[2] ‘... a cold job it was ...’

Some of the large hydro schemes employed up to two thousand workers, although there were rarely as many people on any site at one time. Most of them were men but a relatively small number of women also found work in the camps and various offices. Among the thousands could be found experts in almost every trade – joiners, engineers, fitters, mechanics, crane drivers, explosives handlers, drillers, cooks, office clerks, electricians, surveyors, all supported by a host of semi-skilled labourers who plied the pick and shovel wherever muscle power was needed. Some had no trade at all, save their wits, and offered themselves for work in the hope they could pick up something to get by or escape the eagle eye of the foreman long enough to enjoy their share of the high wages on offer. Some were prisoners of war put to work while they longed for repatriation or displaced persons (DPs) carving out a new life in a new country. And there were the fly guys, the wide boys, who worked their scams.

As time went on, the proportion of native Highlanders among the labour force increased. The Board came in for some criticism over recruitment (although recruitment was usually the responsibility of the various contractors) and was accused of not using locals but this charge was not long justified. Of the 1,739 employed on the Glen Affric scheme towards the end of 1949, 80 per cent were Scots and half of these were from the Highlands; the remainder comprised foreign workers (ten per cent), Irish (six per cent) and English (four per cent), said Sir Hugh Mackenzie in a talk to journalists in December that year.1

In November 1953, G. D. Banks, a Hydro Board information officer, reassured a meeting of the Gaelic Society of Perth that the Highlander was playing his full part in the great enterprise. ‘There is scarcely a Scottish clan that is not represented [in the labour force]’ he said. ‘You will find Highlanders supervising the construction of new dams and power stations, some of them young engineers who, but for the Hydro-Electric Board, would have been abroad developing the resources of some foreign country instead of their homeland.’² In 1954, the local employment offices in the Highlands were able to claim that half the number of men for whom they had found work had been placed in civil engineering jobs, mostly those linked directly or indirectly to the hydro schemes.³ Most of the 250 men employed in drilling the Invermoriston tunnel in 1957 were Scots, if not Highland, with a few Poles, English and one Newfoundlander – Harry Mugford, described as a ‘machine doctor’, who had married an Inverness woman and settled in the town.⁴ On the Strathfarrar scheme in late 1959, 85 per cent of the work force was local and most of the rest came from other parts of Scotland.⁵ The employment prospects with the consequent boost to the Highland economy were very welcome. The Revd Roderick Fraser in Dingwall recorded in 1952 that ‘[The schemes] have brought employment to local men, semi-skilled and unskilled, and talk of heavy pay packets for overtime and weekend work is common but difficult to confirm’.⁶ The unemployment rate in Inverness-shire fell to 1.9 per cent, representing 708 individuals, in the summer of 1954.⁷

In the early days of the schemes, however, there was a shortage of skilled labour and a high turnover. At Sloy, in October 1945, men were in such short supply that some two hundred German prisoners of war and displaced Europeans of several nationalities were drafted into service. The number of Germans rose to almost four hundred, outnumbering British workmen by around nine to one. The POWs were brought up each day by train from their camp at Garelochhead to disembark at the little station at Inveruglas and, while they laboured, for example, on the access road to the dam site, their two guards sometimes resorted to a handy pub to pass the hours until the return journey.⁸

Balfour Beatty and Co, the main contractor for the Sloy dam, had to put up with inexperienced workers who refused to stay on the job for long. In the first two years, there was a turnover of nearly two thousand men just to maintain an average of two hundred on site and, in this context of flux, the prisoners of war proved to be the most stable element. Edmund Nuttall Sons and Co. had the contract for tunnelling. Labour shortages caused them to abandon the usual twelve-hour shift in favour of eight-hour shifts, three a day, and in its wake this brought additional accommodation problems. To overcome the lack of experience in tunnelling of many of the workers, a ‘school’ was run to provide three weeks of tuition. The lack of skilled tunnellers also proved a problem at the start of the Glen Affric scheme in 1949; volunteers from Lithuania were drafted and proved to be apt learners.⁹At Glen Affric ‘there had been a turnover of 9,000 men ... the bulk of [them] had to be trained and sometimes they lost 30 per cent in a month’, reported a spokesman for the contractor, John Cochrane and Sons, in December 1949.¹⁰

Although they may have constituted only a fraction of the labour force, the Irish achieved a prominence belying their actual numbers. The author of description of the parish of Contin, where the Conon schemes were being constructed, recorded in the Ross and Cromarty volume of the Third Statistical Account: ‘In the 1951 Register of Electors for Fannich and Grudie Bridge such names as Doohan, Gallagher, McCafferty, McCallion, McDevitt, O’Brien, O’Donnel, O’Rourke and Sweeney reveal the numerous additions to local labour.’ Perhaps it was because their presence led to such novelties as Beauly having for a while the furthest north pub to serve draught Guinness that they are remembered so vividly; or more likely it is because they were the descendants spiritual and actual of the itinerant navvies who had built canals, tunnels, railway lines and roads during the industrial expansion of the preceding two centuries, and came with a reputation.

They found their way to the Highlands from England or from the western counties of Ireland where economic conditions and poor prospects had made emigration to find work a tradition. ‘It was the boys who went to Scotland who kept many a family on its feet, always sending a few pound to pay for something,’ said Patrick McBride. The men took the night boats from Londonderry or Belfast to the Broomielaw, paying the single fare of 7s 6d (in the late 1940s). Pat Kennedy came from a small farm in the Rosses in the west of Donegal and worked as a shuttering joiner at Rannoch, Inveraray and Shira. ‘The girls working in the camp at Butterbridge were mostly from Donegal,’ said Paddy Boyle.

‘There was nine in the family,’ said Patrick McGinley, from Creeslough in Donegal. ‘Life was very hard at the time [the 1940s]. It was a happy enough childhood but we had nothing. Everybody was the same, nobody had anything. Our father and mother worked hard, our mother especially, although I don’t remember much about her as I was six or seven when she died. One of my sisters was only two at the time. I was fourteen when I left the school. It was bare feet in the summertime, and we got shoes in the winter.’

Patrick left school to cut turf and work for a farmer and, by the time he was sixteen, he had saved enough from his wage of 23s 6d a week to buy a bicycle. This allowed him to join a gang of men who went by bus (the essential bicycles went ahead in a lorry) to Kildare to work at the turf cutting.

‘We had potatoes for breakfast, dinner and tea – that was all we got for the three meals. I was too young to cut turf but I got a job mending barrows, putting handles on shovels and spades, making tea, all that carry-on. I was the youngest of the crowd that went away. The rest were all grown men who cut the turf. I got a job anyway.’

Patrick’s brother, who was a foreman fitter with the English contractor, Cementation, rescued him from the Kildare turf bogs to work on the construction of the Ballyshannon hydro-electric scheme. ‘He put me on driving an electric derrick. I got £6 a week and thought I was in heaven.’

From Donegal Patrick travelled to England, moving around, learning fitting and acquiring skill as a crane driver. All the time news of opportunities flew back and forth along the grapevine and it was through some mates that he learned there was plenty of work to be had with the Hydro. ‘We were young at the time, so we would head up to Scotland to see what it was like. In Edinburgh, the man in the A and M Carmichael office told us, “Aye, there’s plenty work here. Head away for Inveraray. We’ll give you a voucher to go on the train. Somebody’ll meet you and take you out to the works”.’

Dungloe is a few miles north of Cresslough and it was there in his father’s hotel that the nineteen-year-old Patrick Campbell was pulling pints and washing glasses when, one Christmas, eight men dressed ‘like they had stepped out of a Hollywood movie’ came in and bought whiskey all round. There was a long-established tradition of emigration in the family: Patrick’s great-grandfather had worked in America, and his father had done the same. Now the sight of young men, some of whom had been his school chums, returning from the Highlands with the heroic status of tunnel tigers and obviously with cash to burn stirred him to quit the ailing hotel and try his own luck. Borrowing money for the fare, he boarded the night boat from Derry to Glasgow, and then caught a train to Pitlochry, where he transferred to a local bus for the last leg of the journey to the camp at Dalcroy near Loch Tummel.

Paddy Boyle was one of a family of nine children in Gweedore, on the exposed north-western corner of Donegal, and when he reached the age of seventeen he too caught the Derry boat; he made his way to Dalcroy and was taken on by A and M Carmichael: ‘A Dunloe man put me in the tunnel. He gave me a machine for boring but I didn’t even know how to work it.’ After childhood on the small family farm near Creeslough, Patrick McBride followed his father and brothers to work on construction jobs in Britain, on the building of a reservoir at Dalry and in Walker’s shipyard in Newcastleon-Tyne before moving north to the Clunie dam project. As a boy he had heard all about the techniques and problems of practical civil engineering from his father, who used to show his sons with matchsticks and a cake of butter the method of timbering a trench.

Hugh McCorriston, the eldest of a family of ten in Coleraine, County Londonderry, had a similar story. After going to England when he was eighteen to find work and to escape from sectarian troubles, he worked in the gas industry and with the Calendar Cable Company before having to return to Ulster when his mother fell ill.

‘I came back to Ireland and plodded about, working on farms and that, for a while,’ he said. ‘My father was then transferred up to Loch Sloy. He was an ex-army man, a powder monkey, he worked with explosives. He got a job with the Hydro at Loch Sloy, in the tunnels there, and when that was finished he came home. He was home about ten days when he got a phone call from the Glen Affric project, that they wanted him over. He went as a tunnel boss and he took me with him, and that was it.

‘We had a mixture of Irish, Scots and Polish – one or two other nationalities but it was mostly that three. The Scots were not at all pleased to be working in the tunnels – they didn’t like it. Now most of them were coalminers and they were used to working in little, narrow seams, and when they came up and saw this [the tunnel] they said “Bloody hell”, would work about a week and be off again. They couldn’t cope with the space. It was funny, you’d think it would be the other way around but they were so used to the cramped conditions, and this was too big. I got on very well with the Poles. No problem. Quite a nice bunch of lads. Good workers. Quite a lot of them stayed on, got married and so forth. There are a few around Inverness yet.’

Otton Stainke came from a small village near Poznan where his family had a farm. His service in the Polish Army brought him to Scotland and in 1948 he began to work on the Affric scheme. Wodek Majewski had a similar background in the village of Czernno but found his way to the Highlands by a different route: ‘I left home in 1943 and was working in Germany during the War. When it finished I was with the Americans for about a year and a half, and came to Britain in 1948. We landed in Cambridge and then I went to Yorkshire [to the coalfields]. Then an agent came from Cannich, from Cochrane, and said he was looking for fifty men – strong men, and it’s good pay and heavy work but, if you go, it’s too far to send you back. We came up on the night train and landed in Inverness at six o’clock in the morning, and buses took us to Cannich. It was June, I think, and the weather was quite good. That was my first time in Scotland.’

‘On the Quoich there were fair numbers of Poles and east coast men – from Buckie and that area – all great workers,’ said Laurie Donald. ‘There was a vast amount of overtime. They didn’t get rained off, they would work away in the pouring rain. At Foyers the force was mostly Scottish. A fair number had become practised in tunnel work – the attraction was good money, good bonuses, long hours – but it was very hard work. At Quoich we had one German who lived in a caravan – a kind of a loner, in fact, he worked alone maintaining pumps, doing his own thing all the time. We had an ex-German POW at the Orrin – he worked in estimating – and we also had the Army. In those days they ran a scheme whereby engineering officers would be put out to work with contractors for free for the experience.’

Paddy Paterson remembers the DPs: ‘They all fitted in – Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians. There were some Germans as well. There was a chap called Heinz, an ex-POW who worked in the black gang [the fitters and mechanics]. Many of them became naturalised Britons when the schemes were done.’

‘There was even an Indian at Cruachan,’ said Barry McDermot. ‘Big Singh – he drove one of the big dump trucks. The spoil from the tunnels was used to widen the road along Loch Awe. One night Singh was dumping and he went too near [the edge] and when he tipped up the whole lot went over, but Singh was fast enough and got out, but the truck was lost for ever, because it is a wild drop there to the bottom.’

Among the Scots who joined the schemes was Donald Macleod. Demobbed in 1948 from his National Service with the RAF, Donald returned to his native island of Harris and found work building houses. That came to an end in 1950. ‘I never had unemployment benefit in my life’, he said, ‘and three of us decided to head off down to Pitlochry. Fortunately at that period there was loads of work, you could find work anywhere, any day. So, that’s where we went and we got started the next day.’

Before the War, Bill Mackenzie, the son of a crofter at Fairburn at the east end of Strathconon, cycled every day to do construction work for the Air Ministry at the Invergordon naval base from his home in Muir of Ord. In 1940 he enlisted in the Royal Engineers, volunteered for bomb disposal work and, when the War ended, returned to Muir of Ord. He worked for a plumbing firm for five years and then joined Duncan Logan Ltd on the schemes.

