From floor sweeper, to reporter...

Send your memories and pictures to Brian Lee, Cardiff Remembered, South Wales Echo, Six Park Street, Cardiff, CF10 1XR or email brianlee4@virginmedia.com

MY FIRST job when I left school in 1952 was at Guest Keen & Nettlefolds steelworks.

I worked in the Instrument Department and my boss Horace Jenkins, whose mother kept a herbalist shop in Bridge Street, told me he had been in school with my father.

Every day or so I had to put water in the radiator of his car and I still remember the licence plate number which was CUH 624.

As well as running errands for the instrument mechanics, I had to go around the factory changing the charts and filling the various instruments’ pen holders with red or green ink.

Honeywell Brown and Clark instruments come to mind.

For just seven pence I could have a three-course meal in the works canteen.

The first week I took home £2 1s 4d½ and I still have my first pay packet.

Later I was sent on an adjustment to industry course at St Pierre, Chepstow, which is now a wellknown golf club.

We stayed in the mansion for four days, but I cannot remember what we did there, apart from play records.

One of them was called Oh How Lovely Cooks The Meat. I have never heard it since!

I was later given some sort of mechanical test to see if I had what it took to become an apprentice but I failed miserably.

Later my career would progress from floor sweeper to reporter.

Twenty-four hours after completing my National Service, I found myself sweeping the floor and cleaning the linotype machines in the Western Mail and Echo buildings in St Mary Street.

Little did I think, back then in the 1950s, that one day I would have my own columns on bygone Cardiff, Welsh horse racing and local athletics in the newspapers.

Over the years I have contributed at one time or another to the Cardiff Post, Wales on Sunday, South Wales Echo, the Western Mail and many other local and national papers and magazines.

Working in a newspaper office for 28 years, mainly when the papers were printed by the old hot-metal method, I studied how the reporters went about their work and learned how to string words together.

And now, as the author of around 30 books, I put all my success down to the years I spent in what was then known as Thomson House in Havelock Street.

(From Voices of Cardiff by Brian Lee, published by The History Press at £12.99.)

■ Please send your stories and pictures to Brian Lee, Cardiff Remembered, South Wales Echo, Six Park Street, Cardiff CF10 1XR or email brianlee4@virginmedia.com – please include your phone number as I cannot reply by letter.