Talking Chances

Yesterday I gave a talk here at CHAS for the Friends of CHAS and members of the public all about Chances and the project. I had spent the week preparing for and promoting the talk and the collection in the press and we had two visits from the Express and Star resulting in two articles (the second is due to be published soon). It was very bizarre to see my face in paper but anything that brings awareness to the collection is great.

As I said at the end of the talk, the most enjoyable aspect of the job so far is to hear the stories and experiences of people who used to work for the company or grew up in the area and have fond memories of the glass works. After the talk, one gentleman told me that he used to work for the firm that supplied Chances with the coal delivered on the nearby canal. Another lady told me about a sweetshop that the Chances used to own and the very strong smell around the site of the glass works that she can still subconsciously smell sometimes when she is walking round the Spon Lane area.

This week I also received a very lovely letter from a lady who used to live by the glass works. She said that she remembered the visit of the King and Queen very well and actually manged to get a very good view of them when she was 7 years old with the other children from her school. Her grandfather worked on the furnaces and his three sons also worked for the company, one of whom lived in the Chances gatehouse. I also received an email from Alan Dean. Four generations of his family worked at Chances starting with his great grandfather who worked there from 1859 to around 1919 and was awarded a long service medal; followed by his grandfather William Timmins, his uncle Roland Timmins and his cousin Anthony Timmins. There is a picture of Alan's great grandfather's medal below (please note the engraving of the tiny lighthouse at the top of the medal).



Thank you so much to everybody who managed to attend the talk yesterday. For those of you who could not make it, please find a link to the PowerPoint presentation that accompanied the talk below.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/25870976/Chance-Brothers-Limited-Friends-Talk

Shedding some light on lighthouses

It's a brand New Year and I am happy to be back cataloguing the lighthouse records. The Chance Brothers Lighthouse Works was set up in 1851 after James Timmins Chance displayed the first Chance Brothers' lens design for lighthouse manufacture at the Great Exhibition. James' work in the field of optics and dioptrics, previously associated exclusively with France, gained the company international recognition and placed Britain at the forefront of lighthouse design and engineering. By 1951, when the Lighthouse Works celebrated its centenary, the company had supplied more than 2,400 lighthouse lenses and hundreds of complete lighthouse structures to nearly 80 countries around the world.

Hyper-radial single flashing light

Chance lighthouse exhibition stand

There is a huge amount of interest in Chance's lighthouse records and we have a large backlog of enquiries about specific lighthouses, which is why these records are the next on my list to catalogue after the employment records. The lighthouse records are made up of financial ledgers and journals; reference material including articles and books about lighthouse manufacture; and the operational and administrative records including registers of drawings and correspondence between James Timmins Chance and various customers and engineers regarding the sale and installation of specific lights. The most voluminous and arguably most interestering records, however, are the sales and marketing records including order books, catalogues, price lists and exhibition material. There are many large books with photographs and illustrations of the lights and apparatus produced and there is a very complete record of lighthouse customer orders from 1850s to 1930s.

Marketing catalogues, plans and illustartion books

I have just started to catalogue and re-package the marketing records and I hope to have all of these records catalogued within the next few weeks so that we can start to answer enquiries and provide visitors with a draft catalogue.

A very Happy Chance-mas to you all!

This is my last week working on the Chance collection in 2009 but before running off to finish my present buying and gorge myself on all of my favourite Christmas food, I wanted to do one last December post to put everyone in the Christmas spirit. Unfortunately, it has been quite difficult to find much information in the Chance collection about Christmas but this week I stumbled upon a description of the annual pensioners' social gathering, which occurred once a year around Christmas time and was inaugurated by the cashier George Lewis in 1905. The pensioners would invite the Directors to tea and one of George Ferguson Chance's or Henry Stobart's sons would impersonate Father Christmas and hand out presents including tea, tobacco and fruit on behalf of the Directors.

I have also found a mention of children's parties that were held by all of the departments of the company. Joyce Taylor, Alan Taylor's wife who is also an ex-employee of Chance, describes in an interview available on the Chance Encounters website how they would put Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy films on in the cinema room for the children and that they also had clowns and conjurers for entertainment.

