The town garage.
I wonder how many of us remember the town garage. This was an enormous workshop on the outside of the town where all the town cars, Anglias (hired cars) , Peugeot 404's (the engineers' cars) the Landrovers, Mercedes mechanical horses/trucks, Thames trucks were serviced, repaired, completely overhauled.
Remember this mechanic guy "pikkewyn" Chris Swanepoel?? who used to walk around and had a posture just like a penguin.
Then there was Frank ???? the senior foreman of the town garage who I think left OMD for some reason or other.
We used to raid the old car wrecks , Opel Kapitans for the 6 volt globes for our 50cc buzzbikes.
Remember the buzzbikes. When I started in OMD in '70 the Senior Mine Management had stopped allowing these 50cc bikes to be relicensed, so quite a few of us were riding around skelmpies on unlicenced 50's. I remember the Castle brothers and Paul as well now who had 2 lovely 50's which were always beautifully polished up.
I built up a little Honda 50 from bits and pieces lying around the 'single quarters' and for about 2 years I rode this bike illegally around town and even down to the yacht club. Alas one day old man Selby caught up with me as I stopped at the mess and after a severe warning from him and Inspector Kruger (Jakes' dad) I had to get rid of this bike.
Leon