Parkinson’s machine works

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the following is a factory story from Doug Hey;
The Laxative Chewing Gum Saga -

Always looking for a laugh a group of us apprentices dreamt up a scheme to feed laxative chewing gum to some of the workforce, The group included Eggy Moore, myself, Mally Baxter, Lincoln Barraclough, Roy Chappel and Geoff Baxter. The chewing gum could be bought at Remington’s chemist at Fox corner and was almost indistinguishable from the pillow shaped “Beechnut” chewing gum which was widely consumed at the time. We all clubbed together and bought a plentiful supply of both types of gum then we used the wrappers of the Beech Nut gum to cover the identical Laxative gum. As if to prove how easy it would be to hand out the gum whilst we were repackaging it on the pavement at Fox Corner Eggys Mum came round the corner saw the gum and grabbed some and was gone leaving us dumbfounded. I noticed that no one tried to stop her including Eggy.

Back at Parkys pieces of gum were offered to likely candidates and were almost never refused, All you had to do was leave an opened packet on top of your toolbox and it would soon be gone, Stolen! Some candidates were particularly greedy including Roy Smith who grabbed a whole pack and scoffed the lot with a smirk on his face. Mally Baxter worked near him and settled down to watching him for results keeping us informed as to progress. Suddenly Smithy made a run for the toilets and only just made it thereafter spending much time there. Other candidates were fed lesser amounts over longer periods including foremen and much mirth was enjoyed by us apprentices. It was just before Christmas and the weather was worsening with snow in the offing.

At home time, Smithy was observed making a dash for his Landrover and hotfooting it home. He was not seen for a couple of days as was the case with some other candidates, then when he returned he related how he had spent the whole first night on his outside toilet in freezing weather with an eiderdown wrapped around him, snow falling and his wife bringing him cups of hot cocoa to warm him. I often have visions of him wrapped up in the dead of night with the Christmas Star twinkling above his outside loo and snow building up against the door.

In order to divert suspicion from ourselves some of us said that we had also been unwell and thought it was the liver and onions served up by the canteen. The next lunchtime Smithy had the canteen manager half dragged over the counter threatening to punch out his lights because he had lost two days work and had shat himself twice on his way home. You can’t buy entertainment like this! We did feel a bit guilty when one of the candidates from the pattern making department said he was leaving Parkys because the job was getting him down. We dared not come clean and anyway jobs were easy to get then!
 
Scrap from the Canal - Doug Hey

During my time as an apprentice sometimes at lunchtime several of us apprentices would walk up into Shipley centre for a bit of fresh air or call into one of the pubs (usually the Fox and Hounds at the traffic lights) for a beer or two. On one occasion as we left the factory we passed a group of foremen on the canal bank muttering and looking into the canal which had been drained for some waterways work. In the canal bottom was a huge amount of machined parts which had been thrown there presumably by workers who had scrapped parts whilst machining them and to loose the evidence had dumped them in the canal over a period of time. Many different parts were there and I recall that a number of milling machine arbors were amongst them, sizeable and expensive parts. The foremen didn’t look happy but this was not the case of a rag and bone man who was there with his horse and cart with his trousers rolled up paddling in the canal bottom and filling up his cart with the scrap having a real bonanza day. I reckon there was at least four cartloads of rusty scrap to recover.
 
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