The beginning of the end of life as an employee
The beginning of the end of my life as an employee.
My days of working ‘on the tools’, mainly on trade union, National Agreement sites, were brought to an end following a strike I took part in. The strike was unofficial and we were dismissed by the company, after which I was placed on a blacklist. This effectively meant that I was prevented from getting work on unionised, high-wage, major construction projects and was limited to working on smaller, non-union sites, which paid lower wages. Continued:- At the start of the North Sea oil boom in 1975 I started work as a plater on the building of the Auk Alpha jacket at the Redpath Dorman Long rig-building yard at Methil, Fife.
Shell Esso’s Auk platform jacket at load-out onto Heerema barge June 1974.
The future for this yard looked rosy and skilled workers were promised jobs for life with housing in the locality if needed. At an induction meeting I attended prior to starting work there, we new recruits were addressed by an oil-company (Shell I think) executive, who told us that we Scots couldn’t possibly grasp the implications of the boom days that lay ahead. He said we would be on a par with the wealthy indigenous Arab citizens of oil-rich Middle East states, and our only problem once the oil was flowing, was not what car we would drive, but what colour our Cadillac would be.
The irony of this promise was not lost on me, when , after travelling to the site daily for about three years (not in a flashy American limousine, but on less than luxurious bus supplied by the company), I was informed by management that there were to be mass redundancies. The yard’s order book was low, caused by globalisation and a surplus of oil-rig building capacity in countries all over Europe/Asia, with which they couldn’t compete.
To add insult to injury we, the workforce that had been promised so much, were to be compensated with a paltry severance payment, which was a fraction of that being paid to our peers in rig-yards elsewhere.
As a shop steward I pushed for strike action to get an improved severance package, as did other representatives of other trades. But at a mass meeting of the entire workforce a motion for strike action was rejected by a slim margin.
Taking no action was not acceptable to me and almost half of the workforce, who ‘hit the pavey’ as they say, that is we went on unofficial strike, while the other half continued working as normal.
This was a very acrimonious strike, and saw workers picketing the gates of the yard, as their former workmates, friends and even relatives, sped into work on company buses each day. To add insult to injury strike-breakers were bussed in from west of Scotland high unemployment areas.
Locking management out of their HQ.
One morning before the yard opened I was one of group of pickets, who, acting on a prearranged plan, caught the management off guard and strode into the company’s offices while there was only one nightshift security guard on duty. We bundled this startled night-watchman outside and about a dozen of us took over the firm’s main admin office complex and barricaded ourselves inside.
This occupation lasted the rest of that day, during which about 150 police were called out and stationed around the offices. Having got the result we wanted, namely, publicity, we called off our protest.
After a few months the hundreds of men who had taken unofficial strike action were sacked; informed by letter that they were discharged for breach of contract. It was widely rumoured (though these things are hard to prove) that those who had been most active in the strike had also been black-listed.
Life goes on and I began to look for work with a friend of mine, Jackie Mason, a plater like myself. We heard that there might be vacancies with a major firm, Press Construction at Grangemouth and travelled to their construction site there to check out this lead. The rumour was true, but the foreman on the job said he needed only one plater for a 6 month contract. Jackie and I tossed a coin, I won, and got started on the spot.
A few weeks after starting the foreman confided in me that I was lucky to get this job, because when my after-the-event application form had been processed (as a formality with my PAYE/NI details) it was rejected at Press HQ because I was on their blacklist, presumably because of my role with the dirty dozen on the Methil job.
This news didn’t surprise me, nor did it immediately affect me. I was a union member on a union job and couldn’t be sacked without good reason, but it did bring home to me the fact that in future if I wanted to provide for my wife and family by being in regular employment I had to do something other than work on the tools of my trade.
With life ending as an employee, I become an employer.
With life ending as an employee, I become an employer.
In 1978, I was working on one non-unionised site for a small Scottish construction company, Rutherford Stevenson, on outages at power stations and other industrial sites. While working at Cockenzie Power Station I stood in for a site manager who was on holiday for a month. Following this I was offered a middle management position on a permanent basis. I accepted this offer and found my foray into management interesting, so decided to take the plunge by setting up my own steel fabrication and site welding company, Kingdom Engineering.
Continued:- My chance to escape working on the tools came with my next job, which, by necessity wasn’t for a big firm and didn’t involve submitting application forms or vetting. The small engineering firm I got a start with was working on ‘outages’ at Cockenzie Power Station, that is they were doing repair works when the plant or parts of it shut down specifically for that purpose.
Again, like the Press job at Grangemouth the news of possible vacancies at this site came through the grapevine and the job was secured by simply knocking on the doors of the site offices of the sub-contractors at the Cockenzie power station site.
I was quite happy on this job and got on well with the gaffer and when, after a few months, he went on holiday he recommended to his directors that I take his place till he returned. This temporary role was made permanent when the firm won another contact at Longannet power station.
After a while at Longannet, as site manager with this firm and at various sites where I ran the job by myself, including estimating and liaising with the client, it occurred to me that I could do the same thing for myself if I formed a company, and that’s just what I did.
So, in November 1978, with money borrowed from a few friends and family I formed Kingdom Engineering, named in honour of the ancient Kingdom of Fife where I live.
At the time I had no premises and was living in a council house in Dunfermline, and looking for my first contract, I visited the Grangemouth site of a major civil engineering and construction company, again knocking on the door in my quest to secure welding/plating work for my regally named company….. (Me).
The site manager there said he had none, but thought that another of the company’s sites at Rosyth Dockyard had a requirement for steelwork sub-contractors.