‘If the hydro board hadn’t got going when it did we might have had a replication of what happened after the First World War,’ said Iain Macmaster, a native of Knoydart, who learned electrical engineering with James Scott and Company before working on the schemes. ‘All the men came home from the forces and in the Highlands there was nothing for many of them to do. Many more would have opted to leave but the money they earned on the schemes gave them a chance they wouldn’t otherwise have had. It also gave them technical skills and experience of industrial work.’

William Rosie, from John o’Groats, said, ‘After the War work was kind of scarce up here, so I went down to the hydro schemes and I was there for over two year in Cannich. There were quite a few men from Caithness.’

Don Smith was another who came to the schemes after a period in the armed forces. He had left school in his native Newark-on-Trent at the age of fourteen and had begun to serve his time as a toolroom apprentice before enlisting in the Royal Navy in April 1942. The Navy turned him into a qualified electrician and, after demob in June 1946, he found work with Balfour Beatty and then with the Air Ministry as an electrical fitter. In the summer of 1948, and by then married, he learned there was ‘good money on the dams in the Highlands – £12 a week. I came up for a week [to Inverness] and got a job’.

Iain MacRae came home from two years in the RAF in 1954 and rejoined the firm in Beauly where he had served his apprenticeship as a joiner before being called up. Shortly afterwards, the boss died and the firm was taken over by Duncan Logan Ltd, the construction company based in Muir of Ord and then expanding rapidly with contracts all over the country. One of these was for the building of the new dam at Invermoriston, and Iain MacRae was sent there as a joiner. In his army service, Don West drove trucks between Benghazi and Tobruk and it seemed natural enough that, after returning to his home at Struy Bridge in Strathglass, he should drive trucks for John Cochrane and Sons in the last days of the Glen Affric scheme and later find a similar post with Duncan Logan Ltd.

Sybil Davidson, who had learned secretarial skills at school in Elgin, began working for John Cochrane and Sons in 1947: ‘I can’t really remember how I ended up applying for the job in Cannich. I had an interview, and may have applied through word of mouth. The firm’s office was in Church Street in Inverness, and I was petrified. I can’t remember the interview but it must have been all right, I got the job.’ Mairi Stewart, whose family had moved from Skye, began work in the same office at the same time: she had just finished training in the secretarial college in Inverness when her father met on the bus a man who suggested she try for a job at Cannich.

Students, too, found vacation jobs on the schemes. Antoin MacGabhann and five companions caught a night boat from Dublin to Glasgow in 1955 and landed work on the Shira scheme near Inveraray. ‘It rained all day, every day, or so it seemed, in the mountains,’ he wrote. ‘We were not provided with any raingear, and slipped and slid as we helped others to push a large pipe up the mountain to a prepared trench. We did our best to impress on our first few days anyway. Perhaps we hoped to hide in the pipes later. But a big Donegal ganger told us to go down to the office “to get our cards”. We didn’t know what this meant but went down the mountain and got our cards. We climbed up again and innocently handed our cards to the ganger. He reacted angrily and said “What the hell are you doing back here? You’re sacked” ... When we asked him why, he said there was no point in other people pushing the pipe up the mountain and us “Fucking looking at them”.’

MacGabhann found another job on another scheme where conditions were better. Raingear was supplied and he became a scaffolder’s mate, scaffolding the inside of a shaft. ‘One day I emerged into daylight at the top and stepped on a rusty nail. I worked on but after a few hours I couldn’t walk at all, and the ever-present ambulance carted me off to a doctor for a tetanus injection. I spent three days in bed, not seeing anybody between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m. The shifts were twelve hours and ... my friend used to leave bread and water with me before going off to work ... I enjoyed my stint on the tunnels and got on well with my immediate boss, scaffolder Victor from Northern Ireland. I saw no rowdiness or drunkenness, everybody just worked and slept, and would queue up every week to wire home money to their families. I saved about £60 and took the overnight bus from Edinburgh to London ... and blew the £60.’

Throughout the whole period of the construction of the schemes, the workforce was fluid. Men came and went. Gangers tried hard to keep good men in their squads but finally there was nothing a foreman could do to stop one of his workers picking up his cards and his gear and going down the road.

‘We had a lot of Harris and Skye men,’ recalled Bill Mackenzie, a ganger on the Meig and Orrin dams. ‘The Harris men stuck it out and there are a lot living in the village here yet [Muir of Ord, Ross-shire]. There were some Irish as well. I remember a Paddy Doyle, a fine chap, a big tall man. He always carried his jacket with him even for short distances and I says to him one day “Paddy, why are you guarding your jacket?” “Here, Scotty, I’ll show you,” he says, and he had in it an old Warlock tobacco tin full of pound notes. Anyway, Paddy was with the squad down about seventy feet in the rock, in the cutting, on the Meig. We went up and down ladders. There were no guard doors on the top and when it started to rain the pebbles were coming down. No hard hats. You would usually hear the stones coming and you would stand against the rock. This day Paddy never heard them and one nailed him and drew blood, gave him a good knock. He never said a word but went over and lifted his jacket: “Cheerio, Scotty, I’ll be seeing you”, and he just left.’

The surge of construction in the Highlands influenced youngsters and showed them new possibilities, new career opportunities. As a schoolboy from Gairloch, boarding on the east coast in Dingwall, as was then the norm for many from the West Highlands during their secondary education, Roy Macintyre saw the work at Grudie Bridge, Glascarnoch and in his native district: ‘All this activity in our own area interested me as a boy. It was something completely new and it sowed the seed in my mind of becoming a civil engineer. One of the engineers on the Kerry Falls scheme at Gairloch was a young fellow called Roy Osborne. He became friendly with my sister and subsequently they married. I remember him taking me up to the Falls and I was thinking they were great guys who had the chance to be involved in this kind of work. I went to Glasgow University and did civil engineering. At that time it was a sandwich course and we used to find work in the summer, from May to September. In my first year, the summer of 1954, I got a job with Duncan Logan Ltd and of course being a first-year student I guess I was a bit of a liability, with no practical experience. I remember I was given £1 a week and I think they paid my digs in Dingwall, and I got a job as a student engineer on the Meig Dam. At first it was a steep learning curve but as the weeks passed I became more useful, I learned to do setting out – in reality I think I learned more in a few weeks there than I learned in the first year at university. I loved it and got to know the men and the activity. The whole thing was fascinating to me.

‘I was a pretty green engineer at first but you didn’t take long to pick things up. The engineer on the Meig was an interesting fellow called Tom Critchley, an Englishman who had come up to Gairloch, giving up his career to start a crofting life. He was probably a bit of an idealist and I don’t think he would have stuck it long but fortunately Willie Logan arrived in Gairloch almost in the same year and needed an engineer, a site agent, to look after the works. Tom started a career with Logan that was to take him to many different dams. When I was on the Meig, Tom was the agent there; he had an assistant Jack Forsyth who had been at the Kerry Falls, and Tom and Jack were very helpful to a young fellow. I was given a lot of help and a lot of rope as well. Maybe they were at the age when they were glad to have a young fellow take on the graft of setting the thing out as it involved humping up and down the hills quite a lot.

‘Life on the dam was great. We had our own canteen there, and there were a couple of ladies who served the meals. I stayed in Dingwall and I used to travel up every day. I got a lift from a Czech who was the site agent at the Luichart power station. His name was Wilson, which must have been anglicised, and he was a character, close on seventy years old at the time. Then I would walk from Luichart power station up the other side of the river where they blasted a road to the main dam in the Strathcarron valley. The camp was down at the power station.

‘The workers pulled my leg a bit at first, but they were a great bunch and I think I was a part of the team. Catching the bus with a crowd of navvies on a cold Monday morning at six o’clock and there was just one adjective, the f-word, and you heard it so often you became immune to it and it had no meaning. It didn’t have any meaning for them, each sentence would be liberally sprinkled with three or four uses of it.’

Before any building could start, before the tunnels, dams and associated structures could be designed, the country had to be surveyed in great detail. Roy Osborne helped to make a preliminary survey of the upper parts of Glen Strathfarrar between 1949 and 1951, as his first job after graduating in engineering from Woolwich College, London. His interest in hydro-electric engineering had been sparked when his father had bought him a book on the subject and, on graduation, he found employment with the consulting engineering firm of Sir William Halcrow and Partners. ‘In those days,’ he said, ‘there was no knowledge at all about the Highlands in the south. I went to the library and looked at an atlas and there, on the last couple of pages, was Inverness-shire. I came up on the overnight train and, when dawn came, I was in the Cairngorms, seeing for the first time rivers with boulders. All the rivers at home had mud. I was interviewed by an old, very experienced engineer, Duncan Kennedy, in Halcrow’s Inverness office. When I went to start work in Glen Strathfarrar, one of the engineers hired a car and took me up to the digs in a cottage belonging to a war widow at Culligran. Her husband’s relations lived all around and we ate venison and salmon, we lived very well. Meanwhile the work was going on down Strathglass at the Mullardoch dam and there was another lodger, a fitter on that scheme.

‘We got pretty fit, tramping about and wading the rivers. There were two of us [engineers] in the team, with two chainmen, and we worked from May until about November. It took some time as we had to survey for three dams. There was a sense of wonder. My shoes were no good on the hillsides, and I had to get boots with tackets. It was great fun, and it was all new. I remember the flies in the bracken, I don’t recall the midgies. The aim was to make a contour survey of the [Loch Monar area] using Abney levels, which are held up to the eye. One chap I worked with used to tie a handkerchief around his head, go a certain distance, and then we would sight the handkerchief, and go beyond him and sight that. It produced a rough map. The Abney level worked like a theodolite and used a bubble to give a horizontal level. We started from the Ordnance Survey base levels on their six-inch maps. More exciting was the survey of the proposed tunnel line and the outfall for the pipeline to the power station. A detailed contour map was produced where it was felt to be necessary. The preliminary survey was probably taken only as far as to work out the area to be impounded to make the reservoir. From this rough survey you could get a possible place for the dam. Then, precise surveys would be made of the rock, the depth of soil, and so on.’

Plate 18. Surveyors working on the site of the Glascarnoch tunnel portal, November 1951 (NOSHEB).

 

On a year out between leaving school and starting university, Sandy Payne worked for six months as a chainman on the Glenstrathfarrar scheme. ‘We kept regular hours. We left the camp at eight in the morning and went up to the dam in Land Rovers; if the weather was poor you might come back a bit early, but sometimes we worked late and got overtime. It was a pretty good wage, especially for someone just out of school. As a chainman I was climbing around the dam as it was being built, holding the staff, making marks on the cement so the engineers could take levels. There was a group of four or five chainmen and we had our own clique and our own way of life. There were a few perks – we had a fresh supply of bread, sugar, milk and biscuits – only for the chainmen. I don’t know how it came about but we were very jealous of our perks and nobody would intrude on them. We had our own room, just a cupboard in one of the huts, with a gas stove and a kettle, self-contained, a place where when we weren’t needed, we could sit around drinking tea, eating big slabs of cheese (another perk) and playing cards. We felt quite privileged although we must have been the lowest in the pecking order.

‘When the engineers found that I intended to go to university to study maths, they got me into doing their calculations for them. They were having difficulty with the equations for the double-arch structure [of the Monar dam] and I was given the job of working through and checking their figures – slide rule and log tables in those days. I was peeved at first because I wanted to be the hard engineer, out climbing over the dam, but when January came I was quite pleased to be able to sit inside doing calculations. Can you imagine someone like me being given paper, a pencil and a rubber, and a series of equations, and being asked to work out where the next layer of cement should go? I felt the responsibility but eventually I got the confidence to carry on with it. It was all checked. I feel quite privileged to have been part of the building of that dam in more ways than one’.

Sandy Payne spent most of his spare time walking around the beautiful hills, sometimes climbing in rubber boots and overalls, and observing the bird life: ‘It was an eye-opener being stuck in a glen like that. Fantastic, mind-blowing – with golden eagles, crossbills, greenshank.’

As the chief engineer with the Mitchell Construction Company on the Killin-Lochay tunnel system in Breadalbane, Bob Sim took a leading role in surveying. The aim was to prepare a detailed map of the rugged hill country which would then be used to ensure the tunnellers stayed precisely on course. Tunnels were usually driven from both ends, and sometimes from additional internal faces accessed by adits, or side tunnels; and the expense if two sections happened to miss each other by passing to either side or above or below would have been almost as great as the embarrassment.

The survey team, often four engineers and two chainmen, began by establishing a baseline 3,000 feet long. This was laid out on the level floor of a strath according to theodolite bearings and measured manually with a tape made from Invar steel, according to theodolite bearings. Each 100-foot section was marked by driving in an oak post and cementing it in place in the gravelly moraine. Nothing was spared in the search for accuracy: the steel in the tape was specially selected for its low coefficient of expansion and the temperature was always recorded during its use; at each end of the 100-foot section the tension in the tape was adjusted for the catenary, or sag, by suspending weights over pulleys, and sometimes it was necessary to dig a trench to allow the tape to sag freely; further corrections were made for the slope of the ground, the four-inch width of the oak post and the curvature of the Earth. Then the measurement of each section was repeated from the other end, and this was done a further three times until for each 100-foot length of baseline sixteen observations had been completed. A range of 0.02 inches in the results was considered acceptable.

