On the Straight and Narrow
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"Fortunately for me they decided to restore Pont Cysyllte Aqueduct."
Transcript
(Sound of hammer striking metal)
"I was born into a blacksmith's family. My grandfather was a blacksmith, so was my father and I had a brother who was a very good blacksmith as well. I started when I was 17 years old as a temporary and prover blacksmith at the Albany Yard, and we used to make all the lock gates there for the whole of the North West out of timber and iron and that went on until about 1960 and then they decided that they were going to make them all out of iron.
Well it meant that I was going to be made redundant. I hadn't got a job but fortunately for me they decided to restore Pont Cysyllte Aqueduct. They told me that I would have to do the job because it was nearly all blacksmith's work.
We programmed that it would take approximately 9 months to do and we started about the second week in January. We did all the underwater work before Easter because we could drain the canal. It were (sic) that cold in the Winter of '63, '64 they bought us, the six of us, a duffle coat with hood on it.
We had no scaffolding, just a couple of planks bolted across the gap while we fitted that length in and then we moved on and we finished it approximately a week before the nine months was (sic) up.
Thomas Telford, as an engineer, 200 years ago - how on earth he got all those cast iron plates across the pillars, I don't know. There's 19 and if you go down by the first one, either end, and you get behind it and you just move out a foot or 18 inches and you can see every pillar. They have not moved one little bit and that's 200 years this time. I don't know how he did it. He's a marvellous chap.
I feel very honoured to have been associated with the aqueduct and to have been allowed to do that big repair on it, and one that I feel very proud of to have had the chance to do."