I dashed over to the Rosyth site, scene of my formative years in the engineering industry and my boyhood home, and was given an opportunity to prove myself by the site manager of the civil engineering contractor there.
Initially I was asked to tender for the provision of welding machines and welder/fabricators at competitive hourly rates. I had no problem in doing this as there was no shortage of welding-plant hire companies and I knew of welder/fabricators that were unemployed (myself included).
After a while, having given good service in site welding fabrication on a small scale, with three men, including myself, I was asked to price for some off-site steel fabrication work. This was because I had given the impression that I had a small workshop in Dunfermline and if you count a council-owned concrete garage that came with my local authority house as being such, I did.
This blagging caused me a problem, but I got round it by buying material from steel stockholders and having it delivered to the Rosyth site where I fabricated it at an ‘out of the way’ corner, outwith site hours.
My embryonic company’s growth was helped by two brethren.
My embryonic company’s growth was helped by two brethren.
The first major contract Kingdom Engineering worked on was as a sub-contractor to Tarmac Construction, a major civil engineering company carrying out a major project in H. M. Dockyard, Rosyth, the place where I first started working when I left school. This was a stroke of luck for me and the two men I employed as were kept busy carrying out site welding. However in addition to site welding my employer needed some shop fabricated steelwork. Such fabrications necessitated special operations, such as drilling large diameter holes, work that I couldn’t do on site. In this regard my time spent as an apprentice in the dockyard stood me in good stead as I had many old friends there and two Driller brethren who were in the right place at the right time helped me greatly.
Continued:- Being a local boy I had many friends in Rosyth dockyard and now two of my mates (who were both Masons) were in the right place at the right time to do me a favour.
Specifically they were based in a temporary dockside drilling workshop (of which there were many to service the refit of warships) right next to where I was doing my sub-contract work for the civil engineering company. They came to the aid of a friend in need, me, and in fact if I wanted holes drilled in steel bars or plates for my fabrications, the MOD’s warship work took second priority.
I didn’t have to pay for these favours as they were done by friends who knew I would do the same for them if the roles were reversed. These guys would hardly take a pint off me in the pub at the weekend if I saw them. They were just glad to see a local boy making good and help him, as friends do.
In Rosyth Dockyard, Kingdom Engineering, like Topsy, just growed and growed and I was made two interesting offers… but with no questions to be asked.
In Rosyth Dockyard, Kingdom Engineering, like Topsy, just growed and growed and I was made two interesting offers… but with no questions to be asked.
As my workload grew in volume and expanded in scope it was evident that I needed fabrication premises properly equipped with specialised machines to meet the burgeoning demands of the main contractor. At this watershed, embryonic stage, in my growing business I was approached, separately by two men who worked in the Dockyard’s major steel fabrication workshops. They put a proposition to me that would help overcome my fabrication shortcomings. They offered to supply fabrications at knock-down prices on a “no questions asked basis”. One of these entrepreneurs was a Mason, one wasn’t. No prizes for guessing which offer I accepted…. the Masonic one.
Continued:- Even the help given to me by my friends on the dockside temporary work stations didn’t hide the fact that I needed properly equipped fabrication premises, with overhead cranes and specialised equipment to meet the burgeoning demands of my civil engineering client. A victim of my own success, the main contractor, my client, wanted me to price more and more intricate, and larger work as I had proved able to provide good and competitively priced steel fabrications, at a time when other larger companies, either didn’t want to, or couldn’t compete on a cost basis.
I had the cost edge over others because of low overheads, but I was limited to what I could cope with. I was working outside of the site normal working hours, in the open air and at the mercy of the elements doing fabrications and there were not enough hours in the day to meet demand. As a result I turned down or deliberately priced myself out of work. But this wasn’t making me popular with my client.
As someone who was well known within the dockyard, my rise was watched with interest by many. Some, like my Masonic driller mates with pride and joy, others with jealously, some curiosity, and some saw an opportunity to share in my success.
At this watershed stage of my business’s life I was approached, separately, by two men who worked in the Dockyard’s major steel fabrication workshops. The men were fabricators in two of the ‘Bays’ in the yard. These bays were huge steel fabrication facilities serviced with overhead cranes and with every type of machine for cutting, forming, rolling or pressing steel in any thickness and in quantities of hundreds of tons.
Now I knew both men reasonably well and was on friendly, nodding terms to both. One was a non-Mason and one was a Mason who was friendly with the gaffers who were all Masons. Both had a single common denominator however in that they wanted to supply me with steel fabrications to my specification and drawings for a reasonable price.
My choice was simple, the non-Mason wouldn’t have lasted five minutes of production before the MOD police (Masons or Buffaloes almost to a man) felt his collar. So the Fabricator Mason helped me out (I presume while his brethren looked the other way) and helped my business turnover increase significantly for the remaining 6 months or so that I worked for the civil engineering contractor in Rosyth Dockyard.
More to come.
The dockyard work comes to an end, but Kingdom Engineering break into the North Sea oil industry, and once again it’s thanks to an old friend.
The dockyard work comes to an end, but Kingdom Engineering break into the North Sea oil industry, and once again it’s thanks to an old friend.
The work on my first contract came to an end once the project was complete then I was lucky enough to secure some North Sea oil-related work with Kestrel Marine, Dundee, through an old workmate, who also happened to be a member of the Craft
Continued:- When my client had completed their civil engineering works at Rosyth I was no longer needed and was faced with stepping outside of my comfort zone and looking further afield for work and again it was a Mason who helped me out.
The man in question, Charlie Mason the man I had worked with the Blue Circle Cement plant at Dunbar in 1972 [See My Experiences ‘on the tools’]. Charlie was paid off unfairly after that job and I was alone among his workmates in agreeing to testify to this in the event he decided to take his case to an employment tribunal.
