From Cornwall to the Middle East, by accident

Fortune and Misfortune. 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 denying that such a thing exists. 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 clo...

Introduction This blog has been stitched together from memory and charts a course through my boyhood in North Cornwall, linen rounds in West Cornwall, Doha site visits and Holman’s in Camborne. After fifty years of work—including thirty-four as a construction safety professional—I retired.   The first construction company I worked for sent me to the Brooklands Weybridge campus to begin learning the formalities of health and safety. I already knew some of the practical side, thanks to my Holman apprenticeship in 1972. Over the decades, I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with hundreds of excellent people—and a small handful of halfwits—and together I believe we’ve made the world safer. I’ve worked on castles, prisons, palaces, power stations, and countless schools, hospitals, offices, warehouses, and supermarkets. I’ve worked on laboratories, depositories, and dry docks. I’ve worked in four Middle Eastern countries, in the Philippines, in the Caribbean on Saint Kitts and N...