Working in a Foundry

Heroes Remember

Working in a Foundry

Transcript

We were usually up by about five and we had to move out by I think around six, and have our breakfast in between there and that which wasn’t much to eat anyway. We’d go down to the foundry and we'd be there until five o’clock in the evening and that. It would be a good 10 hour to 11 hour day, banging into these, what do you call them, molds. We’d pound this sand into these molds and that and then they would come along with a, and dump the metal into the hot metal into them. And that was something that we had to watch all the time, as soon as you heard that crane moving with the bucket of molten metal, you kept one eye on that while you were working because every once in a while the bottom would drop out and hot molten metal would just splash all over the place so you had to always watch that. And we’d be there making them or we’d be sitting down and scraping pipes, take the rust off of them and so forth and there was one day that we were there, there was about a half a dozen of us scraping these pipes with these brushes and all of a sudden the Japanese disappeared, the stick men and one of the soldiers and we wondered why. We went to get up and we fell flat on our ass. Here was a small earthquake. So we did get up on our feet and we went out and they were all standing watching this big, you know these big pipes, big chimneys that they have, it was going like this and they were standing, didn’t know which way it was going to fall, if it was going to fall, so they were outside waiting to see which way it was going to and then it would settle itself so then we’d get back to work again. And then most of the time when that happened, we had to walk back to camp because there was cracks in the road or maybe the tracks were, along the road there would be cracks, and on the tracks maybe would be broken or something on that principle so they’d have to fix that before we could ride them again.

Description

Mr. Harrison describes his 10 - 11 hour work day in the Nagoya foundry, and the risk of being burned by splashed or spilled molten metal. He also describes another risk, earthquakes which would shake the foundry.

George Harrison

George Harrison was born on April 4, 1920 in Winnipeg, Manitoba and was youngest of three children. His father died shortly after his birth, forcing his mother to place him and his siblings in an orphanage, where he was at times badly beaten. Learning this, his mother took her children back home. After completing grade 9, Mr. Harrison went to work to help support his family. Eventually, he gained employment with CPR Telegraph. On September 13, 1939, Mr. Harrison enlisted with Winnipeg Grenadiers, becoming a specialist on the Vickers machine gun. During the battle of Hong Kong, Mr. Harrison was made a sergeant, and was involved in deadly fighting. Along with the general misery and persecution suffered by all of the POWs, Mr. Harrison faced down both blindness and potential amputation of his toes.

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