It was in 1826 that two brothers, and sons of Dr

Roots

When someone looks across the fence and through the great roller doors of the Pilkington Australia warehouses at Dandenong they look through the entrance to another world and a glassmaking society made up of many small communities. There’s a furnace that roars like a big beast as its insatiable appetite is fed with raw materials. Its temperature, pressure and material levels have to be controlled as it spews out white hot liquid glass onto a molten tin bath. The glass then forms a solidifying river as it flows across the lake of tin and into an annealing chamber, while glassmakers expertly but calmly manipulate it along its way. It’s a process that cannot be safely stopped by the flick of a switch and so the Glass River flows continuously twenty four hours a day, every day of the year; and the community that looks after the tank, bath, and lehr, is known as the Hot End.

From the Hot End, the Glass River flows into the cutting and stacking environment known as the Cold End. This is a land of green machines, yellow guards, orange motors, grease, oil, and glass being cut, snapped, turned and stacked, and forklifts coming and going. Apprentices are taught that these colours look the cleanest when covered in grease and dirt so, like the grease and dirt, these colours are everywhere. It is also a land of noise. The grumble and grunt of steel on steel as machines move. The hiss and snort of air control and the rumble and roar of conveyors as the glass moves about; machines that squeal as they pick and stack; tables that rise with a hiss from horizontal to vertical; and the sudden bang of an impactor that makes unsuspecting visitors jump as the thump shifts material away from the sides of hoppers. The roar of it all wraps around workers like a warm blanket and they can pick out and identify every noise in the cacophony. This is the environment of the Cold End community.

These are introductory descriptions of just two of the small communities that thrive along the banks of this Glass River and make up the society of glassmakers whose story is about to be told. The social outlook of these communities will continually change. Many of its inhabitants will identify themselves as ‘Pilkington People’ even beyond the boundaries of their working environment; and some who leave or retire will continue to use that identity. As the changing philosophies are imposed onto this evolutionary environment, the balance will shift time and again. These communities will be influenced by newer ideas, techniques and technologies, and the people themselves will change with each new generation. Their hopes and ambitions will also shift with the changing times. The communities will come to include long-term inhabitants with emotional bonds and identities, newcomers with long-term ambitions, others that are itinerant and see no long- term prospects, and still others who may be seeking career stepping-stones to greener pastures.

But the roots of this society are beyond the seas, and the environment in which the Glass River communities will form has its origins at the beginning of the nineteenth century. When we go into the world of the glassmakers and meet the Daves, the Darkys, the Billys and the Blueys, and begin to understand what they mean by the lehr, the tweel, the substance, the cullet, the batch or the buckle, it’s those early times in St Helen’s, England, where the seeds were sown of what they do, in the way that they do it, and in the language that they use.

Pilkington glassmaking began on May 16, 1826 when William Pilkington, in partnership with Peter Greenall, James Bromilow and John Barnes, bought a small, ailing glassworks called the St Helen’s Crown Glass Company and began making window glass for a living. Richard Pilkington later joined his brother and by 1849 the others had retired and the Pilkington brothers were in sole control of the business. However, it was not until each of these two founders had introduced two sons of their own into the business that the firm first became known as Pilkington Brothers.[1]

When the Pilkington Brothers began making window glass it was in single sheets of Crown glass and it is easy to imagine a glassworker prodding at his lump of glass on the end of a long tube to see if it was at the right temperature; then when satisfied, first blowing it into a globe, re-heating it, spinning it and watching it form first into something the size of a dinner plate, then to a drinks tray, and then a round dining-table. After that the glass was broken off leaving a knot or crown in the middle from where Crown glass gets its name. Much has changed but what remains the same is the hot, dusty environment, the pride in glassmaking and that same feel required to make good glass.

By 1841 Pilkington Brothers were making cylinder formed sheet glass followed by rolled plate glass, although still in single sheets[2]. This glass required grinding and polishing of the surfaces, initially by hand and then by machine. By hand, it took some 36 hours to grind the surface of the glass and another 72 hours of polishing to get rid of the surface irregularities.[3] It was a long and labour-intensive process.

By 1856 the Pilkington Brothers had exported their first shipment of glass to Geelong;[4] and in 1879 they set up an office in Melbourne[5] at a time when Marvellous Melbourne was one of the wealthiest and fastest growing cities in the world and the centre of Australia’s long economic boom.

