Where are they now?

 

 

 Henry Woolley 1977-78

I was at Broomfield College 1977 to 1978. My year of study was a very happy time and I made many new friends never to be forgotten but now mostly out of touch with until I found your web site on the internet. I hope to go on one of the visits that you organise and maybe I can meet up again with a few of the people I used to know.

My time after Broomfield College has been varied and interesting.

I first worked on a dairy, beef and sheep farm called Roystone Grange, near Pike Hall, Matlock. I worked there as a general farm worker and I lived in at the farm. During my stay, Sheffield University were doing an archaeological dig looking for medieval remains. They found a lot of pottery, a few stones that might have resembled a stone floor in a medieval house and the skeleton of a Roman Centurion (found next to a betting slip… 10 bob each way on Ben Hur!) but unfortunately no sign of any gold coins to be found! (Ben Hur didn’t win that race then)! I left here because it was a bit remote and there was no one my age to talk to.

Next, I worked on dairy farm in the same area nearer to the village of Pike Hall, I was doing a similar job as before and I also was living in at the farm. I would feed the young stock, scrape out (in wintertime) and help clean the milking parlour down at the end of milking. The farm was on the top of a hill and in the wintertime when it snowed, the lane was blocked for days on end. The snow level was at the top of the walls and once there was a snow drift 20 feet deep at the back of the silage barn where the wind was swirling round and round! I had a favourite dairy cow at the farm: Josephine 13 or ‘Spotty Cow’. She could escape out of any field and take the entire dairy herd with her… lively and full of character! I enjoyed my time there but was more interested in the machinery side of things so I moved to another local farm.

I got another job at local farm at Elton near Matlock which was an arable, beef, chickens and dairy farm with over 900 acres spread across 3 farms in the area. They grew barley, rape seed and potatoes on the arable side. Here, I was able to pursue my interest in tractor driving and at busy times in the summer there were a good 14 hours a day of it. They had 6 Ford, 2 Muir Hill tractors, 2 MF combine harvesters and a Terex loading shovel, (six cylinder two stroke diesel). The jobs I did were corn, straw and potato carting, disking and cultivating the soil and buck raking silage with the Terex.  In the winter my job was to feed the dairy herd with a diet feeder and I would also feed the young stock with it as well. The farmer was very innovative with engineering and we would help to make trailers, gates, self-propelled diet feeder on a lorry chassis, self propelled forage harvester (it had an engine mounted on the drawbar) or anything that was needed but wasn’t available on the market. They would think nothing of splitting a tractor to replace the clutch plate and quite often they would modify a machine or implement to make it work better. I thought Mr Done from college would have been in his element here!

Next, I spent a couple of years as a welder working in a workshop on an industrial estate at Pinxton, Nottinghamshire. The company would recondition the old RB (Ruston Bucyrus) cranes, strip them right down the last nut and bolt and make a new machine out of it all. My job was to build up the worn parts on track pads with weld runs of mild steel and then finish with hard face steel. I would also work on the submerged arc welder to put runs of weld onto the rollers from the undercarriages. While working here I was dating one of the girls who worked in the offices but I managed to escape marriage and go travelling around the world instead, they didn’t teach this in college! I did the backpacking, round the world thing for a few months visiting Fiji, Australia, Canada, Bali and Hawaii.

When I came back to England, I went on a training course a Bircham Newton, Kings Lynn to learn how to operate 360° hydraulic excavators. The training ground is located on an old aerodrome and the occasional bomb would be unearthed while we were digging! They said these bombs were totally safe and quite often you would see a student driving over the top of one with the machine tracks to push it into the ground to test this theory!  

When fully trained I managed to get a job working for a drainage company located in Borrowash, Derby. Here, I operated a 12 ton Priestman tracked excavator and was sent to various sites to clean ditches out around Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire. Later on they gave me the keys to their long reach excavator, a Priestman VC20 which had a 20 metre reach. I was sent to clean out settlement ponds one of which was at the Rugby Cement works. Other jobs included, levelling fields where coal mines had made the ground sink, digging ponds including a large pond and landscaping near a new housing estate in Nottingham. Sometimes I would drive a Muir Hill tractor with a stone hopper to some of the sites – I remember driving through the centre of Derby a few times and the cars would seem like Dinky toys at the side of the Muir Hill tractor. The most exciting part was driving it across Swarkestone Bridge especially if there was a bus or lorry coming the other way! Good subject matter for a training day.

Next, I got another digger driving job at the construction of Carsington Reservoir. I operated a Komatsu 210 and a 400 working with the drain layers putting in pipes across the dam wall. This was a seasonal job and ended when the weather broke.

After working at Carsington Reservoir, I went working for a chap that had several mini diggers and I would go out on site with the Electric Board putting in low voltage and high voltage cables.

I also was sent on hire with STW on a main laying job near Clay Cross on a Poclain 61 putting in ductile water pipes. A few of the best jobs I was sent on was working up at Derwent Dams again for STW. One of these jobs was to clean out the Ashopton Siphon which is a concrete built ditch with tunnel sections along the route. We had a Bobcat loader to push the sludge through the tunnels where I would scoop it out with the Poclain machine. I caught several fish in the digger bucket on that job… it’s trout for tea again!

Next, I gained an interest in computers and I studied on a correspondence course programming in COBOL at nights after work. Following this, I went on an HND Computing course at Loughborough College for 2 years, I struggled with it at first but then got better at it and went on and passed with flying colours and I even got the student of the year award… I think they must have got me mixed up with someone else!

After retraining in computers, I filled in lots of forms and had a few interviews, I even had an interview at Broomfield College for an IT support job then I eventually got a job with Derbyshire County Council in IT support and GIS (geographical information systems).

Some of the jobs I have done at DCC are: helping the Rights of Way Section to digitise the online definitive map. The link is: www.derbyshire.gov.uk/council/partnerships/derbyshire_mapping_portal/ We use a program called MapInfo Professional for all the development work which is used with Ordnance Survey map layers. I also train colleagues to use this mapping program and I help with other projects that require maps such as the LEADER Project, Digital Derbyshire, Chesterfield Canal, Greenways cycle network and the White Peak Cycle Loop.

My interest in farming faded a little bit over the years but has never completely gone away and I enjoy going to farm sales and I help out on a dairy farm on Saturday mornings for the job of pasteurising and bottling the milk. The farmer has two sons who also went to Broomfield College. When the bottling job is finished, I take 30 pints of milk home with me each week and make it into cheese. I make 3 types: a blue cheese, a crumbly sage and a Cheshire cheese. I have been on a cheesemaking course at the Welbeck Estate and I recently attended Reaseheath College in Nantwich for a HACCP hygiene course. Soon you might see my cheeses for sale in local shops in the Bakewell area.