A Well-Planned Career by Neville Dunn: Fig. 15 Kips' Map of Flintshire"

Flintshire

1607

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A WELL-PLANNED CAREER

Written July 2008

When I started my first job on 3^rd March 1947 in the County Land Agent's Department of the Flintshire County Council, I entered an unplanned field of work. In the Sixth Form of Mold Alun School I had set my sights on becoming a chemist or a physicist but this would have involved going to university and that became impossible. With my three older brothers either married or in the forces, my mother, my sister and I were existing on a meagre war widow's pension of less than £2.00 per week. The family income had to be increased.

So, approaching my seventeenth birthday, I became a local government junior clerk in a technical office set in Wrexham Street, Mold (see Appendix Fig.1) At that time, the County Council owned some 4,500 acres of farmland in 50 groups of smallholdings scattered from Bodelwyddan to Fenn's Bank on the outskirts of Whitchurch. Staff consisted of County Land Agent, Mr Maysmor W Jones, with assistant land agent Bob Noble, chief clerk Horace Owen, typist Joyce Ashworth and me. My duties to start with consisted of putting the mail together and much fetching and carrying, including getting our ration of paraffin for the office stove which, with a small gas fire, was the sole means of heating the office.

I soon got to know how scattered the Council's estate was when I was told in my first month to attend a committee meeting of Councillors to be held in Penley in the Maelor District south of Wrexham to appoint a new tenant. The winter of 1946/47 was one of the coldest recorded with snow lying on the ground from the end of January until the beginning of April. Mr Jones, Horace Owen and I set out in a taxi to bump and slide our way from Mold to Penley over roads that had not been cleared or treated as modern ones would have been. The chairman was a Mr Preston and one of the committee members was Lord Kenyon. When lunchtime came, we all pulled out our sandwiches and thermos flasks and my mouth must have dropped open when I compared my Woolworths flask with Lord Kenyon's silver plated flask!

However, Bob Noble found out that my artistic talent was more technical than arty and he quickly introduced me to drawing tenancy plans of the smallholdings which had to be traced in black ink on linen from Ordnance Survey maps. Thus started my involvement with Ordnance Survey maps which has now lasted for sixty one years. The plans were always headed "Plan Referred To" and I remember one morning finding I had spelt it "Reffered" - how on earth was I going to correct it. When I came back from lunch, the offending word was spelt correctly! Bob Noble had erased the mistake and redrawn it - he was and still is a very good friend.

I also had to obtain copies of these plans in the days before photocopiers were invented. This meant either putting an order on a bus to Wrexham where a printer met it and put the copies on a return bus to Mold later for me to meet or using a sun frame in the County Surveyor's Department on the Hall Fields. The latter involved putting the original plan with some photosensitive paper in a glass frame, exposing them to the light and then developing the print with some liquid developer. Using the right exposure with the light varying from full sun to overcast skies took some understanding and I got better as the months went on.

When the end of my first month arrived, I was presented with a pay cheque for £6.10s.1d (£6.50). I was being paid £65.00 per year (the prewar salary for a 16 year old clerk) with a war bonus of £24.70. This will seem minute to modern youngsters but then the County Land Agent was only getting £450.00 per year. I gave my mother the six pounds, which doubled her income, and planned how I was going to exist for a month on 10s.1d. (50p). The single bus fair from Buckley to Mold was two pence (1p) and I could not afford the two course canteen lunch of one shilling (5p). I therefore either took sandwiches or sometimes biked it home for lunch. I had my seventeenth birthday in April and with it a rise in salary.

There was little to spare for entertainment but I often played snooker at the Albert Hall and the Palace with my pal Gerald Rowlands who was a legal clerk with Llewellyn-Jones & Armon Ellis in Mold. Tickets for the Tivoli Cinema were sixpence (2.5p) and for the Palace Cinema were four pence (less than 2p). I could not afford to smoke even though twenty Players were only a shilling (10p) and ten Woodbines only four pence. There were also some cigarettes called Robin in a slot machine at newsagent Fred Griffiths on the Cross that were only two pence for ten but the tobacco always fell out of most of them before one could light up!

