Stories From The Raleigh Factory

Derek Goddard
Painter, 1950 - 1995

My first job when I left school was at Wheldon and Wilkins, steaming leggings into shape. I was only fifteen and I hated it. It was the same thing hour after hour, and it drove me mad. After three weeks I left and went to Raleigh. I got a job in the cable shop, which had the worst pay in the whole firm. There were six young lads working there, all sat at a table, screwing nuts onto bolts and then throwing them into a tin. We got nine shillings for one hundred finished bolts. I caught one lad once stealing nuts from my tin and gave him a good hiding in the toilets. He never did that again.

After a while I got to drill gear cases with an electric machine. It was dangerous; if you didn’t hold the piece of metal tight it would fly out. One lad got one embedded in his cheek. That frightened me. Then I got to use a hand press stamping out bits of metal. I got quite quick at that, but once when I was trying to be too clever I looked away and left my finger under the press. I crushed it and I thought I had lost it, it was so badly damaged. I ended up in the machine shop, where my money doubled straightaway. It was hard graft, though; I had to work two milling machines at the same time. There was so much grease on the floor I used to slide between the machines. It was like a skating rink. 

I had a great mate in there, Jack Sheriff. We worked together on nights, and he was so good he could get his quota of work done by 1am in the morning. Then he would have a quart of Nut Brown ale and have a kip. It had to end, of course; one day a bloke came in and told us that they had just bought a machine to do our jobs so off we went somewhere else. I went into the Black shop, where the first layers of paint were put on the frames. They were dipped by hand into vats of paint, at first, my eyes wouldn’t stop watering because of all the chemicals. A couple of blokes fell into the dipping tanks; since they were about six feet deep it wasn’t funny, I can tell you.

Not long after I started there, an apprentice was sent to oil the conveyor and his sleeve caught in the rollers. His arm was ripped off - everyone said you could hear him screaming all around the factory. The nurses gave him morphine to stop the pain, and he stayed at Raleigh for the rest of his working life as the one-armed postman taking mail around all the departments.
There was always fun to be had, though; we had women working nights, and some of the blokes used to go into the pump shop where the paint was stored and have it off with them, until the management found out what was happening and took the entire female workforce off the night shift. One bloke had the biggest nob I have ever seen, he was so proud of it he would walk around the aisles with it on show, swinging it to and fro. There must have been nine or ten inches of it hanging out of his trousers - we got sick of seeing it.

No one was bothered about health and safety at Raleigh. At the end of each week we had to clean out the pit where the frames were painted. We had to climb in and scrape the paint off the walls and then fill the pit with solvent. It was lethal stuff, and we put gallons of it in there. I think it must have affected me as I now have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Worse than that, we had two cleaning tanks filled with cyanide to clean paint off the scratched frames before they were done again. You had to wear gloves, wellies and a mask, but one day a bloke from the shop next door came in and took a cup filled with cyanide away with him. He went out, sat in his car, and drank it. A few months later another young lad took some home, drank it and then jumped out of the window of the high rise he lived in. Only after that did someone think to put locks on the tanks.

There were commissionaires who were responsible for checking who came into and out of the factory and making sure nothing got stolen. Blokes would take wheels from the conveyor, with tyres and gears and everything on them. They would take them to the gangway that ran out onto Faraday Road and bowl them past the commissionaire’s office out onto the road. Their window was quite high and they saw nothing passing by, they just sat there looking at the view. Loads got nicked: men would wrap inner tubes round their waists and walk out. Others would put tyres around their shoulders under their coats and take them home. Eventually so much was being nicked that the commissionaires began to search people as they left.

I moved up to the special painting section, where mudguards and frames were painted by hand. I had to do nine hundred units a day, but I could do these by dinner time. Then I used to go up on the flat roof and lay on an old mattress which I kept there, getting a sun tan until it was time to go home. Later I went into the special products section, where the handmade lightweight bikes were built from scratch and made to measure for the riders. They sold for £1,000 each, a fortune in those days.

After forty five years I was let go. My supervisor just came up to me on the Wednesday and said: you're being made redundant on Friday. I was amazed to hear that and I said if I was going on Friday I may as well go now. He said alright, and I just went home. No-one even said thank you.

