From Chapter 5
Hazardous Knacks
And here's a ready hand
To ply the needful tool,
And skill'd enough, by lessons rough
In Labour's rugged school.
Tom Hood, "Lay of the Labourer" (1844)[1]
All builders' labourers suffer from what they shrug off as the "usual bangs and scrapes, the usual little things that don't stop you working."[2] If injuries were no worse than cuts and bruises, this book need not have been written. To understand why the building trade has been the cause of so many deaths and so much disablement, we need to examine the minute-by-minute experiences of categories of labourers - demolishers, hod-carriers and dogmen. Demolishers and dogmen had the highest rate of fatalities. Dust exposed demolishers to respiratory diseases which killed them decades later. Hod-carriers also died in falls and survivors hobbled away with industrial rheumatics and varicose veins.[3] This extract from chapter five tracks the persistence of Dodgy Bros through the demolishers.
Demolishers
"Whelan the Wrecker was here" became notorious from the 1950s. Sixty years earlier, the 28-year old Jim Whelan had started in a very small way. His line of work was then known as "removal". The trick of that trade was to knock down a building without damaging its materials in order to profit from their sale.[4] Old bricks were worth more than labourers' bones.
Abraham James Smith went to work for Whelan in 1909 on some of the biggest removals around Melbourne. Smith's wage for demolishing was 11s a day, but he got as much as 15s a day in danger money when working on burnt-out walls, at 33m. above the footpath and on a footing only 20cm wide. (p. 585) Because Whelan did not pay wet money, Smith and his mates kept a floor in place on the larger jobs, so that they could go on earning despite the rain. That solution was not possible on cottages where they faced the additional risk of demolishing in slippery conditions. (p. 590) Smith detailed his methods of work, their perils and the knacks he had learned:
It requires great knowledge and skill, and great confidence. We are standing on the top, unsupported by scaffolding. (p. 583) You have a pick and you knock off the bricks and you drop the bricks to the ground carefully so that they will not break. (p. 587)
Despite four years experience, Smith accepted that he did "not understand it properly yet." (p. 591) The 34-year old George Vardy confirmed just how much "skill and nerve" a demolisher needed to protect himself:
Some men cannot stand on a wall. You have often times to take the bricks from under your feet and work your way down. There is no scaffold in most cases beyond the ladder you climbed up. (pp. 545-6)
Smith knew that the keenest knack was to keep a firm footing:
bumping laths is dangerous. It consists of standing on the joists and knocking the laths from below. I have known the whole fabric collapse. I have myself fallen in consequence. In bumping the laths, you stand on a joist and bump them off with a board. (p. 586)
I have known many men to be injured at this work. J. Russell at the Greyhound Hotel, St Kilda, was working on a side wall when a brick gave under his feet and let him down on to a staircase below. His arm was broken. Thomas Worrall, my companion, was killed. He was engaged in lowering joists to the ground. The joists were all resting on girders and he sat on one joist to push another out and the motion of his body moved the joist he was resting on and fell through into the cellar 25 feet below.
Block-and-tackle work, like erecting derricks to get girders down safely, needed more than nerve:
Skill is required to loosen beams and girders as you come across them, so as not to let the girders drop; they are not allowed to fall through because they bend.