I would now like to send the readers of my blog some festive Chance greetings and the best way I could think of doing this is to send you all a real Chance Christmas card. I have found a very pretty card originally sent in 1951 with the message 'With the Season's Greetings from Hugh and Cynthia Chance'. The picture on the front of the card and the inscription inside commemorate the centenary of The Great Exhibition which was held in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. This was an extremely important event for Chance as they not only glazed the entire building with their sheet glass, but their first lighthouse optic ever made was also displayed there.

All that remains for me to add to the delightful little card above are my own Christmas greetings. I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and I will be back in the New Year reporting on my progress with the lighthouse records.

It's a wrap

As Christmas is approaching, I thought I should get some present wrapping practice in at work. And before you protest and argue along the lines of "they pay these people good honest taxpayers' money to wrap their presents whilst they should be grafting", you will be relieved to hear that it was archival and all in the name of Chance. Way back in October, I posted a description of the Chance ledgers afflicted by red rot and gradually decaying. I mentioned that John Everall, the conservator at Wolverhampton Archives and Local Studies offered to spend a day showing us how to consolidate these ledgers and slow the effects of the decay down. Well that day was Monday and two of my colleagues and I met John at West Bromwich Town Hall, armed with brushes, newspaper and empty glass jars. John bought along a vat of pva glue and made a very watered down, milky version of the glue to paint on to the leather bindings of the ledgers. Between us we managed to paint all of the worst offenders by the afternoon, helped along by a cup of tea and one or two mini rolls (thanks Sarah!). I couldn't believe how quickly we got through them and they are now clean to the touch and shining like new (well almost). So a big thank you goes out to John for his expertise and Sarah and Keith for their painting skills.

Another big thank you goes to 'origami' Sophie who started to help me with the more fiddly task of wrapping the ledgers in acid free paper and tape. We wanted to wrap the ledgers in a way that enables them to be opened and read without having to remove the wrapping. This meant that we had many fiddly folds to make and as the books are so big the two of us had to wrap each book together to prevent causing any further damage to the books (and ourselves). We managed to wrap an entire shelf of books in the time we had yesterday. There are, however, another 32 shelves left to do so I think we will be wrapping for quite some time yet.

Ouch!

This week I have been arranging and cataloguing the health & safety records of the company. Whilst it never really occurred to me before, it should not have come as much surprise that accidents were a common occurrence in a glass works. As Robert Wilkes, a previous employee of Chance, commented in an article called 'Chance Brothers 1950/1' published in Glass Circle News (N0. 109, December 2006) glass, 'is one of the nastiest, most dangerous materials on Earth'. He describes the hazards faced every day at the glass works from third degree burns in the 'hot end' to 'drawing blood or taking out an eye' in the 'cold end' as the glass can 'fly without warning' when it resists being shaped.

Chance kept an accurate record of the accidents that took place at the works. There is a series of 7 accident books from 1898 to 1942 that record every accident at the Spon Lane Works following the Workmen's Compensation Act 1897. The books read like a grizzly catalogue of every possible injury you can imagine from the expected cuts, burns and severed fingers associated with glass work to the more unexpected head and back injuries caused by falls into the blowers hole and crushed feet caused by dropped shells (a common occurrence in the book recording accidents in the shell department during the First World War). Whilst the accident books only go back to 1898, Chance had been concerned about the health of their employees from as early as 1841 when they set up the Provident Society, which provided benefits to the employee and their family in the event of sickness or death. The first surgeon was appointed in 1843 to prescribe to the workmen, attend to their wives and families source all medicines and appliances for the dispensary and report regularly to the Board. The only records I have found relating to the Provident Society and healthcare from 1841 to 1898 include the surgeons' correspondence and reports up to 1849 and blank application forms and medical cards.

Aside from the individual injuries recorded in the accident books, there is also a newspaper cutting of a report written in the Birmingham Mail dated Tuesday 8th December 1953 about a major incident that occurred at the glass works and surprisingly, this accident had nothing to do with glass. Four men died when the archway of an underground vault collapsed during demolition work of old buildings near the canal. A further nine men escaped with either mild injuries or shock. The accident was considered to be on the same level as a 'war-time incident' and the Civil Defence squad of the glass works, comprising many volunteers experienced at removing bodies from bombed buildings during the Second World War, was called in to help the 'chains of workers [who] removed bricks one by one in a feverish bid to reach [the bodies]'. It took over two hours to recover the first body. It must have been horrendous for the men desperately trying to recover their dead colleagues from the rubble but they persevered as 'cups of tea were bought out from the factory canteen but the workmen stopped only a matter of seconds to gulp it down before resuming their grim task'.