Like me, Charlie’s sacking proved to be a blessing in disguise. He found employment in a trawler building yard in his home town of Dundee and when the firm hit financial troubles and went into administration he (as shop steward) led a work-in that kept the site afloat.
Then an oil-rig construction company took over the yard and recognising Charlie’s ability they made him manager of their offshore module fabrication yard. During busy times the yard augmented their workforce with sub-contract welders and platers.
I asked for the chance to price for supplying this skilled labour and was successful and for a while enjoyed the benefits of the North Sea Oil boom. Like my Masonic mates in Rosyth Dockyard Charlie never looked for anything in return for helping me out.
Over the next 20+ years Kingdom Engineering, prospered and grew into a well established and respected player on the Scottish industrial scene.
Over the next 20+ years Kingdom Engineering, prospered and grew into a well established and respected player on the Scottish industrial scene.
With two fabrication facilities, one in Cowdenbeath and one in Bo’Ness, servicing industry and construction sites mainly in Scotland as well as some in England, Kingdom peaked with a workforce of 240 and a turnover of £2.25 million. The company resumé read like a Who’s Who in industrial Scotland. Prestigious projects included major works on the Forth Road Bridge, The Queen’s residence in Edinburgh, Rosyth Naval Base, etc., to name but a few.
Continued:- Starting out in 1978 from a council house in Bernard Shaw St Dunfermline, with only a single-berth lock-up garage, Kingdom Engineering had expanded rapidly. We moved into a large garage building leased from a taxi firm in Cowdenbeath, then a temporary factory unit while awaiting the building of an advanced factory unit which was provided by the Scottish Development Agency in Glenfield Industrial Estate, Cowdenbeath.
Kingdom soon outgrew the SDA unit (which was only available as a let) and bought a bigger, privately owned factory unit on the same estate. This was added to by the purchase of a larger factory unit at Bo’Ness to service the petrochemical complex at Grangemouth.
The works undertaken in Kingdom’s 25 year history were wide ranging and it would take a book to deal with them but suffice to say the company was successful and was wound up with not a penny owed to anyone.
The following documents give a fair idea of the life, and success of Kingdom:
Company Brochure: LINK
Company Resume: LINK
In September 1999 what was a purely commercial dispute between my company and a major civil engineering client led to me being charged with housebreaking.
In September 1999 what was a purely commercial dispute between my company and a major civil engineering client led to me being charged with housebreaking.
What should have been a commercial dispute between two companies about the ownership of material used on the off-site refurbishing of a railway footbridge, became a criminal case when a main contractor (whose bank account I had arrested), with Masonic influence, enlisted the help of their brethren in the criminal justice system to do me down.
Continued:- This led to my Cowdenbeath factory being searched on the warrant of Sheriff Charles Palmer by 10 or 11 plain clothes policemen (two of whom displayed Masonic symbols on their person, a ring and a belt buckle), who were very well dressed (some in Armani suits) buy they acted like football hooligans.
I was arrested, charged, taken into custody and only released after my solicitor had sheriff’s officers serve papers on the Chief Constable in person, and after an agreement between my lawyer and the police that the disputed material in question would be retained in the police compound at Dunfermline until ownership was established by the court. This agreement was broken by the police at the direction of the Procurator Fiscal only hours after it was made.
It happened like this: In 1999 Kingdom were carrying out sub-contract work for DEW Construction who in turn were main contractors to Railtrack, the company responsible for the maintenance of the nation’s railway lines.
Generally Kingdom’s specialist skills were employed in the removal of steel footbridges that crossed railway lines, their off-site refurbishment in our works, then their re-installation on mainline stations at Cardenden, Cowdenbeath Montrose and Inverurie.
.
Above video shows stages of refurbishment at Kingdom’s Cowdenbeath workshop & finished job at Montrose.
Kingdom’s work as a subcontractor to DEW was so successful that Railtrack invited us to tender for the steelwork and civil engineering works as a main contractor in competition with DEW for station refurbishments.
The result of this proposed expansion of our involvement by Railtrack was that our main contractor/client DEW was also now our competitor and trouble was sure to follow. Follow it did, when DEW withheld monies from Kingdom in respect of work properly carried out at agreed rates for them.
The despicable practice whereby a large main contractor withhold monies from smaller sub-contractor/suppliers in the hope that they will settle for a lesser amount than the agreed price was/is common in the engineering industry, and is often effective. The game of ‘who has the deepest pockets’ is usually won by the one who controls the purse-strings.
However in this instance I wasn’t having it and I instructed our lawyer to engage counsel to petition the Court of Session for an arrestment order against DEW. This order, which was served on DEW’s bank, effectively froze millions in their account and prevented them drawing out any monies until they had paid the £30,000+ that the court found was rightfully due to Kingdom.
Being deprived of funds concentrated the minds of the staff of DEW and after some bluster and threats of a counter action in the court they paid all of monies due to Kingdom, plus our legal expenses and interest on the monies from the date it was due. But, not surprisingly, they found themselves another steelwork contractor to refurbish further steel footbridges at the stations they worked on.
This in turn led to a dispute over the ownership of some materials that were used for this work. I knew that some of Kingdom’s material was in a local painters’ yard and when I visited there I saw that some had been used to refurbish parts of a footbridge a new steelwork contractor was working on for DEW for their Kinghorn station.
I immediately called our Cowdenbeath office and had our lorry come and remove some of the sections of footbridge that I reckoned had been repaired using our material. I ordered that these sections be taken to several locations where it would be safe until compensation be paid to us or we would reclaim ownership of the steelwork in question. That is we would cut it out.