Brian Hughes
Pedal and Bar Section, 1957 - 1999

I left school and went straight to Raleigh. My dad worked there, so did my brother, so you could say I was following a family tradition. I started - and finished - pedal and bar section, making handlebars. I can remember my first day; A woman from the offices took me down to the foreman’s office where I was going to work and left me standing outside his door. I waited there for one and a half hours feeling really stupid, as everyone was goading and laughing at me.

My first job was on a ball press, putting cups on the end of rods for rod brakes. You had to work fast, as you were paid for what you turned out, not how many hours you worked. Once or twice I went so fast that I squashed my fingers in the press; it’s a wonder I didn’t lose them. There was a conveyor belt with squares printed on it, and in each square was a part of a handlebar. I had to pick up the part, work on it, and put it back in the square. No square was allowed to be empty and you had to work really quickly.

There were fourteen people on the line, and we relied on each other to make money. The total we had earned as a team was divvied up according to our age and job. Some jobs on the rail were worse than others; I had to use a tool to get the burrs out of holes that had just been drilled in the metal handlebars. It rubbed my fingers red-raw. The speed at which we worked was incredible; sometimes, when the conveyor belt broke down in the next department, the blokes there would come and watch us. They were amazed at how fast we were.

One thing about working at Raleigh was that we made things more sociable, as opposed to having it forced on us. I started the section football team and organised trips to London, Brighton and the like. There were loads of activities - we had a sports ground at Coach Road. There was even a fishing pond there, called Raleigh Pond.

By the time I was ready to retire, Raleigh were buying in lots of parts instead of making them themselves. These parts were inferior to ours but cheaper. Eventually an American company bought Raleigh and sold it off a bit at a time. I took a good redundancy package and left at the age of fifty-seven - best thing I've done.

Reg Tomlinson
Wheel Builder, 1952 - 1967

I started my working life at Raleigh straight from school. Wheel building was hard work, and there was quite a skill to it. You had to learn to hold up to eight spokes in your hand at once and then thread them two or three at a time into the wheel. After a while I got a groove in my fingers where I held the spokes. I'd do sixteen spokes on a wheel, and put it on a rack behind me for a lad to tighten up with an electric screwdriver. He had to be quick, as he took work from five of us and couldn’t get behind.

They tried to use a machine to true the wheels but it wasn't a success. The wheels were just about right when they came out but they still had to be checked and adjusted by a man, so it was a bit of a waste of money. We hated it; sometimes one of the lads would throw a nipple into it while no-one was looking. Then the rims would be marked and the wheel would have to be done again. It vanished eventually. 

There was a sense of community in factories, especially at Raleigh. The section I was in had lots of family members in it, we had three sisters working together, and there were one or two couples who met and married at Raleigh. When we weren’t very busy we used to have sing-songs; usually one of the girls would start and then a few more would join in. After a while the whole section was singing.

Sometimes I got a bit cheeky, and once, when I had been laughing at the older lads, they stuffed me in one of the big sacks that the inner tubes came in, pulled another sack over me and hung me up on a coat peg all through dinner-time. We used to have an old bloke who did the sweeping up. He saw this sack moving and nearly had a heart attack. He got me down and told the foreman and I was hauled into the office but I didn’t tell who had done it to me.

Things changed when TI took over Raleigh. They stopped all our perks, including the day trips and our Christmas bonus. Then we started to get Chinese imports. We had hubs being made in Czechoslovakia that were just rubbish - when it came to putting spokes in them we had to hit them in with a bit of wood because the holes were so badly drilled.

I left Raleigh just as redundancies started to happen all over the factory. What with the foreign imports coming in, I saw the way things were going and got another job. I went off to Barton’s buses to be a fitter but I never forgot my time at Raleigh. In fact I went on about it so much at first that the blokes at Barton’s called me Raleigh Reg.

Ann Hodgkinson
Team Leader, 1976 - 2001

I started off as a machinist. It wasn't very nice but you got used to it. We did drilling, tapping, components...whatever needed doing. I did all that for about fifteen years. It was very noisy. Even now people say to me, why are you shouting? And I don’t even know I am.

