the sleeves.

To my surprise, the first thing that happened was that the Personnel Officer swept the two of us, in turn, into the office of the Managing Director, Maurice Fiennes, who quizzed us on our ambitions in life. I felt I had acquitted myself reasonably well, but you can see what the MD thought elsewhere. Michael and Angus took us to Appleby Frodingham and to Lysaghts Steelworks. I came away delighted by everything I had seen, very happy with everyone I had met, and sure that I would get the best possible start in my professional life at Davy even though, at £450 per year, the salary was the lowest of all those who had made me an offer. However, I felt I should see what George Cohen came up with before deciding.

K&L Steel Founders in Letchworth

George Cohen had contacted these people for me, writing, ‘Ewan Hewitt, a young friend of mine who has just graduated from Cambridge with a degree in Engineering is looking for a job, so perhaps you would like to interview him.’ I duly received a letter of invitation to go for a plant visit in mid-July and was told I would meet the senior management at lunch. All I knew about K&L prior to the visit was that they made mobile cranes and had ambitions to supplant Coles Cranes as brand leader, but after my visit to Davy, I felt I could cope with meeting senior executives. I was taken to see the Managing Director and then had a very interesting tour of all the office departments during which senior managers talked about their technical and commercial development plans, showed me details of their products, and discussed where they stood in relation to their competitors. I was clearly getting the red-carpet treatment and was told we would see the foundry and workshops in the afternoon.

Lunch was a splendid affair in the director’s dining room, and I was treated with a most unusual degree of deference for a young graduate being quizzed about his personal ambitions. I was asked if I knew ‘Mr George’, to which I replied that I had known the whole family extremely well since I was five and that they were my father’s patients. Whilst I was musing that perhaps they did not know George Cohen personally themselves, it suddenly dawned on the assembled company that my father was not, as they had supposed, the Mr Hewitt who was a Main Board Director of the 600 Group. The afternoon tour was much more perfunctory, and my guide was far more junior. I was quite thankful that I had accepted my position with Davy before I next had an occasion to see ‘Mr George’. Fortunately, I did not have to recount my experiences on the visit!

Winding up ‘The Frinton Fete Equipment Company’

I was not due to start work in Sheffield until 1 September 1949, so I was able to continue working till then as joint owner of The Frinton Fete Equipment Company.

Once I had gone up to Caius in 1949, I could only be available at vacations, spending the Christmas and Easter breaks, helping to make equipment, and the summer vacation renting it out. By 1952, John was becoming more heavily involved at Hammond Motors, eventually becoming the owner, so I had done the majority of the work in renting the sideshows during each season from June to August. When a fete hired our main attraction, the 12-man 10-foot diameter Boxing Booth, I went with it to assemble the six major components and then usually acted as the Barker for the duration of the fete. We were able to ask for a larger fee for the machine if I acted as barker, drawing the bonus as a wage.

This could not continue once I joined Davy, so we sold the firm to Major Scott, a patron of the Frinton Young Conservatives, with whose encouragement John and I had first started our venture. He owned the Dairy on whose premises we had stored the equipment over the previous four years. The price would depend on how good the books looked at the end of the 1952 season, so I was glad to be around for most weekend engagements. Major Scott paid a good price for our assets, but as John had put up all the initial capital, he got a lion’s share of that money, but I had drawn wages during the four previous years.

I have never been sure what success Major Scott had in running the business; being on the coast was not the best of locations as it halved the area within reasonable transport range. I only went to Frinton for occasional weekends over the next few years, usually taking one or more friends with me, precluding any contact with Major Scott. He died some years later, and as John Clifford Turner had, by then, moved to Thorpe, I never heard what happened to the equipment and the various sideshows – hoopla, coconut shies, Can-Can and so on. The FFEC had been fun while it lasted, but it was never going to be a career opportunity!

Davy Apprentice

I joined Davy on 1 September 1952, arriving by train from Harwich at Sheffield Victoria Station and taking a taxi up to the digs arranged for me in the south-eastern suburb of Gleadless. The taxi driver asked me why I was coming to Sheffield, and I replied I was joining Davy as an Engineering Apprentice. He responded by saying he did not know that Davy employed engineers! It transpired he was talking about the coffee shop by that name in the City Centre!

