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More on the Key Glassworks
From the South London Mercury supplement September 2nd, 1966.
Key Glassworks advertisement 1966: From the SE London Mercury supplement.
THE KEY STORY – The non-stop march of the glass bottle.(No author)
Market gardens and Deptford’s once-famous jumbo-sized rhubarb were still vivid memories when Key Glass-works first dug its roots into the borough at New Cross. That was 1908, a time when London’s southern suburbs were finally succumbing to industrialisation and pushing the country boundaries ever further south.
Key had come to a busy, thriving area, and determined to make itself heard. But even now you can be deceived by the. peace of it all. The site is at the tail end of Anchor Wharf, bounded on two sides by the canal and the railway. A factory village, reached only by a rough. laid lane that in the summer is almost the country again, with its banks of flowering weeds and tumbling blackberry bushes.
Pass the only house in sight, amble through the timber works and you are there at Key with its Victorian buildings and a yard for a village square. You can stand in that yard when the lorries have rumbled off and pretend that the gentle throbbing is an aeroplane high in a blue summer sky.
RUMBLE
But the difference is that this throbbing never stops — twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, only reluctantly stopping for Christmas and Boxing Day. This is the glass industry, and behind the peaceful facade the quiet drone becomes the deafening rumble of machines forever turning out well over forty thousand gross of bottles and jars a week.
Reach for the fishpaste, smother your steak with ketchup, prod a pickle, paint your nails red and your eylids black, dig deep into your face cream and it is more than likely that you will be handling Key glassware. Heinz, Cross & Blackwell, Pecks, Elizabeth Arden, Rimmel, Max Factor - these are just a few of the people for whom Key Glassworks provide by the hundreds of thousands specialist ware of a quality it would be hard to beat.
Key Glassworks advertisement.
When Ronald Gale, importer of bottles from the Continent, decided to make his own, he also wisely decided to specialize in the smaller kind of glassware - quality glassware that as the years passed has become more and more in demand. As our desire for bottled foods became greater, as women began to spend ever more money on cosmetics, so the success of Key was assured. But not, like all success stories, without hard work, determination and the aim for better standards and modernisation all the way.
The Gale family were undoubtedly hard workers, the rest you can judge by the success of Key today. They were so successful, in fact, that by 1926 they were able to create another works at Alperton, Middlesex, and both progressed so much that the two factories had eight furnaces between them (five of them at New Cross) and forty-two machines (twenty-nine at New Cross). Together they were producing some 45,000 gross of bottles.
FUSION
In 1950, in order to meet demands created by Heinz and Cross and Blackwell, Key were looking around for another site on which to expand the business. It was at this time that a small glassworks, City Glass of Canning Town (i.e. City Glass Bottle Co. Ltd. q.v.), was scheduled for demolition and had been directed to Harlow. They planned two furnaces on the six acre site but then a merger was suggested with Key who were unable to get permission to expand at either New Cross or Alperton. In 1952 the companies amalgamated and negotiated for sixteen acres at Harlow to be extended to twenty-six. Over the next few years four furnaces were installed and Harlow works became one of the most up-to-date in Western Europe. They were producing more than 60,000 gross of bottles a week.
GAINING
Meanwhile, Key Glassworks at New Cross were still gaining in reputation and had become known as a pioneering factory - new machines, new ideas were adopted here and developed, the number of furnaces were able to be decreased to three while, at the same time, production went up by leaps and bounds.
By this time, Ronald Gale, the chairman had died, and his son Leslie, as managing director was taking an especially active and lively interest in his New Cross works. And he became extremely popular and respected by his employees and was known for his directness and integrity.
Then in 1962, Key had its biggest change of all – it became an important part of the huge United Glass concern and Mr Leslie Gale became chairman of his group. Now 75 years old he is still actively interested in the company and will turn up at Key, New Cross, several times a year.
No doubt the news that Key have been breaking all records these past few weeks. And heading towards their aim of producing 50,000 gross of bottles a week has been heard by him with as much pride as ever.
For even though there are greater horizons these days, Key quite rightly more than holds its own and the future looks bright.
That peace, outside the factory, you know, really is deceptive…
Key Glassworks Supplement P.IV
Furnaces - the hottest spot in New Cross - but they’re not complaining.
WALK round any of the three furnaces at Key and you will do it in double — if not, treble-quick time. Unless, that is, you have asbestos-like skin. Or are a furnace-man. There are three furnaces at Key in operation - two oil-fired, one electric. Inside the temperatures reach 1,550°C. Out side the furnace-men are walking around in temperatures of 140° F. as if they had never known any other.
INFERNO
The layman, sweating pounds and goggling at the flames licking out through the inspection vents of the furnaces might well think Dante’s Inferno could have had nothing on this — that is if his thoughts could rise above the clamouring noise from the machines below!
But talk to any furnace-man and he’ll shrug it all off and keep you talking till you are fried!
