The Blacksmith’s Daughter by Fay Berry 2013 © – Chapter 10

The Blacksmith Shop —  My brother Graham produced a little booklet describing My Dad and how his blacksmiths business commenced and grew. I am including an excerpt from this booklet to tell my Dad’s story in my brother’s words.
Written by Fay’s brother Graham, 24 June 1996. –
My Dad was a Blacksmith, a manufacturing Blacksmith. Dad was a “Mr Fixit” for farming and industry. My Dad could fix anything. The local council for instance would drop off a whole sugar bag of old pick heads on the Smithy floor and Dad would make them like new by wrapping a length of square section metal along and around each blunted point in turn. He would fire weld and draw down to a new long point with the help of his striker, a boy with a sledgehammer.

When Dad had finished the finished product would be stronger than the original pick. He used to do a similar job on plough shares and he made such things Fish Plates for builders who would set rows of these into concrete to allow wooden posts or beams to be bolted to a firm footing. My Dad first of all worked for a company called Russ Blacksmithing at Glen Osmond and this was the kind of work they were doing when he joined them. Dad turned their business around by looking for products to design and manufacture on a regular basis instead of relying on the seasonal work of traditional blacksmithing.

I was just a small boy at the time and rode my bike everywhere. The hill at Glen Osmond though was a bit daunting and I am not sure that I ever went up there other than on the tram or in Dad’s old Chevy Buckboard. The Blacksmith’s Shop was just up the hill from the Brickwork’s and was my happy hunting ground. I could watch Dad working, explore the Brickwork’s or lose myself in Ridge Park at the back of the Brickwork’s. On Saturday mornings I could earn 3d (three pence) for sweeping the entire factory out. Dad began shoeing horses on Saturday mornings as a way of earning some extra money. I would act as Dad’s striker, drawing down the billet of metal with my sledge hammer into the thickness of metal needed for the horse shoe. As the correct proportions were reached, Dad would take over and shape it around the beak of the anvil. Dad would show me where and how hard to hit by where and how hard he tapped with his hand hammer. Of course he told me the old ”chestnut;” “when I nod my head, you hit it.” Then I would drive the “Pritchel” punch through the hot metal with my sledge hammer to make the nail holes. I started doing this at ten years old. My Dad loved the sound of a blacksmith’s hammer on the anvil, he said it was music to his ears. The “song” of the anvil, he called it. Dad used to use “between hits,” balancing taps that the he made on the anvil, to allow me when I was the “Striker” to gauge the tempo and degree of enthusiasm that I was required to apply to the job.

Dad’s main customers for horse shoeing, were bakeries and dairies, and safety and shoe wear were the main considerations for this job, Dad was well known and highly respected for the quality of his shoes and his skilled fitting. Dad would always make each shoe to the hoof shape of the horse. Most other Farriers at this time would buy machine-made shoes and adjust a general sized shoe to fit the horse. This was never as good as Dad’s handmade shoes. Even if a horse had not worked and not worn out the shoes, the shoes would have to be regularly removed and the hoof cut back and the shoe re-nailed. The nails had to be guided very carefully as a horse’s hoof has a “quick” where new growth takes place. Dad had to be careful not to drive a nail into it or the horse would go crazy.  Driving the nail up and out of about the bottom inch (the horn or toe) of the hoof would hold the shoe and not hurt the horse.

Dad would examine the gait of the horse and adjust the cut of the hoof for correct stance of the horse and when needed, put a “trailer” on the rear of the shoe to stop the horse cross firing or striking the off  hoof (nearer the crown of the road) with the nearside hoof. If the horse’s natural stance caused leg strain by his fetlock being too near the ground Dad would fold down heels of metal at the back of the shoe to make the horse stand to his toes not his heels. Each shoe was burnt onto the hoof after preparation which involved cutting back the growth that had occurred since the last set of shoes and cleaning back the softer centre of the hoof called the Frog and inspecting the base (sole) of the hoof for rot and bruising by stones or other road debris. The cutting was done with a “Knife” which was a piece of flat steel forged into a handle and short blade which was hit with a hammer on the back of the blade and guided across the surface of the hoof, gradually paring back the growth to the desired shape.