I put the items in dispute in storage with others at three different locations because I expected DEW to try to remove them from our yard at Cowdenbeath and I didn’t want this to happen until I had been compensated for my material that their sub-contractor had used on the Kinghorn footbridge sections . DEW had in effect stolen money from us and I didn’t doubt that they would try to recover their bridge sections into which our material had been welded.
What I expected to follow was some direct exchanges between Kingdom & DEW on the extent of recompense we were due. Failing settlement on this man-to-man basis I foresaw an exchange of lawyers letters with threats of civil enforcement action through the courts (as there had been previously with the withheld monies), but what I didn’t expect was what happened next which was that at about 9 pm in the evening I received a telephone call at home from Cowdenbeath police officers asking me to come to my factory there.
I did as requested and was asked to allow the police to search the premises. I agreed to this and answered all questions that were asked of me, up to a point, that point being where to have answered would have been an admission by me of theft. E.g.: “what have you done with the bridge sections which were stolen with your lorry during the break-in at the M90 Commerce Park?”
Then to my astonishment my factory and offices were raided by a small army of senior police officers who acted like a bunch of hooligans ransacking filing cabinets etc.
Between 10 and 11 plain clothes police officers with a search warrant signed by a Sheriff Charles Palmer, which I was shown, but not allowed to photocopy which allowed them to search for ‘stolen’ bridge sections.
Above pic shows two grit-blasted side panels similar to four I loaded onto our lorry at the painters as they had been repaired using my material. The police weren’t going to find them in our office filing cabinets, but they searched there!
Given the technical nature of my dispute and the aggressive demeanour of the police officers with their predetermined status of stolen material, that was at least partly mine, I wasn’t prepared to make a statement until my lawyer was present and I was arrested and taken into custody for questioning.
I was driven by a police car to the cells at Dunfermline police station where I spent some hours before my lawyer arrived. After a brief discussion with my lawyer I made a full statement to the police, which included my belief that freemasonry had played a part in the extraordinary behaviour of the police officers, (two of whom sported Masonic symbols). I knew from my handshakes with my former main contractor’s agents that they were Masons.
But most importantly I only gave a statement after my lawyer had received a promise from the police that the sections of bridge containing my material would be kept in the police compound at Dunfermline until the extent of the joint ownership caused by the use of our material was established and compensation made to us.
The police at Dunfermline promised our lawyer that they would hold the material in their secure pound pending resolution of the commercial civil dispute between DEW and Kingdom was resolved. Mr Stott, the Procurator Fiscal at Dunfermline soon instructed the police to release all of the material from the police compound to DEW within a day of it being put there.
I was then charged with theft and housebreaking, that is breaking into the paint contractor’s works and stealing the bridge sections. This despite the fact that my company had permission from the paint contractors to enter his works, which are in a former secure MOD site (RNSD Lathalmond) that has a single access gate with a security gatehouse and CCTV and Kingdom’s lorry with a large logo emblazoned on the side could be seen from outer space on the sunny day that I reclaimed the material.
With security staffed gatehouse c/w barrier, fencing, CCTV the M90 Commerce park which my company lorry drove through around about 14-1500hrs on a sunny day isn’t the normal scene associated with ‘housebreaking’.
Given these extraordinary factors, linked in my view to the apparent Masonic influence that my competitor seemed to have with the police/fiscal, at the first hearing before sheriff Stuart Forbes I read out a statement that I had prepared in advance to the effect that given my belief in the possibility that Masonic influence had a part in my arrest and prosecution I wished to know if the sheriff hearing my case was a freemason.
On hearing this, the bullying sheriff, who had initially refused to hear me personally and told my lawyer to dissuade me from addressing him directly, heard me in silence, then promptly allocated my case to a lady sheriff at a future date.
Tried and found not guilty of stealing a railway footbridge.
Tried and found not guilty of stealing a railway footbridge.
Much of the publicity attracted by my trial centred on the fact that I asked the male sheriff who sat during my first appearance in court to declare if he was a member of the freemasons, a question he didn’t answer, but instead passed my trial to a lady sheriff, to be heard at a later date.
My concerns regarding possible Masonic interest interfering with justice were assuaged by personal assurances from the lady sheriff who took my trial, but she said the principle I had raised regarding declarations was one for the politicians. So my acquittal wasn’t the end of the matter as the extraordinary acts by the police and Fiscal against me convinced me to complain through my lawyers, but also take the lady sheriff’s advice so I raised a petition with the Scottish Parliament, requiring law officers to declare membership of organisations such as the freemasons.
Continued: – Sheriff Isabella McColl heard counsel on my behalf with my concerns re freemasonry, but allayed them by giving me a voluntary and personal assurance that she had no membership that would cause me concern. However she stated that Richard Stott for the Crown Office had declined to comment on the matter but reserved their position. Sheriff McColl also stressed that the question as to whether or not sheriffs were obliged to declare such memberships was one for the Scottish Parliament.
I accepted Sheriff McColl’s assurances and the trial went ahead. None of the army of senior police officers who had ransacked my offices/works appeared in court and only one woman, a uniformed constable, appeared for the police. Mr Stott, the Procurator Fiscal who had instituted the proceedings against me and caused the police to renege on a promise with my lawyer was also missing, and a substitute, Depute Procurator Fiscal, Mike McMahon from Alloa was brought in to deputise for him.
One of the first things the new fiscal had to do was to advise the court that the search warrant issued by Sheriff Forbes used to search my Cowdenbeath factory had been lost. This was amazing as the warrant presented to me (which the police refused to let me photocopy) at my offices was signed by Sheriff Charles W. Palmer. Sheriff Palmer couldn’t be called to speak to this as he had died in rather ignominious circumstances after a hard day in court in Edinburgh.
