Doug Hamilton’s Machine Memories (Part Fifteen)

Continuing our series focusing on the memories of retired plant man Doug Hamilton in his own words and featuring archive photos from his own private collection.

Doug recalls chatting with his old mate Bill Peter’s about the newspaper cutting from back in their Devon days, featuring the big Hough loader with the mini car parked in front of it. “That fella standing by the back wheel, was actually the sports editor for the Plymouth Herald newspaper, I used to drink with him at the Rock Hotel in Yelverton, one day I was telling him about the 400, sounding impressed he said he would come and see it and do some coverage of it in the paper, some days later in the pub he said, “Did you like report?”, I said yes but unfortunately you spelt it wrong, it’s a Hough not a Huff, there was much hilarity about that and some embarrassment on the editor’s part”.

“Anyway, back to Canada, this big fella who used to who used to operate the big Caterpillar 245 had the nickname “Half Track”, but I can’t remember exactly why we used to call him that!”

“One day I scared the operator on this Cat dozer too, there were too many trucks up on top of the stockpile blocking my regular route down, I got bored of wating for them to move, so I just took my loading shovel over the edge on purpose and slid down the pile, I had it under control of course, but the next time I went up there again he shouted out to me, “You’re F*****g mad!” It made me laugh as I was only showing off!”.

“We were working there for Pitts Construction, there were two of us Loading a fleet of 35 ton Euclid trucks one day sat up on the back of the loader having a coffee the other loader operator came to join me “what are you eating “he said“ they are called Scotch eggs would you like to try one?  My mistake every day he would come over and ask have you any scotch eggs, no today it’s pasties and its all mine so off he would shuffle!” 

“From Winnipeg we choose to go West, but I often wondered what our destiny would have been if we had chosen to go East. I say this because Canada is so vast and I’ve only seen I’d guess around 10% of it in the last 45 years!”.

More from Doug in the next instalment here on the Digger Man Blog.