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| Cousin Sam |
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 Ship building |
Sam sets off early to work on Monday morning. He
has luckily got a job at Rennie’s Iron Boat Builders. He is an apprentice.
Unluckily, it is a slack time for Rennie’s so he is helping the
riveters today. Rennie’s has recently won an order for four lighters.
They are glad of the work, but the lighters are nothing compared to the
warships they built there a few years ago.
The lighters are made from large, flat, iron plates.
The plates have holes all round the edges. Two plates are put side by
side, with the holes overlapping. A rivet
is put in each hole, to hold the two plates strongly together. Each lighter
has more than 5,000 rivets.
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| The foundry |
A rivet is like a large metal bolt, but it has no
thread. First, the rivets are heated in the furnace until they glow brightly.
Sam picks up the red-hot rivets, carefully, one by one, with tongs. Quickly,
he drops them into a leather bucket. He takes the bucket to the riveters.
The rivets are still red hot.
There are four riveters. On one side of the metal
plate, the first riveter skilfully places a red-hot rivet in a hole, with
tongs. The second holds it firmly in place with a block of iron. On the
other side of the plate, the third and fourth riveters noisily beat the
end flat with sledgehammers. The rivet slowly cools. It shrinks enough
to pull the steel plates firmly together.
When the newly-built lighters are completed, they
will carry goods busily between ships and wharves,
in and out of the docks
and up and down the Thames. The lighters will travel slowly on the tides,
or they will be moved quickly by the new steam-driven
tug-boats. The lighters are well built, and they will surely last a hundred
years.
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| The casting shop |
When Sam has moved a 100 rivets in this way, it is
12 o’clock. Everyone gladly stops work for the dinner hour. Suddenly,
the streets are full of people briskly going home to their dinners. Hungrily,
Sam makes his way home through Thames Street and Horseferry Road. It takes
him five minutes to get home to 27 Little Thames Street. He has 50 minutes
to wash his face, and eat a very large plate of Granny’s delicious
stew. Then he must run back to work. If he is even one minute late, he
will lose money from his wages.
Some of Sam’s mates are not at work. They have
been laid off because there is not enough work for them at Rennie’s.
Sam’s friend Bill was laid off. Bill then had no money, so he went
to Woolwich and joined the army. He joined as a part-time soldier. He
will get food and a bed for three months, while he does his army training.
Sam is glad that he is still an apprentice, and so he has not been laid
off. But he wishes he could get back into the engine shop. He wants to
learn more of his trade as an engineer.
He has already learnt how to work with steel, copper
and brass. He has learnt to cast metal parts by pouring molten metal into
moulds. He has learnt how to harden the castings in the forge. He has
learnt how to mill and shape the parts so that they fit together.
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| The shipyard |
Now he wants to learn how to put together the steel
cylinders, the rods and the shafts, the cog wheels and the pistons, the
brass pipes and whistles, and the copper tubes for the boilers, to make
the engines.
If he works as an apprentice for four more years,
Sam can be a ship’s engineer and travel the world. He knows that
some ships built at Rennie’s are in Africa and India, working on
great rivers which run through forests full of snakes and crocodiles.
Sam dreams of working in distant lands. But today, Sam is tired of Greenwich
and tired of doing boys’ jobs like carrying rivets all day. He would
rather be in the army.
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