Map 4. Breadalbane

 

From the baseline, a series of quadrilaterals measured by microptic theodolites were drawn across the hills from one ridge to the next. At the end of the series a final check baseline had to match exactly the length calculated from the initial baseline. From the corners of the quadrilaterals very accurate theodolite bearings were taken to pinpoint the positions of the tunnel mouths; these bearings had to agree within three seconds of arc per 180 degrees. Altitudes were monitored by measuring levels down one glen and up the next.

Weather could foil the surveying as it could affect much else. On one scheme on Ben Vorlich, Bob Sim climbed up five times before he managed to obtain a mist-free day and eventually achieved success only by bivouacking on the summit in a sleeping bag.

‘The helicopter revolutionised surveying,’ explained Bob Sim. ‘Although it was expensive to hire and its use had to be carefully planned, it saved a great deal of time. We were the first to use a helicopter – a Bell, with a glass bubble, open sides and a skeleton tail, the same machine as in the television series Whirlybirds. We hired it from a Derby firm for ten days and used it to fly the concrete columns, with instrument mountings for our surveying, up to the observation points we had established on the ridges. We made seventy-five flights in ten days and erected twenty-seven observation points. The helicopter could lift only 400 pounds weight and the workmen still had to walk up to the sites but they were spared the need to carry so much material.’

Another advance at around the same time was to use a computer to calculate the quadrilaterals covering the course of the tunnel. The standard method using eight-figure logarithmic tables could take ten days of office work. ‘The computer was in Derby, in an aircraft hangar, and it looked like a series of huge grey wardrobes,’ recalled Bob. ‘It was owned by English Electric and it did the calculations for us by return of post.’

The detailed design of a dam begins with knowledge of the foundation on which the structure will rest. ‘In the places we worked, you can imagine the rock was pretty near the surface, so the procedure was to take off all the peat and overburden until you reached solid rock,’ said Roy Macintyre. ‘The rock was cleaned, so clean you could eat your dinner off it, it was really pressure-hosed and scoured, and then there would be an examination of the rock. In the case of the Monar dam there was an extensive programme of grouting because the geologists found a faultline and it was thought to be potentially quite serious. They spent a lot of time doing what they called stage grouting. I think there were three stages. The grouting was fibrillated into the rock maybe for 50 or 100 feet, pressure grouting, and then they would drill again and do a second stage with more liquid grout the second time, and they did it again – by doing it three times they reckoned to seal all the fissures. I think we did grouting on the Meig dam as well. On the Meig, from memory, it was done after the dam was built. It certainly was on Torr Achilty dam – by drilling right down through the dam and into the rock, and we did pressure grouting through the dam, as an extra security.’

A rockfill or earthfill dam needs quite an elaborate cut-off trench deep into the ground under it, pressure grouted and fitted with a ‘blanket’ to stop the water coming up. Rockfill dams are massive structures, with a 30° slope on both faces, and the upstream face has to be protected from wave action with concrete slabs. A concrete dam also has a cut-off trench to stop the passage of water under the dam, pressure grouted and possibly twenty feet deep to ensure the structure is resting on solid rock. If the rock is badly fissured, the pressure from water seeping under the structure could threaten the dam with uplift. ‘A dam has the smallest factor of safety of any civil engineering structure, because it rests on stability,’ explained Roy Osborne. ‘It’s in balance under its own weight. Only uplifts can put it wrong, or if you get a flood and the water rises too high over the dam, to create a greater overturning pressure. This defines the spillway length.

‘The front-face slope of a dam is about 1 in 10, and the back face about 10 in 7. This directs pressure downwards to increase stability. The rule is to keep the resultant thrust, the resultant of the horizontal push of the water and the downward push of the weight of the dam itself, falling through the middle third of the base, or the ‘footprint’, of the dam. If the thrust goes outside that, the dam will become unstable and will topple. The pressure is dependent on the depth of the water. We had to calculate what we thought the largest flood from upstream might be, and the dam crest had to be large enough to take it. In the days before computers, it required a lot of tedious calculation.’

The leakage of water through a dam through the joints between the concrete blocks is prevented by a water stop, sections of copper, one eighth of an inch thick, anchored into the concrete so that, when the joints expand, the copper moves and still keeps the water out. This is a source of failure in many dams. Some stable dams can show slight leakage through the joints.

Fig. 3. A cross-section through the prestressed dam at Allt-na-Lairigie. This is the only dam of its type built by the Hydro-Electric Board (reproduced with permission from ‘Allt-na-Lairigie prestressed concrete dam’, J.A. Banks, Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, 1957, Vol. 6).

 

The contraction of setting concrete is the big movement. After that, there may be slight movement, enough to cause some leakage, from temperature changes but these changes are very small and dams are usually extensively grouted along the contraction joints to protect the interior from external temperature fluctuations.

As the schemes progressed, there was a degree of experimentation. ‘Dam concrete is in compression and the dam is designed on that basis, narrow at the top and wide at the base, stable under its own weight,’ explained Professor Ronald Birse. ‘Thin-arch dams, where the upstream curve adds strength, can be built in a narrow valley. There’s at least one pre-stressed dam in the Highlands. High tensile steel cables were put in and these were tensioned so that they hold the dam down to eye-bolts grouted in the rock and are literally tightened up at the top, stretched like an extremely strong elastic band. Dams are designed virtually to last for ever.’ The pre-stressed dam stands on the Allt-na-Lairigie, a tributary of the River Fyne. The decision to convert what was first conceived as a conventional mass gravity dam was taken to allow building a dam fourteen feet higher than the original, an increase that permitted a greater storage capacity and a more dependable power output. There was an element of risk in the change of plan, as it would entail building the first dam of its kind in the world. This kind of challenge, however, was meat and drink to Angus Fulton, the Board’s chief civil and hydraulic engineer, and work began on the Allt-na-Lairigie dam in 1953. One hundred and thirty-eight high-tension steel bars were placed inside the vertical dam wall and anchored to the granite foundation. The scheme opened in 1956.

After his initial surveying in Glen Strathfarrar and a period of National Service, Roy Osborne continued working for Halcrow on dam design. A new interferometric technique for the surveying of a line had become available and he tried it out on the then newly-completed Mullardoch dam. The purpose was to measure the deflection of the dam after the impoundment of the mass of water behind it. His measurements showed that the structure had moved uphill by a fraction; the valley floor had sunk and the dam had tilted slightly, only thousandths of an inch but still no one could quite believe it had happened.

Economics always came into the equations for dam design and construction – the final aim, after all, was to generate electricity at the most advantageous cost per unit. At the same time the unique combination of opportunities and challenges at each site had to be taken into account. The contractors on the schemes built up over the years an impressive expertise in dealing with recalcitrant rock, unexpected faultlines and new materials.

In the beginning, though, the work could be very tough. Patrick McBride was among the small group of men who launched the transfer of the Tummel-Garry scheme from drawing board to massive reality in the latter months of 1947. After they had completed enough of the work camp to allow the recruitment of more workers, by providing some place for them to eat and sleep, they turned their attention to the Tummel River, where it flowed from the east end of Loch Tummel through a gap in the Perthshire hills before being joined by the Garry and turning south past the village of Pitlochry. The men’s task was to pile the fast-flowing river, the first stage in the construction of the Tummel Dam.

‘And a cold job it was,’ said Patrick. ‘To pile the river and get all the water to one side. We erected two derricks. We piled the river and got the water diverted, and the next thing was the drilling and the blasting. My brother, he was at that now, blasting and all that business. By this time we had the camp well under control and a lot of people started coming, you know, these boys who travelled from one contract to another. Quite a few men came in a short period of time. We had some characters up there, I tell you.

Plate 19. Clunie dam, November 1948. The north side of the dam under construction, as the river rushes past beyond the coffer dam (NOSHEB).

Plate 20. Excavating a trench on the Pitlochry dam (Perth Museum. Copyright: Louis Flood).

Plate 21. Pouring concrete on the Pitlochry dam (Perth Museum. Copyright: Louis Flood).

 

‘Then the Pitlochry project came on stream. After Christmas. The starting day for the Pitlochry dam was Easter Tuesday 1947. And you know that at Easter time we all go for a long weekend. But the boss, Mr Howard, came to me and said I had to be back for Tuesday morning for eight o’clock. I was the man he picked to go to Pitlochry to get six or eight blokes to be going on with. So I picked them out, and we arrived in Pitlochry and went in there at about a quarter to eight, and he was stood there with his watch. “So”, he says, “that’s starting time. That’s the date the contract was signed for.” The first job we had to do was shift a lot of footpaths that sightseers walked on, put them away back [from the building site]. We built the office, the store, the staff quarters, and we got fed in two little canteens by other contractors. Anyway we got all that under control. The staff place was built, and the staff started to move in.

Plate 22. Engineers surveying at a tunnel entrance (Perth Museum. Copyright: Louis Flood).

 

‘The next job was the river. It was a big contract, piling that dam, putting up these derricks. We got things well under control but some time on, in June or July, a holiday period came on, the Scots trades fairs, and they all wanted holidays – but I worked there, stayed there ‘til the rest came back. Then, a big flood came down from rain up north and did a quarter-million pounds’ worth of damage in one night.’ The flood on the Tummel in September 1947 breached the coffer dam, collapsed the left bank and toppled two cranes, but by 8 October the Perthshire Advertiser could report that all the damage had been repaired, in a week less than anticipated, and work had resumed.11

‘The flood washed over the top of the piles, washed away the ground, washed down the derricks,’ said Patrick McBride. ‘All the timber we had sitting on the shore was washed downstream. That all spread out on the farmers’ land and when the waters subsided there were big heavy timbers everywhere. Every day the farmers were coming up: “Get this timber the hell out of there.” It cost more to pick it up than we could have bought it for, but it had to be done, we had to pick it up. Anyway, we got back on our feet again, got the dam sorted again, put the derricks up, started in the middle, drilling, blasting. Meantime my brother had come there and my uncle – he was works manager. So we carried on.

‘What we called the North Cut ran out towards the village. [The North Cut marked the location of the dam’s foundation on the left bank.] We found terrible bad ground and had to go a wild depth down. We sank piles for thirty or forty feet, but when we got down to the bottom we still hadn’t got good ground. Then it had to be all heavy timber. There was a character there – we called him the Great Charlie Logue, he was an all-round heavy timber man – and he used to have a lot of long-distance followers who came with him. So the company got hold of Charlie and sent him up. Every day they were coming, a puckle of his mates, all timber men, and Charlie timbered that trench until he was down on the solid ground – down about fifty feet. All heavy timber along the sides – big boards, 12 inches by 12 inches, and 12 by 6. Then grout was pumped into it. That was the North Cut.

‘Then we had the South Cut. Again it was very high ground. And there were a couple of very big buildings up on top, very nice property, that we weren’t allowed to destroy. Again, Charlie Logue had the answer – dig it out from the bottom up. He and his crew put the tunnel headings in the bottom. When we had the first portion out, we put the boards in, they pumped in the concrete and when that was done, we took out the timber, and started again and came up another lift, and up another lift and so on, until we came to the top. Everything went very well after that.’

The pouring of the first layers of concrete on the dam began, working first on one side of the river bed from which the water flow had been diverted and retained behind a coffer dam. Temporary openings were built into the lower levels to accommodate the river when attention was switched to the other side of the coffer dam. When it came time to close the temporary openings, wooden gates were dropped into place and the gaps were filled with concrete.

Working in the rivers could present novel situations. In Glenmoriston a driller was assigned one day to drill a large rock obstructing the flow of the river to prepare it for blasting. A crane lowered him onto the rock but, as he drilled, the bit slipped and he fell into the freezing water. ‘I was down at the workshop when I heard this clitter-clatter like a music box coming down the road,’ recalled Iain MacRae. ‘I came round the corner and here was the driller. He had icicles hanging round him and every step he took he was going tinkle-tinkle. He was on his way down to the hut to get dried off and go back to work again.’

Plate 23. Brushing down and finishing off the concrete face of possibly the Pitlochry dam (Perth Museum. Copyright: Louis Flood).

Plate 24. Glen Errochty, 1950. The foreman, Sandy Brown, beside one of the skips for carrying concrete from the batching plant to the dam (Donald Macleod).

 

 

Up in the hills of the glen of Errochty, on the Trinafour dam in the Tummel-Garry scheme, Donald Macleod joined a team in charge of mixing and pouring batches of concrete. ‘I was on the batching plant when they were building the actual cement mixer housing and the conveyor belt that fed the mixers,’ he said. ‘Besides having a better number there was also more money in it. At that time I was picking up £13-14 a week which was big money in those days. So, that was at the initial stages of the Errochty dam, they were tearing out the base of the river right across the valley, installing the blondin [the overhead cableway]12 to carry the concrete out to whatever point it was required. I was working with A and M Carmichael, and it was hard.