On arrival, I found that another Cambridge engineer, Basil Burtt, had just arrived. We knew each other by sight, but as I had been at Caius and he at Jesus, we had not got to know each other. A third new arrival was Brian Deacon, a student apprentice, who was also starting on the same day. Basil had a 1934 Morris Eight that was very useful in getting around town. We had all brought our bicycles, so on the first Saturday, we cycled down into the City Centre. Our digs were 1,100 feet higher than the City Centre, and the road down the Gleadless Valley was so steep that my brakes, only used to the flatness of Cambridge and Essex, would not hold, so I had to bail out into a hedge on the way down, and all three of us pushed the bikes much of the way back. Mine went into the outhouse and was left there when we moved on!

Our landlord took us for a long walk in the Peak District on our first Sunday, going by train into the Hope Valley, walking via Bakewell and Chatsworth to Grindleford, and taking the train back – a good introduction to the wonderful countryside on our doorstep. We each paid just £3–50 per week for dinner, bed and breakfast, with lunch provided at weekends, excellent value, but we had to move on after a few weeks as the landlady was stealing from us. The three of us moved around together until Brian was posted to Glasgow and Basil married, getting to know many different parts of Sheffield.

Basil and I were put in the Apprentice Training School for six weeks to join 25 school-leavers embarking on a five-year apprenticeship that would lead to them becoming machinists, fitters, welders, or patternmakers. They would spend six months in the school, staffed by six skilled craftsmen who were all excellent teachers. They would learn the basics of each trade for four months before making their choice of career and then spend two months in their preferred role before being sent to the workshops.

We two shared a series of machine tools with fourteen-year olds, a few days each on lathes, millers, borers, shapers, planers, slotters, and grinders before having a go at forging, gas and electric arc welding, heat treatment, quench-hardening, and fitting. Under instruction, we made a set of personal tools: centre punch, callipers, mole wrench with hardened steel jaws, driver for screw taps, depth-gauge, and two right-angled triangle protractors, each item hardened, ground, and polished. I still possess them as well as the 10 kg bench-vice made during workshop training at Cambridge.

For my first week, I shared a lathe with a youth whose Sheffield accent was so thick that I did not understand anything he said. He did not understand anything I said either, so communication was difficult! Five years later, I saw him in a pub, and he proudly boasted that he had just been put in charge of a planer used to machine 250-ton mill housings, the then largest and most prestigious machine tool in the factory. He was earning more money than me, but he would only get cost-of-living awards in future, unless he became a foreman, whereas I was moving up the management ladder and would end up much better paid.

Basil and I moved into the works for the rest of our first year in the pattern shop, iron foundry, forge, fabricating department, tool room, machine shops, and fitting bays, working with a skilled craftsman in each. We also went to the Steel Foundry in Middlesbrough. By the end of the first year, Michael Dowding wanted me in Engineering Sales, and Basil would go into Purchasing, so our second-year paths differed. I spent several weeks each in Production Control, Operations Control, and Contract Management, then joined the Engineering Proposals Department for four months, learning how to establish the engineering aspects of bids, plus a few weeks in estimating and some with the Sales Engineers.

I then embarked on plant visits: three weeks at Steel, Peech and Tozer, in the primary, billet, bar, and rod mills, three weeks at Appleby Frodingham in Scunthorpe in plate and section rolling, two weeks in Port Talbot in the hot and cold strip mills, two weeks in Birmingham in Brass and Copper Mills and Extrusion plant at Imperial Metals, and two weeks in South Wales at the ALCAN hot and cold strip mill plant to learn about rolling aluminium. I was required to summarise the liquid metal operations at each works but made a detailed report on the processes and practices in the mills, including comments by maintenance people, operators, and management. This was excellent grounding for my future path in mill engineering and technical sales. These reports all ended up in the library with copies passed to the Proposals Engineers.

