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Post by smshogun on Oct 29, 2015 13:47:59 GMT -5
It was a time at Cotgrave when the management decided it was time to upgrade the telephone exchange and "go digital" as it was the latest all singing and dancing telephone system with more features than your local Odeon cinema and many which were undisclosed which was to return and haunt several members of staff.
Norton were a company from Birmingham vying for a contract with British Coal to replace all the telephone exchanges and this was their first for evaluation to see how good it was and it was duly installed. Admittedly it was a brilliant system and anyone at the pit was offered two sets of operating instructions, one was a full user manual which was a booklet and it gave all the features and capabilities, and you got a small card with the main functions on, but it was the full book which made interesting reading.
This system had some functions NOT MENTIONED and these were in the FULL SYSTEM MANUAL and included a full monitoring system which could record the time, date, and number of any number called from any of the phones at the pit and apparently the manager stated it wasn't being installed as it cost too much and wasn't to be evaluated, then the nuts truly hit the booster fan when I was called to see the manager and some unusual questions were asked of me. One was to record all my outgoing calls and their numbers as I was one calling all over the world as well as to numerous UK pits, workshops, central stores, and suppliers to the industry and with full justification and this alone told me the monitoring system was installed and fully operational. I was at this point the manager informed me we were the only two who knew of it when I questioned him.
Evaluation and monitoring unknowingly took place and suddenly there was uproar as it was either the deputy manager or senior undermanager was issued with a bill for about £7,000 as he had two children who emigrated, one was to Australia and I believe the other one was to Canada and he was calling them at least twice a week and on for anything over 30 minutes a time to them; costs to these countries were very expensive then and the manager used the monitoring system to prove they were all made from his office, he was at work on every occasion, and nobody but the cleaner had a key to his office which was always locked when he wasn't there. He tried blaming the cleaner, no way as a large majority of the calls were made when the cleaner wasn't there and the manager had already looked at this, he wouldn't buy it and gave him a simple choice which was "prove it wasn't you or pay up" and once word of this broke it spread like wildfire and the colliery phone bill dropped by nearly one third overnight. What was happening was many on afters and nights were calling premium rate numbers such as the emerging sex chat lines for a little fun and were on for long periods and this ran up the telephone bills dramatically, some were calling home and talking to their wives while others were calling girlfriends.
By reading the full user manual you could discover the full features and the best one was call divert, by entering a simple code into any phone and the divert number any call to that phone was diverted to the new number you put in. One day a sneaky little nuts who was in charge of the Blacksmiths shop began whispering lies in the managements ears about me and when I found out it was him (It was John Cook Mick) I had a little walk around the pit top and diverted nearly every phone to his number and when anyone rang somewhere which had a call diverted phone Cooky received the call. Yes it was me Mick. He went absolutely ape as someone may be calling somewhere on the prep plant or maybe the shaft top and he was getting all their calls and as nobody had really studied the full user manual they didn't know what was going on. A chap called Paul Hodgkinson was responsible for the pit top phones and the new exchange and he figured it out, he also knew about what Cooky had tried to do to me and put 2 and 2 together and came up with 4 but he never grassed me up bless him, he saw the funny side of it and occasionally diverted a few phones himself.
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Post by eleceng on Oct 30, 2015 15:30:26 GMT -5
Blimey, you've really pulled the memory banks, smshogun. Paul was surface chargeman on my shift for many years. Great guy, we got on really well. I remember the phone bill incident, can't remember who it was though. Also Cooky's incident. !st class wally he was. The blacksmiths didn't think much of him. Not a patch on Geordie Phillopson, do you remember him? I've racked my brains to try & place you, to no avail. May come to me eventually!
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Post by smshogun on Oct 30, 2015 22:41:26 GMT -5
When I went it was Don Parsons and John Howitt, but I do remember John and Dave Martin as EOM, Don took early retirement and died within a year of finishing, John went to Pork Farms, and Dave opened or bought a gym out Mansfield way.
