Crabtree's Engineering Works, Southtown Road

Hi Brian & thanks for your contribution on Crabtree's. Yes it seems that you had gone on to pastures greener as I started in 1964. I left what was then Oriel Technical High in the summer of 64' fully expecting to have a summer holiday before taking up gainful employment, but my mother had other ideas & arranged for me to start work on the following Monday ha ha! Yes Crabtree's was certainly old fashioned & I believe the only machine shop in Great Yarmouth at the time to still be running machine tools on overhead line shafts. The gas engines had been removed by the time I started, I guess as the electric motors were deemed to be reliable enough. I started work assisting Graham Newson who was building Newbury Diesel generators, but I was soon bugging Percy Pearce to be let loose on a lathe as I had operated lathes at Technical High. I was put to work on the Herbert Turret lathe, for ever known as The Big Erbert, mostly doing tank bolts & wing nuts, but of course other lathe work also. Nevermind being old fashioned, Crabtree's was also poorly tooled for the machine tools we did have. Dickerson tool holders were unheard of when I started, tunsten carbide required you to go begging to Percy & if you broke well don't think about going back for another. Packing for the lathe tools was in very limited supply as were boring bars, centre height gauges & dial test indicators. One had to walk the shop looking for the last guy to have used it. The Turrets & Capstans were extremely poorly tooled & generally only a drill chuck, a centre, a drill & a Coventry die box were used. Roller box's, auto release tap holders, Knee tool holders, boring slides, all in common use elsewhere, were just not available, either that or I didn't know what I was looking for at the time perhaps they were in the stores & nobody knew what we were looking at. Parting off tank bolts was a particular nightmare as no rear tool holder was available on the cross slides, although the sound of yet another parting tool breaking always raised a shout from the shop floor generally led by Geoff Carver et al. Frankly a well set up & tooled Turret lathe should have turned out 100 tank bolts & wing nuts in no time at all. Lathe chucks was another matter. In the years I was there I never saw a chuck changed out & frankly never knew how to change one out, hence a three jaw chuck was expected to handle everything we through at it from black bar, through to castings & was then expected to run true for second operation work, of course an impossibility. Most of the lathes never had graduations on the cross slides & carriage, hence machining to size really was hit & miss. Screw threading, well the capstans & turrets had the venerable Coventry die box, but the dies were years old, never sharpened & many had chipped teeth. As to single point threading on the other lathes, well I was taught at day release how to calculate the gearing, but nobody ever taught me how to calculate thread depthing & I generally cut until it looked right! Of course the question is, was it a good apprenticeship? The basics were there of course & the opportunities were there via day release & night school to gain qualifications, but my father had died when I was 11 & there was nobody to push me. I expected to be taught everything & really never sought out the technical books that were available in the libraries. Never the less Crabtree's did give me a solid engineering basis & indeed working ethos that has served me well throughout my career. It also gave me some great memories & at least one friend by the name of Barry Banham who has remained with me for the rest of my life. Whilst the pay was small, I would give anything to spend one more day in that old workshop warming my backside around an old coke brazzier! Making tank bolts, maching wing nuts for Ginger to file up, parting off the sprue from a propeller, machining up flanges for another boiler re tube....yes it all brings back great memories. During my last year at Crabtree's, some newer, but second hand machine tools were purchased & an arrangement was made with Grant Oil tools to manufacture oil field cross overs. A new lathe & tooling was purchased & a seperate workshop set up in a sealed area. Frank Watson was to run this lathe. The blanks for the cross overs were bored out on one of the old Dean Smith & Grace lathes using a spade drill. Just as soon as I finished my 5 years, as was the custom I left Crabtree's to move onto Brooke Marine in Oulton broad, then Ross Foods, Birds Eye & then moved on to work for one of The Seven Sisters in the oil Industry for the remainder of my working life. Crabtree's was closed down within months of my departure, when ironically it was ideally placed to pick up a great deal of work from the Oil Industry, with just a little forethought & investment it could have still been running today. Frankly I left Crabtree's believing I was Gods gift to Engineering. It had been drummed into me that after five years I would be a skilled man, capable of almost anything & on joining one of the Seven Sisters I was surprised to find that one could be called an Engineer without serving an apprenticeship. How short sighted I was, quickly finding out that Engineers with a University degree were advancing much faster than I was ever going to do. I guess I'm slow catch on, but I finally gained a Masters Degree in my early sixties, oh that I had tried harder when I was in my teens eh! In my fifties I decided that I wanted to get back into machine tools, I guess as a second fiddle, as the oil industry was going though one of its down cycles again. So I set a machine shop, really as a hobby. I now have a total of 6 lathes ranging from 32 inch swing with a 3 1/2 inch hollow mandrel down to two Myfords, one a Super Seven & the other an ML7 with a capstan head. Having been so poorly tooled at Crabtree's I was determined to set up a well tooled capstan lathe & purchased a new capstan with all tooling from India. With the exception of the Myfords all my machine tools are either Chinese, Taiwanese or Indian, & frankly they lick anything we had at Crabtree's. I machine up all sorts of stuff from model steam engines through to doing some work for boat yards on The broads, As I operate my turret mill, one thing that always makes me smile is the way I remove the draw bar, I undo the nut, then on tip toe I give it a sharp tap with the end of the spanner.....just like Alfie Hewit used to do on the vertical mill at Crabtree's. Alfie was always a little short in the height department ha ha! I still have some of the old stuff from Crabtree's, I have & still use some of the lathe tooling, I still have some old Tangye shafts that I have used as drifts over the years, I still have one of the old stores book of chits, I still have one of the name plates & for some reason I still have the large set of inside & outside calipers that were the only set in the shop. They must have been in my tool box when I left. The nought to one & the one to two micrometers that I had at Crabtree's are still turning in Sterling service....& yes I still prefer to work in Imperial units ha ha! Photographs from this period are indeed in very short suppy, remember that Digital was to be some 50 years off & frankly we at Crabtree's just couldn't afford a camera. Still, I do have one or two pictures, especially one of me on the tail shaft lathe....one that I treasure & use as a letter heading! I believe that that this picture was taken by Barry Banham on an old Halima camera that I found left in a telephone box along the sea front. Talking of the sea front & money, most of the lads from Crabtree's had second jobs in the summer months, pulling pints as Tom Pearson.... used to say. Shooooooo what are you laughing at Sheave! OK all for now & would like to hear from other lads from this era at Crabtree's & Fellows.

