My first job after I left school at 15 was at a Woollen Mill. This was in 1976, and my job was to assist our "Textile mechanic" operate a machine called a "Carding Machine", that turned wool straight off the sheep's back, into knitting wool.
The carding machine was built in England in 1903, and was about the size of a small house. You would throw the wool straight out of the wool bale, still stinky with burrs and the occasional sheep poop or dead rat into a giant hopper at one end, throw some lanolin oil into the mix and the carding machine would tear the wool apart, and twist it into greasy merino knitting yarn, which I had to thread into rotating bobbins at the other end.
Just before my end of the machine, there were two massive steel rollers, only a couple of millimetres apart, each weighed a couple of tons, were about 2 feet wide by 12 feet long, and if the yarn broke before it went between the rollers, you had to "flick" it back in.
I'd only been there a couple of weeks, but Tim, the textile mechanic was a real nice guy, and he used to pick me up from home and drop me back off in his old Mini Moke, or his hotted up 1958 FC Holden wagon, so I liked working with him, even if the boss was a bit of a jerk.
Anyway, one morning, the yarn started breaking before the rollers, so Tim told me he'd flick it back in, and I had to get around the front to thread it back onto the bobbins. Suddenly Tim screamed to turn the machine off, so I ran over and hit the switch, as Tim was pulling his whole hand out from between the rollers!
We were both in shock, his hand was flat, most of the bones were crushed or at least broken, the skin was split open and his hand was as big as a dinner plate! Suddenly the blood, which had been forced back up his arm returned, and gushed in every direction, and Kay, one of our knitting machine operators, who was also a St John's ambulance officer, grabbed a sweater and bound it around Tim's hand, then we put him in the back of her old Humber Vogue car, and apparently the cops chased her at close to 100 MPH up the main street of my home town, but she didn't stop until she got to the hospital.
They flew Tim to Melbourne where he had hours or micro surgery, but they were able to save his hand, although years later, his ring finger had to be amputated. Tim was in and out of hospital for 3 months for more surgery, so as the machine couldn't be operated, the boss fired me a week after the accident. He was such an arsehole, if he'd just said that he'd have to let me go because without Tim there wasn't much for me to do I'd have been OK with it, but he was really angry with Tim as he was losing money, so he took it out on me instead.
A year later I joined the Army, and I was stationed in Melbourne, when I got a call from an insurance investigator, who wanted to talk to me about Tim's injury. The bottom line was that if I told him that the boss had taken all necessary precautions to prevent such an accident then it was just bad luck and Tim would be paid out by the insurance company, but if I thought that the boss didn't show due care and provide a safe work place for Tim and I, then Tim would still get financial compensation, but it would come out of the bosses pocket. (around $80K from memory, more than enough to buy a new house and a new car)
The good thing was I didn't have to lie, I told him that the machine was ancient and dangerous, that the safety guards were all removed and stacked neatly against a wall in the store room, and to be honest, I was worried about the risks the boss made us go to, to keep the dangerous old machine running. The insurance investigator almost kissed me, and the bottom line was that the boss had to sell the business to pay Tim out. And the new boss sold the old carding machine for scrap.
I'll never forget that incident though, if those rollers weren't greasy from the lanolin oil Tim wouldn't have been able to pull his hand and it probably would have pulled his arm in all the way up to his shoulder (or worse) and it would have taken hours to pull those rollers apart, what a nightmare.......... Cheers, Terry.