Mr Ernest Peagam, for instance, used the favourite throw away phrase of all the men who work some eight hours a day around the furnaces. “You get acclimatized to it,” he said.
NO COLDS
But even he had to admit that not everyone felt the same way. “There are some men,” he said, “who never get used to it. But I’ve been a furnace maintenance man for two years now and I can’t say that it is guaranteed that heat bothers me.”
He doesn’t even catch colds by the sudden change in temperatures when he leaves the furnaces for the cool air out-side - which puts paid to one old wives’ tale, at least. “Mind you,” he said, “we do wrap up well. Furnace-men also wrap up well when the job demands getting on more intimate relations with the furnace. This time, to keep the heat out. And no one knows more about that than Mr. Fred Lockey, who is the furnace superintendent and, as such, a - highly skilled - and some would say brave - man.
Mr. Lockey, a big man, who by rights should look older and greyer than his 44 years, has worked with furnaces for fifteen years. In 1961 having taken a course on the technicalities of the new electric furnace, he was promoted to superintendent.
When doing repairs to the furnaces he and his men have worked practically inside the furnace.“Sometimes you have to lay bricks in the flames, and the temperatures are fantastic. You put on as many clothes as you can possibly wear - we top them with a duffle coat - and asbestos gloves and then it possible is to last three or four minutes in the heat.
FINE!
“Of course,” he added almost off-handedly, “your clothes do tend to catch fire!” And he told the hair-raising tale of working on repairs to the electric furnace when rubber gloves have to be used. “The heat is so great,” he said, “that the sweat literally boils in the gloves and scalds you!”
Repairs, of course, usually only crop up towards the end of the life of a furnace - after three or four years.
Then the glass has probably worn the refractory blocks so that cracks appear, or a burst. When this happens the molten glass seeps out and can be stopped more often than not by dousing it with cold water to set it.
Danger? “We have had no accidents as far as I can recall” he said. The men aren’t afraid and the don’t get worried.”
In between repairs, there is still a good deal of work for the furnace-men. Mr. Lockey has 12 furnace-men altogether and four foremen and they work four shifts, four men to a shift.
INSPECTION
The foremen are responsible for the operation of the furnaces, for annealing the glass, the production of steam in the boiler room and the general care of the compressor room - all the machines run on compressed air.
The furnace-men are the general operators on the furnaces. They have to operate manually the batch charges which feed the furnaces for glassmaking, maintaining the level at times to within one-third of an inch.
And at all times the furnaces are inspected - by Mr. Lockey, the foremen and the furnace-men.
In the mould shop where the bottles begin to take shape.
The Key Glassworks mould shop was probably the largest in the country.
At one time, the making of glass containers was an art. But it would be strange to use this description in an industry that has for years been turning out thousands of bottles an hour.
And yet, in one respect, there really is an art to it. Or perhaps the word should be craft. For, if you have ever stopped long enough in your tracks to admire the humble bottle with its clean shape and sparkling sheen, you might have wondered who is responsible. At Key, it is the men in the mould shop.
Before you can produce a bottle at all you must have a shape. A mould. Before you can produce a perfect bottle you must have a good mould.
BOAST
And this is where the men in the mould shop - the craftsmen of the trade - enter the story. This particular shop was founded in 1952 and it is their proud boast that there is not a shape or mould they could not produce. The basic mould - of high grade chrome iron - is brought in from Yorkshire where the patterns are made for the jars and bottles. It is the mould shop’s job to make those rough casts fit to produce a bottle - and it is no easy job.
Profiles must be made of them to match the master mould to ensure a perfect shape and size and they have to be welded, milled, engraved, if necessary, and polished. Then they have to be checked carefully, and one is a special water check that measures capacity to within plus or minus two grams.
It is the polishing that produces the lovely sheen on glass we are so used to. At Key, it is done by hand or mechanically and if the finish to the mould is not perfect then the final bottle will be dull and unwanted.
DESIGNS
Some real art comes in with the engraving. If the manufacturer wants a simple design on his bottle - like those well-known three bears on a honey jar - or words, then it is the job of men in the mould shop to produce them. And it is done very precisely with a chisel.
It is little wonder that this shop is well equipped - some £115,000 - £200,000 worth of machinery. “You see, we take every care to see that the bottles are as perfect as possible,” they say.
It is in the mould shop that you meet some of the longest-serving members of Key. Like Alfred Titcombe, for example, who got his gold watch for 35 years’ service a month ago. There is Ted Stubbings, who came here 44 years ago at the age of 15.
There are several family ties at Key. In the mould shop, for instance, there is Jack Meaden and his son Derek, and another son Terry in the work study department. Jack came into the firm 45 years ago and is now a fore¬man. Derek followed Dad’s footsteps 16 years ago. Terry joined 10 years ago. Jack says that when he came the firm was an exponent of the art of the semi-automatic process of making glass. “A man used to gather the molten glass on a rod, then drop it into the mould, then, when the bottle was made he had to pick it up with sticks and put in on the paddle work,” he said.