So of the original prosecution ‘cast of characters’ who rushed to have me criminalised, The Fiscal, The Sheriff & posse of Plain Clothes Policemen were all posted missing.
As there was no dispute that I had taken the material into my custody the only question facing the court was what was in my mind in so doing. The new Depute Procurator Fiscal brought in from Stirling to prosecute me based his interpretation of my motive for stealing the bridge as being my wish to put the main contractor DEW to great expense as they would have the costs of an extended hire of a temporary footbridge necessary for the period while the permanent footbridge was off-site being repaired.
This argument may have been good enough to explain my ‘mens ray’ or guilty mind but for the fact that there was no temporary footbridge at Kinghorn, the station in question, and this was evidence in DEW’s Bill of Quantities, which was one of the productions for the prosecution!
Although many footbridge refurbishment contracts include the use of temporary footbridges which are hired in from specialists, in the case of the Kinghorn contract there was no need for one. No need because the distance between the two platforms was a short one on good pavements and access to the platform opposite the ticket office was made by the simple expedient of fitting a style and gate for that purpose.
The supply and erection of the access gate, which again, was in the PF’s productions in a Railtrack BOQ, as well as being advertised widely in the local press in the run-up to the refurbishment was a matter of undisputed fact.
So the new Procurator Fiscal might as well have said my motive in taking parts of the Kinghorn Bridge was because I had a collection of railway footbridges on the dark side of the moon and I only needed the Kinghorn one to make the set. This hypothesis would have been no more fanciful than the one he argued, which had no basis in fact.
Strangely enough when I pointed this (and the wrong identity on the lost search warrant) out to my Q.C., Derek Ogg he didn’t want to take this point but looked me hard in the eyes and assured me he would gain an acquittal without it. This left me in a quandary; I was paying him several thousand pounds a day for advice so should I accept his word, or did I insist on taking my points. I wasn’t daunted by the reputation of Derek Ogg, QC and in an arbitration hearing in London had previously sacked an English QC as I had no faith in him, but I had got on well with Mr. Ogg, a former Woodmill, Dunfermline High School pupil and not the normal posh lawyer so I took him at his word. I figured that in the cosy little world of lawyers working together in a provincial courthouse he did not want to embarrass the procurators and the sheriffs, by highlighting their serious deficiencies in his case.
Anyway, Mr. Ogg was right and in 2001 I was acquitted of the charges against me, but at what cost? In terms of my company’s reputation the costs were immeasurable, but in terms of cash they were quantifiable and amounted to some £70,000.00, even allowing for the kind gesture of Derek Ogg who reduced his quoted daily rate. These costs are not recoverable so my only recourse was to complain about the actions of the Procurator Fiscal and the police through my lawyers, which I did, all the way up to the Justice Secretary, but despite a lengthy process over a period of 18 months, more frustration was the only result. LINK
But with the advice of Sheriff McColl fresh in my mind I also decided to petition the parliament to introduce a register of freemasons in the judiciary. LINK
I did this so that in future anyone accused like myself wouldn’t have to go to the expense and trouble of ensuring that the person hearing their trial was not a Mason if there were factors in the case that might suggest freemasons were involved.
In my case I wanted a judge who had only one oath to be true to; I.E. the one to judge without fear or favour, and did not have another, Masonic oath, the one to favour and help a brother in trouble, competing with it.
As Masons help a brother in trouble it struck me that when people are in court they usually are in trouble, and I didn’t want a judge weighing my evidence against one of his brethren because he would be oath-bound to prefer his brother .
Sadly my two petitions to the Scottish Parliament (PE 306 & PE 01491) didn’t achieve anything. The first was binned for no good reason other than the majority of members of the committee wanted that result.
My second petition, PE 01491, was withdrawn by me when it became apparent that it was not getting a fair airing as the central plank of my argument, a letter from the Norwegian Court Service showing that judges in Norway were compelled to register membership of the freemasons, was lost. Not only that the PPC had accepted lengthy submissions from the Grand Lodge of Scotland, which were in effect a counter petition . This second petition farce is dealt with in detail, in my blog here: LINK
Masonic corruption gives a chosen few firms returns of 100 to 1, or 110 to 1 their money.
Masonic corruption gives a chosen few firms returns of 100 to 1, or 110 to 1 their money.
My company carried out a variety of work almost always on a competitive tender basis. This system if administered properly should ensure that the client gets value for money, or in the case of Public works, the taxpayer.
In my experience corruption thrived in a cocoon of Masonic protection at H.M. Dockyard Rosyth after it was privatised. This resulted in taxpayer paying up to 100 times the going rate for some works and in one instance a £100,000 contract being let for £11million. That’s right this isn’t a typo!
Continued:- The competitive tender system in use at HM Dockyard Rosyth is designed to allow the client to choose the best price from a variety of tenderers with the necessary expertise to do specific jobs. Tenderers for this work, which had the MOD as end user, were vetted on their ability to work to correct MOD quality standards before being placed on an approved list.
The short list of selected firms for any particular discipline were given an identical tender package and these sealed bids were supposed to be opened by a group of assessors who invariably awarded the contract to the most keenly priced bid.
This way the MOD knew how much they are paying for the work before they award the contract. The successful bidder then had to make a profit from completing the works under their budget costs, or a loss if they exceed their estimate.
On the face of it this system is foolproof and guarantees the taxpayer gets best value for money, that is, unless there is corruption in the process.
