12 of 24 - Camaraderie in Holman Portable Compressor Assembly

I went on to spend several years in PCA, the Portable Compressor Assembly , putting together various Air Recievers and the turntable chassis for the large towable compressors.

The workshop was a linear space with an overhead crane servicing the entire floor. At the top of the shop hoses of various lengths and diameters were assembled, along with other smaller assemblies. Then the chassis were assembled and passed onto the engine and airend assembly, cooling and control, then finally the acoustic enclosure.

There was an air of raucous camaraderie in PCA.  Frequent hoots of laughter at someone’s misfortune, running jokes about the chap who went to Lust-leigh for his honeymoon (though why that might be who knows, because it is often called one of the prettiest villages in England), the “library” held in a locker for general furtive perusal, the practical jokes such as thick grease injected into one of the wonderful pasties from the canteen and left for a hapless fellow to sink his teeth into, the labourers oil drum deftly holed as he hauled his trolly through the workshop leaving an oily trail behind him.

My gait wasn’t spared either. One Holman’s wag sang ‘Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down’—a Weeble jingle turned workshop chorus. I took it as a kind of praise. I wobbled, yes. But I stayed upright. And besides, it doesn’t pay to be too sensitive, so I joined in and laughed at the wit.

Around the time I was in Holman’s Gary Small was also there and starting his musical journey. He played bass for Zeitgeist, a post-punk band from the Camborne/Redruth area that formed in the late 1970s. Zeitgeist had a distinctive sound—dark, funky, and experimental—that earned them comparisons to the B-52s. Zeitgeist released their first single Shake/Rake / Sniper independently, which caught the attention of Human Records, then on to Jamming! Records, part-funded by Paul Weller, and released a cover of Ball of Confusion that got BBC Radio 1 airplay.

My enduring memory from my Camborne days is the wonderful singing in the pubs.

“I love the White Rose in its splendour,
I love the White Rose in its bloom,
I love the White Rose so fair as she grows,
It’s the rose that reminds me of you.”

At work I witnessed many accidents, some in the training school cinema, some in real life. We were taught the absolute necessity of wearing hair nets over our shoulder length hair when using a lathe by showing us graphic scalping films. I saw an apprentice lose the end of his finger between a lathe dog and a tool post, witnessed and received numerous hot swarf burns, and gradually over the years learnt that I could minimise my proneness to accidents by being mindful and aware of my surroundings and the task I was undertaking.

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