Jewson Jimmy Marrs took over from Don and was a total thingy and robbed the pit dry by buying stuff on account for himself.
Cooky was in charge of the blacksmiths and grassed everyone up, when he had nothing he used to just lie about them.
John Tank Moss was in charge of the fitting shop, knew Tank before going to Cotgrave and Brian Hubbard was in charge of the beltmen, always liked Brian even though he was miserable, always 100% straight and honest with me and would always do you a good turn and not a bad one, earned my respect anyway.
What can I say about you Mick, being totally honest you always looked miserable but you were another one I had time for, you always made time to sit and talk to people so they fully understood what you were trying to achieve and were always willing to listen to ideas and work with people even if it meant taking ideas from someone and amending your own to produce better solutions by combining or incorporating others ideas.
Paul was still EOM and had Les Lydon with him.
Other notable incidents I can think of?
When we got a batch of Canon copiers and Cotgrave was allocated one and everyone was bringing their holiday snaps and copying them so they removed all the 6 X 4" paper to stop them, or when I copied a £5, £10, and £20 note and stuck them to the floor and most of the office staff tried to pick them up and pocket them only to find they were fakes and copied on one side only.
Or when John (willy wanker) Morley has his white Astra GTE at the time the car thieves were dumping nicked cars on the dirthill and I took that fork lift which Moxy in the chock shop had on hire which had the extended forks and I lifted his Astra with it and we swapped it for the nicked one and put it in his spot and he has awful trouble getting into it as his key wouldn't fit, then he noticed it had been screwed and noticed it didn't have any number plates on it and realised he had been done, he laughed about that for years after and blamed me.
Saw Brian out of the telephone exchange a couple of weeks ago and he has throat cancer, do you remember him?
Never knew Geordie Phillopson.
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Post by John on Oct 31, 2015 15:57:34 GMT -5
When did you start at Cotgrave smshogan?? I was transferred there from Clifton in early 68, I was on Dennely Pickerings shift, and worked under him until I left in Nov of 68. I'm not sure now who was my elec shift engineer, might have been Mick.
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Post by eleceng on Nov 1, 2015 8:19:40 GMT -5
Yes, John, I was Asst. Eng. when you were there. I was days reg at that time, mainly U/G. Eric Baines was Asst. Eng. on surface. Granville (Nobby) West & Selwyn Murfitt Dep. Eng's. Eric Drury you remember. It was after you left we became Shift Eng's when 2 more came & we went on 3 shifts. You may remember one of them. Jack Robson. He came from Clifton.
I did 6 months around area on Asst. Eng. course, before moving back to Cotgrave as Asst. Eng. Before that I was on Denly's shift. Happy times, fond memories!
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Post by eleceng on Nov 1, 2015 9:11:42 GMT -5
It was a time at Cotgrave when the management decided it was time to upgrade the telephone exchange and "go digital" as it was the latest all singing and dancing telephone system with more features than your local Odeon cinema and many which were undisclosed which was to return and haunt several members of staff.
Norton were a company from Birmingham vying for a contract with British Coal to replace all the telephone exchanges and this was their first for evaluation to see how good it was and it was duly installed. Admittedly it was a brilliant system and anyone at the pit was offered two sets of operating instructions, one was a full user manual which was a booklet and it gave all the features and capabilities, and you got a small card with the main functions on, but it was the full book which made interesting reading.
This system had some functions NOT MENTIONED and these were in the FULL SYSTEM MANUAL and included a full monitoring system which could record the time, date, and number of any number called from any of the phones at the pit and apparently the manager stated it wasn't being installed as it cost too much and wasn't to be evaluated, then the nuts truly hit the booster fan when I was called to see the manager and some unusual questions were asked of me. One was to record all my outgoing calls and their numbers as I was one calling all over the world as well as to numerous UK pits, workshops, central stores, and suppliers to the industry and with full justification and this alone told me the monitoring system was installed and fully operational. I was at this point the manager informed me we were the only two who knew of it when I questioned him.
