BRIGG MAN RECALLS WHEN RAF PLANE HIT POWER LINES

Educated at Brigg Grammar School and raised in the town, Cliff Turner, now 91 and living in New Zealand, continues his memories of the 1950s. By then he had called time on his career as a sailor and was working at Appleby-Frodingham steelworks, in Scunthorpe, but that was about to change...


Travelling from Scunthorpe to Doncaster I used to pass the 360 megawatt power station being built by the Central Electricity Generating Board at Keadby on the River Trent, about four miles from Scunthorpe, and somehow I learned that houses were being built for the staff.
I wrote to the station superintendent who gave me an interview but referred me to the engineer of the transmission department. This department was responsible for 132,000 volt substations at Scunthorpe, Hull and Grimsby as well as Keadby. At that time 132,000 volts was the highest voltage in use in Britain. 
The department was based at the Scunthorpe substation but was due to move shortly to Keadby. I was offered a job as an electrical fitter which I accepted and so left the steelworks after about a year there. My new job also allowed me to attend the technical college without losing a day's pay
When I gave my notice at the steel works my foreman told me that he knew my new boss,   and advised me that he was not a very nice man and so it proved to be. However, I have never regretted the move as it set me on the path to what proved to be a quite successful career in the electricity supply industry. 
At the time I had very hazy ideas about how the national electricity grid operated. I soon learned that most power stations generated electricity at 11,000 volts and that transformers at the stations stepped up the voltage to 132,000 volts and supplied the national grid which linked all the power stations in the country together in one huge network of 132,000 volt transmission lines. At substations connected to the grid the reverse procedure applied and transformers stepped the voltage down to 33,000 volts or 11,000 volts to supply the Boards that distributed electricity throughout Britain. These Boards, I think there were eleven in England and Wales, had 33,000 and 11,000 volt networks which supplied transformers which further stepped the voltage down to domestic voltage. The electricity supply industry had been nationalised by the Labour government that had been elected in mid-1945.
The group I joined looked after 132,000 volt substations in Scunthorpe, Grimsby and Creyke Beck on the outskirts of Hull, as well as the switchgear in the much bigger switching station at Keadby power station.
One job I did not like was going into the huge oil tanks of the 132,000 volt circuit breakers which controlled the overhead lines. These breakers were opened and closed during normal operations by a control switch but opened automatically, almost instantaneously, if a fault occurred on a line. A fault resulted in large currents flowing through the breaker and when the breaker opened a large electric arc resulted. This arc was extinguished by the oil which surrounded the breaker's contacts. A record was kept of the number of times each breaker had cleared a fault and after three faults the oil tanks were pumped out so that we could get inside and examine the contacts for burn damage and clean them. The tanks were big enough for two men to get into. It was not a job for the claustrophobic.
At Keadby a different kind of circuit breaker was installed. They used a blast of compressed air to extinguish the arc caused when opening for a fault. This was all very new to me so I spent time reading the instruction manual supplied by the maker, A Reyrolle, whose works I had toured in 1946.
One incident I recall is of an RAF aeroplane flying into one of the transmission lines; quite a large piece of wing was torn off but the pilot managed to return safely to wherever he had come from.
Soon after starting my new job we were allocated a brand new house, 4 Mill Road, Keadby. It was a much better house than those in which Nancy and I had lived in as children and we thought ourselves very fortunate. Young people now will perhaps not realise how acute the shortage of housing was in Britain in the early post-war years. No new houses were built during the war and thousands of houses had been demolished by German bombs.
We had, thanks to Nancy's earnings, saved enough to buy a new lounge suite and dining room suite which were duly delivered on the day we moved in. The downstairs floors were of Marley tile. We bought a carpet square for the living room; in those days working class people did not aspire to fitted carpets and we knew that we would probably move on once I had passed my exams so fitted carpet would have been an extravagance. The only thing bought on hire purchase was a television; it cost about 70 pounds. I cannot remember when it was bought but know we did not have one in time for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in May 1953.
I continued to have one day per week with pay to attend the technical college. Fortunately our house was quite near to Althorpe  station where I could catch the same train as before, with the advantage of leaving home a few minutes later, and getting home a few minutes earlier, because home was now about four miles closer to Doncaster. 
In July1953 I passed my next exams, but only just scraped in by 2% in one electrical paper as I had spent far too long on one question and did not finish all the questions. I knew I had done badly and spent a many anxious hours worrying about it.

MORE MEMORIES FROM CLIFF TO COME ON BRIGG BLOG