‘We worked 100-odd hours in a week. We started in the morning at half past seven, and we were never rained off. It would be bad weather and very little doing, and the job would be blown off, the actual job itself, and we would go away down to the checking-out office and we were told, oh you’d better go back, wait. We just sat around but we were never sent home, unless there was a threat of snow, for we were way out in the glen.’

The housing for the batching plant had a frame of four-inch steel girders that had to be bolted together. ‘We had no safety helmets, no safety belts, no gloves, nothing,’ recalled Donald Macleod. ‘On a cold frosty morning, your fingers were sticking to the iron. They gave us no clothes at all. You had to provide for yourself. No boots, no donkey jackets. Now that steel frame was sixty-odd feet high. I just climbed up. We had problems with some of the girders. The holes were not fitting, you know. And we would argue and big Sandy Brown, the foreman, would start up to show us what was to be done, but he would change his mind. He was no climber. Climbing was no problem to me at all.

‘Then, big steel containers were built from sheet iron to hold the different types of aggregate. There were eight of them and underneath that we had eight conveyor belts going out to the concrete mixers. Two big mixers. This hopper would be on the top for the cement which was wormed from a shed close by.’

‘The boys in the cement shed had good money but they deserved it,’ said Don West about the Loch Luichart dam. ‘The cement came in bags, and they had to open them and tip maybe fifty bags at a time into the mixing. The dust and the sweat – you’d think their heads were harled – and they wouldn’t wash. There was this guy from Caithness whose bed was next to mine in the camp and you could scrape the flakes of hard cement off his head. Off he would go in the morning with this crust on his head and he would come back with a new layer.’

Plate 25. Donald Macleod perched on the girders during the construction of the cement mixer housing at Glen Errohty (Donald Macleod).

Plate 26. A concrete mixer and batching plant inside the Clunie tunnel on the Tummel-Garry project, February 1949 (NOSHEB).

Plate 27. Shuttering on the buttresses on the Meig dam, September 1953 (NOSHEB).

Plate 28. An early stage in the construction of the Meig dam, March 1952 (NOSHEB).

Plate 29. The Meig Dam in 2001 (author).

 

It was standard practice to convey the hoppers with the fresh concrete from the batching plant out across the site to where they were needed on the blondin. ‘The cable was nine-inch diameter steel, suspended 600-odd feet at the highest point from the river bed,’ said Donald Macleod. ‘You could move the masts holding up each end by 100-horsepower motors from side to side, angle them, and when they were installed we used to go out on what we called the bicycle, the machine that carried the skip for the concrete. This cable had to be cleaned because it was all grease and everything, and we used to go out on this bicycle 600 feet above the river. I had a good head for heights, I quite enjoyed it, you had a good view, and nobody would come and chase you. There was quite a big swing on it at times, when it was windy. The hopper was slung on chains and held a few ton of cement.’

Don Smith remembered the blondins at Trinafour with awe: ‘The cables had to be greased every day. The main cable was about three inches wide, rounded but flattened on the upper side, and it swayed. Blokes used to walk across this bloody thing, no safety belt. Two wires on either side, and two cables below for the thing carrying the cement. The blondins were 120 feet up, so in the middle these blokes were probably 200-250 feet high, just walking.’

When the workforce of Duncan Logan Ltd started to build the Meig dam, they had to make do with less sophisticated equipment, as Bill Mackenzie recalled: ‘I put in the first shovelful of concrete in the Meig and the last one. I was in charge of the concrete squad – there were only four men. The firm was young then. Machinery and cranes were expensive. They were a wee bit short of material and it was all shovel. The rate of concreting was a five-ton crane delivering a five-ton skip every five minutes, and they were trying to speed that up to get on, as usual. We hadn’t vibrators at first and we had to use the boot to settle the concrete. Now, the five ton was dumped and it was spread, until it was six to eight inches deep over the required area, by four men in five minutes.

‘Maybe a whole day’s pour would take sixteen hours and you had been at it all that time, five-ton batches coming every five minutes. They had two cranes but they could have done with another one as the furthest away part of the dam was beyond the reach of the crane and we had to shovel from man to man. That was work, I can tell you. It’s a heavy job and the concrete’s soft. As you’re working you’re maybe sinking up to your knees in it. A sore back all the time. We were supposed to be on twelve-hour shifts but once you started pouring you had to finish. It all depended on the size of the bay and there would be maybe wee snags along the way – it could be sixteen hours to get finished. Sometimes we were late in getting started, maybe 3 or 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and you would be on all night, working under floodlamps. Then you’d have an hour in bed and be back again in the morning. Once you started concreting it didn’t matter what the weather was, although we had to stop if the frost was very severe. We didn’t stop for rain. We had oilskins on and shovelling in oilskins and rubber boots was hard work. You couldn’t complain; if you didn’t like it, you knew what to do. It was an experience.

‘Then we did the Orrin dam. That was a lot easier. More tackle, more men. I was still a ganger but I had moved on to fancier jobs, finishing and so on. I did all the crests on the spillways, on the Meig and the Orrin, and all the finishing jobs between. In the Orrin dam you can walk right through it, there’s a passageway inside the dam. I built all the stairs inside. They were precast and dropped in.

Plate 30. Laying the Allt na Fainich aqueduct on the Orrin scheme, August 1956 (NOSHEB).

Plate 31. A rock fault in the Orrin tunnel (NOSHEB).

 

Roy Macintyre remembers some of the men he worked with on the concreting of the Meig dam. ‘Barney Malone was a ganger and was given the responsibility of vibrating the concrete, and he did it methodically and with great care. The vibrator was a heavy poker-like device to drive out air bubbles, equivalent to tamping. It was important not to over-vibrate the concrete as this would cause segregation [separation of the constituents]. It had to be done for just the right length of time. Now, Barney liked to go for his dram on a Friday night and most of the wages got blown. On this particular Saturday morning Barney had had a heavy night the night before and he was vibrating the concrete – and he couldn’t have been feeling very well for he suddenly emptied his stomach and his false teeth into the concrete and, with the vibrator going, the whole lot disappeared straight into the mixture. Poor Barney was without teeth. He was fitted for a new set and, I remember all that summer, Barney would be getting ready to go to Inverness for his teeth – but you would see him on Monday morning and his mouth would still be sunken looking and he would say he hadn’t got past the Achilty Hotel.’

Iain MacRae went to Invermoriston as the chargehand in a gang of shuttering joiners and his first impression of the site has remained with him: ‘There was nothing there, nothing at all. They started by cutting into the rock on both sides of the river, away in maybe forty feet on one side and thirty feet on the other. Then that was all concreted to make a very big foundation: there must have been about an acre of concrete, what they called a solid core, on the bottom of the river. They diverted the river, put in coffer dams and worked on the inside of them. It was quite an education as we’d never seen this before.’

The shuttering joiners worked in squads of eight men to build, in effect, the moulds to receive the wet concrete. Shutters were made in the site workshop, from inch-and-an-eighth strips of dressed Swedish spruce. The joints between the strips had to be tight to stop the leakage of the frothy, watery cement run-off the men called ‘fat’. Special skill was needed to build the oddly shaped shuttering that served as moulds for the heel of a shaft or a circular shaft mouth.

The joiners dealt with a ‘lift’ every day. This was the section of shuttering, seventy-two feet long and six feet high, that could be erected to make a mould and filled with concrete in one day – a day’s pour. ‘Keys’ could be poured at the ends of a section to lock into the next pour, and copper and rubber seals placed to prevent leakage through the end joints. The shuttering was held to the face of the dam as it curved upward, by bolts run through reinforced steel joists or RSJs, known as ‘soldiers’ and often made from old railway lines. The sections of shuttering were raised and lowered into position by a crane or a derrick.

‘The work wasn’t desperately hard’, recalled Iain MacRae, ‘but the hours were long. I used to leave the house at six in the morning and not be home until nine at night. You had to be on the job at half past seven. It was thirty-two miles each way to and from Kirkhill, in one of Logan’s lorries, a Ford Thames. An old fellow, Donny Urquhart, was the driver, they called him K. Don after the great racing driver, and he went like the mischief. He was one of three men who drove from this area: to collect the workers in the morning, they started from Strathpeffer, and went over Mulbuie, on the Black Isle, to Avoch and then to here and over the top by Culnakirk to Invermoriston. The weather didn’t matter. At work, you never came in for rain or snow, you were outside all the time. We were given clothes, no hard hats – but everybody got oilskins. If you wanted a donkey jacket you had to buy it. It was drastic in the winter.

‘We had some good laughs. There was a fellow, Eddie Chalmers, from Muir of Ord. He was a brilliant artist. Periodically we would get a brand new shutter and, as soon as Eddie saw it, he would do a drawing on it of somebody, with a big joiner’s pencil. Now the bloke in charge at this time was Willie Ingram. Eddie drew two pairs of Clydesdales pulling a plough, and Willie Ingram was the ploughman walking behind the horses. This was on the full length of the inside of the shutter. Walking along the furrow behind Willie came Tom Critchley the engineer with a level on his shoulder. It was brilliantly done. We used to keep our eye open for anybody coming but this time that didn’t happen. Willie Ingram came round the head of the shutter while Eddie was busy doing this drawing. The shutter was up by this time, in position and bolted. Willie came in and said, “What the Dickens is that?” Then he says “Take that shutter off there.” We had to unbolt it and take it off, and we left it leaning up against the office, and it was there for the duration. Willie was so pleased with it.’

Map 5. Great Glen. The Garry–Moriston schemes

 

Iain MacRae went on to work on the Orrin and Meig dams. The last job was the construction of fishladders on the Meig after the dam was complete. One of the joiners was an old-timer, Tommy Hossack, and he was complaining about the way they had set about the job. ‘“That’s no the way to do it at all,” he would say, “This is what we should be doing” and all this. This day, this fellow came in and started talking to us. He wore a fore-and-aft hat and plus fours. He asked how things were going and what we thought of the design. This got Tommy going, and Tommy told him it was no use. It turned out the newcomer was a Dutchman, the bloke who had designed the fishladder in the first place. He took Tommy’s views all in good part. Afterwards he changed the design. It was very complicated, with stepped concrete, awkward shapes and corners, like building a stair in reverse.’

Patrick McGinley arrived in Inveraray after an all-night journey and went to work more or less at once on the Lochan Shira dam. Two ten-ton electric derricks had been lying idle for want of someone who could drive them. Patrick had picked up the skill of crane driving in England, after a workmate had said ‘God, you’ve got a dirty owld job at that fitting. Why do you not start at the driving?’, and had found it to his liking. Now, he and a mate were put on the derricks right away and worked a twelve-hour shift. ‘That was it,’ he recalled. ‘We stayed there a good while.’

Later, he shifted to another site where his brother, Eddie, found him a position as a crane driver. ‘A man asked me if I would like to go on a Jones revolving crane. A Jones mobile crane. I says, “I don’t know much about that kind of work.” “Ah,” he says, “you’ll be all right, you’ll soon learn.”’

The Jones crane had rubber wheels and a small diesel engine, and was used to lift and move the shuttering around the dam. The crane itself was lifted by the blondin from one construction bay to another, a short aerial trip during which the driver stayed aboard.

‘It was kind of dangerous sometimes lifting shutters,’ said Patrick. ‘It was hard, you know, tight, they were stuck in the cement, and the joiners would be around hitting them. Some would come up no bother but there were some you needed to hit away at, from the scaffold outside, where there was a big drop down below. Once you got one shutter up you were all right, then you had a bit of protection for the wee crane. If you put too much weight on it, the wheels would come up, you know, the wheels would rise up, and that was it, the crane was away then. If you had a long jib on, you could lift a couple of ton, but this was a short jib, specially made for lifting the shutters, and you could give that bit extra power. If the shutter was tight to move, there would be maybe four- or five-ton pressure coming on it. A shutter itself would be about a ton at the very most.

‘Everybody knew what they were doing, they knew the job. There would be no accidents or nothing. You would try and lift it first, and if you didn’t move it, well, they would slacken the bolts off, do something, to make the shutter come away easy. There was no dragging of it. It had to come smooth.

‘On a particular wall there would be three or four shutters. With the crane, you placed the shutters on the left, the right, behind you, like a square. You just moved the crane back and fore in that particular bay, whatever space it was. When you had all the shutters in place, and the joiners had them all tightened up, the blondin would come and lift the wee crane and land you in the next bay. I was still in the crane. I’d be shaking, and when I’d be put down I’d hook the blondin off. Depending on when that was done, whether it was time to start or not, you could go down. There was a big ladder. I was up maybe fifty, sixty, a hundred feet.

‘I was young at the time. I could climb up no bother and I wasn’t scared of heights. You wouldn’t need to be scared. You could surely feel the crane swaying with the wind. But it was solid enough, it did the job it was meant to do – lifting the shutters.’

Patrick McGinley often stayed up in his eyrie above the dam for the whole of his twelve-hour shift. To avoid the climb down during the break for the midday meal, he would sometimes have a flask of tea and sandwiches up with him, and sit in the tiny cabin and read a paper. When he had to answer the call of nature, he just had to do it on the job.