How interesting to read about life at Crabtrees.  My mother's family owned and run Burrells next door also making steam engines.  They also ran there machines in the 50s from line shafts.  Burrells took over Crabtrees machine shop shed when it closed. Burrells closed in 1991 and the yard is now part of Richards Shipbuilding & Engineering.  Crabtrees built a lot more engines than Burrells engine 618 made in 1930 is fitted to the Lydia Eva.  As you say they also had a shipyard and built 41 steel drifters from 1903-1930.  The Lydia Eva was built by Kings Lynn Slipway Co part of Crabtrees due to a strike at Southtown but had engine fitting in Yarmouth.

Hello Roger,

I just came across this article and recall the time we spent at Crabtrees.

I don't get to GY very often,however it would be nice to catch up when I do.

How interesting to read all this detail.

After service in the navy, my grandfather (George W. M.) worked there for 48 years,according to my aunt.He lived in Alberta Cottages,Bunn's Lane (now a demolition site?) and later in Wolseley Road. I was shown a brass ornament he made from a German shell. Seeing a photo of the vessel Lydia Eva made me realise that the ships he worked on (wireman/electrician) were not like the QE2. Coincidentally,his 2nd wife was 'Lydia'.I heard that his 2nd son (Percy M.) made his own model railway; my brother was taken to see it.

The 1939 register describes his work at a 'power station':was that  part of the Crabtree firm?