Tweet
Reflecting on a time when we could do it, and did
Keeble Mcfarlane
Saturday, March 31, 2007
A while back fellow-columnist Geof Brown spoke of the Queen's Highway as an example of high-quality work, since it still stands, in good condition, after many years. But he was off by a whole decade in the opening date. Brown says the Queen declared the road open in the early 1960s, but the event actually took place in 1953, not too long after she had ascended the throne. I recall the event very clearly because at the time I was a pupil at the government school in nearby Duncans. (That's what we called elementary, or primary, schools in those days - government schools). My father was a Works Overseer for the Public Works Department in Trelawny, and played a peripheral part in the operation. Both he and my mother were guests at the opening ceremony, and a function at the Silver Sands Beach Club not far from Duncans.
I had the privilege of going around with him from time to time as he supervised the work done by the people who kept the roads in order. Now, roads at that time were still a fairly primitive affair, constructed for the large part by flattening the surface before applying marl and medium-sized gravel. If the road was secondary or tertiary, it remained a gravel road, occasionally spruced up with the help of gangs of men wielding hoes, rakes and other hand tools, then finished off by the steam-roller, a ponderous, snail-paced machine which puffed clouds of smoke and vapour and clanked noisily as it flattened the small stones into a surface cars and trucks could navigate. The driving surface was elevated, and on either side was a ditch to drain water away during a shower.
Keeping those swales clear of vegetation, rubbish and silt moved by the rushing water was a constant job, and my father regularly went out to check on how the work was done, and how much, measured in chains. And yes, he actually had a metal chain, 22 yards long, for that purpose.
If the road was considered a major artery, then it was asphalted - a more involved process. After the bed was evened out and the gravel applied, a tanker truck filled with hot asphalt or pulling a trailer carrying the sticky stuff, came along and sprayed the surface, which the rollers then finished up. This left a relatively smooth surface which would stand up much better than the bare gravel to the pounding of the Royal Mail vans or buses, the trucks carrying cane to the sugar factories, and the few cars driven either by the well-off, or people going about their official duties.
The one thing common to all of this activity was the large content of muscle power. Men cleared the land, fashioned the surface, shaped the drainage ditches and constructed the stone fences largely by hand. Women played a part, too - and a very hard one indeed. They could often be seen, sitting in an area with big rocks, breaking those rocks into tiny pieces with nothing more than their brawny arms and special hammers. It must have been one of the most mind-numbing jobs around, but it was what they could get, and those indomitable women sat on those big rocks, gradually reducing them to a building material upon which people and goods could be transported.
As a youngster I was fascinated by all this, including the way they would measure the quantity of stone the women had broken, or which had been transported by truck to patch up a given section of road. The PWD truck would bring along a slope-sided box exactly one cubic yard in extent, open at both top and bottom. Workmen shovelled the gravel into the box until it was full, then using two handles bolted to the sides, lifted the box away and repeated the process. The resulting piles determined how much the stone-breakers were paid.
But progress, slow though it might have been, came along anyway. All the pre-teen boys I grew up with were invariably intrigued by the latest earth-moving machines brought on the scene - for instance the Caterpillar bulldozers of various sizes - from the little D2s all the way up to the mighty D8s which could dispatch huge trees in short order, or tear down a hillside in a day's work. The huge Euclid dump-trucks could transport large loads of sand, gravel or fill with ease; the ingenious scrapers which shaved away huge quantities of dirt to prepare the roadway, and the oddly-shaped graders were also totally fascinating, as they shaped the land in preparation for the fancy new Barber-Greene paving machines which laid a ribbon of a mixture of asphalt and gravel in a smooth, continuous strip as the final running surface. And the new, much more reliable diesel rollers made short work of truing up the asphalt surface.
The Queen's Highway was the first serious example of this technique, and the local people were so impressed with the smoothness of the surface that they immediately dubbed it the "nylon road", comparing it to the then also-new fabric with all its magical properties.
That road was built either by the Caribbean Construction Company or Higgs and Hill (I can't recall which), two prominent engineering firms around at the time. They were responsible for a number of public works projects of the day, and were well known for the high quality of their work. The PWD itself had also put together a team called the Special Works Branch which was responsible for a number of roads and other public projects. The most prominent at the time was the construction of an airport in the Cayman Islands.
The department at that time had developed quite a reputation for quality work in building and maintaining not only roads but also public buildings like post offices, police stations, collectorates and the residences of senior public servants such as judges. I recall several of my father's contemporaries, such as Tad Smith, who left the PWD to start his own construction company, and the father of the man now in charge of government works, Bobby Pickersgill.
All this is a roundabout way of asking: What has happened to the body of expertise built up over the years? What has caused the PWD to fall on such hard times that it is now practically out of business, the government having supplanted it with another organisation, the National Works Agency? What has happened to the imagination, skill and dedication of organisations which have, over the years, provided the island with examples of quality such as the Queen's Highway? The biggest question of all is: Why does this country need to hire contractors from Korea and France to do a job which once was adequately performed by home-based organisations?
