I worked in Port Talbot steelworks. Just saying, innit.
Is that near the Angel Hotel? Tee hee hee.
I worked hard. You should try it some time. Second thoughts - you would not have been able to have survived the works. It's not for snowflakes.
I didn't say it wasn't hard work, sweetheart...
I must say, I've been on visits to many big facilities and the like through out the years but until you have had a tour around somewhere like the PTSW, you've not seen anything. It's like being on the sun. That is all I can equate it to. Molten shit everywhere, the heat, the din in the air. The place it fucking mental. To work there? No thanks and hats off to you boys who did. Hard graft and then given the big shaft by those tory kunts
Seem to recall packing down opposite a few of your boys back in the day. Hard and nails and basically mental. Must have been the fumes.
I was young and fit so could cope. I worked in the Research Centre and we used to test the bricks and clay used in the blast furnaces and the "Basic Oxygen Plant". Although the testing was done in the centre I had to go out on site every day to take samples. It was a fascinating place and at that time one of the biggest and most modern steelworks in the world.
There were some terrible accidents - four men gassed and died in the soaking pits, hot metal blowback from the converter killed three ,even fatalities when trains hit cars. It was a dangerous place and I have dozens of stories. I was in No.5 blast furnace one day and having carried out tests on the clay used to seal the furnace I wanted to see what the men thought about it. The furnace was tapped and the hot iron poured out into the trenches before it fell down a hole in a huge torpedo ladle which was mounted on a railway track beneath. The noise in a blast furnace is unbelievable and we should all have been wearing ear protection but this was the early days of "Health and Safety" and such protection did not exist.
The tapping was going well and I stood with a small group of men about fifty feet from the taphole. Suddenly, one of these men started jumping up and down and shouting to a man who stood nearer the furnace. Standing next to him I could not hear what he was trying to say but by looking in the same direction all of us started shouting to the man. We were screaming at him, "Your trousers are on fire !". Fortunately, he realised what was happening and put the flames out. We all pissed ourselves laughing. What could have been really serious turned into laughter. That is how steelworkers treat life.
I recall a Max Boyce one liner.
when asked by a stranger, “is that the sun or the moon” he replied, “I dunno, I’m from Port Talbot”
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