Later, on the Glenmoriston scheme, he used a crane to drive steel piling. The ten-inch steel piles were positioned carefully and unshackled, and then the crane driver picked up the steam hammer and put that on top of the pile, where it was clamped in place. In the hard rock it could take some time to drive the steel down as much as possible of its twenty- or thirty-foot length. Ten or twelve strokes of the steam hammer might push it into the unyielding substrate by a miserable inch. The foreman decided when each pile was sufficiently embedded and, when the driving was complete, a man with an oxy-acetylene torch burned the pile tops to level them.

As was the custom, many workers moved from one scheme to another, according to their whim, and found a job where they were needed. A setback might set a man thinking ‘To hell with this’ and walking off. Patrick McGinley once left a skip of concrete hanging in the air at Pitlochry. He took over an old derrick temporarily from its operator, unaware that a running repair with a stick had been improvised to stop the cable from coming off the drum. The stick jammed. ‘I took a scunner and left it there,’ said Patrick. ‘Left it altogether and went down to London. I don’t know how they got it down, I wasn’t interested anyway.’

In London, that time, Patrick met another McGinley he knew: ‘Black McGinley they called him, Steam-iron Jim McGinley, no relation but he came from Donegal, he said we should go down to Hammersmith, to Wimpey’s office, we might get something in the north. We went in. They knew this McGinley. He was well known. He was a lot older than I was. The man says would we fancy going up north, to Inverness? I didn’t say nothing. Jim, he says aye, we surely will. The man gave us a voucher for the night train, some £20 each, to land in Pitlochry. “There’ll be somebody to meet you there to take you to Clunie”.’

A jeep met the men off the train and took them the few miles west to the site of the Clunie Dam, far enough from the last place for Patrick to escape any censure for leaving skips of cement in the air. The work at Clunie was to the young Donegal man’s liking and he stayed ‘a good while’. A foreman recognised his ability to ‘jump on anything’, to drive any type of crane or derrick, and offered him extra money to stay. ‘I was spare driver then for a good while and I was getting the same money as if I’d been on the crane. I was on stand-by. If I was wanted or if somebody took a day off or got sick, I could jump up on any particular machine and that was me. The foreman says, “I’ll miss you now if you go”.’

The Hydro Board published two major new projects in 1948. In February the Highland papers carried the details of the Glascarnoch scheme, aimed at tapping the water resources in 345 square miles in central Ross-shire to produce 280 million units of power a year. Estimated to cost £8.5 million, the scheme would create four power stations and six dams, and involve the Conon, Meig, Bran and Glascarnoch rivers and parts of the drainage areas of the Carron and the Broom. The level of Loch Fannich would be raised and new lochs would appear in Strath Vaich and in the long valley of the Glascarnoch beside the main road from Dingwall to Ullapool.

The Moriston-Garry scheme was published in the following May and, to the satisfaction of the editor of the Inverness Courier, involved no diversion of water from the Loch Ness catchment area. The West Highland Power Bill in 1928 and the Caledonian Power Bills in the late 1930s had all sought approval to develop the Moriston-Garry basin but had been defeated in Parliament; the older schemes had considered it necessary to divert water from Loch Quoich to the west, thus threatening the Ness with reduced flow and a danger of drought in summer. The new plans preserved the eastward flow of the river drainage and also promised to drown less land. In Glenmoriston only one house attached to the sawmill at the Blairie estate would be submerged, and the family who lived there told the Courier that they had no objection to moving and were looking forward to being nearer a place with more community life. Reservoirs would be created – in Glenmoriston and at Dundreggan. A large dam would be built at the east end of Loch Cluanie, extending the length of the loch by three miles. Here one lodge and one cottage would be submerged. Dams would also be constructed on Loch Loyne and Loch Quoich, and Loch Garry would be doubled in length. The raising of Loch Quoich would flood over a number of cottages and two lodges, of Loch Loyne one house that had stood empty for decades, and of Loch Garry a cottage and an empty mansion house. The whole scheme would cost almost £13 million.13 In the summer of 1952, the design of the scheme was simplified to save steel and cement, both commodities in short supply, and a lower dam at Dundreggan was dispensed with.¹⁴

The Highlands received a further filip when the contracts for parts of the two schemes were awarded to a local contractor – Duncan Logan Ltd. This family firm had been founded in 1895 in the village of Muir of Ord at the west end of the Black Isle peninsula in Ross-shire. Duncan Logan, the founder, was a stone mason who acquired ownership of the Tarradale quarry and became the biggest house builder in the area. Those who remember him recall a man who worked hard and expected his employees to do the same.

The firm grew slowly for many years – the turnover in 1934 was £25,000¹⁵; the payroll in 1939 had fifty people – but Willie Logan, Duncan’s son, took over the reins and proved to be a dynamic, almost buccaneering expansionist. Willie was born on Christmas Day 1913 and he joined his father’s business after he left Dingwall Academy, the local secondary school, in 1932. His academic career had been fairly undistinguished but he had ambition and a remarkable mental facility with numbers and detail. He was also fired by a desire to work and succeed, and he drove the company to take on more and more contracts. His restless enthusiasm was almost an embarrassment to his fellow directors, reported one observer,¹⁶ but it endeared him to his ever-growing workforce, many of whom had been his schoolmates, and made him a hero in Ross-shire. Laurie Donald was recommended to Willie by another engineer and was called to meet him in the Station Hotel in Inverness: ‘He was an interesting person, full of go and vim. He could be quite hard if he thought he wasn’t getting the cooperation he wanted but he stood by his men. They had great faith in him and he knew his foremen.’

‘He would never ask anybody to do anything that he wouldn’t do himself,’ said Iain MacRae. ‘Once some men [on the Glenmoriston scheme] left a set of levels out on a rock in the middle of the river. It had risen eight feet and this expensive equipment was in danger of being washed away. It was Willie himself that went down on a sling from a crane and picked it off.’

‘Willie Logan and I got on all right,’ said Bill Mackenzie. ‘He would just say “Chance it, Mac”. I had a job inside a tunnel on a shuttered face, where the concrete was going in by pump. It had to be well pumped to make it secure. This night he was there himself and the pump was going. I said, “Look, Mr Logan, the shutter’s beginning to bulge.” It was a terrible pressure, with 200 ton of cement inside it. Luckily enough, there was a bit of planking to hand and we were able to strengthen the shuttering. Logan said, “Gie it another pump, Mac.” He was willing to take a chance.

‘On the top of the Orrin dam there was a crane with a 120-foot jib. From the top of the dam to the riverbed, where a pipe had to be shifted, was 120 feet. It was only a five-ton crane and the pipe was six or seven ton. The jib was full out at 45°, and an overload along with that. The driver said no, no, he wasn’t doing it. “Come out of there, lad,” said Logan, “I’ll do it myself.” And he did, and you could hear the bolts screaming.’

Duncan Michael from Beauly left school in the summer of 1955 and, because his family already knew the Logans in neighbouring Muir of Ord, went to ask Willie for a job: ‘He said, “Hello Duncan, yeah, yeah” and put me on a lorry. I was a favoured child and he put me on the various schemes but mostly I was at lower Glenmoriston, where I worked during four summers while studying engineering in Edinburgh. I commuted for a while in K. Don’s lorry – he drove like mad. What I’ll never forget is that at half past five in the morning in summer, it is magic in Beauly Square – the birds, the light – and this lorry comes in, you jump in the back, and the smell of that diesel matched against what air can be. Whenever I smell diesel I think of sitting in the back of that lorry.

‘Willie Logan was a man of huge energy, a gambler, he looked for a problem and head-butted it. At Invermoriston we were tipping rock spoil into the Loch Ness and it’s pretty deep. Once a driver on a huge machine was out there on the edge of the loch and lost his nerve. The tailrace works were difficult and, at times, dangerous. Willie – this great fat man – waddles over, gets in and drives it back. In corporate planning terms it was mad, staking the heart of the company on one machine, but he was like that.’

Willie’s brother, Alastair, ran the quarry near Beauly that supplied the huge quantities of sand and aggregate needed on the schemes. ‘Alastair was a completely different character from Willie,’ recalled Roy Macintyre ‘Willie never rested for two minutes, working at fever pitch, but Alastair was laid back.’ If there was a knotty problem, Alastair was liable to disappear for a while and come back when it was likely to have been solved. But Alastair was also a man with ideas; he told Bill Mackenzie once how he would like to reclaim the head of the Cromarty Firth and turn the mudbanks into farmland.

Don West started driving for Logan after leaving Reed and Mallik at Mullardoch and stayed with the firm for eighteen years. ‘We were driving sand from Beauly up to Corriekinloch at Inchnadamph, to Lairg, to Glascarnoch, to Quoich, all over. No matter who built the dams, Logan supplied the sand. He had thirty-two lorries on hire in addition to his own fleet of between thirty and forty. On the street in Beauly, you could hardly turn your head but a Logan vehicle of some sort would be passing.’

Willie Logan never seemed to rest and wise employees knew to look busy themselves whenever he was around. He had an abrupt, fast way of talking and would reel off an instruction or an order, leaving a man having to ask a colleague what had been said. ‘I would ask the man in the office and he would say “Oh you’re going to such and such a place”, and I would be off around half of Scotland, delivering, loading, shifting – long hours,’ said Don West.

‘In the fourth summer I was working for him’, said Sir Duncan Michael, ‘Willie asked me what was I going to do. I could have had a job with him but he said, No, Duncan, there’s a world out there. Off you go. I’ve been grateful to him ever since. He could have had me, I would have been loyal to him but he thought no, that’s not fair. He could see an end to the schemes.’

Logan’s fame rested on very Highland foundations. Teetotal and nonsmoking, he was an elder in the Free Church and no one in the firm was allowed to work on the Sabbath. This observation of the holy day caused some controversy whenever there was a delay in completion of a job, but by and large he was admired for his steadfast adherence to principle. In the 1950s the Highlands still cared about these traditions.

Plate 32. Willie Logan (third from the left) at the opening of the Orrin Dam (courtesy Dingwall Museum).

 

He lived in a large house in Dingwall – the beautifully laid-out garden was pointed out to visitors – but his main church was the Free Church in Muir of Ord, where he had gone as a boy. At the time of one of the dam contracts, on a Sunday, water started to leak into a site to be concreted on Monday morning; something had happened to one of the submersible pumps and the place flooded. They sent for the engineer who came out in his own car and collected one of Logan’s vans at the yard to bring up a new pump. The engineer happened to pass the church as the congregation was assembling and, on Monday, he was called in to Willie Logan’s office to explain this breach: “Man,” Willie was reported as saying, “could you no have taken a machine that didn’t have my name on it?”

Although some necessary jobs were done discreetly on the Sabbath, by and large Willie deserved the congratulations extended to him at the opening of the Orrin dam in April 1959 for ‘having accomplished the huge construction in three years and ... without Sunday labour’. In the construction of the Orrin the men had set a record for laying 4,528 cubic yards of concrete in five days; Willie had forbidden an attempt at a seven-day record because ‘from the outset we wished to uphold our Highland heritage and programmed this contract on a “no Sunday” basis’. At the luncheon after the ceremony, further praise came Willie’s way and he replied, saying that it would be vain of him to try to conceal his pride over the firm’s achievements. Their earth-moving fleet, he said, was the best in Scotland, if not in Britain and in the next three weeks the entire operation would be moving to South Wales to fulfil an excavation contract.17

Map 6. Conon

Plate 33. The pipeline following the Kerry river, Gairloch, from the reservoir to the power station, May 1951 (NOSHEB).

 

The first contract completed by Logan for the Hydro Board had been the construction of the small scheme on the Kerry Falls near Gairloch. ‘I was with Halcrow the consulting engineers,’ said Roy Osborne. ‘Outside I would guess there were sixty men working at the peak. The concrete was mixed by hand and placed by wheelbarrow. There was a weir at the top of the glen on the loch, and then a canalised river to the intake weir, and then a pipeline down to the power station. The top weir was just to give a little impounding to the loch. The lower weir was to create a catchment pond to guide the water to the pipeline. It took between two and three years to complete.’

The mainly local workers lived in ex-army wooden huts on a site close to the intake weir. This camp was run by Willie Logan’s wife, Helen, setting a pattern for the years ahead. Roy Osborne and his fellow junior engineer lived in digs at Badachro: ‘It was my first experience on a construction site and, coming from the sinful south, I was ready to work on Sunday, but the men would look the other way. They weren’t rude but they wouldn’t acknowledge me. It wasn’t oppressive but it was quite noticeable.

‘We started at 9 and finished at 5. I suppose we had weekends off but in the office we worked every Saturday morning. For entertainment we just went walking. Occasionally we went to the pub at Shieldaig. I met my wife in Gairloch. There were dances. The resident engineer, who smoked a pipe, went to this dance in the Gairloch Hotel, and a box of Swan Vestas went off in his pocket. It caused quite a commotion but no harm was done. The manager came up and said “I’m very sorry but this is a private dance”, took us back to his rooms and poured us a drink.’