Evaluation and monitoring unknowingly took place and suddenly there was uproar as it was either the deputy manager or senior undermanager was issued with a bill for about £7,000 as he had two children who emigrated, one was to Australia and I believe the other one was to Canada and he was calling them at least twice a week and on for anything over 30 minutes a time to them; costs to these countries were very expensive then and the manager used the monitoring system to prove they were all made from his office, he was at work on every occasion, and nobody but the cleaner had a key to his office which was always locked when he wasn't there. He tried blaming the cleaner, no way as a large majority of the calls were made when the cleaner wasn't there and the manager had already looked at this, he wouldn't buy it and gave him a simple choice which was "prove it wasn't you or pay up" and once word of this broke it spread like wildfire and the colliery phone bill dropped by nearly one third overnight. What was happening was many on afters and nights were calling premium rate numbers such as the emerging sex chat lines for a little fun and were on for long periods and this ran up the telephone bills dramatically, some were calling home and talking to their wives while others were calling girlfriends.
By reading the full user manual you could discover the full features and the best one was call divert, by entering a simple code into any phone and the divert number any call to that phone was diverted to the new number you put in. One day a sneaky little nuts who was in charge of the Blacksmiths shop began whispering lies in the managements ears about me and when I found out it was him (It was John Cook Mick) I had a little walk around the pit top and diverted nearly every phone to his number and when anyone rang somewhere which had a call diverted phone Cooky received the call. Yes it was me Mick. He went absolutely ape as someone may be calling somewhere on the prep plant or maybe the shaft top and he was getting all their calls and as nobody had really studied the full user manual they didn't know what was going on. A chap called Paul Hodgkinson was responsible for the pit top phones and the new exchange and he figured it out, he also knew about what Cooky had tried to do to me and put 2 and 2 together and came up with 4 but he never grassed me up bless him, he saw the funny side of it and occasionally diverted a few phones himself.
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Post by John on Nov 1, 2015 9:33:33 GMT -5
Yes, John, I was Asst. Eng. when you were there. I was days reg at that time, mainly U/G. Eric Baines was Asst. Eng. on surface. Granville (Nobby) West & Selwyn Murfitt Dep. Eng's. Eric Drury you remember. It was after you left we became Shift Eng's when 2 more came & we went on 3 shifts. You may remember one of them. Jack Robson. He came from Clifton.
I did 6 months around area on Asst. Eng. course, before moving back to Cotgrave as Asst. Eng. Before that I was on Denly's shift. Happy times, fond memories! I got on well with Den, he was easy to work for, I "bumped" into his nephew on line some years back, apparently Den used to have a side we never saw, as a younger man he had a reputation for fighting in pubs. Sadly he passed on a few years back.
Jack Robson, was he at Wollaton and transferred to Clifton when Wollaton closed??? Short chubby bloke with a tach?? It's a name I forgot, if it's the same feller, then I worked with him a few times at Clifton, he was appointed as a shift engineer and was still training. I was with him on days one shift, we had to fit a second snaplock switch to the Cablebelts thruster brake to make it fail to safety. The Cablebelt hauled coal up the Stonehead Drift, pretty steep climb and over 3/4 mile long. The outbye Sutcliffe plate belt bunker loaded on to a Crawley stage loader which fed the Cablebelt.
The bracket was premade for us and we bolted it to the Cablebelt thruster assembly, fitted the Snaplock switch to the bracket, all while the belt was running.... For some reason the Cablebelt stopped, so we moved our hands out the way of the thruster dropping...Well it was supposed to drop!!! It got hung up on the Snaplock switch bracket we'd fitted...OOOOOOO ERRRR missus!! The belt slowed to a stop, then slowly started to roll in reverse until it was making an awful screaming noise....This happened so fast, then there we were struggling to remove the bolts holding the bracket on, seemed like an eternity, last bolt pulled out, thruster brake dropped and Cablebelt ground to a halt.... Back to the drawing board, we made a hasty retreat before anyone spotted us..Nobody ever found out why the Cablebelt had reversed causing a massive spill of coal at the loading point...