I consider that there is great skill needed in lowering girders and principals in burned out buildings, because sometimes the walls have bulged and the girders are just leaning against the walls and you have to crawl down them or be lowered down on a rope to loosen them off the walls or fix a block and tackle to let the girders go. I have never been lowered in a sling but I have crawled down a rope. I assisted to lower some principals at Clivedon Mansions. We were lowering the principals in the ballroom on a 40-foot derrick and they were considered very difficult to get at. I have known principals collapse with their own weight when we have lifted them with the tackle. (p. 591)
When Justice Higgins heard that Jim Whelan had broken an arm and a leg after slipping from a parapet onto an iron fence, His Honour asked: "Was he demolishing?" Taken aback by the prospect, Smith replied, "No, he was the boss." (p. 528)
The work became more hazardous in the dawn and at dusk. Round-the-clock operations were the most dangerous because men dozed off or were deceived by shadows from the artificial lighting.[5] (pp. 546 and 597) Yet, BLF Branches negotiated penalty rates for its members who did so. By 1927, Sydney demolishers were getting an extra 2s 6d per hour for burnt-out and exceptional sites.[6] In South Australia, labourers had to work at night because the law forbade demolition of exterior walls between 8 am and 6 pm. At the hearings for the 1962 Award, the Federation argued that it was too dangerous to demolish after dark. A tug-of-war developed between higher rates and greater safety, with the employers wanting what the Industrial Commission called "open slather", which it granted, reluctantly.[7] Four Sydney demolishers on night-shifts were killed that year.[8]
Demolishing concrete walls began in the late 1930s, presenting new problems. Where explosives could not be used, the wreckers borrowed the feather-and-wedge system from stone yards to crack open concrete foundations. They used a jackhammer to drill holes 75cm deep and 5cm across before inserting spikes to break the slabs apart.[9] The reliance on concrete shifted the aim of the demolisher from removal for resale to wrecking everything except the internal fittings or sandstone facing.[10] Reinforced concrete left little to take away beyond rubble from which it was rarely worth the cost of extracting the steel reinforcement. Wrecking balls swinging from cranes and front-end loaders took over from labourers wielding sledge-hammers.[11] Although the demolisher had fewer bricks to sell, those that did survive the impact had most of their mortar knocked off, which saved the cost of cleaning by hand.
The new methods and materials attracted the old stamp of contractors, foremen and labourers. Safety meant little to the big firms and the blow-ins alike. The latter took to wrecking houses because they could not afford the equipment to build them. They stayed in business by accepting oral contracts to be paid after the site had been cleared. That arrangement interlocked two problems: first, the men had to wait for their pay; secondly, everyone on the job rushed to see some cash, adding to the risks. Victorian organiser Harry Karslake answered a call in the 1970s from a labourer who had not been paid for knocking down a house in South Yarra:
I went to the site which was almost completely cleared except for a 45-foot chimney, with the only person on site, the contractor, about to attack said chimney with a big hammer. His mode of attack was to knock out the corner to let it fall.
He told Karslake that the labourer would get his wages after the client paid up. Karslake drove off, accepting that he could not get cash out of a brick. Later in the day, his car- radio reported serious injury to a man demolishing a chimney in South Yarra: "I didn't like our member's chances of getting his money."[12]
Machinery was no guarantee of safety in demolition work since it replaced one set of hazards with another. An FEDFA member lost his life on 17 May 1988 when the eleventh floor of the MBF building in Sydney collapsed under the weight of four wrecking machines. The structure had been designed to support office furniture. The FEDFA identified four failures in supervision as contributing to the death. Although unions banned all demolition of multi-storey buildings using heavy plant, two more serious injuries followed in the next week.[13]
Wrecking buildings spawned a sub-species of contractor. At their worst, these vandals picked up crews to knock down heritage-listed properties in the dead of night, the most infamous being Brisbane's Belle Vue Hotel in 1979. Matters had not improved much a decade later. Demolishers still did not need a licence. By underbidding for work, cowboys made it difficult for anyone else to afford safe practices. Even those who tried to do the right thing displayed "a relatively poor understanding" of what the law required. Working for public authorities altered the terms under which the demolishers operated because bids had to show the costs of conforming to OHS regulations. One demolisher admitted that his business "just went from a slap-happy company to what is required: working for government – have to." Nonetheless, the Department of Labour and Industry inspectorate had little impact on behaviour or knowledge. Government pricing and the publicity about asbestos did not level the field for contractors. Scratch crews still removed asbestos sheeting with no protective equipment so that, in 1997, only six out of ten demolishers complied with the regulations. If fear of asbestos contributed to safety, it was because customers expected to pay more.[14]