The local County smallholdings included two at Prenbrigog and Myrtle Road and two at Nant Mawr as well as others at Argoed Hall and Bryn-y-Baal. One of my duties every quarter was to bike to the Argoed Hall estate and read the six water meters. These meters were in chambers set into the ground in the farm yards and were always full of liquid manure so that I ended up stinking when I got back to the office.

In 1948, the national electricity companies were nationalised into electricity boards and I was given the task of recording all the instances of electricity lines that crossed our smallholdings land so that we could receive the wayleave payments for every pole and pylon. The North Wales Electricity Company became MANWEB and for several weeks I was taken to MANWEB's main office in Rhostyllen every day where I poured over my beloved Ordnance Survey maps covering the whole of Flintshire.

My work for the County was interrupted in September 1948 when I was called up for National Service. I served in the RAF for nineteen months and, after initial training, received training as a clerk and ended up at RAF Hucknall near Nottingham. This was the headquarters of No 43 Group that had been the headquarters of No 12 Group, Fighter Command during WW2 and we had more officers than airmen on the station. One of the stations in the Group was No 30 MU, Sealand and, although planes flew over to Sealand on Fridays quite regularly, I was never lucky enough to get a flight on a weekend pass.

I was promoted to corporal in 1949 and, with my lifelong interest in trains, put in charge of the section issuing warrants and directing posted airmen and officers via a very complex railway network all over Britain. I had my first flight there when the Commanding Officer, keeping up his flying hours, took some office staff in an Avro Anson for an hour's flight around Nottingham. RAF Hucknall was also the experimental base for Rolls Royce Ltd and, as well as seeing testbed Lancastrians fitted with two jet engines to replace the outer piston engines, we heard various curious noises coming from the end of the airfield. Only much later did we learn that these came from a crude steel framework fitted with special jet engines nicknamed the "Flying Bedstead", a prototype vertical lift off aeroplane from which the Hawker Harrier jump-jet fighter was developed.

I returned to the County Land Agent's Department in April 1950, a more mature young man. I had taken a correspondence course in the RAF to study for the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors' (RICS) exams, and I sat and passed the First Examination in 1951. Continuing to study for the Intermediate Exam had difficulties for me because, although the surveying and law subjects presented no problems, the main subject was agriculture. Not coming from a farming family, I struggled with this and failed this subject twice.

Bob Noble encouraged me to progress from designing simple farm building alterations to more complex designs. We needed new farmhouses on some parts of the estate and, taking a Ministry of Agriculture sketch plan which had a defective staircase design in it, I designed a four bedroomed farmhouse of which several were built in Sychdyn, Hope, Talacre and other parts (see Appendix Fig.2).

I decided in 1955 that I would not be successful in qualifying as a chartered land agent and, with the pleasure I got out of building design, obtained a transfer to the County Architect's Department. There I had the good fortune to be placed as an assistant to Bob Harvey, then Chief Assistant Architect who had, with a qualified colleague, designed from scratch Kelsterton Technical College (now Deeside College). The office was situated on the first floor of Llwynegrin Hall (now the Registrar's Office) and Bob Harvey and I shared a drawing bench in what had been a bedroom in the original hall. I was immediately introduced to his latest project which was a new, three storey secondary modern school at Aston, Queensferry which I have included in my story about Ken Hibbert (see No 32, 48-52). This was a complex, steel-framed building far removed from what I had been involved with previously and I learned quickly (see Appendix Fig.3).

