Paul Murley joined Westland straight from school in 1945 and rose to the position of Engineering Services Manager completing 44 yrs service. He remembers 'clocking in' at the start of every shift

When you arrived they’d give you a clock card and the clock card was split into morning, afternoon. The clock machines were usually either in a passage way or even outside the buildings. So, you would walk up and there would be a rack and in the rack, it would say, Paul Murley, so, you’d take out your card, put it into the machine, press the lever clunk, clunk and that clock, which you’d see right in front of you, would have said what time you clocked on. Gradually, as time went on, they became electronic so that you would go to the same clock or, similar clock, and you’d put in your card and it would go “chignon” and that was you done, that was you in, and that’s how it used to be. That all changed as time went on because people used to fill out what we called time sheets and, of course, because of the contractual arrangements we had with the Ministry and so on, and the company overheads, you used to fill in the sheet each week to say what you had worked on and the hours you’d spent and at the bottom of the page it should add up to thirty-seven, unless you’d done some overtime when it might add up to a little bit more. Those sheets would go away and they would be all analysed. People would come back and say I’m not quite sure why you booked on that contract Paul because you really didn’t work on that did you? Should you have put something else there? Those were the days. That was different from clocking in we used to fill in time sheets.

No Comments

Start the ball rolling by posting a comment on this page!

Add a comment about this page

Your email address will not be published.