- keeble.mack@sympatico.ca
Keeble Mcfarlane
Saturday, March 31, 2007
A while back fellow-columnist Geof Brown spoke of the Queen's Highway as an example of high-quality work, since it still stands, in good condition, after many years. But he was off by a whole decade in the opening date. Brown says the Queen declared the road open in the early 1960s, but the event actually took place in 1953, not too long after she had ascended the throne. I recall the event very clearly because at the time I was a pupil at the government school in nearby Duncans. (That's what we called elementary, or primary, schools in those days - government schools). My father was a Works Overseer for the Public Works Department in Trelawny, and played a peripheral part in the operation. Both he and my mother were guests at the opening ceremony, and a function at the Silver Sands Beach Club not far from Duncans.
I had the privilege of going around with him from time to time as he supervised the work done by the people who kept the roads in order. Now, roads at that time were still a fairly primitive affair, constructed for the large part by flattening the surface before applying marl and medium-sized gravel. If the road was secondary or tertiary, it remained a gravel road, occasionally spruced up with the help of gangs of men wielding hoes, rakes and other hand tools, then finished off by the steam-roller, a ponderous, snail-paced machine which puffed clouds of smoke and vapour and clanked noisily as it flattened the small stones into a surface cars and trucks could navigate. The driving surface was elevated, and on either side was a ditch to drain water away during a shower.
Keeping those swales clear of vegetation, rubbish and silt moved by the rushing water was a constant job, and my father regularly went out to check on how the work was done, and how much, measured in chains. And yes, he actually had a metal chain, 22 yards long, for that purpose.
If the road was considered a major artery, then it was asphalted - a more involved process. After the bed was evened out and the gravel applied, a tanker truck filled with hot asphalt or pulling a trailer carrying the sticky stuff, came along and sprayed the surface, which the rollers then finished up. This left a relatively smooth surface which would stand up much better than the bare gravel to the pounding of the Royal Mail vans or buses, the trucks carrying cane to the sugar factories, and the few cars driven either by the well-off, or people going about their official duties.
The one thing common to all of this activity was the large content of muscle power. Men cleared the land, fashioned the surface, shaped the drainage ditches and constructed the stone fences largely by hand. Women played a part, too - and a very hard one indeed. They could often be seen, sitting in an area with big rocks, breaking those rocks into tiny pieces with nothing more than their brawny arms and special hammers. It must have been one of the most mind-numbing jobs around, but it was what they could get, and those indomitable women sat on those big rocks, gradually reducing them to a building material upon which people and goods could be transported.
As a youngster I was fascinated by all this, including the way they would measure the quantity of stone the women had broken, or which had been transported by truck to patch up a given section of road. The PWD truck would bring along a slope-sided box exactly one cubic yard in extent, open at both top and bottom. Workmen shovelled the gravel into the box until it was full, then using two handles bolted to the sides, lifted the box away and repeated the process. The resulting piles determined how much the stone-breakers were paid.
But progress, slow though it might have been, came along anyway. All the pre-teen boys I grew up with were invariably intrigued by the latest earth-moving machines brought on the scene - for instance the Caterpillar bulldozers of various sizes - from the little D2s all the way up to the mighty D8s which could dispatch huge trees in short order, or tear down a hillside in a day's work. The huge Euclid dump-trucks could transport large loads of sand, gravel or fill with ease; the ingenious scrapers which shaved away huge quantities of dirt to prepare the roadway, and the oddly-shaped graders were also totally fascinating, as they shaped the land in preparation for the fancy new Barber-Greene paving machines which laid a ribbon of a mixture of asphalt and gravel in a smooth, continuous strip as the final running surface. And the new, much more reliable diesel rollers made short work of truing up the asphalt surface.
The Queen's Highway was the first serious example of this technique, and the local people were so impressed with the smoothness of the surface that they immediately dubbed it the "nylon road", comparing it to the then also-new fabric with all its magical properties.
That road was built either by the Caribbean Construction Company or Higgs and Hill (I can't recall which), two prominent engineering firms around at the time. They were responsible for a number of public works projects of the day, and were well known for the high quality of their work. The PWD itself had also put together a team called the Special Works Branch which was responsible for a number of roads and other public projects. The most prominent at the time was the construction of an airport in the Cayman Islands.
The department at that time had developed quite a reputation for quality work in building and maintaining not only roads but also public buildings like post offices, police stations, collectorates and the residences of senior public servants such as judges. I recall several of my father's contemporaries, such as Tad Smith, who left the PWD to start his own construction company, and the father of the man now in charge of government works, Bobby Pickersgill.
All this is a roundabout way of asking: What has happened to the body of expertise built up over the years? What has caused the PWD to fall on such hard times that it is now practically out of business, the government having supplanted it with another organisation, the National Works Agency? What has happened to the imagination, skill and dedication of organisations which have, over the years, provided the island with examples of quality such as the Queen's Highway? The biggest question of all is: Why does this country need to hire contractors from Korea and France to do a job which once was adequately performed by home-based organisations?
- keeble.mack@sympatico.ca
Comment