Roy: It’s like a different life in this place, you’ve got a life at home and then you’ve got a life in at this place.
Stephen: There’s people doing repetitive functions for 8 – 9 hours a day. They need something to keep them going. And the camaraderie and banter is just absolutely tremendous sometimes. It really is, it’s just so funny.
Some days you know people are miserable and other days you just won’t stop laughing for 9 hours. That’s a fantastic sense of humour some of the guys have, they’re so funny. There’s a lot of characters in this place. Some very, very strange characters.
Roy A & Stephen HP
Some days it’s been absolutely hysterical – there’s so many characters in this place. It’s like a sit-com. Some guys out there, they could earn a living on the stage, they really could.
The combination of the blokes – there’s some guys out there, absolutely hysterical, so funny. Then you get another bloke, sits there during tea break with his head buried in his book, don’t say anything to anybody. From one extreme to another, all in the same little room.
David C
You’d go all your time down there and you’d only know a guy by his nickname. My nickname was Sarge because I was in the army. And you had Picker because he’d pick his nose and you’d have Scratcher because he kept scratching you know.
Martin N
Andy: We had an old sewing room at the time where it was obviously full of older women. They were really good to the apprentices, if you went up there and asked them if they could make you a tool bag, they used to make you a tool bag out of the vinyl they used to use for the seats.
But you took your life into your own hands a little bit because you got ribbed. But it was really good. It’s something you don’t get any more which is a shame but it was all part and parcel and it was all good fun, good bit of banter. I think everybody enjoyed it.
David: I used to go to the sewing room, you had to go up and repair the sewing machines. And they had some old ladies up there, and it used to frighten you to death going up there. They used to take the mickey out of you.
All these old ladies up there and a couple of young lads go up to fix their sewing machines, yeah, they used to take the mickey out of you. You used to get up there, get the job done and get out as quick as possible. [Laughs] You’d get terrorised! I swear the machines weren’t broken half the time. They were just ‘Let’s get an apprentice up and take the mickey out of him’.
Andy B & David C
At lunchtimes we used to play football on the sports field which is now ‘C’ building. And I can remember every lunchtime it was football.
Graham C
All the guys I worked with especially in the Titanic Building, we had a good laugh, bit of mucking about. Why’s it called the Titanic? And they all looked at me and said, ‘What’s the last thing the Titanic did?’ I said ‘It went down’ they said, ‘Look at this, everything that comes in there, it goes down the line’.
John B