Serving the Teesside Business Community | 39
The Business Buzz
With award-winning
writer Harry Pearson
DIZZY
HEIGHTS
Industrial climbing is not
for the faint-hearted…
Tall tales - Wilton Engineering transition pieces have
brought back the memories for Harry Pearson.
W
atching film of Wilton
Engineering’s towering
340-tonne transition pieces
being towed down the Tees
stirred misty memories of a freezing morning
nearly half a century ago when the cold black
river witnessed the passage of another of
Teesside’s great engineering feats.
I was about 12. It was 7am on a freezing
Sunday and I was standing at Port Clarence
steelworks watching the modules for the
North Sea Oil platforms – built by Cleveland
Bridge – being towed out to sea by a fleet of
tugs.
The recollection of that day sends a shiver
down my spine, not because of the icy
wind that seems a permanent feature of the
waterway that shaped our region, but at the
memory of visiting those same modules with
my father a few weeks earlier.
My dad had worked in the structural steel
business all his life. When he first started out
at Cargo Fleet back in the 1950s, one of his
jobs was checking and servicing the blast
furnaces that lined the Tees.
At least once a week he’d climb 220 feet
up what furnacemen called ‘the stick’ – a
straight steel pole with rungs sticking out
left-and-right alternately at one foot intervals.
When he got to the top, he’d put out his
fag and step across a six-foot gap onto the
steel plates at the top of the furnace. Just
typing that sentence has made me feel
dizzy, but my dad was so unfazed by this
escapade he’d sometimes take his sandwich
and a KitKat with him in his pocket and eat
his lunch while he was up there, his feet
dangling over the side (now I really do feel
dizzy).
If anyone asked my father if he was ever
nervous clambering about up there, he
waved the idea aside. “Nobody is afraid of
heights,” he was fond of saying, “They just
aren’t used to them.” Unfortunately, on the
day we went to see the oil platform modules,
he had forgotten that one of the people who
wasn’t used to heights was me.
The modules were huge things, as tall as
a block of flats. On our visit my dad merrily
led me upwards through a series of ladders,
chatting breezily all the while. Halfway up the
module we came to a gap you had to cross
by walking a couple of yards across an 18-
inch steel beam. There was a drop of about
75 feet beneath it, straight down, onto the
cold, hard ground. “I can’t walk across that,” I
squeaked, “What if I fall off?”
My dad snorted, “It’s as wide as a
pavement,” he said, “You wouldn’t fall off a
pavement, would you?”
I knew what my father was saying was
correct, but it made no difference. My feet
wouldn’t move no matter how much I willed
them to. Eventually we gave up and came
back down again.
“The height makes no difference,” my
dad said when we were back on the ground
drinking syrupy-sweet steel erector’s tea
from tin mugs. “You jump three feet across a
beck, or three feet over a thousand foot deep
chasm, it’s the same action, isn’t it? How
high you are doesn’t affect anything, unless
you let it.”
This, of course, was true. There was
nothing rational about it. You can walk across
a plank that’s on the floor no problem at all,
but lift it four feet in the air and try and walk
across it and your legs suddenly won’t do
what you want anymore. It’s fear that makes
you fall – as with heights, so with life.
Wilton Engineering’s gigantic pieces are
going out to the Hornsea Project wind farm.
The wind turbines are very tall. Somebody
will have to erect and maintain them.
I have huge admiration for those that do,
but I’m very glad I’m not one of them.