That’s me blowing glass 72 years ago
THIS photograph appeared on our front page two weeks ago (Bugle 1515), and we were delighted when one of the young ladies pictured telephoned to tell us more about it.
87-year-old Phyllis Evans of Smethwick, is the girl on the right blowing the glass.
Firstly, we must apologise to Mrs Evans for getting her maiden name wrong. The original details with the picture had her as Phyllis Brown but her name then was actually Phyllis Round.
15 years old
Phyllis was 15 years old when the picture was taken in December 1949, not long after she had started work at S. & W. (Lighting) Ltd in Church Lane, Dudley Port.
The other girls in the picture, from left, are: Mary Fisher (aged 17), Margaret Bennett (16), and Evelyn Payne (17), and the man is Leslie Whitaker.
Both Phyllis’s mother and sister worked at S. & W. and Phyllis stayed there for about a year.
The girls were not actually glass blowers but were simply posing for a photograph. However, they did work with the glass blowers, who were all men, as Phyllis explained:
“Our job was to hold a mould that the glass blowers put the glass into. When the blower tapped his foot that was the signal for us to open the mould. Then we had to carry the glass with asbestos tongs over to the lehr.”
The lehr was a kind of annealing oven where the hot glass was carefully cooled down.
S. and W. Lighting was part of Stevens and Williams, makers of Royal Brierley crystal. Although they shared a head office, the production of lighting glass at Dudley Port was entirely separate from the tableware glass at Brierley Hill.
“It was a nice place to work,” said Phyllis.