The Kerry Falls scheme opened in May 1952. Small it may have been but it had its share of problems. The workers cut the main telephone cable to Iceland, which happened to run down the glen, and a GPO engineer was sent from Dingwall at as high a speed as possible along the single-track road along Loch Maree. The excavation for the intake weir uncovered a pothole in the stream bed that proved to be some twenty feet deep and took several days to empty of gravel before it could be filled with concrete. The route of the pipeline down the glen was altered to save some trees which later blew down anyway. The sections for the pipeline were made in Motherwell and welded in situ, after being lined with bitumen in a machine designed for the job by Willie Logan himself.

Roy Osborne and a colleague walked down through the completed pipeline from the weir to the power station, crouching in the four-foot diameter space. When they were inside, Roy thought he could hear the rushing of water. At the end, the other man said he too had heard it. Neither had felt able to mention their apprehension that they were about to be caught in a flood.

In the decade after 1949, the Hydro Board awarded contracts worth over £8 million to Logan. A quarter of this sum formed the firm’s wage bill, a measure of the contractor’s importance to the Highland economy.18 Willie Logan admitted that the first contracts from the Hydro-Electric Board had given him the experience and the self-confidence to expand the firm; the same self-confidence, he asserted, had been ‘also released in hundreds of my fellow countrymen’.¹⁹ It was said that Tom Johnston had originally invited Duncan Logan Ltd and R. J. MacLeod, another contractor with a strong Highland connection, to tender for Board projects to counteract what was felt to be overpriced bids from the big southern contractors: Roy Osborne remembered handling tenders in the offices of Halcrow the consulting engineering firm and finding that bids from Duncan Logan Ltd and R. J. MacLeod were between 40 and 60 per cent less than the others.

The competitive pricing paid off. Throughout the early 1960s, the Logan operation included contracts for the Gartcosh strip mill, the Dunbar cement works, the new Ness Bridge, a NATO fuel dump on Loch Ewe, the Corpach pulp mill, the Tay road bridge, and innumerable roads and housing schemes. As the head of the enterprise, Willie’s bulky, square-cut, bald-headed figure often featured in the Scottish press, usually as the man from the Highlands who was scooping all the big boys from the south for lucrative and prestigious contracts.²⁰

Roderick John McLeod, or ‘RJ’ as he was almost universally known, was actually born in Canada but he lived for a while at Elphin in Sutherland, and his mother ran a café in Ullapool. After his Highland childhood he worked for the Aberdeen contractor William Tawse Ltd before setting up on his own, with a headquarters in Glasgow. ‘RJ had been the resident engineer on the road along Loch Lomond and through Glencoe before the War’, said Roy Macintyre, ‘and later he started his own firm. He was probably on a par with Logan although a bit smaller.’²¹

The Hydro Board’s first projects to be completed were two small, local ones – at Morar, and at Nostie Bridge near the Kyle of Lochalsh. They came into operation on Tuesday 21 December 1948 and made electricity available to the country between Mallaig and Lochailort, and to a large area of Wester Ross and a part of Skye. Catherine Mackenzie, the widow of a crofter, performed the opening ceremony by throwing a control switch on the turbine at Morar. ‘Gun tigeadh solus agus neart dealan dhionnsuidh gach croit’ (‘Let light and power come to the crofts’) she was reported to have said in Gaelic, and she added ‘Electricity means new hope for the Highlands. Thank God for it!’ Tom Johnston was delighted and told the press it was an end to the old argument that oil lamps were good enough for the crofters.²²

The large schemes took several years to complete, bedevilled as they still were by labour problems, shortages and bad weather. Two years after Mrs Johnston had fired the shot by the River Glass, work was progressing in Glen Cannich and Glen Affric at a rate that allowed prediction of completion by the end of 1950. (It was, in fact, to be another three years before the Duke of Edinburgh was to perform the official opening.) The original intention to build two power stations had been changed in favour of only one, at Fasnakyle. In June 1949, the great dam at Mullardoch, the largest the Board was to build, and the Benevean dam were slowly being assembled; two-thirds of the tunnel between Mullardoch and Benevean had been excavated, and the other main tunnel, from Benevean to Fasnakyle, was 80 per cent complete.²³

‘First week in December 1948, I started at Mullardoch dam as an electrician,’ said Don Smith. ‘I took a bus from Inverness to Beauly, another bus from Beauly up to Cannich, and hung about there waiting for a lorry going over the hill. I sat in the front with the driver. First week in December. It was snow and sleet, and it was misty, and I saw that camp with the smoke coming up from the cook house, and all the old Nissen huts, and thought what the bloody hell am I doing here. I’d never seen landscape like this before, at least not to live in it. We’d sailed up the west coast [in the Royal Navy] and been in the sea lochs, and we’d seen the hills, but I’d never seen anything like Mullardoch – the hills closing you down.

‘The road up was single track, not finished, tarred in places. Anyway I got in, got to the camp, got a bed and a locker in a hut, and there were twenty-two or twenty-four beds in that hut. From the camp up to the job was about half a mile, you had to walk up in the mornings, up a dirt road, it was a bit coorse. I was there from December until the following November.’

One of Don’s first jobs was wiring the crane and derricks on a Bailey bridge, built on stilts across the back of where the dam was going up. The wires were fed from a main cable running across the bridge, from a big iron junction box. This was not an easy task: as was common in the early days of the dam building, much of the material was old, ex-War Department stock, bought by the contractors on the cheap. The main cable, four inches in diameter, was stiff and required several pairs of hands before it could be made to feed into the junction box.

One of the characters Don got to know was a short Glaswegian called Tommy Cowie, ‘the best wee public-works man I ever saw’. Tommy asked Don where he had worked before. ‘Balfour Beatty.’ ‘Who was you with at Balfours?’ ‘My boss was Ernie Wells.’ ‘Ernie Wells,’ cried Tommy, ‘I knew that bastard twenty years ago at Spean Bridge and Tummel Bridge on the schemes, a Newcastle man. He was the engineer with Balfour Beatty, and then he got moved to Loch Sloy when that started.’ Don learned some useful things from Tommy, such as the Glaswegian’s habit of finding his own jobs. ‘He used to come into the workshop, pick his bag up, leave his haversack with his lunch, and he was away,’ Don recalled. ‘I would say “Where are you working?” “Oh,” he would say – and the chargehand used to stand there at the bench with his hammer, “I just look for jobs. They say where are you, Tommy, and I say I’m at the crusher or I’m at the sand plant, or over at the tunnel, or so-and-so. You see?” He never had a job given to him, he used to skive off, he did work, he knew what work needed doing and he’d move around and get what he wanted from the store.’

Plate 34. Tom Canning, from Ireland, checking a Bugee pump in the Mullardoch tunnel (Don West).

Plate 35. The completed Mullardoch dam in winter (Don West).

Plate 36. Don West at the wheel of a Dodge truck (Don West).

Plate 37. Hans (surname unknown), a German, in an old Chevvy at Mullardoch (Don West).

 

Don took a cue from Tommy and, after about two months, became a roving electrician: ‘I just looked for jobs. The crane was nearly ready, so I went in and wired it. The fitters got to know you; they’d say “Hey, Donnie, there’s a wee job here”. There were four electricians in all and a couple of labourers but, at periods, I was the only electrician, with a couple of mates. Tommy Cowie left. He went down to the Tummel Bridge scheme but he wrote to me and said why don’t you come down here. I was with Cochrane, on two shillings and elevenpence-ha’penny per hour at first, but then we had a rise to three shillings and a penny. Tommy said, pack that job in, come down here and work with me, I’m with Carmichael – far more money, more hours and a bonus.’

When he was working on the Trinafour dam, Don shared a cubicle with a young Irish lad called MacMullan. They worked in the tunnel on opposite shifts: ‘I did twelve hours, he did the other twelve. Now there was always work to do. After a fortnight or three weeks I says to him, “What the bloody hell’s this? I’m doing all the work”. “Ah, you can do it,” he says. He was a chancer, a nice mate, a good lad, but he wasn’t an electrician. He had been a mate at Sloy. “Ah well,” I says, “if you start to do a bit more, I’ll leave instructions for you. You can soon pick up the job.” Anyway, I was on days and doing all the bloody work – and then there would be half a salmon left for me. MacMullan was going off poaching with gelignite and a slow fuse. Now the man in charge of supplying explosives was scarred all around his face, the result of an accident with fuses in the pits. Anyway, him and MacMullan got on well, and I used to get my bit of salmon. I used to cook it on a wee electric fire in the cubicle.’

At Tummel Bridge, the electricians had to look after the 120-volt Oldham batteries used to power the electric locomotives in the tunnel. Heavy awkward things, the batteries needed recharging and topping up with distilled water every day. A charged battery lasted for eight hours and recharging took as long – on top of that was the lugging of the things, as long and as wide as a table, on and off the locos. Distilled water in quantity was not an easy commodity to come by in the Perthshire glens and a distillation apparatus was acquired to provide a continuous supply. This apparatus resembled an outboard motor attached to a container and produced distilled water at the rate of one drop per second – it took twelve hours to fill a carboy. Once it went missing, said Don Smith; it had been ‘borrowed’ to assist in making moonshine whisky.

Iain Macmaster worked as an electrician on the Lochay scheme. ‘I looked after one site that branched out into two. From that site you could go right through the hill and come out on the other side once the tunnels had been made. Initially there was an electrician on every site, and sometimes a day-shift and a night-shift man, and I met up with my opposite number at the change over and we had a wee briefing. I did most of my work at the weekends – you got a clear run, after the tunnelling men went off shift at midday on Saturday and sometimes it would be Sunday night before they came on. As they tunnelled, we followed, extending the lights and the fans, and the best opportunity to do that was at the weekend. In the tunnel there would just be myself and a mate, and fitters who were taking the same opportunity to put in air ducts.

‘You could say the standards were rough in comparison with today’s but advances were being made all the time and we had hard hats. Usually the engineer and myself had electric miner’s lamps. With the tunnellers on bonus, if they had power, light and fans, you were a good boy – if they didn’t have any one of these, comment would be coming your way. I used to go in there on shift at 8 o’clock on a Monday morning, coming off at 8 on Monday night, going on at 8 on Tuesday morning and coming off at 6 on Saturday morning. Today that would not be allowed. By that time on the scheme the other electrician would be down about the camp to cover other sites, and the tunnel boss would say “I need you tonight because we’re concreting, and if that power goes off I’ve got thirty men idle”. There were plenty of blankets up at the tunnel and it was a case of “we’ll get you if we need you”. This happened on a fairly regular basis. At the head of the tunnel, there was a wee Red Cross room, hence the blanket, and some workshops, where I would sleep. Very often I wouldn’t be called on to do anything.’

Plate 38. Engineering and office staff of John Cochrane & Sons at the office building at Fasnakyle, December 1948. Mairi Stewart is third from the left in the front row, and Sybil Davidson is second from the right (Sybil Davidson).

 

 

Archie Chisholm left school when he was fifteen and after working with his gamekeeper father for a time as a gillie decided, in October 1948, to try for a job on the Glen Affric scheme. ‘I was interested in engineering,’ he said. ‘I knew one of the chaps there, the head engineer, Malcolm MacNeil, and I wrote to ask him if he would take me on as an apprentice. I started working as an apprentice fitter, gopher, making tea, and washing engine components with diesel or petrol, just a general run-around. That was a real experience for me, a naïve glen boy thrust into this very cosmopolitan environment. There were people from all over the world there. I was still staying at home and taking the bus up every day. They tried to employ as many local people as they could, [but] there were Poles, Lithuanians, Irish, and Canadians who had married and stayed on after the War (they had come over in the Forestry Corps), and also Maltese – just a tremendous mixture of people. Of course there was the usual overspill from Glasgow of engineers and marine engineers. I got a wealth of experience from them. I was lucky to serve my time with Davie Main from Banff who had been a first engineer on the Stirling Castle – what he taught me was tremendous. Of course, Cannich camp, built on a wartime basis by James Laidlaw from Glasgow, was over-lavish for that time – there was a barber shop, a shop, a club, a cinema and dance hall. Everything was on a grandiose scale. There were some 2,000 men in Cannich and Mullardoch, with some real characters among them. The five years I spent there was the best education any boy could get. It made you streetwise and worldly wise.

‘On the first day, I was told to report to the workshop, a huge ex-RAF double hangar where they had their plant, with railway lines running in, and a big Motor Transport place where they did the lorries. The uniform on the scheme was a donkey jacket and a pair of welly boots, and I was told to go to the store to pick these up. A white donkey jacket, well, off-white, in a blanket material, was for ordinary workers, the staff got navy blue ones. Where they got them from I don’t know, but I couldn’t get one to fit me – it was too long, but that didn’t matter. It was all ex-WD stuff, even the plant – Cochrane must have gone to the yards and bought it all up. For going over the rough terrain they had Willys jeeps, still with the [US Army] star on the bonnet. Cochrane’s colours were maroon and gold – but you could still see the star through them. All the engineers had a jeep. The firm also used Chevrolet four-wheel-drive lorries, ideal for the job. The narrow roads were difficult, tarmacadamed but narrow and dangerous.