We architectural assistants were not barred from carrying out private work in our spare time and throughout the 1950's I designed a number of houses over quite a wide area from Wrexham to Holywell. One private design I undertook in early 1958 however changed my life completely when I was asked to design a modern terrace of three houses at The Square, Buckley for Edward Hill and his family. After inviting tenders for the construction, the successful building contractors were the Buckley firm of Wilcock and Jones and I soon had to call at their Bistre Avenue office quite regularly to sort out queries. The blond secretary in the office was Doris Iball from Church Road, Buckley and Edward Hill pointed out that she was living with her sister close to him in Victoria Road, about 100 yards from my home in Park Road. On Saturday, 21^st June I plucked up courage to ask her if she would go to the Bistre Garden Fete Dance in the Parish Rooms, Lane End as a foursome with Ed Hill and his wife, Florrie. So started a courtship which ended with my marrying Doris at St John's Congregational Church nine months later and we celebrate our golden wedding next year in 2009.

I assisted in a number of fairly small office projects in the late 1950's such as Flint Fire Station (see Appendix Fig.4) and started studying for the Royal Institution of British Architects' (RIBA) exams. The office was quite small at that time numbering only 29 staff but there was a strong social spirit and our sports and social club organised car rallies, photo competitions, Christmas parties and other events (see Appendix Fig.5). The County Architect at that time was Mr Bill Griffiths and, when I asked for an upward regrading in 1961, he told me I would need to get my Intermediate RIBA Exam first. Mr Griffiths was older than the normal retiring age but appeared to want to carry on for some time so, in January, 1961, I obtained a new job at a higher grade in the County Architect's Department of Cheshire County Council, based at County Hall, Chester. While I was there, I designed extensions for two primary schools at Lower Peover and Weaverham, travelling around the county on my Vespa scooter.

Then in the summer of 1961, I saw an advertisement for an architectural assistant in Flintshire County Council under the new County Architect, Bob Harvey! Mr Griffiths had decided to retire within a few weeks of my leaving. I was lucky enough to get the job and so, after a short break of six months, I was back at Llwynegrin at a grade higher than when I left with the prospect of a further grade up when I got my RIBA Intermediate Exam for which I was studying part time at Liverpool College of Building.

By now Kelsterton College was bursting at the seams and in need of extension and Bob Harvey set me to work with a vengeance. Over the next few years, I designed a number of extensions to the college including a motor vehicle workshop and an aeronautical workshop housing a Westland Wyvern and a De Havilland Venom aircraft, donated to the college for Broughton's Hawker Siddeley apprentices to work on (see Appendix Fig.6). I moved into Connah's Quay town centre when I designed a clinic and library at the end of Wepre Drive whose construction ground to a halt for two months in the bitter winter of 1963. As it was completed that year, I sat my RIBA Intermediate Exam and passed it.

I returned to the Kelsterton College site afterwards for more extensions during the mid 1960's including a four storey classroom block (see Appendix Fig.7), a chemistry laboratory block to university standards, a sports hall and a six lane running track (see Appendix Fig.8), the only one in Flintshire. The track was designed as an Imperial 440 yard circuit and later had to be set out again when it was converted to 400 metres. I was studying now for the Final RIBA Exam, which would give me Chartered Architect status, when disaster struck. After a mass radiography checkup in 1968 at work, I was referred to Chester City Hospital and diagnosed with tuberculosis on account of a lung shadow. I had suffered with bronchitis since childhood with little ill effect on my general health but now I was given the choice of admittance to Llangwyfan Chest Hospital or treatment at home together with an offloaded lifestyle.

We had two children by then who had to be inoculated against TB and I chose the latter course of action which meant giving up my RIBA studies at Liverpool. Three colleagues from the Department carried on their studies, got their Final and two became future County Architects. I was somewhat downhearted about my position at Mold and in 1969 applied for an architectural post in Bermuda but nothing came of it. Later that year, I started to design a small project of which, nevertheless, I am extremely proud - Buckley Fire Station. It proved to be a very interesting project as I have related in my story "Buckley's Duke of York Inn tunnel - fact of fiction?" (see Appendix Fig.9 and Buckley Magazine No 29, pages 58-68). {Also 96.1 for the story on this archive - ed.}

Buckley Fire Station was the first of three fire stations I designed but was the last using Imperial measure - feet and inches. Flintshire was a member of a Welsh consortium of Architect's Departments (CLAW) and, in 1971, was chosen to build the first designs in North Wales to use metric measurements. Because of my liking for the technical side of architecture, I was selected to design a branch library and a fire station at St Asaph and these were officially opened in November 1971 (see Appendix Fig.10).

