I Thought They Made Jam
John Chilton of Spofforth, Harrogate, North Yorkshire remembers:
In 1957, having sold office equipment for Olivetti and not long out of National Service, I applied through the Labour Exchange executive section to train as a technical representative with a company called W Canning & Co Ltd. When I got the job, I found my impression that they canned fruit or made jam was wrong. They sold equipment and materials for electroplating and metal polishing and were the biggest and most influential manufacturer in the country.
Several attempts had been made to take over this company, but the speculators were soon put off by Sir Ernest Canning who pointed out he owned 51% of the shares in the company. Sir Ernest, ex-lord mayor of Birmingham, was said to be under the impression that he was ordained to bring metal finishing to the world. Sometimes eccentric and still a few years off his eventual semi-retirement, it would be right to say that he was respected by most of his employees.
A favourite story was when he had brought in a bunch of flowers from his garden and needed a vase to put them in. His office was on the first floor at the front of the building, and he emptied a vase containing water and flowers out of the window on the head of a man who happened to be walking by. The pedestrian stormed into reception and bumped into Sir Ernest who listened patiently to the tirade before saying: “If I were you, young man, I’d go upstairs, find the boss and claim a new suit.”
My first job was in the estimating department. If a customer wanted a new or replacement electroplating plant, the equipment consisting of open-top tanks, pumps, filters, electrical accessories and so on would be priced and the cost of installation and transport would be included. Added to this, quite often, would be the cost of the necessary chemicals, supplied by a separate office.
The firm had an extensive fleet of lorries which covered the whole of England, Scotland and Wales on a regular timetable, so we had to go to the transport manager to get the cost of delivering the equipment. In retrospect, I realise the logistics involved were considerable and to be interrupted was annoying, especially if the estimator could not provide the full information about the load. For this reason, many of the visits were cut short and the visitors were instructed to go away and come back when they had their facts right.
Nobody liked this task and, quite often, the young women would ask one of the men to go on their behalf. One of our number was surprised when the manager offered him a seat and gave him a toffee. “Are you busy lad?” he asked. The estimator nodded. “Well go back and get on with your job instead of sitting around here wasting my time.”
There were about 30 of us in the estimating office, including estimators, typists, comptometer operators and the office manager, the combination of young men and women inevitably led to a social life in and out of the office and this included competitions mainly with the technical department, chemists, researchers and specialists in things such as anodising and lacquers. The contests included cricket, football, tennis and, on one occasion, water polo.
The company was established in 1758 as a drysalter which supplied chemicals such as copper sulphate to the printing industry and silver cyanide and anodes for the extensive manufacturing of tableware, cutlery and ornaments in places such as London, Sheffield and Birmingham. Electroplating of zinc was invented in
1800 but the first bright deposits were not obtained until the early 1930s with the alkaline cyanide electrolyte. Cadmium plating was developed in the early 20th century and used mainly in defence equipment because of the metal’s resistance to chlorides on voyages to overseas conflicts.
When I joined in 1957, the car and bicycle manufacturers were major customers for Canning with nickel and chrome for accessories such as bumper bars, hub caps, handlebars and wheel rims together with bright zinc plating other essential parts. In those days, the spray from hexavalent chromium was highly toxic and the estimators were joined by specialists in designing and pricing extraction systems.
Anyone who worked at the company for 20 years was invited to join the Twenty Club and was presented with a gold watch. Sir Ernest’s speech went as follows: “We are all in this club together: the workers who get the hands dirty, the office staff, the technical people with the brains… and the directors.”