Quarrying

Most quarrymen's sons, from about the age of ten, served an early apprenticeship delivering blunt tools from the quarry by 'go cart' to the blacksmith's shop, and so my routine would be to walk to school, from home - Moorfield Road, to what is now Royal Manor School and, at dinner time, run down the back lane of Channel View and if the Station Master was not around vault the railway fence, and run across the lines to Tom Collins' blacksmith's shop. There I would find my 'go cart' filled with yesterday's now-sharpened tools. I would pull the load to the top of Straits and traverse the whole length of Wakeham sitting in the cart among the kivels and twybils, then the short pull to the quarry at Perryfield House where I would find a new batch of blunt tools and start the long pull with a heavily loaded cart back up Wakeham to Moorfield Road. It would now be 12.30am and a hasty dinner with the family would allow me time to finally deliver my load to the blacksmith at Park Road, and on to school with enough time left to play football in the school yard before the lessons of the afternoon began. �This would be my daily routine every school day while-as the quarrymen say they were "Bout Stone".
Our unwritten contract with the owners of the land was first to remove all that height of overburden, known locally as 'rubble', which could vary in height and content from the soil heavy clay, intermixed with a slatt tier . Mostly gangs of eight men were kept as a kind of unskilled labour force for this task, but quarry gangs, usually just three men and a boy, working with the old hand crane, often removed this glutinous, back breaking, pick axe and shovel mass, by themselves. Months of this toil in winter weather, with chapped hands and boots made doubly heavy with clay, was exhausting and we were only kept going by the knowledge that the next tier below - the Cap, would be, if not easier labour, at least be cleaner. The Cap offered the first solid tier of stone-like material. This stood some twelve feet high in general terms and the content of the task in hand would be in the region of perhaps some 2,000 cubic yards. Cap is a very dense material, much harder than the stone below it, and it had no marketable use in the days before the war, and so explosives were used - not enough to shatter it, just to break it into pieces for the crane to remove and place either as filling for the bank upon which the crane would next be moved, or as far out of reach as the crane would plumb.
Prior to the advent of the compressed air driller (about 1930) these holes into which explosives were placed, would be drilled by a gang of three men, the one sat holding the drill upright, while the other two, each with an eighteen pound sledge struck in rhythmic sequence. At each blow the drill was lifted and turned so that a circular hole was forthcoming. Water was added and when the mixture of the cap chippings formed a heavy sludge in the hole, the striking ceased and the drill was removed for��the hole to be cleaned of the sludge. Of all the labour intensive jobs in the quarry this was by far the most monotonous and exhausting, hour after hour of it, each keeping in perfect time. The concentration required, for day after day of this strenuous work, was enormous, especially when it could take a whole day's labour to 'knock down a twelve foot hole' and over the task a dozen or so holes might be required. �