Cumbrian Lad

Barry Coulton

Description

A Cumbrian Lad is Barry Coulton's fascinating biography, in which he takes readers on a journey from a small West Cumberland village to the Black Pearl pirate ship in the heart of the Caribbean. Telling the story of his exciting, action-packed life, Barry begins by describing his craft apprenticeship at the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant, offering inspiration to those who believe that apprenticeships should still be an integral part of youth development. Barry's biography tells of his experiences at the Murray Firth Outward Bound Sea School and his pilot training with the Whitehaven Squadron of the Air Training Corps. At the age of 24, Barry gave up an aspiring management career to venture into the wilds of Central Africa where his professional life as a control systems engineer took on new dimensions and his astounding adventures began in earnest. Barry has travelled the world and in A Cumbrian Lad he describes the more unusual events in his life. "My biography is the inside story of the Windscale incident, the frightening truth of the Cuban missile crisis, the heroic untold story of a bomb disposal team at Royal Air Force Kinloss and the real story behind the Russian Putsch. All of my revelations give a new perspective on events that have shaped or profoundly changed the lives of many people in recent history," observes Barry. Even in retirement Barry has never ceased to pursue new interests, from becoming a crew-member on the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race to becoming a pirate in Disney's film trilogy Pirates of the Caribbean. In A Cumbrian Lad, Barry shares his adventures on both the Bristol Clipper and the Black Pearl.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 22 avril 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783066568
• Langue: English

Extrait

A Cumbrian Lad
Barry Coulton

Copyright © 2014 Barry Coulton
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,
or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the
publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with
the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries
concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
All characters and events and actions are fictional
and no similarities are intended or implied.
All locations are real but addresses are fictional
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ISBN 978 1783066 568
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Matador ® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