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Post by eleceng on Nov 1, 2015 9:45:08 GMT -5
Don Parsons was at Bestwood until it closed. I worked with him a few times when I was there. He was U/G, came to pit top through accident. John Howitt was on Prep Plant & some U/G before main workshop. Dave Martin was served his apprenticeship on my shift & was a district elec. as well. He was a good amateur boxer & martial arts expert. I remember him opening a gym. Jimmy Marrs worked at Notts County Council. Bumped into him a few times when I was PAT testing. Told me all about the fiddles when Cotgrave was closing. Cooky took over from Geordie (he was in EOM blacksmiths). Brian Hubbard was Shift Eng. on C/V installations. Les Lydon was U/G on Dave Holmes shift before surface. Now, Paul Hodgkinson was surface c/man on my shift until I finished. Was a great guy. We had a good relationship. Don't know what happened to him.
You mention Brian in Telex. Was it Brian Straw, who lives in Ilkeston?
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Post by eleceng on Nov 1, 2015 9:50:50 GMT -5
Yes, John, I was Asst. Eng. when you were there. I was days reg at that time, mainly U/G. Eric Baines was Asst. Eng. on surface. Granville (Nobby) West & Selwyn Murfitt Dep. Eng's. Eric Drury you remember. It was after you left we became Shift Eng's when 2 more came & we went on 3 shifts. You may remember one of them. Jack Robson. He came from Clifton.
I did 6 months around area on Asst. Eng. course, before moving back to Cotgrave as Asst. Eng. Before that I was on Denly's shift. Happy times, fond memories! I got on well with Den, he was easy to work for, I "bumped" into his nephew on line some years back, apparently Den used to have a side we never saw, as a younger man he had a reputation for fighting in pubs. Sadly he passed on a few years back.
Jack Robson, was he at Wollaton and transferred to Clifton when Wollaton closed??? Short chubby bloke with a tach?? It's a name I forgot, if it's the same feller, then I worked with him a few times at Clifton, he was appointed as a shift engineer and was still training. I was with him on days one shift, we had to fit a second snaplock switch to the Cablebelts thruster brake to make it fail to safety. The Cablebelt hauled coal up the Stonehead Drift, pretty steep climb and over 3/4 mile long. The outbye Sutcliffe plate belt bunker loaded on to a Crawley stage loader which fed the Cablebelt.
The bracket was premade for us and we bolted it to the Cablebelt thruster assembly, fitted the Snaplock switch to the bracket, all while the belt was running.... For some reason the Cablebelt stopped, so we moved our hands out the way of the thruster dropping...Well it was supposed to drop!!! It got hung up on the Snaplock switch bracket we'd fitted...OOOOOOO ERRRR missus!! The belt slowed to a stop, then slowly started to roll in reverse until it was making an awful screaming noise....This happened so fast, then there we were struggling to remove the bolts holding the bracket on, seemed like an eternity, last bolt pulled out, thruster brake dropped and Cablebelt ground to a halt.... Back to the drawing board, we made a hasty retreat before anyone spotted us..Nobody ever found out why the Cablebelt had reversed causing a massive spill of coal at the loading point...
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Post by eleceng on Nov 1, 2015 9:55:40 GMT -5
Yes it was the same guy, Jack Robson. He retired at Cotgrave several months before I took redundancy. We had a party for him & hired a stripper. His wife was not pleased! Made him leave the party early!!!
Smshogon, did you see my post about Brian Straw?
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Post by smshogun on Nov 4, 2015 8:20:41 GMT -5
Yes I have now Mick, and you are correct about it being the correct Brian.