The CLAW consortium developed a standard form of building design to speed up construction of schools in particular, needed because of rapidly expanding populations in the early 1970's. At that time, Buckley was the third fastest growing community after two London Boroughs. The Department decided to set up a Research and Development Section to promote the CLAW work and I became the architectural leader.

Part of the work consisted of a project to mechanise the preparation of drawings and bills of quantities by using computers and from 1971 onwards I was to spend much time in the computer laboratory of Liverpool University's Building Department, working in a team headed by Paul Daniel, a computer expert from Cheshire. Paul, while working at ICI Chemicals, Runcorn, had developed a sophisticated computer system which not only drew plans of pipework designs but also calculated the quantities automatically. Aided by computer graduate, Andy Pinnington from Liverpool, the aim was to apply the same techniques to building design with me as the prototype program user.

By 1975 the team had developed a means of describing a building for input to a computer which would then allow one to prepare the drawings automatically and produce half of the building quantities untouched by human hand. The computer at Liverpool filled a whole wall of one room, was less powerful than a present day mobile phone, cost £75,000 and was fed by punched paper tape. We started to use the programs in our own department at Mold using the Treasury IBM computer previously used only for processing accounts and wages.

In the late 1970's, we started to get interest from overseas in our computer system, now called CARBS (Computer Aided Rationalised Building System). We had demonstrated it to other County Councils and to the National Coal Board Research Centre in Derbyshire. The latter organisation decided our team needed to see how things worked underground and we went to a mine in Cannock, Staffordshire. I had already been down two coal mines locally at Point of Ayr and Llay Hall but this was different. After travelling to the coalface in a cramped little train, Paul, Andy and I were told that we would "manride" our way back to the shaft bottom. This involved jumping on a moving conveyor belt and we were warned to keep our heads down because of the low ceilings. After a shower and while half way through our working lunch, the mine manager was suddenly called out because a miner had been manriding and, not keeping his head down, had been killed!

Interest in our labour saving development for designing buildings began to mushroom with interest from different parts of the world. We demonstrated the possibilities to a variety of visitors to Mold including the Chief Government Architect from New Zealand and an architect from Singapore who was housed at Ruthin Castle where we entertained him at the Mediaeval Banquet. He was invited to stand up to applause as a representative from the colonies!

We also did a demonstration at Bush House, the BBC headquarters in London who wanted to design computer models of stage sets before they were built. Derbyshire County Council also took a very keen interest in our work as they were members of CLASP, an English equivalent of the Welsh CLAW organisation. I travelled across the Pennines many times in all sorts of weather, stopping at times to pick up some genuine Bakewell tarts at Bakewell. The leader of our R & D Group, quantity surveyor Phil Jelley, left in late 1977 to work in the new oilfields in Shetland and on, 1 March 1978, I was appointed Senior Principal R and D Officer, a post I filled until retirement in 1985.

It was in 1978 that a surprise contact from French company, Renault, led to some interesting co-operation. Renault not only made cars but also ran a serious architectural design group in Paris. We invited their representatives over for a demonstration and dined them this time in Cheshire at the Wild Boar Inn, Beeston where one of the Frenchmen insisted on asking the chef for the recipe for rhubarb crumble which he thought scrumptious! Later in the year, Renault was serious enough to want us to go to their Paris office and teach some staff how to use the system. I did this in 'Franglais', a mixture of my quickly updated, schoolday French with English for the highly technical terms. Walking through the office one saw design projects on the drawing boards in Cote D'Ivoire, Guadeloupe and sites all over the French colonies. Needless to say, we were entertained to some fine cuisine including a Normandy restaurant where all three courses were contained in crepes.

