Volume Four - An Era of Change, Uncertainty, Depression & War - Dai Woodham and the steam graveyard . . .

During 1969, I was seconded from Barry back to Penarth to work in the drawing office for the last year of my apprenticeship. The Penarth Dock Engineering Co. had a project to design an earth moving machine to magnetically separate residual ore from slag and iron ore tips. The basic structural calculations were wrong and underestimated the forces necessary to separate the ore so the “MagSep” machine was designed and detailed but never built. In the days before electronic calculators, someone had a twitch using a slide-rule. Thankfully it wasn't me on that occasion!

Dai used to call at Hodges and speak to Tosh Thomas the foreman and I remember being drawn into a conversation when he told us the story of his leaving home at the age of fourteen and waiting for the next ship going anywhere to pass. He jumped on and hadn't even told his parents he was going. He seemed to very proud of the fact that his parents didn't know that he had gone to sea!

One of my friends, who played trombone in the Barry brass band (Conductor : Mr. Islwyn Williams) was the driver of a scrap wagon for Woodham's Metals and he called at Hodges on a daily basis. I recall that he was somewhat uncomplimentary about Dai Woodham as an employer!

The "Rodos" [115] was was one of the last Liberty ships to visit and typical of many of the ageing ships which sailed into Barry, loaded up with Dai Woodham's scrap metal and sailed away on a one-way trip to India or China for breaking up. Axles ended up in France being high quality steel and some ended up being recycled at the various South Wales steelworks. At the time the South Wales area was the largest steel producer in the UK.

I remember the "Rodos" docked up at the old coal tip adjacent to Hodges works in 1967. An argument ensued between the Russian crew and a number of us whilst we were having our lunch sat on the dockside (I think we were the protagonists, as always!).