We went to work in Basil’s car – the narrow tyres exactly fitted in the Sheffield tram tracks, so we had to be careful not to be diverted along them at junctions. My knowledge of cars was very limited, but I helped Basil on a couple of occasions. The clutch was giving problems, so he bought a set of liners, and we took everything apart, fitted the new liners, and then tried in vain to bolt the two halves together. At this point, Basil sent for the Haynes Manual. On the appropriate page, it said, ‘Do not attempt to take the clutch apart yourself’, and we had to have the car towed into Darnall Works, where, with the aid of some hydraulic clamps, we could force the two halves together and tighten up the bolts.

Later, the cylinder head gasket needed replacing. It all went together perfectly, but for some inexplicable reason, the engine progressively gave up the ghost over the next few days. Coolant water was leaking into the cylinders – we had put the gasket upside down. It had seemed to fit OK but obviously not well enough, and all was well once we rotated the gasket. I have kept away from car engines ever since.

In early June 1954, I was sent to the north of Norway for five months to help with the installation of several thousand tons of machinery in the primary, billet, and section mills and Morgan merchant mill at Norsk Jernverk in Mo i Rana, just 30 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

This was Davy’s first really large export order since the Second World War. My experiences there are in the Norway chapter, but it is worth noting that one of my father’s patients, a regular army colonel, was on a NATO posting, with his wife, to Oslo. He met me off the Fred Olsen liner from Newcastle and showed me Oslo for two days before I set off on the fourteen-hour train journey to Mo i Rana.

They took me to a night club, my first night in Oslo. We had already had a couple of stiff gin and tonics before we set off, but the drinks served in the club, though tasting innocuous, were far stronger. It was the only time in my long career that I became the worse for drink, but I was not yet practiced in keeping up with customers whilst showing no effects. One of my few memories of that night was finding that, although the lavatories were marked Male and Female, it was all one big room once through the doors, with nubile young women teetering right past the urinals!

My friends were still in Oslo in November as I came through on my way home, so I stayed another night before catching the ship back to Newcastle. The Fred Olsen liners were really something; the buffet meals were the most spectacular I had then encountered, and although both crossings were rough, I was able to take full advantage of the spread. Back in Sheffield, it was straight to work in the sales department, with life being fairly hectic right from the start. A 50% pay rise was very welcome.

Bidding for Rolling Mill Contracts

There are no silver medals to be won in the plant building industry. You either get the gold medal and, hopefully, a profitable contract that will prove to be a superb reference for future work, or you get nothing other than a hole in the bank account.

Whilst it is very galling to lose a job to one of your major competitors, it is even more annoying to find that after pursuing a project for many years, spending a small fortune on putting bids together, and sending teams on numerous visits to the client, the government of the client’s country decides that the loan your government is prepared to provide will be spent building, say, a fertiliser factory rather than a steelworks!

Equally galling is to find that after gradually overcoming your opponents and working your way into the favoured position with your client, the British Government does something to upset either the client himself or his government, with the result that a Veto is imposed on placing the work with you. This happened to Davy twice during my middle years with the company. We were just about to get a major order from South Africa when the then Labour Government refused to allow the South African Air Force to buy a second batch of Buccaneer Bombers or more spares for the first batch. As a result, ISCOR, the National Steel Company, was leant on by their government to place the rolling mill order in Japan. A similar situation occurred soon afterwards when Davy were about to get a repeat order from a valued client in Spain – some injudicious remarks about Gibraltar by a labour minister meant that the work was directed to ‘anywhere but Britain’.

However, in spite of such mishaps, life in a plant building company was very rewarding, not to say exciting. Often, in various parts of the world, up to ten projects were being actively chased at the same time, so there were many challenges. There was seldom a dull moment, and one never knew to which country one would be going next and often had less than a week’s notice before flying out. In the 1950s–1980s, Davy could come up against three American, four German, one French, one Italian, and three Japanese plant builders in developing world projects.

Plant builders did not chase every enquiry; pressure of existing contracts or a heavy proposal workload could preclude a bid within the available time frame, or a firm’s references might not be good enough to warrant bidding, but it was not unusual to find eight to ten firms submitting initial offers. It could then take several years for a client to place the order, and during this period, there might be many revisions to the project and one or more rebids, with the number of bidders being gradually whittled down to the two or three who would be called for the final discussions. The scope of the plant could change considerably during the bidding process as the client took in ideas from the plant builders or new technology took hold.