My company, Kingdom Engineering were qualified to carry out structural steelwork on warships, so we were pleased to be asked to tender for the supply and fitting of two decks on a frigate. The decks were above the main deck and were fitted with equipment mountings for R.I.B. cranes/weapons. We were disappointed to hear on the grapevine that we had lost the work because we were too cheap.
In industry generally there will be occasions when a client might not award a contract to the firm with the lowest priced tender if they felt that the tenderer had underestimated the extent of the work and might default halfway through the contract. But as explained above with the MOD a naïve or inexperienced contractor would not be invited to tender for government contracts in the first place.
In the case of the frigate’s decks the work was well within our capability and workscope, so I immediately asked to see the Ship Manager in charge of the refit and he listened to my explanation of how I had priced the work based on well established industry estimating norms and previous works carried out successfully by my company.
The Ship Manager was convinced by my argument and I was given the bulk of the contract but several minor elements were awarded to a competitor and though they amounted to a tiny fraction of the work my company was undertaking they were valued at many times the total value of our contract.
This baffled me but I let it go without protest, but later when a new director came to Rosyth and encouraged whistle-blowers to reveal corruption I formally complained through my lawyer to the MOD Procurement Executive about an instance I knew of whereby contracts for fabricating steel vessels was awarded to a competitor, despite the fact that they had a much more costly bid than ours. At a meeting the Director of Procurement (up from London HQ) listened to my complaints with my lawyer present and assured us that he would investigate. As we were leaving he said, in passing (as if to impress on us his level of authority), that he had awarded a contract for a new frigate’s mast for £11 million. Our company had priced for the supply of a new frigate’s mast for £80,000! So even allowing for painting and fitting the job should have cost about £100,000.
This level of cost multiplication was witnessed by me on another occasion when I was in a dockside office with one of my staff discussing contract details with a buyer. The buyer left the office on another matter and on his desk in plain view we could see a Purchase Order for a competitor which we had tendered for on a price-per-tonne and our competitor had won the bid on a price that was one hundred times higher than ours.
This work was on the refit of RFA Sir Bedivere which was part of a Ship Life Extension Programme whereby three RFA “Sir” class ships, Bedivere, Geraint and Percivale were to be refitted at a cost of £120m (£40m each). It came as no surprise to me that with the end date being extended by a year and costs to date having doubled to £80m and rising the programme was scrapped.
Now I know as I type this the reader may be thinking that I am motivated by jealousy and they would be right to some extent, I was jealous.
However I didn’t form my company to rob the taxpayer. I formed my own company because I had confidence in my ability to compete with the best of them and make a good living for me and my family, but I did envy those lucky people who corrupted the process, and in the process made more in a week than I did in a year. Who wouldn’t?
Of course it may have been just coincidental that when inexplicable pricing was seen so were the onyx rings and the managers trotting off on midweek evenings with their little attaché cases, but I doubt it.
More to follow:
Masonic influence corrupts local government.
Masonic influence corrupts local government.
I have no direct evidence that local government is corrupted by Masonic influence, but the circumstantial evidence in my own area of Fife suggests this is the case.
My perception is based on an expectation that a local authority headed by a CEO who is paid more that the Prime Minister should be very efficient, but in fact it is one of the most indebted and inefficient. So it is fair to conclude that something is wrong.
The massive council overspend on projects, the pot-holed roads, the town centres that deteriorate in tandem with large grants being given to the chosen few are symptoms that can’t be ignored, and coupled with the prevalence of Masons in the local authority make me wonder if the two factors are linked.
Continued:- Fife Council’s public face is often represented by the Provost of Fife, Jim Leishman, “Big Leish”, a self-proclaimed football legend from his days as a player and manager of Dunfermline Athletic (The Pars) and he makes no secret of the fact that he is a Mason and believes freemasonry is a good thing. So much so that he visits primary schools with the master and fellows of his Ballingry Lodge to show the young boys what they might aspire to. LINK
What didn’t get a mention in the Fife Times article was that one of Leishman’s school visiting party, a Master of Lodge Ballingry was found guilty of child porn crimes, but then perhaps that was because his trial wasn’t reported and it was only after outrage in his village that his sentence hearing was publicised, without mentioning his leading Masonic role. LINK
The Rosyth Masonic Hall, home to the Lvdge of Dumfermling, which has many of the local contractors as brethren, are quite sanguine about their cosy relationship with the local authority and their Gallery shows photos of them hosting Fife council (with a few sub-contractors!!!!!), with photos of building contractors schmoozing with local council officials/councillors. LINK
A friend of mine who served his apprenticeship as a caulker at Rosyth Dockyard went on to become the leader of Fife Council and a very successful politician with overall control of a budget of hundreds of millions, but as nice a chap as he was he was hardly an academic and once in a demarcation dispute at Methil took the phrase “burn to fit” in the National Agreement definition of a plater’s duties as meaning “burn two foot”. But he had the handshake.
A dead giveaway for the prevalence of Masonic influence in Fife Council is the fact they no longer have contract tenders opened in the presence of elected representatives, but leave this matter to officials without oversight. The resultant corruption can be seen in Fife’s pot-holed, rubbish strewn, roads and pavements and of course their record budget deficit and record borrowing at loan-shark rates.
Talking about loan-shark rates, reminds me about a well known Glasgow civic leader and J.P. who was caught out in a loan-shark sting, but though the press reports of him mentioned that he was a prominent politician, member of the local synagogue etc., they omitted the fact that he was also a past Depute Grand Master Mason of Scotland, which in my opinion isn’t an insignificant detail. LINK
Despite being a provider of jobs in Fife or a quarter of a century I had little success in gaining any work with the council. Even when I had a friend (Masonic of course) who became the leader of the council it was impossible to get speaking to anyone who didn’t give the Masonic handshake and a fruitless attempt to gain work followed.