Thank you

I would like to take the opportunity this week to thank everyone who has followed my blog so far. The emails and comments I have received have been overwhelming and I am extremely grateful for your support. When I am cocooned down in the basement, immersed in boxes and papers it can sometimes feel as if I am the only person interested in this collection and I forget about the hundreds of different people who are waiting for the chance to access these records. Which is why I was pleasantly shocked by a surprise visit last week from Toby Chance, who popped in to CHAS to meet me and see how I am progressing. Toby has written a book about Chance's Lighthouse work with Peter Williams called Lighthouses: The Race to Illuminate the World, which will be extremely useful for me when I start cataloguing the lighthouse records next week. Having gone through many of the boxes of records himself to conduct his research for the book, he can appreciate how overwhelmed I occasionally feel by the size and scope of the collection.

I have also been fortunate enough to meet and speak to Alan Taylor and Ray Drury, previous employees of the company who have offered to help me when I get stuck with understanding how Chances operated. Whilst the records provide the textual evidence of how work was done at the company it is very hard to imagine what it actually felt like to work at the glass works. Alan and Ray can provide this insight and it is very interesting to hear their stories. Ray has kindly sent us a copy of an interview he participated in as part of the Taking Chances project in 2006, recording the experience of Chance employees. I have also received other items from followers of the project. Kevin Byng bought in some photos taken in 2004 of Chance Glass Limited in Malvern, which was set up by Chance Brothers Limited in 1946 for the production of syringes made from precision bore tubes and laboratory glassware. This branch is now the only part of the company that is still operational today. Thomas Tag from the USA Lighthouse Society has also forwarded a copy of a photograph taken of Queen Elizabeth during her visit to Chance in 1940, which I previously posted details of. I will post these images on the blog as soon as I get permission from the owners.

If anyone else has any items of interest they would like to share or deposit with CHAS or if you would like to leave feedback about what you have read on the blog please feel free to post a comment or send me an email to laura_brett@sandwell.gov.uk

A job for life?

Whilst working my way through the employment records over the past two weeks I have been struck by the realisation that the well-worn cliche 'a job for life', harking back to the halcyon days of continuous work at the same company, is not a particularly accurate description of employment in the late 1800s/early 1900s. I have been under the impression that we are currently witnessing an increasing number of employees on fixed-term contracts as temporary employment becomes the norm for many people. Yet, Chance's service agreements with their employees suggest that fixed-term contracts have always been a prominent form of employment.

There are hundreds of service agreements amongst the collection, which offered employees fixed-term employment for a period of between one and ten years (subject to three or six months notice being given by either employer or employee). Once the employee's term of service was over they had to write a letter offering their services again for a suggested term and wage and the company would then negotiate with them to confirm or alter these new terms. This means that some employees who continuously worked for the firm over a longer period may have had many service agreements during that time, for example, John Penn's twenty two years of service as a clerk is made up of five service agreements for a period of three or four years each . Permanent agreements seem to have been offered more to the managers and directors of the company.

Nevertheless, this does not necessarily mean that there was a high turnover of staff at Chance. The company has a very strong record of long service employees and these employees were awarded accordingly. For 25 years of continuous employment they were awarded £10 and on completion of 45 years service a presentation was made and the employee could choose from a gold wristwatch, a chiming clock, a camera, binoculars or a barometer. For example, William Grigg received a gold watch and a medal on his 80th birthday in 1916 after completing more than 60 years of service. Which proves that although employees were not often on permanent contracts, they did often have a job for life at Chances.

Long service employees and pensioners at the Chance Pensioners' Party 1945

After cataloguing the main bulk of service records I am now moving on to catalogue the wages and salaries books and records. Once again, it appears that in true Chance style, these are not a straightforward run of records. The picture below shows a sample of the salaries books. Each book is a totally different shape and size and they each records different details regarding salaries, for example, the biggest book contains quarterly and yearly salary payments whilst the smallest book contains notes on salary ranges for different jobs. I will keep you posted on how I progress with this mixed batch next week.