20 June 2006
We meet a man who is keeping alive a traditional industry by opening a working foundry in Brislington, Bristol... Listen to Mike Brett talking and you might think he's a Jonah, some dour Scots harbinger of doom 'I was at a machine tool foundry in Arbroath, but that closed down,' he muses. 'Lewis and Hole at Dudbridge in Stroud, there's a Sainsbury's where they used to be. The old Torrance foundry building at Bitton was still standing when I was working nearby, but it was not producing. The last foundry I worked in was in Bristol, Thomas Clarke's in Meriton Street, and that folded five or so years ago...' It must be said that not all Mike's former employers are now doleful footnotes in industrial history; when you've got itchy feet, as he did in his younger days, you simply move on to see what's round the next corner.
But the fact is that the little Bristol Foundry he has just opened in Ironmould Lane, Brislington, is almost certainly the last one in the Bristol area, and his story is typical of that of many men in this country who have devoted their lives to heavy engineering. What's not typical is the way he is still hanging on in there. The very name of Ironmould Lane is a reminder of Bristol's, and especially east Bristol's, long association with the metal industry, though iron tended to be secondary to lead and brass. Producing lead went on in the city from pre-Roman times until 1994, while brass-working flourished long before the Industrial Revolution.
A key to the success of both industries was cheap and readily available local coal. In Bedminster, Capper Pass were big producers of tin in Victorian times and the early 20th century, and Mike Brett, while working alone at his furnace, might reflect on young Capper (he came from a Huguenot family) doing the same in the late 18th century. There are differences, of course. Capper was 16 and at the dawn of the industrial society. Mike is 46 at a time when Britain and manufacturing go together like kippers and custard. 'Still, if I can make a go of it, that's all I ask,' he says. He's making a go of it. Veteran and vintage car buffs come to him to cast valves and spigots and cylinders and what-have-you. 'I've no idea what some of these things do, but I know how to cast them,' he says.
He knows this kind of work will not pay the bills, but it's good that his name is being passed around this tight-knit little group of people enthusiastically. You never know where it might lead. There have already been one or two interesting arts projects. He has made 20 panels of railings for the Parc Cwm Darran in the South Wales valleys, created on the site of the Ogilvie pit, which closed in 1975. They incorporated miners' helmets, lamps and other artefacts, and were tricky but fun to do. Commissions for plaques have come his way - one for a bandstand in Swindon and the other beside two trees at the Royal Albert Hall for the British Mario Lanza Society. The Avon Valley Railway at Bitton has also come up with some orders, but Mike knows that a successful future lies not in the romance of past times but regular work for mainstream industries.
Working with the Hanham-based Caddick and Moss, he recently made 75 aluminium parts in a number of different shapes for Honda in Swindon. He would like more of that kind of thing. He speaks admiringly of Caddick and Moss and other companies in Bristol, mainly small and all of them, like him, pushing against the tide, who produce precisely engineered patterns from which he can make his casts. They come in wood or plastic, and the work he produces from them is in bronze, brass, aluminium or iron. He packs the patterns around with clay-like greensand (which is, in fact, a rich brown) and water, or hard sand permeated with carbon dioxide, and molten metal is then poured into the hardened moulds.
Much of the metal Mike uses is scrap, though some clients supply ingots. It's been a long journey for him to Ironmould Lane. From Kilbarchin, on the edge of Glasgow, he left school in 1975 to do a year of engineering at an industrial training centre before going on to a four-year apprenticeship at a firm making pumps for the ailing Clyde shipyards. Wanderings followed taking in foundries in Cork, Dublin, Yorkshire and Wiltshire, not to mention that Stroud job. The lads there used to call the place Hell's Kitchen, long before the TV people latched on to the name. Looking around his tiny empire today, he laughs to think he's cast everything from wingnuts to lathes 20 feet long.
He'll also tell you that years ago, he made some manhole covers for the town centre in Kingswood, where he and his teenage son Connor live, and there they are still to this day. Mike and his fiancee Esther are to marry in her native Kenya on June 30, and he's hoping for a bulging order book when they get back home. When he was in his first job, he helped make replacement pumps for the paddle-ship Waverley, which is often to be seen in the Bristol Channel in summer, and he wonders whether they are still working. Has he never been to look? Nah, he says, never had the time. There's part of him hoping he never will.
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