In 1980 came an even more serious enquiry about CARBS from Africa. A private architect from Nairobi in Kenya was keenly interested in putting the programs on Nairobi University computer and using them to design big projects including a large skyscraper building in Nairobi for Barclays Bank (see Appendix Fig.11). He first visited Mold for a demonstration and then, in June, Paul sent me to join Andy in a long flight to Nairobi. I spent a whole month in Nairobi which was an eyeopener in more ways than one. Mr Hughes lived in a large, riverside house with trees on the river bank that housed a lot of monkeys. As well as working in the architect's office and the university office, we visited his building sites in the city with oddities to our eyes such as multi-storey scaffolding in bamboo not steel and scores of Kenyan labourers wheeling barrows of concrete in a procession up multi-storey ramps.

At weekends we were able to relax with various highlights. One Sunday, the computer analyst Andy and I were taken for a flight in a four-seater plane down the Rift Valley and in a circuit inside the crater of an extinct volcano. Another weekend, we motored to the Uganda border to see a lake housing many thousands of flamingos. I was navigating and told Andy the map showed we were very near the Equator. Sure enough, around the next bend was a sign "You are now crossing the Equator".

On the last free weekend we took the main road (there were only three, paved main highways in the country) south toward Tanzania and then turned off onto a rough dirt road leading towards Mombasa. There was plenty of wildlife to see - hippos, giraffes, lions, rhinos, elephants and baboons galore. We stayed at Amboseli Safari Lodge (see Appendix Fig 12) and were about to sit down to a late Saturday dinner when we were invited out to see a long string of elephants walking trunk to tail in the dark past our hotel! Our last meal in Nairobi was in the revolving restaurant where an order for shrimps produced shellfish as big as small lobsters.

In the early 1980's, my time was spent assisting the design teams in the office to consider choices of detail design that would be more economical from the point of view of initial cost and reduced future maintenance, and more economical in running costs. Even then we were getting alarmed at the rising cost of fuel oil with which most of the County properties were heated, following the Arab oil crisis of 1974 after which fuel oil prices rocketed from their original 8.5p per gallon I devised a computer system called PROMIS (Property Management Information Service) which acted upon the initial computer design input to work out the theoretical construction costs and the probable running costs with different fuels.

One problem we had in the system was sourcing reliable local weather information on which to base the calculations. There were three local official weather stations at Shotton Steelworks, Hawarden Airport and Colomendy School, Loggerheads. The former two were sited almost at sea level and the latter was in a frost hollow above Mold were cold air collected and gave earlier frosts than elsewhere on the high ground in the county. I had resumed taking weather records as a hobby at my home in Mynydd Isa in 1976 and I used these in PROMIS as an average set of readings for the County. I carried on taking them after retirement and the present set of information appears to show that global warming is a very unreliable forecast.

It was decided in 1985 that the R & D Section had served its purpose and was to be disbanded so I took early retirement at the end of July 1985 at the age of 55. I soon ran out of jobs around the house and garden and, in the spring of 1986 when my elder son Peter had resigned from hazardous work at Capenhurst Atomic Energy Centre following completion of his apprenticeship, we decided to set up a land surveying business serving the legal profession. I had carried out odd surveys for my own solicitor but we found out that generally solicitors were not well served in obtaining plans for deeds, accident cases, etc. It was Peter who decided on the business name 'Fastplan' and he designed our headed notepaper and business card (see Appendix Fig.13).

After circulating practices around Mold, Deeside, Chester and Wrexham, our commissions increased steadily. I had decided that, in spite of all of my computer drafting experience, I was going to do my surveying and plan preparation the traditional way as Bob Noble had taught me. It was a very healthy lifestyle with much walking in all weathers and our clientele quickly built up. However, Peter was losing the use of the engineering skills he had learned at Capenhurst and decided in late 1986 to return to engineering. I was now in a fix because I could not carry out the surveying without an assistant. The problem was solved when my wife offered to be my assistant and so we ran Fastplan together until we retired in 2001.

