Peter Horleston provides a Transporting Interlude

A Transporting Interlude

In the years 1966 and 1967 I was a fresh faced, cocky, and somewhat naïve college student.  My father, then an accountant with Newport Borough works department, viewed me with a jaundiced eye.  Economically non-viable, a trifle on the spend thrift side and all in all a drain on the bank balance.  Particularly in the vacations when I could be found spending the mornings / afternoons in bed and the evenings with friends in the local.  Solution? Find the wretch a holiday job.  So it was that in the Christmas and Easter vacations of those years I was to be found labouring away as a relief conductor on the Transporter Bridge.

In those days the bridge was still busy, even with the George Street Bridge and motorway being newly available.  It provided an easy and short route from Pill to places of work on the other side.  Notably the Orb steel works and the two Uskmouth power stations.  From memory it crossed 4 times an hour and there were often queues of vehicles, not to mention numerous foot passengers, many with bicycles.  My duties involved opening the outer and the inner gates.  Next load the vehicles in a strict rota left front, left rear etc. Finally the foot and bicycle passengers.  Shut the gates of course.  Then depending on the time of the tide, to the front, look up, look down the river to ensure no ships were approaching. At that time the river still carried some commercial traffic.  Particularly ‘’sand hoppers ‘’ which dredged sand from the channel and took it to the wharves where the Riverfront now stands.  The occasion when one hit the town bridge is well remembered.  If none were to be seen signal the driver that it was ok to cross.

The whole enterprise was over seen by ‘’The Driver’’, a disembodied spirit never seen but whose presence could be felt emanating from his shrine, ‘’ The Pagoda’’.  Actually a very affable, if eccentric Geordie whose job demanded he stay in the pagoda.  In lunch breaks and in conversations between trips he, of course, took pleasure in teasing the college boy.  I was never actually sent for a sky hook but that sort of thing.  One story sticks in the memory. The power stations were it seemed liquid cooled and this was done by taking water from the river. The danger was that salmon would be sucked in. Should this occur, as a safety, measure men (a man), were employed to rescue said fish and put them in the outflow. Of course on occasion the fish failed to make safety. The failures could be seen concealed in the duffle coats of power station staff crossing the bridge. Head and tails protruding from the collar and hem of the duffle coat. He suggest I should look out for them. This I did quite overlooking the time of the year! As I do not think salmon run at Christmas.

Fact or fiction? I know not but it enlivened my days and his I guess.

Peter H