More to follow:
The normal safety and quality assurance standards in the petrochemical industry are waived to the benefit of the Mafia of the mediocre who otherwise couldn’t make it. This could and probably will one day lead to a disaster.
The normal safety and quality assurance standards in the petrochemical industry are waived to the benefit of the Mafia of the mediocre who otherwise couldn’t make it. This could and probably will one day lead to a disaster.
I have seen the rule book that was, quite properly, strictly applied to my company and others, thrown out of the window when the brethren were concerned. It is my firm belief that Masonic cowboy companies are waved through, or given contracts on a handshake, despite not being qualified to work in hazardous industries such as the petrochemical plants at Mossmorran and Grangemouth. I firmly believe there is a good chance that this will one day lead to accidents with loss of life (& may have already done so in the past).
Continued:- My company had to apply for approval to work for the Ministry of Defence and other major private companies before being accepted to become an approved contractor.
The M.O.D., and others would inspect the works and test the quality control procedures and equipment to ensure that the prospective supplier could satisfy the stringent needs demanded for their sites, ships or whatever. Even when accepted an approved contractor would be subject to constant monitoring and random and unannounced inspections.
Kingdom Engineering were held to this very high standard while working at Rosyth Dockyard for Babcock’s with the Royal Navy as an end user and I could quote many instances where the high standards we were held to were not applied to others but this one will suffice: Given a contract to supply a large number of machinery seatings for the pumps and other equipment on R.F.A. Sir Bedivere we had completed this task and had delivered about 15 tonnes of them to the storage area at Rosyth where they would be inspected by Babcock’s and Lloyds before being taken to ship.
A phone call one afternoon from an irate Babcock official summoned our Quality Control Manager to Rosyth immediately. Our QCM was a very thoroughly professional and unflappable individual called Callum, who was stringent in his documentation and inspection of all fabrications before they left the shop so he calmly sped to Rosyth where he was greeted by a group of Babcock’s QC staff and a Lloyds inspector who were in high dudgeon because of the numerous faults they had found in our seatings.
They took Callum through this litany of bad fabrication errors in welding, dimension, finish and just about everything that could be done badly and Cullum agreed in each and every fault highlighted in a calm and reasonable manner before telling the assembled ‘lynch mob’ in a matter of fact way that the seatings they were looking at were not the ones Kingdom had supplied but were a similar number (the work package had been split into Port and Starboard lots) supplied by one of their favourites!
He then invited them to the other side of the lay-apart store where our fabrications were at which the irate welcoming party he had faced became rather sheepish.
Mossmorran was no different and I’m ashamed to say that when the American staff were in charge during construction and commissioning they were stringent but fair in their dealings with contractors but when they left and the local Masons took the reins it was a backward step with work being handed out to friends who had no experience or facilities to carry out the work. One such in the know contractor asked us to carry out welding work on major equipment parts. When I asked him how he got the order he told me he had knocked on the door of a man who worked at the site and was promised the work on his doorstep.
Grangemouth was no different and though some of our competitors had works that were equal to ours (we had a radiography bund, a large earth-walled area outside our works where pipework fabrications could be taken by fork-lift and radiographic exposure carried out safely by remote) some didn’t and did this hazardous examination in the back of the Inspection contractor’s van. One radiographer who worked in our safe environment but also worked with the cowboys, Mr W. Nelson became the world’s most irradiated man. LINK
More to follow.
Masonic cops can help law breakers subvert the justice system to avoid prosecution
Masonic cops can help law breakers subvert the justice system to avoid prosecution.
In my blog: Experiences of freemasonry while working “on the tools” I recalled my long boozing session with a Masonic mate who later in the day was involved in an accident when the car he was driving knocked over a young woman who died.
He was never convicted of any crime and at the time I didn’t think too much about this as although I knew he was as drunk as me. I thought that perhaps the breathalyser equipment may have been faulty or he had a constitution that processed alcohol in a different way or whatever.
On reflection now, years later, and taking into account my own personal experience of Masonic miscreants avoiding drunk driving, and boasting about it and other criminal acts, plus second-hand anecdotal evidence from reliable sources I am positive that if I heard today of this man avoiding any sanction for the accidental death I would immediately attribute this to Masonic preferment cheating justice.
Continued:- The Masonic driver who spoke too soon when he regaled me with tales of his get out of jail card (password).
A bragging brother made me rethink my views on a fatal road accident 30 years previously, when I had attributed my Masonic friend’s miraculous negative breathalyser test to faulty equipment, or his amazing ability to drink large quantities of alcohol without it entering his blood stream. If I’d known then, what I know now, I would have immediately suspected Masonic preference at play. The police coming to the aid of a brother in distress.
This aid was certainly apparent in the case of a friend of my late brother Joe who, like Old Andrew Mason drank in Kelty Ex-Servicemen’s club. My brother introduced me to Old Andrew Mason with a wink and asked Andrew where he had been that night. Old Andrew replied that he had been drinking in the 385 Club that is the social club associated with Lodge Minto, Lochgelly and had just driven from there.
Joe had given me the wink because he knew the answer to his question, as he had obviously asked it before, and Old Andrew was blasé about being stopped by the police. “I’ve told you Joe that when I get stopped I just tell them I have been to the 385 club and I’m on my way home and they always just say O’K now drive carefully” responded Old Andrew.
Much later, my brother Joe could hardly stop laughing when he phoned me up one day to tell of how Old Andrew Mason got his comeuppance. A downhearted Andrew had admitted to Joe that his freemasonic Friday follies were brought to a halt by a non-Masonic PC who was not impressed by Andrew’s 385 Club tale, breathalysed him, and charged him with drunk-driving which lead to him being banned.
