By NOEL MURPHY
DANGLING aloft 120 metres above the hard ground of the old Fyansford cement works is hardly everyone’s cup of tea.
Nor is tangling with snakes in tunnels beneath the former cement complex.
Or eating lunch in concrete chambers designed as an escape route in case of explosions.
But for James Boyd it was all in a day’s work as a rigger – and good work at that.
With the cement works to become a new housing estate at Fyansford and the silos likely to be sold off soon, the 89-year-old Scottish migrant this week revisited the site in an industrial trip down memory lane.
He recalled steam engines and train carts, pits and pumps, kilns and pyrators, high-rise conveyors and giant chimneys – 380 feet high by the old measure in a rarified atmosphere he occupied as a matter of course.
“You know, you could walk around on top of those old chimneys,” Mr Boyd told the Independent.
“And they swayed by about a foot in the wind. Oh yeah, and it got windy up there.
“I used to go over the side of the chimneys, and the silos, in a bosun’s chair hooked on half-inch wire a winch up top, to patch up the cracks with what we called blackjack and then cement.
“A lot of people probably don’t know of all the tunnels beneath the quarry floor for water to flow through. There was a spiral staircase in the quarry that went right below the water level, too.
“They dug up all kinds of fossils there, ancient whales’ teeth and sharks’ teeth, too.”
With his 90th birthday this October, Mr Boyd’s no longer interested in taking to any great heights.
But he’s more than happy to recount events at his former workplace, including the death of a worker in one silo, crushed by a load of dust when it dislodged unexpectedly.
He talks of giant 150-tonne cylinders moved into place on train wheels fashioned on-site to carry the massive weight, of blast tunnels, old workmates, output, turnover, crews …
Mr Boyd started worked at the cement works in 1958 after arriving in Australia in Sydney the year before. He worked there until 1967 before returning to sea as a merchant seaman.
Distant as those years are now, he recalls them fondly and rattles off a catalogue of names he used to work with: “Mann, Grant, McMurrich, White, Trait, Freeman, Ryan …”