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Post by eleceng on Nov 4, 2015 12:39:18 GMT -5
Yes I have now Mick, and you are correct about it being the correct Brian. Brian was my main man in Control Room, really 1st class man to have there. His nickname was "Straw the claw" due to his accident U/G & reason he came to surface. I taught him to programme the computers if they broke down. Much to Mike Need's dismay. We have some great memories together. I'm so sad to hear of his cancer. Please pass on my kind regards when you see him again. My thoughts & prayers are with him.
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Post by smshogun on Nov 4, 2015 14:21:32 GMT -5
Sorry Mick, its been a busy few days at work, Switzerland on Sunday, Croatia on Monday, busy all day Tuesday and today at lunchtime was the first time I have logged in properly.
Will certainly pass on your message to Brian, saw him a week last Monday and he is as happy as Larry pushing the grandkids around. He has to be careful now as when we met he always dropped back into "pit mode" and have some good crack, now of course his wife is always with him so he has to be careful and stop himself going back into pit mode.
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Post by eleceng on Nov 10, 2015 17:34:23 GMT -5
Sorry Mick, its been a busy few days at work, Switzerland on Sunday, Croatia on Monday, busy all day Tuesday and today at lunchtime was the first time I have logged in properly.
Will certainly pass on your message to Brian, saw him a week last Monday and he is as happy as Larry pushing the grandkids around. He has to be careful now as when we met he always dropped back into "pit mode" and have some good crack, now of course his wife is always with him so he has to be careful and stop himself going back into pit mode. When you see him ask if he remembers the Jon Peters Breakfast show on Radio Trent when he mentioned the control room staff finishing night shift, was so funny at the time. Glad his life is good. Tell him I'm into great-grandkids now. The eldest will be 15 in January.
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Post by smshogun on Nov 11, 2015 22:10:27 GMT -5
John used to be a good friend, mind you so was Kenny Everitt when he lived in Nottingham, John always had yank cars as he was so fat he needed the American wide beam seats.
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Post by eleceng on Nov 12, 2015 10:26:23 GMT -5
I used to go out with Jon & Chris Ashley for a few pints. Had a go with Jon's Mustang when he had it. Not seen them for a few years now. Think Jon still lives in Harby & Chris is in Spain. Did a 3hr oldies programme with Chris one Sunday tea time back in 1979.
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Post by smshogun on Nov 13, 2015 14:05:48 GMT -5
Last I heard of John was him going back to London for another radio station, did you ever see his Pontiac GTO? I painted that and it won best paint job in Yanks class and best in show overall winner, 800 individual colours all mixed by my own fair hand, when it came back from the show some scrote keyed it front to back down one side just when it was offloaded from the lorry, he nearly cried. His Trans Am bonnet eagle was hand painted by me also as they were transfers and used to lift.
If you see him ask him about the time he got drunk and Kenny Everitt, Cleo Rocos, David Lloyd (don't mention me) stripped him naked in Kenny's apartment and Cleo wrote "things do grow in the dark" on his thighs in lipstick next to his todger.
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Post by eleceng on Nov 15, 2015 13:52:41 GMT -5
I never saw the Pontiac. Remember his Trans-Am though, had a drive in it. Was some beast!! Haven't seen him for over 20 yrs. Funnily today on Radio Nottingham, Paul Robey made a mention of him & he does still live in Harby. Not surprised at the incident! Did you know Brian Powles, ex stock car racer & whiz-kid with motors? He occasionally did some work for John.
He also had a Austin Healey 3000.
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Post by smshogun on Nov 15, 2015 21:18:02 GMT -5
Name rings a bell, did he either have a garage in Cotgrave, or live in Cotgrave?
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Post by eleceng on Nov 16, 2015 8:32:03 GMT -5
Yes, he lived in Cotgrave & had a small building he used as a garage to do his work. Was not for general public.
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