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On ...
The Felling Mafia
Around 1976 I had settled myself very nicely into a job as an estimator and surveyor for an electrical contractors in Horsforth, Leeds and when the senior estimator left at the end of that year I found myself, at the tender age of 20, doing his job.
Part of the work involved preparing wage and bonus details for the 70 or so electricians on the books so most of the week was spent checking on the progress of several building developments, making sure that no-one was claiming bonus for work that they hadn’t yet done.
Which is how I came to be wandering around a soon-to-be H Samuels Jewellers store in the new Waterdale development in Doncaster, gazing up at the ceiling at a tangled mess of cabling and wondering which one of our electricians had done this job when suddenly my thoughts were answered by a “Howay bonnie lad”.
Turning around I came face to face with Ron Gibbons, an electrician that we had borrowed from our sister company in Newcastle as we were short of labour at the time.
Electricians tend to develop specific skills over time, so that some are extremely good at re-wires in old properties, some prefer working on new housing projects, some prefer industrial work with big heavy armoured cables, and some others prefer shopfitting with its tight schedules, round the clock working and plenty of overtime and completion bonuses.
Ron never really fitted into any of these categories, he was an electrician who had never found his forte and this was the first shopfitting job that he had been on. He was unprepared for the very tight schedule and the claustrophobic working conditions where dozens of different craftsmen all muscled for tiny remnants of space, all trying to get their bit of the job done first lest they get bollocked for holding the job up.
But Ron was skint, he’d heard of the massive overtime opportunity and the completion bonus and so he’d volunteered to leave his home in Felling on South Tyneside and come south for a few weeks to seek his fortune.
“Any chance of a sub mate ?” was his second sentence
Ron had just arrived in Doncaster the day before, had found some cheap digs but had arrived with no money and as I prepared the wages every week he wanted an advance to pay his landlady, and to pay for the vast quantities of beer that he consumed every evening.
I promised that I’d do what I could, had a bit of a chat then left.
And that was about it, I didn’t do him any really special favours, I added about £50 to his wages that week and deducted it off his overtime the next week and I settled his expenses quickly every week, nothing unusual, nothing that I didn’t do for all the electricians (its easy to be liked as a bonus surveyor, just pay them what they ask for, especially if no-one checks your work).
But Ron thought otherwise.
I didn’t know at the time but Ron was a big cheese in the Felling mafia and Ron worked to an honour code, I had done Ron a huge favour by paying all his receipts and keeping his beer money cashflow going and in his eyes he was now indebted to me….
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