14-12-2023, 04:32 PM
One of the highly skilled men charged with making the stamping dies for the Merlin Crankshafts was Darce Kerwin a dour but friendly Liverpudlian and my childhood next-door neighbour. This was such a well-paid job that he could afford a decent new house in a lower middle-class area in the West of Sheffield. But, it was quite a treck to work for him; at 6am sharp the gate 'sneck' would click as left to walk down the very steep Greystones Road to catch the two trams that took him to work on Carslie Street. He took me round the works on two occasions - quite an experience that I can remember clearly. He told me that after one air raid, the offices had been damaged so the men had a wander around, opened some filing cabinets, and discovered that jobs they were charging £5 for were being sold on by the company for four times as much (they were not paid a wage, they "bid" for different jobs as they arose). Needless to say, there was a great upset and the threat of a strike quickly persuaded the management to be rather more generous.