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Local History

Local memories - loading barges

Terry had a near accident while working at Spillers

Make sure your volume is on: "At the tipping point"

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I then went to Spillers, which was an animal feed place. And I got a job in the ‘heavy gang’ unloading sacks of herring meal, meat and bone, groundnut (which is peanuts)….all manner of things which would go into animal feed. And I worked there unloading lorries using hooks, and loading barges under the supervision of lighterman. Because if you didn’t have a lighterman there to assist you in loading them up then you wasn’t allowed to go onto the barges – it was all unions.

And we did manage to get onto one barge one Sunday morning it was, many, many years ago. We was loading up a load of animal feed that was going to Tripoli. And we never had no lighterman on because they hadn’t shown up.

So we decided to load the barges while we stood there. And we’d been putting bags and bags and bags of this animal feed in, and there was screams from above from the lighterman saying, “Get out of the barge quickly because you’ve loaded it wrong, and it’s on the turn!”

And basically what it was, the water was just lapping at the gunwales of the barge. If we’d put another couple of bags in the barge would’ve turned over and we’d have all been lost. And so as luck had it, we got a right telling off over that!

Bulk cargoes were brought to and from the factories along the canals by barges and lighters. At Spillers the 'Heavy Crew' did the manual handling of the cargoes on and off the trucks and barges, using stevedore hooks to get a grip on the sacks.

Usually the loading of a barge was done under the watchful eye of a lighterman, who would take the boat on its journey across London. If the lighterman was late, it was tempting to load his barge anyway...

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