Rumbling spuds

Principal engineer, Jan Kojro, is celebrating a hugely impressive 50 years of service with Royal Mail.

Last week, we had our first instalment of Jan’s work memoirs charting the 1960s. Today, we bring you the 70s.

‘Sheffield opened its brand new mail centre or mechanised letter office (MLO) as they were called then, at the start of the decade and I was involved in the installation and commissioning of the new machines that came in,’ said Jan.

‘No sooner were we ready to go, however, another event took place that was to leave a lasting impression on me as a young man at the beginning of a working career and probably set the tone of industrial relations for years to come.

‘Britain’s first “all-out” national postal strike was to last seven weeks. Fortunately for me, engineers were represented by a different union and as apprentices, we weren’t included in any strike activity. But it was an eerie experience to walk around a brand new building full of state-of-the-art equipment that was completely silent.

‘The apprenticeship was relatively short for the time – just three years – and with that out of the way, the focus was on the coveted engineering rank of technical officer (TO). A lot of time was spent away on courses at the Post Office Technical Training College (POTTC) in Staffordshire, which was residential. The courses then were very detailed and long; four to six weeks was not unusual and the accommodation by today’s standards, was very basic.

‘Most of the training facilities then were on former military sites, probably the most famous one being Bletchley Park. So, after arriving on campus and being allocated to your dormitory Nissen Hut, you inspected the communal facilities, introduced yourself to your roommate and for the next several weeks, just got on with it.

‘It has to be said that the early machines we had then weren’t that good with sorting speeds of between eight and 10k per hour and jam rates in the hundreds per hour, so we were kept quite busy trying to coax the best out of them. We were also a multi-disciplined technical resource dealing with some of the heavier plant and building services as well as the sorting equipment.

‘Important decisions had to be made; for example, if the potato peeler packed in on a Friday afternoon, that being fish and chips day, what was the priority? After a brief conversation with the chief inspector, the “spud rumbler” was fixed and all was well.  After all, sorting could always go to manual but the consequence of a walkout in the canteen was far more serious – fact!

‘My lasting memories of that period, however, are the people I worked with. Having been recruited over a short timescale into a new technology function we were all mostly in our 20’s. So, we worked together, socialised together, found girlfriends, got married, and had children, (though not necessarily in that order). In short, we were a family.’