The following day Gwynne Thomas, overall Industrial Manager at Headquarters called me in and appointed me there and then to take over at Tottenham. It meant thirty-five miles to work including some of the worst congested roads in North London. After almost twenty years I was back for the third time and now in Sid King's seat.

Many of the engineers, clerks and fitters were old friends whom I had known when I was there before. The Draughtsman, Jack Riches, used to go to night school at Westminster with me before the War. He had learned to drive after coming back from the Forces in order to have an outside engineer's job, the way to promotion, but one day had a serious crash which left him with double vision for many years. It's all right now but was not much help when he had to go back to the drawing board, having lost his nerve. His passenger was killed. It was not until several years later, in fact while I was back at this time, that we knew where they had been that day. I was visiting Enfield Rolling Mills discussing the forthcoming natural gas conversion when one of their foremen came up to me and handed me their test equipment which had been in his office ever since. He had been waiting for them to come back for it!

Naturally I knew the area very well, except for Harlow New Town. I had been there when it was green fields while gas mains were being laid in the new roads by the same gang with which I had been sandbagging Headquarters the day war broke out. When I now toured it to see what I had inherited. The gang was still there after seventeen years and were pleased to see me. We had a few beers. Harlow was now almost fully developed with about 35,000 people and a large factory area.

Most of these factories had been built so that industry could move out of the congested London areas, similar to what I had been experiencing out in East Anglia, particularly Tottenham and North London. A large part of Tottenham formerly occupied by some of these factories had now been redeveloped, becoming the Broadwater Farm Estate where the West Indian riots had happened. There had always been rows of slum houses there before the War surrounding these factories and it had always been a rough district. Policemen, rent collectors, gas meter collectors and their like had always gone there in pairs for safety.

There was no difference in the work, just more of it and more responsibility. The area was due to convert to natural gas, so I still wasn't free of all the preparation work and the inevitable troubles afterwards. The run-of-the-mill work also had to be done, and I had an experienced department to cope with it. There was another chore - the removal of the whole department to a new site at Barnet, about six miles away, after forty years in the same place.

Under the re-organisation seven enormous sites were being erected, to accommodate rows and rows of desks, at Barnet five hundred of them in one open space. The only separate offices were for the General Manager who had four walls and a ceiling, and six others with walls and no ceilings, in the middle of the noble five hundred, just the roof thirty feet above. They were known as the 'Log Cabins'. Mine was one of them.

I had to organise this for all my engineers and clerks, and at the same time close down my stores and resite it together with my workshop and fitter's accommodation at an old disused gas works at Ponders End (Ponders Plonk) about six miles away thereby separating the two sections after being together for more than forty years. There was a great deal of muttering about this and I had to be a peacemaker. It left me with a split department and was a rather inconvenient arrangement.

After so many years it has been difficult to oinpoint any particular incident which is worth recording in print, but there is something which happened at Ponders End which I shall always remember.

I had a phone call from my Foreman while I was eating breakfast. He said there had been an explosion near the workshop and that it was a bomb. I got there fairly quickly to find Police, Firemen, Bomb Disposal Squad all in possession and saying it was I.R.A. There hadn't been much damage, only windows blown out because the idiots had placed it between the two gasholders (please note - not gasometers - there is no such thing) which had taken all the blast and were completely undamaged except for burn and soot marks. There was a search going on for other bombs, and so they closed the site up. Ten minutes after doing this our Board Chairman arrived at the gates and was refused admittance even though we identified him. He is a short man and was fairly dancing up and down for about an hour, not in the best of moods. We thought it was hilarious, and it somehow reminded me of the time in Italy when two convoys met head-on. The bomb had met an immovable object and so had the Chairman, John Gadd, born in Dunstable.

At Barnet I was a few minutes nearer home, but it was still necessary to leave home before 7.30, and leave the office, if I had been working there, well after 6 o'clock to avoid traffic.

Natural gas conversion came and went, business started to expand just as we had planned for, and I was soon on the move again.