Converted to eBook by EasyEPUB

Dedicated to the memory of my great granddaughter, Mia Lucy
Contents

Cover


About the Author


Acknowledgements


Prologue


Chapter 1: The Early Years


Chapter 2: A Good Old-fashioned Apprenticeship


Chapter 3: Wear the Queen’s Uniform with Pride


Chapter 4: Reaching for the Sky


Chapter 5: I’m the Gaffer


Chapter 6: Africa Here We Come


Chapter 7: Broken Hill, Zambia


Chapter 8: Living on Half a Loaf of Bread


Chapter 9: A Tough and Dangerous Year


Chapter 10: One of the White Tribe


Chapter 11: Coulton Industrial


Chapter 12: Robert Mark Brett


Chapter 13: Flying My Dream


Chapter 14: Home to Blighty


Chapter 15: European Job English Salary


Chapter 16: Three New Relationships


Chapter 17: Fall of the Russian Empire


Chapter 18: A Russian Misadventure


Chapter 19: Coulton Instrumentation


Chapter 20: White Man’s Grave


Chapter 21: Kenyan Sugar, Not so Sweet


Chapter 22: A New Pair of Hands


Chapter 23: Clipper Round the World Yacht Race


Chapter 24: Looking for Paradise


Chapter 25: New Horizons to Discover


Chapter 26: A Pirate’s Life for Me


Epilogue
About the Author
Barry Coulton was educated in a small village school in West Cumberland. He served a craft apprenticeship at the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant and was awarded a flying scholarship while training with the Whitehaven Squadron of the Air Training Corps. At the age of 24, he gave up an aspiring management career with the UK Atomic Energy Authority and ventured into the wilds of Africa.
Barry has worked on copper mines in Central Africa, gas separation plants in Siberia, sugar factories in South America and oil refineries in Malaysia. He has installed and commissioned control systems on more than 160 industrial plants in 46 different countries. He aspired to own engineering companies in Zambia, South Africa, Russia and England.
At the time of writing this book Barry Coulton was working as a Black Pearl Pirate in the Disney film trilogy, Pirates of the Caribbean. He is a pianist, a time-served tradesman, a chartered engineer, a commercial pilot, a blue water sailor, a background film actor and above all else, a world traveller.
Acknowledgements
I wish to acknowledge the tremendous encouragement and support given by teachers and lecturers at Distington Village School, Richmond Secondary Modern School, Workington College of Further Education and Liverpool Regional College of Technology. Each contributed at different levels, and in their own way, helped to change a country bumpkin who failed his 11-plus into a highly skilled professional engineer.
I reserve a very special mention for the excellent training provided by technicians and engineers at the Windscale and Calder Works of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, and in particular, I wish to acknowledge the help of Len Pearce, known to hundreds of ex-apprentices as ‘Fruity’. I owe my professional career to the help and dedication of this one person more than any other. Thank you Mr Pearce, your trust in me was well founded.
I wish to thank work colleagues and customers of Honeywell, Rosemount and Fuji Electric around the world with whom I have had pleasure to work alongside on so many exciting projects. Professionally, I would like to mention officers of the Institute of Measurement and Control with whom I served for several years and I ask them to carry on their excellent work in helping young people to develop their full potential.
Finally I wish to thank Mattie, a very good companion to my father in his later years and Anne, my own very dear companion and very forgiving wife. I thank them both for their perseverance with two very difficult and stubborn members of the Coulton family.
Prologue
Never a Dull Moment
I have been fortunate to know several beautiful and graceful women in the fullness of my life. This book is inspired by one of these women; she was my first and only teenage love; Margie. When I searched through Margie’s effects I found a collection of 25 handwritten pages. These pages were the beginning of her life story, ‘Never a Dull Moment’. Her writing style was simple and to the point, she laid bare her innermost thoughts about those who had influenced her life. Sadly, she was only able to write a very small part of her book and now 25 years on I have decided to use her pages as the opening chapter of my own story.
And now her story……
It was even funny how we met, in a dance hall in the small steel town of Workington, Cumbria. The town had dark grimy buildings from years of billowing furnace smoke, but a short drive outside town brought me to splendid grey slate fells, sparkling lakes and lush green fields. The people in Workington were friendly but life was not very exciting.
When I was a teenager the highlight of the week was dolling up on a Saturday afternoon and getting ready for the dance that night in the Princess Hall; it used to take me three hours to get ready. The Princess band was good; very much the Glenn Miller sound. I thought that I looked splendid in my six-layered petticoat, flared skirt and tight sweater. My waist was clinged-in with a black waspie belt that was so tight that I could hardly breathe. My shoes were very high stilettos with real mink fur bows. Looking back, I must have looked ridiculous.
My best friends were Anne and Jeanie. We each backcombed our hair into huge beehives, stiffened them with lacquer and then clipped little bows in the front. When I was at school I even had a Bill Haley Kiss Curl; I used to train it with soap and water. I cringe when I look at my old photographs.
Barry asked me to dance on that special Saturday night when we first met. I thought him a bit of a square because he wore a suit and owned a scooter; I much preferred Rockers to Mods. Barry gave me a lift home afterwards, but when he asked for a date and mentioned that he was only sixteen, I stood him up. I was eighteen; I knew my friends would hoot with laughter and say that I was cradle snatching.
I remember my first dance. It was the Tanner Hop at Harrington, so called because it cost six pence, or a tanner, to enter. We all wore school uniform, short socks and long glass dangling earrings. We didn’t have anything else. The last dance was always the single record, ‘You are my special the angel’. The girls knew that if they were asked for that one, then they had clicked and would be escorted home.
Everyone fancied Jakey; he was slim, dark haired and dressed in jeans and a leather jacket. He looked the part but didn’t own a motorbike. Strangely he had a yen for me and although he was supposed to be a bit of a tear away, I found him the perfect gentleman and rather gentle and shy. We were talking one night on a bridge when along came my mum and she clattered my ears all the way home. I thought that I would die from the humiliation of being hit in front of my boyfriend.
Mum was scared for us when we were out. She always said, ‘Remember I trust you’, before we left the house and she never slept until my sister and I returned and we were both in bed.

Nana
Nana, my mother’s mum, lived quite close to town in a small flat. She was a wonderful old girl. I loved to watch her brush out her long hair and plait it until it hung in a long rope down her back. She wore flannelette nightdresses and had a soft wrinkled neck. I used to sit on her vast lap and cling to the folds of her neck. She was like a warm security blanket to me. I was such a timid child that I refused to go for bread to the shop unless I had one pound in my pocket because I was so scared that I would not have enough to pay.
Nana had two husbands and she lost both of them when she was very young. The first died of cholera and the second was killed in France while serving in the Highland Light Infantry. He took a direct hit from an enemy shell and his remains were never found. His name was William and he was my grandfather. He was a brave soldier with several medals to prove it and I am very proud of him.
When Nana became a War Widow she found that she could not manage on the meagre pension offered by the government; she had Billy, Maurice and my mother Minnie to support. Times were hard and she was fortunate to find work in Queen Street Mission as a cleaner. She also took washing in and forced my mother to stay at home to help. It was several years before Nana finally relented and allowed my mother to take a job in the Beehive Department Store where she worked her way up from sales assistant to manageress.
Mum eventually married my father Joe Elliot and they continued to live with Nana until I was ten years old. Then th