In the early 1920s Pilkington Brothers co-operated with the Ford Motor Company of America to develop the continuous flow process rather than single sheets and at the same time developed a method of continuous grinding and polishing. By 1935 they had developed a twin machine which ground and polished the continuous ribbon on both sides at the same time, giving them the international edge in flat glassmaking.[6]

In 1952, so the legend goes, Alistair Pilkington, later to become Sir Alistair, had a flash of brilliance while washing dishes and noticing the detergent floating on top of the water. Why not make glass by floating it in the same way that oil floats on water? The concept had been claimed by an American in 1902 but nothing had become of it.[7] And maybe the washing of the dishes is a Pilkington myth but it is a fact that Alistair, with the support of Chairman of the company, Sir Harry Pilkington, persuaded the board of directors to invest in long-term research and development, at high financial risk, to prove and perfect the concept that Alistair so firmly believed in.[8]

Boilermaker Arthur Chesworth remembers making an experimental trough, eighteen feet long, nine inches wide and six inches deep. Arthur recalled his experience when visiting Australia in August 1988:

For the first experiments we rolled the glass first then floated it on the tin which we heated with burners under the bath. I remember I worked all Saturday from eight in the morning till midnight, then all day Sunday right through until the Monday. We dragged the glass along with sticks or anything we could find, and Jimmy Sefton, the lehr man, was breaking glass off at t’other end with a wet stick. At that stage, the glass ’ad nowhere else to go.[9]

Young apprentices such as John Dandy and Barry Birchall, would look on as experimental troughs were attached to the side of furnaces and glass bled off and floated on various media to see which was best. The technique of floating molten glass on a bath of molten tin in an inert atmosphere of nitrogen was finally perfected and announced in 1959.[10] It was a simple but brilliant concept. As the glass spread and settled on the surface of the tin it naturally formed itself into a flowing river of constant thickness. By regulating the rate of feed from the furnace, and manipulating the way it flowed over the tin, the thickness and width of the glass that formed could be controlled. The top surface would be perfectly smooth and flat because it would not come into contact with anything, while the bottom surface would be a perfect reflection of the smooth surface of the tin. No more stress and strain problems or ‘waves’ that came with sheet drawn methods, no more expensive, time-consuming grinding and polishing techniques. Now with this revolutionary float process, which they could license to others, Pilkington Brothers could conquer the world.

It took almost a decade and millions of pounds invested before any profit could be made; and when you consider that in the twenty-first century the emphasis is, generally, on a two-year payback for research and development, it is hard to imagine that the float process would ever have happened had that same payback requirement existed at the time Alistair was washing dishes.

In the 1960s the company turned its float attention towards the southern hemisphere, looking to capture the Australasian markets with float glass. In 1972 they formalised an Australian merger with ACI Ltd in order to make better use of the resources of these two glassmaking companies, and English executive, Geoffrey Iley was given the task of overseeing it:

It was a very simple task I was given back in the early 1970s. I was told to go to Australia, amalgamate into one company the two businesses making glass and safety glass there, build a float glass plant, make a profit, find a successor, and come home.[11]

So Geoffrey Iley came to Australia, and soon, at a cost of $26 million, and under the name of Pilkington-ACI Ltd, the new float plant was being built alongside the sheet glass plant at Dandenong. It was to be the fiftieth float plant built in the world and the first in the southern hemisphere.[12] The paddocks became a construction site and to the sheet glass workers this new process being built alongside them became a promised land.

The sheet glass plant was a hot and dirty place, built in 1962, and many people who came there to work couldn’t cope with the environment; but the tough ones stayed. When young Johnny Meyer came down from Ballarat, chasing a girl and money, he came to work at the sheet glass plant, and his first thoughts were; ‘Oh, shit! I’ll be here for a week and that’ll be it.’ But he stayed and made window glass with his mates by melting the raw materials in a diesel-fired furnace, drawing the molten glass upwards and through rolling machines and upwards again to what was known to the workers as the top floor. On the top floor sheets were cut, manually snapped and removed on big sucker frames by the glassworkers. Don Thorrington was in charge of the furnace or tank as the glassmakers refer to it. He had two deputies in Bob Martin and Gerry Parker, and a young assistant, Ken Pennington. His workforce was divided into shifts led by their foremen: Bill Bendon, Ken Day, Noel Thompson and John Daire. The warehouses were overseen by a Warehouse Manager, Bob Bryant and people such as Wes Dirks, Ken Barlow, Alan Hardy and Jim Hardman were his foremen supervising the workers handling the glass. However, in their homes, the talk was of the new float plant that they would one day be part of.[13]

Then the Poms came. They were a team of float glass plant experts, from St Helens, whose job it is to travel the world to oversee the building and start up any new plant being built. The Poms became a title that these experts would wear with pride and to this day they enjoy an enormous respect and admiration for their skills and a warm gratitude for the way in which they freely and patiently pass on their knowledge. Barry Birchall and John Dandy are a couple of young poms who, after finishing their apprenticeships also came from St Helen’s except that they migrated to be part of new beginnings as Australian float glassmakers.