The last process before nailing was to burn a hot shoe onto the sole of the hoof, to ensure that the sole of the hoof was flat and an exact fit to the hoof. Dad made final shape adjustments on the anvil if deviations were seen. During the making of the shoe, Dad also used to build up the shoes with electric welding to minimize shoe wear. He used an Abrasocraft welding rod that had been developed to build up tractor parts that rub together constantly. This made him very popular with the Bakeries.

The welding rod used was a dirty rod that flung off lots of spatter during use, each shoe had to be ground off on a high speed grinding wheel prior to final fitting to the horse. The shape of the horse shoe made it necessary to remove the guard on the grinding wheel to get at all parts of each shoe that had to be ground smooth. As Dad was grinding away one day, part of his leather glove got caught between the wheel and the “steady” that held the shoe in place against the motion of the wheel. His hand was pulled down onto the wheel and the shoe went down between steady and wheel causing the wheel to shatter. Pieces of wheel stitched a path right up the wall and straight through the roof of corrugated asbestos plaster. Dad had terrible damage to his hand and broke his glasses. He bandaged his own hand, pulled on a leather glove and finished shoeing the horse before going to the doctor.

My long suffering Mother often had to nurse my damaged Father after just such an accident, because even though he was the most careful of men, Blacksmithing was a very dangerous profession; fire, hot metal and jagged edges were an unforgiving medium. One of Dad’s extra money things that he did was on Saturdays when he finished the horse shoeing was to remove all of the “Swarf” (machine shop waste) and other sweepings, take it to the local tip (a disused quarry) in the Chevy buckboard (utility) and tip it over the edge of the quarry. On two separate occasions Dad accidentally tipped himself over too, as metal waste is very hard to handle and once it starts to move, the lot goes, so look out! He was quite badly injured on both occasions but had to be back at work quick smart.

Eventually I was involved in the part of the horse shoeing function by “clinching” the nails and finishing the hoof. This involved taking over when Dad had hammered in all of the nails and broken off the points with the claw on the special hammer. He would leave the nail ends in the rough and my job was to lift each hoof in turn up on to a stand, a metal tripod and file under the exit point of the nail about an inch up the hoof and hammer the bent over nail flat into the space created and file it flat with one face of the rasp. A show horse would then be painted with a black dressing like shoe polish but cart horse hooves were left uncolored except for a dab of oil and tar to repair a rotted area.

The Glen Osmond district at the “Foothills” was home to quite a large Show Horse population and word soon got around about the new Farrier. In the end Dad had more work than he could manage on a Saturday morning as in the show season these people would usually want the horse re-shod for special shows and Gymkhanas. Some of these horses were high spirited and some downright dangerous. This is where a “Twitch” came in. The Twitch was a wooden shaft about 1″ thick and 1.5 foot long with a hole drilled through one end and a strong 4″ diameter loop of leather thong passed through the hole. The twitch was the equivalent of the ring through the Bull’s nose. The thong was looped over the top lip on the horse and the shaft twisted until it had a firm grip on a large part of the lip or nose. The Twitch was then held by an assistant (me) while the Smith shod the horse. It really worked and was approved by council authorities and the predecessors of the RSPCA. It left no mark on the horse and was very calming. Some farriers were severely injured by wild horses and some of the horses that Dad shod were broken to a halter only and shown as two year-olds. Some really bad horses had to be “Cast” or pulled over on the ground because they were too wild even for the Twitch.

Somewhere down the track, Mr Russ and Dad decided to manufacture Ships Chandlery. This consisted of anchors, grapnels, boat hooks, mast bands and turnbuckles. As part of the manufacturing process, Dad designed oil fired furnaces for mass heating of billets of steel instead of using the forge and the company bought a Pneumatic Power hammer to supplement the mechanical Trip hammers.

