THE DELTA

This memory of 1961, and me and me pal Wes Coulthard started work at the Delta Rolling Mills (this was over Scotswood Bridge towards Blaydon, left along the river by the Skiff Inn). It was hard work but the dosh was better than other places. We started on the East Mill which rolled flat bars maybe up to 60 feet long when finished through the process of the rolling.
I remember Phil and Lennie Scott who were brothers, Gambo, whose name was Eddie, Alan Bingham keep fit lad, Chappers, Ted, Geordie Ray, Junior Armstrong, Snoz Holmes,and a couple of others who slip my mind at the moment, the furnace men, and Jackie, our foreman who was a powerfully built man with bandy legs. As time has passed by some are no longer here, Wes and me were living Longbenton at this time and used to get the 61 bus from Scotswood bridge to go home along Scotswood road with a crowd of Elswick lads, not before calling into the cafe on the corner where there was a jukebox, one of the favourites at the time was Johnny Burnette's new release "Dreamin" Gambo liked this one. Anyway going home on the bus Alan Bingham used to get off at Joanna Street and he would give us a wave then run up the steep bank which was a ritual, then one day was his last he died of a heart attack ,just a young lad in his teens. Then just a few years ago Junior Armstrong who was a fruit and veg barrow boy had went out fishing off Creswell with a friend as they always did and his boat was hit by a freak wave and there lives were took, such a sad end to a nice man.
Vicky tells me she used to sit on the step outside their house in Woodlands Crescent, Scotswood on dark winters' nights watching the red hot steel flashing through the rollers, probably seeing me working there in the distance but not knowing we would meet up in later years as the encounter on the farm proved in one of my other memories. The steel would come out in ingots about two feet long from the furnace with large tongues hanging on a rail and dropped in front of Phil who would send it back and forth through his rollers. His brother Lennie would be operating a hook hanging from the girders above, then skilfully catch the steel at the precise moment it came out the mill and throw it back to Phil on the opposite side, narrowing it down and getting longer with each pass. Me and Wes were the last in line on the mill and only had a pair of steel tongues which we used to catch the flying steel ribbons, him on one side of the rollers and me on the other, you had to be quick because this could only be done when the steel was red hot, so speed was a virtue... There were long metal shoots behind us angled up high where the flying steel would go, sometimes it would hit an obstacle and arc in the air like toffee. When the hot metal caught you the burns on your skin were like nothing Ive ever had or seen, they turned into water blisters more or less straight away and of course your clothes would catch fire and you would dad it out in a flash. We wore towels around our necks like scarves for the sweat, and we stopped for a couple of minutes every hour on the hour to take on water. In the summer someone would bring around salt tablets to replenish what our bodies had lost  "What health and safety?" none here. This was a short lived job, as after about a year redundancies were on the cards and it was last in first out. So that was our little time there over, but jobs were never far away for two work hungry lads. London was our next stop. and that was an experience.