Legacy

BARRY WILLETTS’S STORY [from a letter submitted to Salford City Council’s Letters In Life]

I just read the snippet about the Totem Pole from Manchester Liners, what a lot of people do not know is that it was a Swinton man that took delivery and signed for and unpacked that Totem Pole. Then the site manager and myself erected it and fixed the wings on it one Sunday when the site was a little quieter from onlookers.

At that time I was foreman over the Liners building, there was another building to the side of it for the Custom & Excise people and a bonded warehouse at the rear for all contraband excise items to be destroyed.

Leeach, Rhodes and Walker were the architects for that development and the main contractor was Mathews and Mumby concrete specialist whom I worked for.

I got a message one day that a delivery from Canada lay on the dock side and needed collecting. Myself and three or four men armed with crow bars and hammers along with a dumper went to investigate this mysterious parcel. It was a massive plywood crate with timber cladding and steel bonding wires . As we remove each plywood panel it revealed this huge head and beak of an eagle, eventually the whole Totem Pole was revealed. We had removed 24 sheets of plywood that we stacked neatly on the dockside.

When I inspected the pole it had a very large diseased crack to the base and about 6ft up the pole, I was concerned that with the enclosed wing attached the wind might snap the pole off its concrete base.

LR&W had a permanent clerk of works on the site who was of a rather nervous disposition, having this Totem Pole on site did not help his situation and he constantly asked when are we going to erect the pole?

After a discussion with the site manager Albert Brierly we decided to have a little fun with Tommy the clerk of works. Every time he enquired as to when are we gong to erect we always replied that we were waiting for instructions as to how we could sling it to the tower crane without damaging the pole or the intricate paintwork. As the concrete base was completed we eventually informed Tommy that we had received the instructions and were setting a date for its erection, we were to use a hemp sling with plaited loops at each end, one to hook to the crane and the other to hook the beak of the pole and if the weight of the lift broke the nose off we would use a quick setting glue to stick it back, Tommy took to his cabin with a bottle of whiskey and no one saw him for three days, When he eventually emerged he informed us that he had spoken to several crane specialist engineers and his bosses and they did not and would not allow us to sling the pole using the beak as a lifting point,

Secretly we had ordered some cotton slings and arranged to erect the pole on sunday. Slinging the pole was not a problem and we eventually had it fixed with large timber wedges into its base all plumbed and perfect, we then mixed a few batches of very wet cement slurry and poured it around the base to fill the socket and the diseased crack with a cement mix. The real problem was with the large wooden wings that had to be fitted into a hand cut mortice in the shoulders of the pole, these wings came with some very crude wooden pegs to act as dowels to fit the wings in position,the problem was that the wings were lay on the floor and the mortices were 30 odd feet up in the air! The liners building had a lot of glass windows and as such had a motorised dolly on the roof which could travel along and lower its platform cradle down as required. We very soon had this cradle lowered down to floor level and hitched it to the tower crane, with the wings and dowels loaded along with a couple of large lump hammers using the umbilical remote control for the tower crane we were in a position to fit one wing. One wing was fitted to the mortice when it became quite obvious that these dowels were next to useless, we had no tools to par them down and the hole for the same had not been drilled but burned through with a hot metal rod hence were any size shape or form. And as the day was creeping on Albert produced a large cardboard box of 6″ nails, I actually cringed as he battered these nails into the body of the pole to fix the wings in their final resting place. We very quickly manoeuvred the cradle around to the other mortice and fitted the other wing again using the nails. We then returned the cradle back to the dolly and raised it to the roof cleaned up the area and retired to the local pub for a well-deserved pint. Monday arrived and the site was buzzing with news of the newly erected Totem Pole. I don’t think Albert and I know I did not tell any one how it got there and it remained a mystery until I left for another contract.

Famous musician Peter Hook (Joy Division/New Order), from Salford, told us of one New Year’s eve in Ordsall/ Salford, as a kid, he was tasked with looking after his aunty’s Black Labrador, when he opened the front door during the course of the evening the dog ran out and disappeared into the Salford night. He searched for hours for this dog, and eventually he found it sat at the bottom of the Totem Pole at Midnight as the New Year started. He took it back home safely. What did the dog know that he didn’t?

See more photos on the Totem Pole's Facebook page