This revolutionized bulk production techniques and Dad designed a whole series of jigs to allow rapid production, never seen before in blacksmithing. Mr Russ later took in a partner, a Mr Morris and the firm became Russ & Morris.

During this time, Dad had designed and produced an emergency wheel locking device for use on drays but the unions would not allow their use. Russ and Morris took the bulk production idea a whole lot further by putting in a machine shop and started making builder’s hardware, eventually being taken over by Hazelgroves. Dad did not get on well with Mr Morris and set about starting his own blacksmith’s shop at Frewville further down the Glen Osmond Road.

At this time I was still in High School doing a Blacksmithing and machine shop course, and Maynard Jnr was at Teacher’s College. After Dad had set up the workshop in a garage at the side of a produce store and Wood yard, he decided to take Maynard into the business and to do this he had to pay fees to the Education Department to allow Maynard to be released. After some teething problems, the business found its feet. Dad took a trip to Sydney to get orders for the Ship’s Chandlery lines that he had taken over from Mr Russ. Maynard had a difficult time with the business while Dad was away but managed to keep things going OK.

I think that the Frewville business endured for several years until we moved to Glen Osmond Road Parkside and Dad commenced building the new factory which opened onto Macklin Lane at the rear of the house. Dad of course worked day and night to organise the building of the factory and to save money chose Double Clinker bricks which were reject bricks bought cheap from his friends at City Bricks at Glen Osmond. Maynard and Dad did the roof steelwork and set all of the machinery in place. A feature of the O’Connor Blacksmith shop which reflected Dad’s character was a sign that said “NO BAD LANGUAGE PLEASE.”  Before the factory opened, Dad held a barbecue for all our friends, and Dad and Maynard gave demonstrations of the various Blacksmithing tasks.

As time went on, Dad was able to buy a small Pneumatic hammer that again helped to increase production. Dad still shod horses, made ship’s gear, put towbars on cars made builder’s hardware and did lots of jobbing work. A line that Dad was proud of was the production of Cray Pot hoops. These were hoops rolled in a continuous coil from round section steel and were oxy‑cut into individual hoops that were butt welded at the ends and bundled up and dispatched to the people who wove the actual crayfish traps onto the hoops for SAFCOL, (South Australian Fishermen’s Co‑op) Several refinements on anchor designs were perfected for both local and interstate customers. These included Patent Anchors sand anchors and grapnels.

Around this time, Maynard developed a machine shop to supplement the blacksmith shop. He showed his developing inventiveness by designing the “Maycoson Overlock Load Binder.” This device was a replacement for the heavy and dangerous American design which had for years been used to tighten the chains that held large loads on Semi-trailers. Each end of the chain was secured by a bolt to the running rail of the trailer and the load binder (or chain dog) was hooked into a loop of the chain and tightened. The “Maycoson” model was light, strong, cheap and easy to use.

Maynard and Dad soon found that patents on good inventions were soon subject to constant attack from determined competitors and could only be maintained by taking the patent breaker to court and Dad was not prepared to do this. As time went on, they would manufacture their new product and then when it was under attack sell the patent and get onto some new invention. This suited Maynard particularly well because he was so inventive, as soon as he had completed one invention he would get bored and move onto the next project. The inventions that Maynard Jnr came up with were really quite amazing and he always had “something on the go.” Dad’s best invention, my sister Fay says, was possibly an automatic fish scaler, powered by a normal garden hose. He used to attach the fish to the scaler, turn on the hose, scale his catch of fish without having to use a knife. He used to do this scaling under his lemon tree and this encouraged the worms, so he reckoned he had it all wrapped up because he could use he worms as bait. When he died, his fish scaler got lost in the “chuck out” of all his belongings, so his “fish scaling” invention has been lost to humanity. Such a pity. He never did patent it.

