Reading an article and it’s photographs are flashing me back to work in the 1970s while still at school and later, the gap year before attending university.

I worked in a different location to the one featured in the article but similar situations in the steel city of Sheffield.

One crazy job, from age 17, was when the electric arc furnaces — creating steel — were switched off for the weekend. We’d climb on top of cranes that tipped scrap into the furnace then carried molten steel to be poured into giant moulds.

We’d clip our safety harness on to the structure, then walk along narrow gantries to brush the dust that had accumulated during the week, shovel it into bags to be carried down.

Here’s a photo of a similar crane in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Art gallery in London, formerly a power station.

It was still really hot, even though the furnace was shut-down and always dusty. By the end of the shift, the dust had worked it’s way through two layers of protective clothing and ingrained into our skin. With sooty faces and light patches (Hanuman style) around our mouth and nose showing the masks did have some protective effect.

Footnote.

It provided insights into how others live that I value to this day. Men and women often working twelve hours, sometimes seven days a week.

It was my first opportunity to supervise a small team.