The 1970s was also a time for new beginnings on the Australian political landscape. When the Whitlam-led Labor Party was swept into power after twenty-three years in the political wilderness, it began, at a rapid pace, to apply its philosophies and policies for increased wages, shorter working hours, and equal pay for equal work for women. It also intended to give a leg up to the economic growth of developing countries by reducing import tariffs by twenty-five per cent. These moves would affect the markets in which the new float process would trade but they were issues yet to come as the new float plant neared completion.

While under construction, the new float plant was covered by a swarm of construction workers and was out of bounds to the sheet glassmakers although each shift foreman was able to take his two best men to England to see the float process in operation. It was felt by some glassworkers that the selection of the two best men was more based on who the foreman’s drinking mates were or who were his favourites rather than a measure of seniority or glassmaking potential. Green Shift’s Danny McCormick was one of the lucky ones:

On our shift it was Col Dickens and myself. Col Dickens came after me: we were two late starters. Roy Angelow obviously thought he should have got it ’cause he’d been there a lot longer than me. Alf McConnell should have got it; he’d been there a long, long time, and he didn’t, and it caused a bit of strain... Alf and me have always been decent mates but naturally I didn’t turn it down. In honesty I think it was because I was well in with John Daire…[14]

In 1973, as the sheet glass Israelites waited for the Promised Land to open up, the OPEC countries quadrupled the international oil prices. This caused economic collapse and recession in industrialised nations such as Australia, and more influences that would be felt on the potential markets of the float glass enterprise now in the commissioning stages and about to be introduced to the glassworkers.

Glassworker Dave Birchall was one of the first to be asked to move across to the new plant. He was asked to work alongside the poms and get into the newly built tin bath to clean and inspect it before it was filled with tin. What he saw was a set of structures and a process beyond his comprehension: colour-coded pipes going in all directions; control rooms with rows of television screens; instruments and chart recorders to monitor all aspects of the process; rollers, conveyors and machines not recognisable as glassmaking equipment.[15] The tin bath he faced was a massive structure about the size of an Olympic swimming pool. It was in two halves: one suspended above the other with a five hundred millimetre gap between them. The bottom half of the bath was covered in special tiles while the top half held rows of electric heating elements that looked like rows of protruding cricket stumps. Lying horizontal on a mechanic’s trolley, Dave slid into the five hundred millimetre gap, mindful not to get caught on the heating elements above him, and began picking and poking at the bath tiles loosening any dirt and vacuuming it away along with any cast-off nuts and bolts that may have been left behind by the construction workers. At the same time the gas-fired, open-hearth furnace designed to provide 2500 tonnes of glass per week was being readied for its warm-up.

Someone had the innovative idea to line the bottom of the new furnace with sheets of glass so that at relatively low temperatures the sheets would soften, then melt and seal up the bottom of the furnace protecting it from any breakdown during the warm-up process.[16] For two weeks the furnace temperature was increased slowly and deliberately by the Poms. To warm a furnace up or to cool it down too quickly would cause its superstructure to twist and warp and more than likely crumble into a pile of refractory bricks, so plumb-lines were hung, and measurements taken by the Poms who constantly made adjustments to the giant adjusting mechanisms that are part of the permanent furnace superstructure, there to keep the furnace square as it expanded with the heat.

At 7am on February 4, 1974, Ken Pennington, the young assistant to the Tank Manager, stopped the sheet plant producing. A hole was punched into the side of the old furnace, and the glass bled off. The glass oozed out and the old furnace slowly died. As its lifeblood bled away it was sprayed with water, causing it to granulate and the glass granules were then sprayed into the new furnace to fill it.[17] The main gas burners of the new furnace were lit and filled the new building with a hot roar as the temperatures of the furnace climbed to sixteen hundred degrees Celsius at the hottest points. Tin ingots, looking like anaemic gold bars, were placed onto the now spotless bath bottom and the heat turned up. They melted into a glassy red lake as the rumble of the annealing lehr rollers completed a symphony of sound.

And so it was that the Promised Land was ready to be opened up to its new inhabitants six weeks ahead of schedule. Some of the tradesmen and technical people who were contractors building and commissioning the equipment on the new plant were poached to swell the numbers of the future float glass society; and those from the shut down sheet plant would soon step into the new glass environment for the first time. Many glassmaking and administration communities not yet mentioned would follow and form into bands of people working together on specific aspects of the process and its peripherals.

Overseeing it all would be a Management, headed up by Geoffrey Iley as Managing Director, acting as a government to formulate policy and make decisions. The future beyond 1974 promised difficult but exciting times; times of learning new skills; times of forming new bonds, new friendships and earning trust. It would be an evolutionary process of environment and community building, and how those communities would stand the test of time depended on many factors, some they could control, some beyond their control and some influenced by their roots. It would all come to a grinding halt before the year was out.