Carefree Summer

A Memory of Salisbury.

I took a job at Gibbs Mews during the summer school holiday of 1967. I had worked every school holiday since I was 14, but this was certainly one of the more memorable jobs. The brewhouse, kegging department and warehouse were all inter-connected on the ground floor, the bottling department on the upper floors. Casual labour mainly consisted of schoolboys like me, and soldiers from the local Army camps who had blown their pay on the first weekend off and had to work until they were allowed back at the end of their fortnight's leave. Principally, we serviced the kegging line, where freshly washed and sterilised aluminium barrels would come in still boiling hot to be filled with whatever beer was being kegged that day; the brewery had a Guinness and Harp concession, and the latter I remember was in demand that hot summer. Casual labour didn't get given the gloves the regulars recognised as necessary to handle these hot barrels, so it was a pig of a job. One huge squaddie had had enough one afternoon and, taking a spike to the valve of a newly filled Harp keg, released a 20-foot jet of lager into the air, which his enormous mouth then took full advantage of. He got his cards on the spot, but he had made everyone's day.
That line was at the back of, and open to, the warehouse, where towers of pallets of beer kegs stood some 18 feet tall. Us more agile casuals would take a stick and an arm full of the 3-inch circular rubber washers used to seal the kegs and shin up these stacks, from which we could target the bent bums of our fellow workers below with lethally accurate force.
One day, I was asked to mind the rickety old conveyor belt, taking the wooden boxes of empty beer bottles up to the 2nd floor sterilising plant. This was a boring job and I had wandered around the corner to chat with a mate when I hear a horrendous crash. The wire binding one crate had come loose, caught in the top of the conveyor belt's machinery, and upended the box to send 12 pint bottles smashing down through two floors. Every other crate following had done the same, until I managed to hit the emergency halt button. I was unsurprisingly relieved of that duty.
We were officially only allowed a pint of beer a day, which we would have sweated off by mid-morning most days, so we interpreted this licence liberally. Unfortunately, tapping off my own supply of Guinness led to my early dismissal. I had, however, by this time discovered that the ancient clocking-in machine had a useful fault. Only the most favoured regulars were allowed an hour's overtime at the start of the day but, I found, that if I managed to be clocking in at 00.06.59 for a 7 o'clock start, the '59' turned to '00' a whole second before the '06' turned to '07', thus enabling the astute clocker-in to log a whole hour of unperformed overtime. Others clamouring to clock in on time made this difficult to achieve every day, but this tiny triumph against the system was a heady bonus.
Just over a decade later, as a BBC documentary director, I made an award-winning film about Young's brewery in Wandsworth, just around the corner from where I then lived. This explored the complexity of governmental constraints on this business, which had thrived precisely because it had failed to adapt to the 'keg revolution' of the 1960s, and had thus become the poster-child of the growing CAMRA movement. As all experience is valuable, I credit my apprenticeship on the Gibbs Mews production line as formative. Would that Gibbs had survived to evolve accordingly.

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