Wrexham north Wales

 As I wandered through life I worked in a racing stable as a stable lad. Riding out different horses and mucking out. Every month or six weeks we would take a few horses out for a race.

There was an older horse in the stable called Eternal.. This was the horse that won the Grand National once.

Well the pay was not  great and I went over to working in a plastics factory. There was one guy working there who had been an engineer in the army. He was a real go getter and a hard worker. His regiment was based in Wrexham and they were the actual regiment who fought the Zulu warriors in the movie Zulu.

Taffy asked me to join him in a project which would make us a good wad of money.

We had to extrude sheets of plastic of uniform thickness and density and while it was molten we embedded fiber glass cloth with a loose weave into the plastic. So we worked hard and got it flawless.

We won the contract which involved 24/7 production and keeping it well monitored.

The plastic sheeting was to be used in the making of a tunnel.. The Mersey tunnel. Taffy went to Liverpool on his motorbike and spoke to the engineers at his own expense and things moved on.

At around 6 weeks into the project we were met be security guards at the gate and escorted to our lockers and walked back out the gate.   We were all sacked.

Taffy the foreman went to meet his colleagues in Liverpool and came back to Wrexham a few days later.

What they had done was to give the contract to an Italian company at half the cost. Taffy said that he opened some of the containers and took out the new sheeting and it was pure crap.

Tafffy  demanded a meeting with top management plus directors from London. "What you have done is to introduce materials which are far inferior to what we were supplying.You signed a contract to supply good to the spec. supplied in the contract. When our sheeting is used up total work will stop.

 I have spoken to the management team and your contract will leave you liable for millions in damages"

He said I will be back in one hour, I will leave you a space to talk, When he came back into the room he dropped a bomb.

The managers who arranged this are to be sacked straight away. The supply chain will be managed by me.

We will only return to work provided we get 4 times the hourly pay, weekly in advance.

Remember gentlemen this was all your fault, even if we start in the morning there may be delays.

The word came the next day and we put our heads down and completed the task over the next months.

That night in the Greyhound bar there was mighty celebration. 

I went back to Ireland for another few years.