Plate 39. Archie Chisholm beside a contractor’s lorry at Cannich (Archie Chisholm).

Plate 40. A group of apprentices on a jeep at the Cannich work camp (Archie Chisholm).

 

‘There were always pranks. Especially in the smiddy. Kevin Gillespie from Donegal and Willie Miller from the Glasgow shipyards were both characters. Kevin and a Canadian, Elmer Turner, were blacksmiths and worked together on two anvils. Kevin used to fry steak, bacon and eggs on a shovel. There was another man from Glasgow, Tommy Lennon, who was a piper. He was teaching Kevin to play the chanter but Kevin didn’t seem to have the puff to keep the instrument going. They rigged a wee air pipe from the smiddy bellows to the chanter and then you would hear “The Boys of Wexford” playing away. We often had to make rails up for the tunnel, and level crossings. It was all riveted together. You would be working away quite happily and all of a sudden you would feel something burning in your pocket: somebody had slipped in a hot rivet. I was young and full of pranks myself then, and it was sort of tit for tat. As the only apprentice in the shop, I was always the tea boy. On the day I came I was presented with this half-five-gallon drum with a wire on it: this was for the tea. I couldn’t believe this at first. I had to fill it with water, take it through to the smiddy fire, boil it and put the tea in. I hadn’t much idea how to make tea and put in a whole packet, and poured a tin of condensed milk in on top – it was like tar when it came back. I got a right rollicking. Every Christmas they put round a tin for me, and I came away with a big collection; they were very generous. There were about thirty men altogether in the shop. They repaired all the plant, did all the welding, repairing pneumatic tools and compressors.

‘For my first two years I was working under an Aberdonian, Jimmy Thompson, who was in his fifties at the time. We were working, just the two of us, late one Friday on a rush job. When we had finished Jimmy decided to wash his boilersuit and sent me to the petrol pump to get some red petrol (you simply helped yourself to this). I put a copious amount into a tub used for cleaning engine parts, and Jimmy duly got down to his washing. When he had finished he hung the boiler suit up to dry, looking well pleased with himself, and then proceeded to roll a cigarette. He turned to me with his usual “Right, ma loon” and struck a match. There was a mighty flash and up went the petrol in flames to the roof of the hangar. Apart from his bushy eyebrows getting a singeing, he was okay – but worse was to come.

‘We both raced out of the inferno to get help but, unbeknownst to us, an electrician had just been renewing the spotlamp bulb above the workshop door and had left the extension ladder leaning there. As we pulled back the workshop door, the ladder came crashing down on Jimmy’s head, knocking him cold. Here I was – the place on fire and the only help lying unconscious with a gashed head. I raced to the garage about a hundred yards away and luckily some of the mechanics were still working. We mustered as many foam extinguishers as we could lay our hands on and managed to put the fire out but not before quite a bit of damage had been done. By this time Jimmy had come round and was taken to the sick bay to have some stitches.’

Archie formed a close friendship with the Canadian blacksmith, Elmer Turner, who had come to Scotland during the War and had married and settled in Glen Urquhart. ‘He was a real craftsman, and a man of the wide open spaces, a big strong man. I loved to listen to his stories. He restored an old flintlock gun, making all the parts, and got it working. He made the lead shot out of molten lead on the forge, and shot crows. He used to walk at night back over to his home in Balnain from Cannich – a fair distance. One night he was going home and he shot this hind on the way. He gralloched it, cut it up, stuck it over his head and carried it all the way home. You can imagine the state of his face with the blood coming off the carcass. He stopped to take a rest and somebody came along the road, and thought he had been in an accident. Elmer explained what he’d done and added “I haven’t been idle, have I?”’

March 1951 saw publication of more hydro-electric schemes for the Highlands. The £8 million plan to build a dam on Loch Shin, to be the Board’s most northerly hydro-electric project, was revealed at the beginning of the month; and some ten days later the third phase of the Conon basin schemes, the construction of a £3.5 million dam on the Orrin river, was announced.24

Map 7. Shin

 

Power from Glen Affric flowed into the Highland grid for the first time on 19 July 1951 when Sir Hugh Mackenzie switched on the first of the three 22,000 kW turbines in the Fasnakyle power station. The completion of the Benevean dam and successful preliminary tests made possible the historic moment, although its significance was tempered somewhat by the fact that the dam at Mullardoch was still to be finished and the turbines could not yet be brought into full operation.25

It was over a year later, in October 1952, that the Duke of Edinburgh performed the final opening ceremony of the Glen Affric scheme. Under a sky threatening drizzle, the Duke drove from Balmoral to Fasnakyle and arrived too early, a little to the discomfiture of the officials. He walked through the cheering crowd, entered the camp dining room through the wrong door and approached the Lord Lieutenant of Inverness-shire and Tom Johnston from behind.²⁶

Don West worked on an addition to the Glen Affric scheme about two years after the official opening: ‘John Cochrane and Sons had done the main job, and then as an afterthought by the Hydro Board, which was pretty clever really, they contracted Reed and Mallik to install a turbine in the tunnel between Loch Mullardoch and Loch Benevean to generate power from the water flowing down. [After the inlet to the tunnel had been sealed by a concrete wedge and the water had drained out] they sank a shaft ninety-six feet straight down and about thirty feet in diameter to build the turbine. It was a tremendous job. They bored down through the rock ten to fifteen feet at a time, took out the spoil in buckets with derricks and tipped it over the edge of the dam. It took nearly two years. The vertical section probably took the best part of a year, nine months anyway. The buckets were loaded by hand. Once they reached the bottom they installed a lift – it’s still there – and the equipment for the turbine was taken down. The firm of Gilkes and Gordon did the pumps, and the turbine was by English Electric. The turbine sits on a bed of concrete above the water tunnel.’

The turbine successfully installed, the next job was to remove the wedge from the tunnel inlet to allow the water to flow once more. The wedge, a huge plug of concrete, had been sealed with blue clay from Invergordon and was held in situ by the pressure of the water in the newly enlarged Loch Mullardoch. ‘In the two years on the turbine job’, continued Don West, ‘everything had gathered at the wedge and, when the turbine was ready, the wedge would not budge. A team of divers who were there to hook it to a crane tried for two months, working in the dark, getting nowhere. We had constructed a raft for them from four barges joined with twelve-by-twelve timbers, with a platform for their compressors, winches, pumps and so on. The only thing to do was to empty the loch. The engineer started to undo the bolts on a six-foot diameter valve at the bottom of the dam. There were over sixty one-and-a-half-inch bolts. Soon the water was gushing out, up in the air like a fountain. You can imagine the pressure – there was ten miles of water behind the dam, remember – and eventually he couldn’t turn the bolts any more. Some more equipment was brought up from Cannich and they finally got the thing undone. Did that water not pump out of that dam? It went 100 feet before it hit the deck. There wasn’t an awful flood as the outflow was restricted and the catchment area could cope, but it took weeks for the dam to empty. When it did, and we saw the wedge, we realised the divers would never have cleared it – there were trees, sand, silt, even dump trucks in there.’

Plate 41. Jimmy Speed, from Invergordon, in the Mullardoch tunnel during the waterproofing of the concrete before installation of a generator (Don West).

 

The team of divers who tried in vain to free the wedge were an interesting microcosm of the multinational nature of the construction world – headed by Tich Fraser,27 they comprised two men from Liverpool, one from Harris and one from Jamaica. ‘Johnny Dailey was the Jamaican,’ said Don West. ‘An out and out gentleman. I used to drive the men to Inverness on Saturday, leave some of them, and pick them up on Sunday night to take them back to the camp. I said to Johnny this Sunday, come on down for a run, man, to my home in Struy. Johnny was learning the guitar at the time and I put on this Slim Whitman record, he was very popular then. This was great stuff. Then Johnny went away to get married and, while he was away, we decided to gather some money for him for a present. We must have collected about £35, there weren’t that many of us on the turbine job. Johnny came back and showed us the wedding photos – he looked like a film star. Then we gave him the money, and the poor man was crying, he’d never got anything like that in his life. He was so taken.’

The next big scheme was published in 1953. Work had begun on the first phase of the Breadalbane scheme in 1951, with the start of construction of the Lawers dam on Lochan na Lairige on the south-west side of Ben Lawers to feed the Finlarig power station on Loch Tay, an arrangement that is incidentally the one with the highest head (1,348 feet) of all the Board schemes; but it was now proposed to add to the scheme by constructing in the Perthshire glens a further five dams and six power stations with associated tunnels and aqueducts, in a complex arrangement that sprawled across three watersheds. The overall cost was estimated at £15 million and the output at 304 million units of electricity per year.²⁸

In 1953, Ronald Birse and his family arrived in the village of St Fillans. Growing tired of commuting between Biggar and Edinburgh, where he worked as an engineer in the capital’s water department, he had applied for a job with Sir Murdoch MacDonald and Partners, the consulting engineers overseeing the construction of the St Fillans section of the Breadalbane scheme, at the east end of Loch Earn.

The quiet little village found itself suddenly at the centre of a great deal of activity, possibly the biggest thing to happen locally since the coming of the Caledonian Railway in 1901. ‘We must have doubled or quadrupled the population in St Fillans and Comrie, where most of the engineers were billeted or lived,’ said Professor Birse. ‘There was a camp for most of the labourers and tradesmen, in a place called Twenty-shilling Wood. I don’t know why it had that name but it’s still called that – there’s a caravan site there now. Just outside Comrie. The camp probably had, I’m guessing wildly, somewhere between five hundred and a thousand men, living in wooden huts.

Plate 42. Assembling a turbine in the generating hall at the St Fillans power station (Perth Museum. Copyright: Louis Flood).

Plate 43. The Gaur dam nearing completion, and a shuttering joiner showing a good sense of balance (Perth Museum. Copyright: Louis Flood).

 

‘We established contact early on with villagers because my wife and I had one child and were expecting another one, and we stayed in a caravan in the garden of a lady’s house in Comrie for a few weeks until we found a house to let in St Fillans. Through this lady we met other locals and we certainly got to know quite a few. The residents of St Fillans before we arrived must have been hardly 100 – it was really a tiny place. It had a country dance society and there were two, if not three, hotels. It had a little tourist trade, but so much less than it is now. It’s a watersports centre now, with hundreds of boats. There would have been a few boats then but nothing like now.

‘We were quite isolated up there, though not as much perhaps as the engineers and workers on the remoter schemes. I suppose it was the nearest scheme to Edinburgh. We were thrown on our own resources for entertainment. My oldest daughter was born in 1952, so she was two when we went up there, and about four and a half when we left, and by that time she had acquired a remarkable vocabulary through playing with some of the other kids round about. The father of some of them was the tunnel boss, and we were amazed at the colourful language our daughter came out with.

‘There were probably eight or ten engineers and their families in St Fillans, a similar number in Comrie, and a few in Crieff. I can remember one engineer, a foreign chap, he stayed in a cottage halfway between St Fillans and Comrie. To some extent we were all doing the same job but on different parts of the scheme. There was a superintending engineer and three resident engineers who had overall charge of a big area, and there were section engineers, of whom I was one, who had direct, hands-on responsibility for a particular part, in my case the underground power station. There were several section engineers on the dam, I suppose, and some on the tunnels. As resident engineers, employed by the consulting firm, we didn’t have much direct contact with the labour force. In fact, we were not supposed to interfere with the labour force at all. If we had any observations to make, we were supposed to go to the contractor’s engineers.

‘Quite a number of the consulting engineer staff were English, because Sir Murdoch Macdonald had his office in London. Sir Murdoch had made his reputation in Egypt with the Aswan Dam. He was a venerable old chap by the time I met him – he came up two or three times to the scheme. The engineers were mostly young men, in their late twenties or early thirties, and for some it would have been their first big engineering job. So we had the two sides – the resident engineering staff and the contractor’s engineering staff. The Hydro Board didn’t supervise schemes directly themselves, they employed consulting engineers for each scheme.

‘We were overseeing the contractors. We didn’t have responsibility for the construction but we had responsibility to see the work was done according to the drawings and specifications. The contractor’s engineers had the significantly more difficult job. We were pampered in a way: emergencies apart, we worked by and large 9 to 5, or 8.30 to 6, but the contractor’s engineers, if they were working shifts in the tunnels or other sites, had to be on duty or on call all the time.

‘We also did surveying and some of the setting out. The early work involved establishing base lines because we were working in country that hadn’t been surveyed in detail. You had to do your own kind of local ordnance survey. I remember we set out a base line with very accurate theodolites and steel tapes, and tried to maintain an accuracy of a millimetre in 100 metres. I can’t remember the actual accuracy we achieved. We had to project from that baseline, which was probably of the order of half a mile long, ten miles in one direction and five miles in another with as much accuracy as we could achieve. We tramped across the hills a fair bit. I was a lot younger and a lot fitter then.

