Newcastle Blue Star Remembered

By Harry Pickersgill

My name is Harry Pickersgill and in 1959 I got a job with the breweries and it was Youngers Breweries in them days and then eventually they amalgamated with Scottish and Newcastle Breweries. I went across to the main breweries which is in Bath Lane and I was working in the blacksmiths shop there as a maintenance blacksmith. It was a great job and it was the kind of job that it didn’t just visual on one thing you’d done a cross section of work and it was very, very interesting, and I got on very well with the engineers because having an open mind, and I could do drawings, we made all types of things even to making machines that was appertaining to the brewing industry. It was the type of job where it took a lot of your time because a lot of work was done at weekends and it helped me to bring up a family, and it give me a good living but it also took me away from my family where I was working seven days a week and at times paying my missus at that time, we fell out because of working too much for the breweries. But never mind we got holidays, all through the breweries, and it was a very good thing. It was a family sort of place to work, we got on very, very well with each other we also fought with each other, not fisticuffs, but telling tales and telling people where to go, but at the end of the day when push come to shove everybody sort of chipped in and helped each other be it a domestic thing, a bereavement, a birth, a birthday or even a retirement. Out of this retirement bit we’d done a club, called the BERCS club, the Brewery Engineers Retirement Club. It seems a queer word but that’s what we called ourselves, the BERCS club and we gave some blokes that was retiring a real good send off and the wives come, their families came and we gave them a real good party thing. Some of them got damn good presents but everything was such a great thing, it was, like I say it was like a family and I went all the way through this I done umpteen different jobs, I got on well with different engineers, I got on very well with some of the directors believe it or not, and I was on first name terms with some of the directors, it makes you feel humble in a way but it was true. And then came the day, when, they decided that my department was going to close down and that was in 1988 and it was the saddest day of my working life. I left there on the Friday and I walked out the back gates, the back gates not the front gates, I walked out the back gates because there was nobody actually on them gates. Very, very sorrowful. That was my life in the breweries. Thank you.