Page 8 - The Life of Chris Turner

A bit More About Me

Name: Chris Turner

Nickname: grumpyoldman

How did I get that name: As I suffer from Anderson’s Disease, I was having a bad day my
daughter Sally said dad you really are a grumpyoldman? and since then it’s stuck, even
got an email address called grumpyoldman.

Like a lot of boys, I hated school “Sussex Road Secondary Modern” it did not help that a
few of the teachers new my Dad who worked at the Judd School “Major S W Turner” and
they made my life hell at times.

You have to remember that teachers actually hit their pupils in those days and there was
very rarely any come back, only ever saw one master removed from school he was really a
very nasty piece of work would hit you and even swear at you, we all where very glad when

he was removed.

We did get our own back on our last form master who also was our maths teacher on the
way out of the last every class we nicked his briefcase & beloved brolly hoisted it up the
flag pole and waited for him to start hunting for it, he went mental when he saw it even
threatened us with detention, we had to remind him wasn’t at school any longer so nothing
he could do☺.

First job British Railways at Tonbridge Depot Priory Road, started as the lowest of the
low a cleaner his meant you did whatever job around the depot needed doing unfortunately
I started end of December 1961 that was a bad winter which went on for a couple of months
one of the jobs was snow clearing the paths and walk ways and then clearing out the pits
plus literally sitting on top of the steam locomotives and having to clean them until they
shone top to bottom.

One day our shed foreman told us were told that for the next week we were going to Redhill
depot as they wanted us to clean the Royal Train stand by engine, when we arrived at the
depot we saw this rundown dirty looking steam engine always remember the number 1834
it took 6 of us 5 days working from 8am to 4pm to get it fixed but in the end it was
gleaming and the Redhill shed master was very happy.

Then the day came when I was told you are going to the training school at Hither Green that
was three weeks hard slog learning all the rules and regulations which I passed but then
there was another two weeks of steam training as Tonbridge was classed as a steam depot &
I was the only one there “passed that”, then came even more hard work two weeks on the
footplate shovelling coal with an inspector always present, luckily my inspector was Fred
Tibbles who I knew from my time as a cleaner. Nearly did not pass made a stupid mistake

forgot to put a red lamp on the rear of the steam engine that was night pilot at Tonbridge
Station got a right dressing down but did pass my exam.

The worse part of the job was when you have a jumper unfortunately I have had two and a
cow who also decided to do it as well, only good thing about the cow was the fire brigade
had to cut it up to remove it from under the engine, so they had half of it and Tonbridge
depot shared the rest of it, my mum thought Christmas had come early when I arrived home

with two boxes of meat.