‘We got on well with the contractor’s engineers. Occasionally they might be wary of us but if they were trying to skimp or rush anything they would know what they could get away with, broadly. They could always get away with something but this is what factors of safety are all about. There was a tremendous responsibility on the shoulders of the engineers. They had vast amounts of money under their control, and they were responsible for getting the job done within the time and within budget. As consulting engineers, we had none of that pressure, except that we shouldn’t unreasonably delay things or make things difficult for them. They would have had a real gripe if we had been unusually pernickety.

‘The day-to-day work on the scheme has to be carefully planned. Nobody is going to do anything down the line unless they’ve got clear instructions, so the guys wielding the pick and shovel or drilling to place the explosive have to know exactly what’s expected of them. That information comes from the drawings and documents first of all, and usually the consulting engineer draws up a programme for the works, covering the whole project, in effect a chart outlining the parts to be under construction at various times over the total construction period, which might be three to five years. The contractor would then have to plan it all in much more detail. He had to do it for each part of the work – which gang was doing what where when, etc. It had to be all organised down to the last guy, the last worker.’

Roy Macintyre, as an engineer with Willie Logan on the Meig dam, remembers his dealings with the men from Sir Alexander Gibbs and Partners, the consulting engineers overseeing his part of the job. ‘Each lift had to be got ready for pouring the concrete, a lengthy process in those days. You had to send a note to the consulting engineers to say Lift Number such and such was ready. The consulting engineer would come down to check all the setting out. If you got a sheet back that said it was a quarter of an inch wrong in this direction or an inch wrong in another, or the levels would need resetting, you’d go back and either agree or disagree with him. Then there would be a meeting to resolve the differences and you got the official go-ahead. It was very formal. All the paperwork had to be signed off. I think in later years it became less formal. Sir Alexander Gibbs and Partners were the crème de la crème of consulting engineers, or so we were told, and we did everything strictly according to the book. And then when the concrete was poured you had to be on hand. The degree of precision was probably far greater than was strictly necessary but it was a very good discipline.

‘The consulting engineers also had inspectors, generally more elderly tradesmen, who were meant to do sub-tests on the work, checking the quality of the concrete by testing cubes. As I was a young fellow I was tasked with looking after the making of the concrete cubes. Sometimes, human nature being what it is, the contractor was always making damn sure his cubes passed the test. Some of the inspectors were very diligent.’

Concrete is not very exciting to most people. Redolent of urban utilitarianism, it symbolises the very antithesis of beauty. Yet its properties make it an invaluable building material and most of the dams were built with its grey masses, by the ton.29 As an employee of the consulting engineers on the Breadalbane scheme, one of Ronald Birse’s main tasks was making concrete cubes by the thousand and testing their quality.

‘We took samples and made six-inch cubes,’ he explained. ‘We cured them, kept them in conditions of temperature and humidity similar to those of the dam, tunnel lining or wherever the concrete was, and then crushed them, destructively tested them in a big machine that put a force of seventy to eighty tons on the cubes.’ The factor of safety the engineers were seeking was concrete strong enough to withstand a force of probably 3,000 pounds per square inch at twenty-eight days.

The weather affected the setting, the curing, of concrete. ‘If it is not treated decently in its first seven days, if it is not protected from extremely low temperatures, if it’s allowed to freeze, and concrete can actually freeze in its first days when it has a lot of water in it, that destroys it completely, and it’ll never get any strength at all,’ said Professor Birse. ‘Even if it doesn’t freeze, low temperature will mean that it takes longer to achieve the required strength. In winter, you have to allow for the fact it gains strength more slowly. You daren’t put loads on it, significant loads, at an early age. In summer, you could put a load on it in certain circumstances after three days, in winter it might be seven or fourteen days.’ The need to wait until concrete set properly often caused some argument between the contractor’s engineers, keen to proceed as quickly as possible, and the consulting engineers who wanted things to be according to the specification. The men mixing the concrete were always tempted to add more water as it made the mixture flow more easily but this carried the risk of later segregation and a weakening of the setting compound.

Plate 44. The vertical tower in the centre comprises the cement elevator (the dark structure on the right) and the batching plant (the pale tower on the left) at the Cluanie dam site. On the left can be seen the cableway to convey skips of concrete to the dam. A quarry is in the background and the long, low shed houses a block-making plant (Mitchell Report No. 1. Ronald Birse).

 

Another factor that affects the strength of concrete is honeycombing. In theory, there should not be any but in practice it is sometimes difficult to prevent the grey mass from hardening around pockets of trapped air, resulting in a weak structure. It can also be impossible to spot until it is too late. Later in his career, while he was teaching civil engineering in Edinburgh University, Ronald Birse was at times called on to investigate building failures – and sometimes the failure would be due to honeycombed concrete which nobody spotted at the time. The hydro scheme engineers had no means of detecting it, no ultrasonic equipment, and relied on experience.

Fig. 4. A ground plan of the construction site and work camp for the Cluanie dam (Mitchell Report No. 1. Ronald Birse).

 

‘Honeycombing certainly was not welcome’, said Roy Macintyre, ‘and we always had to take steps to prevent it. By the time I was on the scene, it was better to show any to the consulting engineer and say can we clear this up. In the worst cases, you had to cut out a section and replace it, but these sections were not more than a quarter or half a square metre. I don’t remember bigger areas on the dams being replaced, although there were bigger areas in tunnel linings, which were fairly thin. In a dam the main reason to replace honeycombed patches would be to prevent frost getting in which could disintegrate the concrete. Patching was an acceptable way of dealing with it.’

The ratio of aggregate – sand or gravel – to cement in the mixed concrete is also a crucial factor; the more cement, the stronger the result. Other problems arise from the fact that as concrete hardens it shrinks and generates heat. This rise in temperature in large masses of concrete can be high enough to crack it, and sets a limit on the amount of fresh concrete that can be laid at one time. To allow faster laying, American engineers developed a system whereby they could circulate iced water in pipes through newly laid concrete – the pipes would eventually be grouted up – but this technique was not used in the Highland dams.

Running water posed other headaches for the engineers. Water percolating through the rock lining a tunnel could be a considerable problem. ‘It might have to be caught – channelled by corrugated iron – and then you would put in an arch of concrete, with the water still running above it, and finally drill holes in the lining and inject cement grout to fill the gap,’ said Professor Birse. ‘By and large, water being what it is, you couldn’t stop it, you had to cope with it.’ At least in the tunnels that simply channelled water over long distances, the load on the concrete could be low and, in such cases, usually there would be only concrete on the floor with bedrock sufficing elsewhere.

‘As consulting engineers, we all had our own little patch. As I had developed an interest in the properties and behaviour of concrete, the contractor wanted to test the use of fly ash, the power station residue from burning coal. It’s also called pulverised fuel ash, or PFA. It was described as potsolanic in its properties, a term that comes from the district of Potsola in Italy where volcanic ash is a natural cement. In fact, it was used by the Romans in their concrete.

‘PFA was a waste product of power generation – produced when pulverised coal is burned in steam boilers – and the contractors decided it would be more economic for them to use a proportion of it in their concrete, particularly in the parts of the dam where high strength was not needed and where there were no severe stresses. There was a positive engineering advantage to using it as well as an economic one. The fly ash arrived sintered together to some extent and we ground it on site to incorporate into the concrete. We needed lab tests to find out how it would behave.’

The addition of fly ash made the concrete less permeable to water, although it took longer to set, and it was used in the building of the Lednock, Lubreoch and Giorra dams. Lednock represented the first major use of fly ash in a construction project in Britain. Lednock also has diamond-headed buttresses – the Errochty is the only other Board dam with them – to provide extra strength to cope with tremors along the Highland Boundary Fault that ran almost slap through Comrie five miles to the south.

The Board was always looking for innovations in dam design and construction that could cut the high costs. Mitchell Engineering Ltd introduced the Trief cement process in the building of the Cluanie dam in Glenmoriston in 1953, and also made use of pre-cast blocks on two dam faces. The Trief process, named after its Belgian inventor, Victor Trief, used waste slag from blast furnaces to replace in part the amount of Portland cement in its concrete mix. Lorries brought loads of slag from Colville’s steelworks in Glasgow to the dam site where it was ground into a wet, creamy slurry at the rate of 170 tons a day. This slurry was then pumped to the batching plant to be mixed with sand, aggregate and cement to produce the final concrete. There were many advantages to using Trief cement; it can withstand the cycle of frost and thaw, is more resistant to water erosion and shrinks less as it sets.

The need for economy dictated that the Loch Quoich dam be made by the rockfill method. This technique, in which the dam is built up in layers of locally quarried compacted rubble around a concrete core, needs less cement than the traditional mass gravity design, and very little shuttering. When it was completed, the Quoich dam became the largest one of its kind in Britain and its rubble downstream face reminded one observer of ‘a gigantic drystone dyke’.30 The upstream face was covered in twenty-feet square concrete slabs, between twelve and fifteen inches thick, to create a waterproof skin. The rockfill structure ensured a massiveness not found on more conventional dams: the rubble fill forms in cross-section an immense triangle, 290 feet thick at the base, narrowing to a roadway at the top. ‘The scale of the Quoich operation was incredible back in the 1950s,’ said Laurie Donald who worked there in his first job after graduating from Aberdeen University. ‘It was an American-type operation, especially with plant and equipment, very much in advance of what they had in this country before. Huge machines. The rock was laid in layers according to size and vibrated to pack it down – the ground shook.’ The Vaich dam in the Conon Valley scheme was built with earthfill around a concrete core.

Plate 45. Working in the penstock access manhole on the Cassley section of the Loch Shin scheme, April 1959 (NOSHEB).

 

 

One of the more unusual professions associated with the schemes was that of photographer but on all the construction projects official photographers took series of pictures to record progress. Stanley Mills was one of them and he still recalls humping plate cameras over steep hillsides in all weathers to take photographs from the set vantage points he used to chart the progress of the work. Once his assistant disappeared from sight when he dropped into an unexpected bog hole. On another occasion, at the holing-through of the Clunie tunnel, Stanley crouched behind a row of sandbags with an explosives man as blast and debris roared towards them. Some of the pictures were touched up before inclusion in official Board publications: for example, builders’ huts and scaffolding were painted out and a neat wall and gate inserted in the photograph of the sweeping panorama of Loch Lomond that graced the brochure for the opening of Loch Sloy. Another early picture of Loch Faskally had to be doctored to show a natural, tree-lined shore where only tree stumps and mud existed at the moment the photograph was taken.

Plate 46. Building the Duchally generating station on the Loch Shin scheme, November 1957 (NOSHEB).

 

 

The construction of the most northerly of the hydro projects, the Loch Shin scheme in Sutherland, was officially opened in a ceremony at Lairg on Tuesday 6 July 1954. In keeping with Tom Johnston’s exercises in public relations, buses were laid on to bring spectators from Dornoch and Golspie, and Jessie Murray, representing the fifth generation of her family to have a croft at Drumnahaving, was accorded the honour of firing the first symbolic explosive charge. A crowd of over 1,500 gathered in the bright sunshine to listen to the speeches and the pipe band from Bonar Bridge. The press and television cameras were also in attendance.

A Board engineer was in charge of the catering and some of his men were pressed into service as stewards, handing out drinks and sandwiches. Ben Bentley and some of his pals from Dingwall had come along to set up and operate the sound system but were told on no account to touch the drink until the guests had been satisfied – ‘If you do, your feet won’t touch the ground.’ ‘One of the hydro boys worked out that, once the official business was underway, he could get “a cup of tea” without milk,’ said Ben. ‘He was carrying out these trays of cups, supposedly tea without milk, under their noses. The boss saw the trays with tea but thought nothing was amiss. By the time the thing ended, it was really like Fred Karno’s army. An AA [Automobile Association] man, who was never known to imbibe, this day went daft. We had to get him and his AA Landrover home, and we did it – luckily he didn’t have a call out on the way. His wife said “What happened to him?” and I said, “Oh he just had too much tea without milk”.’

Plate 47. The Creanich access road and camp on the Loch Shin scheme, March 1956 (NOSHEB).

Plate 48. The Loch Shin scheme: the Glen Cassley access road, July 1955 (NOSHEB).

Plate 49. The Lairg dam under construction, March 1957 (NOSHEB).

Plate 50. The Lairg dam under construction, March 1957 (NOSHEB).

 

In his speech at the opening, Tom Johnston regretted that the Duchess of Westminster, the major landowner in the area,31 had been unable to join the celebrations, adding: ‘It would indeed have been significant of a new deal and an augury of brighter days in the north if under the aegis of the Hydro-Electric Board we could have had a woman crofter and duchess landowner on the same platform, cooperating in the same great cause.’³² Johnston referred to the ‘pioneering achievements’ of the Westminster estate and expressed his belief that electricity would bring about a ‘drift north’ of industry and workers. In the meantime the crowd could look forward to the scheme needing 800 workers and the assurance that, for a time at least, there would be the prospect of full employment. In the evening, Miss Murray was invited to the home of a Golspie man to see herself on television.