From Cornwall to the Middle East, by accident

  The council house that we lived in was about half a mile from the main road and to catch the school bus, I had to walk up the hill to the main road. Walking with one built-up shoe was a risky business. I was regularly stumbling, even on level ground. If the ground was uneven or if there was an adverse camber, my progress could be erratic. Our school bus was a single decker Bedford OB coach that would trundle around the country lanes picking us up one by one and delivering us to our school in town. One afternoon, on the way home from school when I was eight or nine, the bus coasted gently to a stop in the middle of nowhere. We were informed by the kindly driver that several baby rabbits were huddled together in harm’s way in the middle of the road. He suggested that one of us should get off the bus and shepherd the young rabbits onto the verge. I volunteered eagerly and stumped down the steps and onto the tarmac. As I approached the rabbits my fellow travellers crowded into the ...

  Up until I was about 12 my family lived in a very small Cornish village on the fringes of Bodmin moor. The village had no shop or pub. The only other buildings it had apart from farm buildings and houses was a Church and a vicarage. The church dates to the 1430’s and had hosted notables such as John Wesley the Methodist evangelist, and John Couch Adams the astronomer who predicted the existence of Neptune. B ack in the early sixties it was common for children to play outside entirely unsupervised. This was not considered a dereliction of parental duty. Rather the assumption was that the freedom to roam would teach children valuable lessons regarding all manner of natural and manmade hazards, like stinging nettles, farm gates and gravity. I think I was about seven years old when I learnt my first tough lesson in gravity when I went exploring behind the vicarage. Parked up and out of commission behind the vicarage was a Rover P4. The Rover P4 was a splendid example of British p...

  I don’t know how that goo got me back in 1958.  Perhaps an asymptomatic and entirely innocent fisherman wiped his arse with a clump of grass and tossed the mess away. And there it was, pungently waiting for two-year-old me. Or maybe it was artfully spat out by a farmer on a passing Fordson Major. It could have been an invisible smear on a glass of Corona Raspberryade given to me by a kind neighbour.  The polio virus could have entered my body in any of these, and thousands of similar scenarios.  What I do know is that the accidental meeting of me and the poliomyelitis virus happened and I, and my gait, would never be the same again. During the 1950's there were 45,000 cases of polio in the UK and hundreds died. Pure fluke allowed me to walk away, one withered leg a few inches short of its partner, and missing its calf muscle, but walking. So many others were much less lucky. Just look up pictures of “1950’s Iron Lung” and you will see exactly what I mean.  I...

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...