2 of 24 - Cornwall 1958

Wikipedia tells us that “Accident-proneness is the idea that some people have a greater predisposition than others to experience accidents, such as car crashes and industrial injuries”. This idea is of course dismissed by most safety professionals who see a loophole developing by which employers could duck their responsibilities towards the less safety-conscious of their employees.

I am in two minds about this as in my youth I was, with good reason, labelled by my family “accident prone”, and yet later in life and for 34 years I pursued a career in construction safety management.

The earliest example I remember of my “accident proneness” occurred at the end of my cousins wedding reception one sunny day in 1960 when I was just 4 years old. My cousin and his new wife were preparing to drive off and were waving to us from the car. But they were stopped short by my wail of pain as I had got my finger caught in one of the closing doors. The honeymoon departure came to a complete halt as my cousin, his new wife, my parents and several of the guests were busy stemming the flow of blood from my injured finger and arranging transport to the nearest A+E.

During my years in construction, I certainly encountered other individuals who appeared on the face of it “accident prone”. One man springs to mind, a burly fellow working on a small construction site near Newbury. Every time I visited for a site inspection, he had a new injury. A tool he was using broke and gouged his hand, both sides of his ribcage were abraded when a scaffold board gave way beneath him, he had to wear an eyepatch because somebody else’s angle grinder threw grit into his face etc. Of course, safety practitioners reading this will be saying to themselves that there must have been obvious faults in the management of safety on that site. Not enough attention had been paid to elimination, substitution, engineering controls, administrative controls, and personal protective equipment . Thats all very well but things kept happening to THAT burly chap. So yes, improve safety management all you like but the hydraulic hose will still probably burst right next to HIM.

I suppose I could start this story by talking about the cosmic accident that resulted in life on earth. A molecule more of H₂S in the air, or a wayward wobble of our planet in its orbit round the sun, or a thousand other variables of physics and chemistry and this Earth would just be one more dusty rock in the barren vastness of space rather than this wonderful garden of Eden.  

Or I could discuss the accident of fate whereby that handsome hominid hunk offered auroch jerky to that good-looking missy which eventually, after another two thousand such fortuitous mating's, resulted in me.

I could start this tale like this, but I am not going to. For me this story starts with a smear of human goo waiting patiently for me somewhere in Cornwall in 1958.

My dad once told me that his family were descended from German pirates. Certainly, he was cast from a unique mould – raised in a home with very little money to spare, he soon learnt to be resourceful and thrifty. In 1937 at the age of 11 he was the “Car Park Boy”, at a coastal Dorset Inn, charging day-trippers 2/6 to park their Morris 8s and Austin 10s.  As a young buccaneer he separated the unwitting tourists from their money – selling them fishing boat rides and cigars. 

He met my mum at the Inn where she lived and worked. The Inn, a nearby farm, and a fishing boat were all owned by the same man—and Dad worked on all three. His early working life consisted of milking the cows, cooking the prawns, mending the lobster pots, and probably winking at the girls.

Mum was a feisty Dorset girl who was a teenager during the Second World War, living in Weymouth which was a target for the Luftwaffe bombers.   They dropped many bombs in the area, one of which killed her father, my grandfather, who was on Warden duty at the time and was cut into two neat parts by a door that had been blown off the local bank.   

Mum and Dad married a few years after the war ended and set up home near the Inn.  Mum’s resilience met Dad’s resourcefulness.

In the Mid 1950’s Dad moved on to Manage a Dairy Herd on a farm in Sussex, then around 1958 he landed a job as an animal foods rep and was posted to Cornwall with all of us in tow to sell cow cake to the Cornish farmers. His first company car was a “duck egg blue”, Ford Prefect.

The Cornish farmers became very fond of Dad, giving him poultry at Christmas. He would arrive home with a large wriggling sack containing a goose or turkey which he would prepare for the oven. One Christmas he came home with three wriggling sacks, Dad being reluctant to turn down the seasonal kindness of his customers.

Sometimes he took my brother and me with him on his salesman rounds of the Cornish farms during the long hot summer holidays of the early 1960’s. A Day out with Dad sounds great but invariably it involved a series of endless waits inside a hot car with a demented farm dog barking at the car window.