I moved from there onto the swarf dock. Swarf is all of the scrap from steel turnings; my job was to give out oils to them who needed to collect it. The barrows of swarf would go into a tank and a man would come along and suck all the suds up. It was a very dirty job. I ended up as a team leader. It was quite physical; I used to drive the forklift an'all. As a gaffer, I wasn't popular at first. Not because I was a woman, but because I’ve got a gob on me, and I say what I think, you know.

People were aware I was a lesbian, but I were lucky, I never had any unpleasant incidents. People wouldn’t dare say owt to me, and if they said owt behind me back, well, it didn’t matter. My only real work problem was that I don’t read and write very well, so when I used to have to write management reports I'd come home and dictate it all to my partner, Lynne.

I used to take on board the men’s problems, and give them help about things at home. I don’t think they looked on me as a woman; I climbed up things and did stuff and they never thought, bloody hell, a woman’s doing that. In the end, I think they respected me because they knew I wouldn’t ask them to do anything that I wouldn’t. I loved me work, I really did. I couldn’t think of anywhere better to go and work than Sturmey-Archer. It was famous for gears, back then, we made so many components that I didn’t really have a clue what they went on or where they fitted. As long as we got our quota done, that’s all that mattered.

In the end they didn’t want me to leave when I did. There was a collection. I think they bought us a gold bracelet and something else. I didn’t get anything off of management because I was just short of twenty-five years. But I did go for what they call a ‘pass out’ do, and I did! In fact I fell down the stairs of the pub. I can’t even remember where we went now (laughs).

Sue Davis
Typist, 1965 - 1968

My very first job was at Raleigh, in the motorised division on Triumph Road. Raleigh made mopeds called Raleigh Runabouts and were developing a new moped called Wisp. The building was a bit tatty; the toilets were absolutely shocking, and we had to share them with the working blokes who were covered in oil. The colour scheme was a nightmare too; dark Raleigh Green, as it was known.

I had lots of enthusiasm and once - when I was typing furiously - I knocked my typewriter off the desk and onto the floor. That didn’t go down too well. I was asked to type small labels for parts fitted on some new bikes, and put; “This part is not shitable to be fitted to this frame”. Well, u is next to h on the keyboard - an easy mistake to make. No one saw the error until it was too late and the labels were printed and sent out. Never mind.

I was moved to the head office on Lenton Boulevard. No one asked you at Raleigh, you just got moved. I didn’t realise that everyone in the offices wanted to be at head office because it
was so posh. When I got there it was gorgeous; when I went into the staff canteen for the first time I was astonished to see white tablecloths on the tables.

I worked in the middle of a huge open plan office with hundreds of office workers. My new boss was a little creepy; the way he looked at all the young girls made me shudder. He had his own secretary and I thought she was so glamorous. She wore the right clothes, the right make-up and was so trendy, bang in the middle of the swinging sixties. I saw her years later, working on the checkout in Asda. 

I was free to wander round the head office but it was the done thing to be quiet when you walked around. The doors were highly polished and you didn’t dare slam them. Once I actually peeked into the ballroom, which was amazing; compared to the rest of the factory it was so posh and clean. They had dos for the bosses in there, and once or twice a year there were dances for the rest of us but I never went to one. Who wanted to go to a dinner dance when you could go to a disco at the Beachcomber Club in town? But I loved walking up and down the main staircase in head office - a real Hollywood job, with the busts of old Raleigh directors on pedestals lining the sides.

The thing I dreaded most of all was having to walk through the factory. My boss would delight in asking me to take things to the mail room, knowing full well what would happen. There was the incredible noise and smell of oil, and wheels and bike frames whizzing above your head, followed by a constant barrage of wolf whistles and remarks from the men. Raleigh was like a small town without signposts, and no-one had ever given us a tour of the premises when we joined, so you had to quickly figure out where everything was. My greatest dread was getting lost, which happened a lot; it was a maze. I only once got to go down to the basement; what a place that was. Some really old Raleigh bikes were stored down there, and on the walls were original advertising posters. They were works of art, and I often wished I had managed to take a few home; they'd be worth a fortune now.