The Era of Target Price Contracts

During the Second World War, Davy had been directed by the government to handle war work: urgent spares for steel mills, shell-forging presses, brass mills for cartridge manufacture, aluminium mills for aircraft parts and so on. However, no new steel mills were built. So when the War ended, most steel mills had been worked to death for the previous five years and were worn out or obsolete. Thus, there was a pent-up rush to place work with Davy, with firms trying to place orders even before the specification was defined or a proposal worked up, let alone priced. Davy came up with the idea of a Target Price Contract in which we would make a rough guess at what the ex-works cost would be and ask for a lump sum for profit on top. The work would then be undertaken, and the actual cost would be audited, with the client paying the final bill. If the cost went up, Davy would earn the agreed sum as profit, but it would be a smaller percentage of turnover, and vice versa. Thus, the incentive for Davy was to do the job for the least possible cost to make the profit a larger percentage of the total, but the client’s engineers would take the opposite view: ‘If we are paying for it anyway, we will jolly well make sure it is exactly what we want’. So if a driveshaft would be fine at 10 diameter, the client might ask for it to be 12, or they would want three oil seals per bearing housing instead of two and so on. Thus, although the throughput was huge, the designs gradually got more and more expensive or ‘Rolls Royce’ and, therefore, less and less suitable for the export market where competition was intense.

By the time I joined Davy, Target Price Contracts for the UK steel industry were being phased out, but I found it was just what the Aston Chain & Hook Company in Birmingham found such an attractive proposition. Neville Bond Williams, the MD, was not sure what he wanted but was quite sure that he would like his engineers to get exactly what they wanted. A proposal to work together along these lines got me an order even though Robertsons and one or two minor mill-building firms were building more brass mills than Davy at the time, but they were less flexible in their offering. A roughing mill and a finishing mill to roll batches of 8 wide cold brass slabs down to strip gauges in two successive operations was hardly mainstream work for Darnall, but it filled a gap in the Drawing Office at the right time. Fortunately, my Graduate Apprenticeship had taken me to see the brass mills at IMI Witton for three weeks, and I had seen the same process on 24 strip on some Davy mills supplied just after the War.

Design Developments

Practically every Davy contract included some new design development, either put forward at the proposal stage or introduced at the design stage. There was a small Development Department at Park Iron Works when I first joined Davy. It was run by Gordon Russell – no relation of the Furniture Designer of the same name for whom my older sister was secretary for a dozen years. Gordon’s best-known assistant was Larry Bond, who took over when he retired. The major effort in the early years was to improve the design of the expanding mandrels on cold mills, known as tension reels, or devise a design of hot strip mill coiler that would stand up to its heavy duty without causing downtime for maintenance.

Larry came up with a ‘clam-shell’ design of downcoiler for the Arthur Lee narrow hot strip mill in Sheffield, which, whilst not being a huge step in itself, led the way to bigger and better units for the wide hot mills. However, as the Target Price Contracts were phased out, there was an urgent need to produce new designs that could be built more cheaply and be better than those offered by the competition or our collaborators, UNITED Engineering of Pittsburgh and Morgan Construction of Worcester, Massachusetts.

Roy Sims had joined Davy from the British Iron and Steel Research Association (BISRA), in 1956, to set up the Davy Instrument Company so as to exploit the Bisra Patents on Automatic Gauge Control. He was made Technical Director around 1958 and built up a Development Department some 80 strong, located well away from Darnall, at Suffolk House, near the Midland Station. There it could do blue sky development work without being engulfed in proposal work or contract execution.

At the same time, a number of physicists and mathematicians were taken on for Field Research to find out more about the rolling process and mill performance. Mills were fitted with measuring instruments for every possible parameter and mathematical models built to understand and mimic the results. In 1958, an analogue computer and a Ferranti Sirius digital computer were acquired, and the Systems Analysts were heavily engaged in devising new methods of design calculations and having considerable success.