In spite of all the advances in computer techniques since my early experiences, I still drew my plans by hand. The benefit of this came to light in a court case concerning a boundary dispute when the judge could not make out the computer drawn plan provided by the opposition but was quite happy with my plan. In our fourteen years together, we carried out over 2000 surveys and extended the area we covered as far as Barmouth, Anglesey, Rossendale and Market Drayton. We got to know all the best bar meal menus for miles around and worked in many interesting places.

One of the most interesting was Bodidris Hall, Llandegla which was being turned into a hotel by the Swiss owner and was the oldest property I had ever measured. The original part of the mansion was a stone tower house dating from 1350 and the remainder of the house was a timber frame structure dating from Tudor times with a final Victorian kitchen extension (see Appendix Fig.14). The aim was to turn it into a restaurant and hotel with the top floor of the original tower as the bridal suite. In measuring this tower to prepare submission plans, the main problem was in measuring the height. We got around this by getting Doris to hang out of the second floor window with a measuring tape while I read off the measurements with binoculars. There were also funny incidents like my disturbing a wasps' nest in the middle of a field near Holywell Golf Course, some of which crawled up my trousers. There was no option but to take the trousers off and whirl them around to get rid of the wasp - fortunately, I don't think anyone saw this eccentric surveyor's actions.

We had about sixty solicitors on our books and established good working relations with all of them. However, when I started to get commissions as an expert witness in court cases usually involving boundary disputes, I saw a different side of the legal profession. I appeared for the complainant involving a boundary at Kinnerton while an ex-colleague from the County Surveyor's Department, appeared for the defence. The barrister for the defence criticized my work and plans as being below standard while praising his surveyor who had once worked for the Ordnance Survey. Some time afterwards, I appeared in another boundary dispute case and that same defence barrister now appeared for my client. This time he extolled the quality of my submissions, quoting the long and varied experience I had had in my career!

One most enjoyable part of the Fastplan work meant that I needed frequent copies of my beloved Ordnance Survey sheets to support some of the plans drawn from our surveys. This entailed regular visits to Bookland in Bridge Street, Chester and I struck up a good relation with the OS assistants. I still have a lever arch file full of the small copies and rolls of the larger ones. Although it is now eight years since Fastplan ceased working, I still get calls from time to time asking whether I have still got the survey notes from such and such a property as there is now a boundary dispute. All I could now offer was advice!

After retiring for a second time in 2001, I lost contact with OS Maps for some time until I decided to join the Buckley Society. Soon I was writing stories to place on the Society archive and, happily, these often had a need to use OS maps but this time old ones rather than current ones. I got to know the staff at Hawarden Record Office while obtaining copies of old OS maps dating from the first in 1841 to later ones in 1912. There were also other old maps to examine - Tithe maps, Enclosure Act maps, etc. I was happy again and still am!

APPENDIX

Fig.1 The author at 16 Wrexham Street, Mold in 1948. - 96.91

Fig.2 Farmhouse in the Mold Area. - 96.92

Fig. 3 Aston Secondary Modern School, Queensferry. - 96.86

Fig. 4 Flint Fire Station. - 96.94

Fig. 5 County Architect's Department staff in 1958. - 96.95

Fig. 6 Aeronautical Workshop, Kelsterton College, Connah's Quay. - 96.96

Fig. 7 Classroom Block, Kelsterton College, Connah's Quay. - 96.97

Fig. 8 Running track, Kelsterton College, Connah's Quay. - 96.98

Fig. 9 The author at site of Buckley Fire Station. - 96.99

Fig.10 St Asaph Branch Library. - 96.100

Fig.11 Barclays Bank Tower, Nairobi. - 96.101

Fig.12 Amboseli Safari Lodge, Kenya. - 96.102

Fig.13 Fastplan business card. - 96.103

Fig.14 Bodidris Hall Hotel, Llandegla. - 96.104

Fig.15 Saxton's map of Flintshire dated 1607. - 96.90

Author: Dunn, Neville

Tags

Year = 1607

Document = Map

Landscape = Cultivated

Extra = Visual Arts

Extra = Pre 1900

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