A highlight of their anchor production was a series of large anchors including a 4 hundred weight Kedge anchor which was sent up to the pearling fleet at Broome. A whole series of large anchors and grapnels followed. All the time, Dad and Maynard refined their production methods to include advances in technology including replacing fire welding with clever application of electric arc welding and inspired use of manufacturing jigs purpose built to allow absolute uniformity and continuity in each production run. This resulted in a cleaner stronger product. Maynard used his design abilities on structural steel-work for factory roofs.  Dad had done this for years but Maynard devised ways to make the roofs stronger but using less metal and therefore a lighter roof and less wall support was needed. Using the same technology, Dad and Maynard made several semi‑trailers for special purposes such as transporting motor tyres and motor bodies interstate. The secret of their success in this field was the method that Maynard conceived to pre-stress longitudinal camber in the trailer frame while building overall a lighter stronger trailer.

Dad wanted me to be in the business too and so I attended Thebarton Technical High School where Blacksmithing and Fitting and Machining were taught. Dad attended a parent teacher night and showed how a real blacksmith worked. His party trick was to place an open matchbox on the anvil of the Massey Pneumatic hammer and close the box with one blow of the hammer without damaging the matchbox. When I left high school, I started work at North Adelaide at the William Cox Blacksmith and Wheelwright’s shop. The idea was that I would learn the wheel wrighting side of the trade that Dad had never had a chance to learn in his training. Old Gordon Cox (Son of William) was 81 when I started and planned to commence my apprenticeship after a year of pre‑training. He never made it and had to retire before the year was up and I believe he died shortly after, and so I did not get to commence an apprenticeship.

I worked for Dad and Maynard for a while after this but did not seem to fit in between them as they could never agree on how I should do things. In the end, I wandered off and got a job. I came back and worked again several more times but it never seemed to work. In the end I went out and got a job in another field. It grieved me though because I loved and respected my Dad so very much but we clashed a lot and I guess that’s another story.

Dad and Maynard eventually moved their business to Bowden and started again. They sold the house and factory at Parkside to the fire fighting equipment company that was next door to the house on Glen Osmond Road and the house was demolished and a new Fire Fighting showrooms was built on the site. The Bowden factory reflected the new balance of the business. Mostly machine shop and a smaller blacksmith shop. At this time Dad added a Flashbutt Welder which he liked to operate himself. This welder could be used to buttweld pieces of steel together or to heat and upset a bar of metal to create a Collar part of the way along or on the end of the metal. This was used on the shank of thousands of Rowlocks and made the knob on the end of boat hooks and many other long forgotten tasks. This welder was used also to buttweld the join in the craypot hoops in a flash. Dad liked to work it because as he would say, “Each time I press this button, it is 2 shillings in the bucket and my mind is free to go where it wants”.

My brother Graham wrote this poem about my father and his anvil

The Song of the Anvil, by Graham O’Connor

I loved a Farrier as a lad,
Oft woken from my bed.
By the sweetest music ever heard,
The anvils trilling beat.

My Dad would rise up with the dawn,
And blow to life his forge.
With cheery shout to council wags,
Share an apple with the horse.

I learned from him to love the sound,
Pealing down the lane.
The beat that brought me to the day,
More times than I recall.

He had a language of his own,
The stout grey mare knew well.
As he stooped to do his work,
A love nudge with her nose.

Removing worn out broken shoes,
Rasping cutting care.
She’d hold there steady as a rock,
And have her toenails pared.

By then I’d have my breakfast down,
My leather apron on.
With sledge I’d hammer to the beat,
To punch the pritchel through.

The red hot shoes he’d hold against,
Each hoof fore and aft.
And fill the yard with choking smoke,
To bed the hoof down hard.

Adjust the shape to perfect fit,
Then quench it in the tub.
Tap it on with long curved nails,
And cut the nail points off.

That was when I got my turn,
To start to learn my craft.
Clinch each nail end over tight,
And smooth with file and rasp.

Down the lane would come a line,
Of workers one and all.
With their tall horse every one,
Heed the music’s call.
The Smith is hard at work today,
The music says it all.
The rhythm of the anvil reigns,
Until he’s shod them all.
My brother’s story continues in Chapter 11