Obtaining Repeat Orders for Rolling Mills

In the twenties and thirties the two largest US mill builders often succeeded in selling a repeat of a recent design to another domestic steelworks or, more often, to an overseas steelworks. MESTA Machine Company of Pittsburgh was particularly noted for the number of times their president, Lorenz Iverson, persuaded clients to buy a repeat of a recent mill. Davy’s partner in the USA, UNITED Engineering & Foundry Company, tended to try to make some incremental advances in design on each successive contract, but their reputation was such that most clients would ‘leave them to it’ once they had placed an order and had attended an initial set of meetings to establish design parameters. Thus, whilst MESTA had very little new design work to do on some contracts, reissuing the majority of drawings unchanged, UNITED had a fair proportion of new drawings to prepare on every new job. However, by using many sizes of drawing paper, putting only one item on each detailed drawing and making separate Bills of Material, they increased the proportion of reissues they could achieve.

After the Second World War, although Davy increased in size rapidly and built up a substantial reference list in most types of rolling mill, the proportion of drawings that could be reissued averaged just 5%. Clients were intent on procuring plant that would give them an advantage over their competitors. They did not want a repeat of what Davy had just supplied to Joe Bloggs. They wanted their new plant to be better, to give them more output, have a higher efficiency, to be easier to maintain, to roll to a closer tolerance, to use less energy and so on. So at the proposal stage, they would discuss everything in great detail, pressing for improvements to give them a competitive edge. For instance, new strip mills had to be a little wider or produce heavier coils or roll thinner than those of their competitors.

Thus, there was the need for a lot of new engineering at the proposal stage, and once an order was achieved, the Engineering Department would have to discuss the design of each major plant item with the client at several stages in the design process. We often found it easier to produce brand new drawings for most of the components rather than struggle to reissue existing ones in face of client input. Furthermore, because the works insisted that the Bill of Material should be part of the drawing and because Davy used one size of drawing sheet, with many items on it, the possibility of reissuing drawings was always less than at UNITED.

The only time Davy really thought it had an order for two identical mills was when Richard Thomas and Baldwins (RTB) and Steel Company of Wales (SCOW) each ordered a Five Stand Tandem Tinplate Mill capable of rolling half a million tons of tinplate stock per year. The mills were of the same width and for similar duties. Design costs were, therefore, divided between the two contracts, only for us to find that once each client’s engineers had had their input, almost every assembly required two different sets of drawings.

With clients from developing countries, one might have thought that they would have few fixed ideas and could, therefore, be steered towards purchasing a plant based on the latest reference. However, their first step was often to appoint consulting engineers to help them decide what sort of plant they needed to draw up the bid document and to lead the discussions with the plant builders. Directly after the War, the consultants that Davy encountered most frequently were John Miles and Partners, a British firm, and International Construction Company, known as ICC, which was a Swedish firm with two outstanding engineers, Olsen and Bengtson, whose ideas influenced numerous steelworks in the developing world. From the 1960s, McLellan and Partners, electrical engineering consultants, and WS Atkins, civil engineering consultants, also began to expand into steelworks process engineering and took on a small core of engineers with plant building or operating experience.

Furthermore, by the 1970s, several leading steel companies also started to form branches to sell their operating expertise as well as providing advice on plant selection, often staffing them with people with long operating or engineering experience, who moved into this field in preference to accepting early retirement. Such people were often set in their ways and unwilling to go along with new ideas that were outside their specific experience. The net effect was that it was often more difficult to achieve an order incorporating ground-breaking advances in technology when the client had advisors than when they had enough experience to deal directly with the mill builders.

Very often, a proposal would be based upon repeat designs that were acceptable to the client only for our own Assistant Chief Engineer responsible for the contract to try to improve what had been offered, or worse, encourage client input in the mistaken belief that the client was therefore taking responsibility for the success of the design or, more importantly in their view, would have to share the blame if there was a problem during commissioning. The buck stopped with Davy with regard to the design, however much the client interfered.

The Search for Export Orders

Those of us in Davy at the front end of proposal engineering or technical sales found that because we travelled the world and dealt with dozens of different projects, we tended to be more up to date on how the technologies were developing and who was doing what than either the client or his consultant. This helped to