Why I’m not a musket hot-shot

As a penniless trainee I liberated the lumps of metal used to make typefaces at the local newspaper and bartered them for ten Gold Flake cigarettes with Tom who ran the corner shop. He would melt them down in a discoloured pot on a gas ring in his cubby-hole behind the counter and pour the silvery liquid into moulds for weights which he sold to the fishermen on the pier.

I don’t know whose need was greater. Apart from the odd tin of Macconnachie’s Herring or corned beef, his sole income seemed to be derived from the sale of single cigarettes and sweet sherry from a collapsible two-gallon plastic bag.

Alf, our sporting companion, did not seem to be convinced that making lead weights, even if we had the moulds, was a useful by product of the 45-gallon drum full of lead scrap he seems to have assembled from his career as a builder. Someone had told him that lead was worth £3 a kilo and considering a lump the size of a small tennis ball weighs a kilo, he was in the money.

But for reasons unknown, he felt this pension pot was best served by being turned into lead ingots. To this effect he rigged up the remains of a sluice from a dam overflow and balanced it between a series of building blocks. Beneath the “retort” – effectively a metal cylinder with a pipe coming out at the bottom – he built a large fire.

The lead went in the top of the cylinder/sluice and as it melted, dribbled out of the pipe into an over-large battleship grey metal wastepaper basket on which were stencilled the words “Air Ministry Renfrew Drawing Office”.

The result of the first firing was a completely immovable wastepaper bin-shaped ingot. At which point we became bored with immovable ingots and unearthing half a dozen hazel rods Alf had cut as wading sticks some years ago, drilled out three-inch holes in the bottoms and filled them with molten lead – weighting to stop a stick being swept away in the river current.

By now rather carried away with success and by way of historical re-enactment we filled a metal Thermos with liquid metal, took it to the top of his 40ft scaffolding pigeon shooting tower in the woods and aimed a dollop of lead at a water-filled bucket on the ground. Thus had the British Army, and indeed sporting gun cartridgemakers, been supplied in the past with musket balls and lead pellets.

By the time our lead hit the water it should have been perfectly round shot. As it was we weren’t high enough so the “musket ball” was a sort of splodge in the bucket. Perhaps we shouldn’t declare war on the Chinese this week, mused Alf. n