To me, the likes of Old Andrew the Mason who for years had weaved his way along the minor roads of Fife like some sort of drunken Masonic Mr. Magoo, is only the thin end of the wedge.
No one would suggest that the police aided and abetted their Masonic brother Thomas Hamilton in the murder the of children in a Dunblane school, but they did in a way, by giving him Masonic benefit of the doubt by not charging him with lesser sex offences and discretion in having a gun licence (despite police officers objections), which meant that he had a gun and no criminal convictions; free to walk the streets when he walked into Dunblane Primary School.
The Masonic police officers who give their brethren the benefit of the doubt are only applying an obligation that they are taught at the very first degree, that of Entered Apprentice where they promise to “prefer a poor Brother, that is a good Man and true, before any other poor people in the same Circumstances.” The decent Mason will interpret this within the law of the land, but the opportunist and crooked with have a much wider definition, which might let his brethren away with murder.
More to come.
Jobs for the boys, if they’re in lodge, or sometimes in the right lodge.
Jobs for the boys, if they’re in a lodge, or sometimes in the right lodge.
This was revealed to me by a valued and skilled engineering employee of mine, when with a downturn in orders meaning I might have to lay him off told me (when I warned him of this) that I shouldn’t worry, as he was guaranteed another job as a lorry driver delivering petrol from Grangemouth refinery, but it would mean he would have to join a Larbert lodge.
Another (Masonic) mate who always got into the right jobs where there was money or other benefits in kind to be had, told me of a lucrative position as a toll collector he was taking up, but it had to be through a Burntisland lodge, not the local one he was in.
Tanker drivers, toll collectors, football managers, miners, shop employees and engineering workers all benefit from membership of the craft, but at what cost?
Continued:- My employee was matter of fact about his Masonic option of employment in the event I had to make him redundant, as was my toll-collector friend Ian who wasn’t shy about telling me about the edge the Craft gave him. A Mason in a local Rosyth lodge, he explained how one plum job meant he had to go to Burntisland lodge to get a start as a toll collector on the Forth Road Bridge. This he said was a nice little earner, as there was no way of reconciling the number of vehicles that the barrier was raised for, against the amount of cash or vouchers collected.
Ian got cockier as the weeks wore on and took to leaving our local to do his shift with a wee ‘carry out’. Then he alleviated his boredom with a 10″ TV set tucked under the counter. Things came to a head when an irate toll payer smelled the alcohol and saw the strobe reflection of the TV and he complained about the stroppy attitude of our collector. Worse for wear Ian jumped out of the booth and tried to get into the complainers car to have fisticuffs with him. Even the lodge couldn’t save him from that one.
The job sites where Masons have the senior posts and have an obligation to start their brethren are a recipe for inefficiency one Ship Manager of a large are of R.F.A. Sir Bedivere was a bus driver and another was encountered by me after that refit as a baggage checker at Edinburgh Airport.
Fraud is as a big a problem as inefficiency as the Masonic boss is unlikely to blow the whistle on his errant workers who may break the law as they are brethren in distress.
Isa, a dearly departed old friend of mine told me how she was bitter against Masons because her grandfather, James, a miner couldn’t get a job in the mines and was forced to join the army (served in N.W. Frontier, 2nd Boer War & WWI), then as a returning hero he still couldn’t get a job when a new mine was being sunk on his doorstep at Crosshill/Lochore because all the highly paid mining jobs went to Masons. James the highly experienced miner could only get a job as a tea boy. However when the boss needed a man he could trust to go for the wages from the bank on pay-day it was only James he could turn to. Isa explained that the Masonic workers knew that they would not be prosecuted by their gaffer brother so were more liable to steal the payroll. So the gaffer relied on James.
In a television interview Terry Butcher, the former England football captain told of how when he came to be offered the captaincy of Rangers he was advised to join the Masons as every captain in the clubs history had been a Mason. Perhaps tellingly the quintessentially Masonic club has since been liquidated owing about 300 creditors millions.
But Masonic membership as a prerequisite to employment isn’t confined to engineering, toll-collection mining and football as I know from my experiences of courting my wife when she worked in the office of the Dunfermline and West Fife Cooperative Society.
CO-OP
The Dunfermline and West Fife Cooperative Society had once been a very profitable business, with their own farms, dairies, bakeries and stores in every town and paid out substantial annual dividends to ordinary shoppers. I can remember the joy each year when the “divvy” was announced. However this profitable and equitable state of affairs was spoiled by a Masonic clique who ran the business as if it belonged to them and not the people. Some time later I became friendly with a member of the board of the Cooperative Society who told me with incredulity how he was brought in to review the once thriving enterprise and when he investigated the extent of the criminality he said he simply had to close the ledgers and move on. To do otherwise he said would have involved years of criminal investigation and court proceedings which would have damaged the business further. It was just too big a can of worms he said.
This didn’t surprise me as I knew of a Masonic clique in the CO-OP when I was courting my now wife in the late 1960s. The gang of Arthur Daily types were all Masons from all the different department within the CO-OP who pilfered goods on a grand scale and exchanged it within their circle and to brethren from other stores. Just like Ian the toll collector they got too cocky and one in particular would come in to the payments’ office each Monday with a large wad of banknotes to be exchanged for larger denomination notes. This was always laughingly said to be proceeds of a win on the tables or the horses.
This Flash-Harry Mason had several expensive cars one of which even his boss couldn’t afford. The boss, also a Mason, warned them to stop stealing. The gang didn’t believe that their brother would call the cops, but that’s what he did. My fiancé told me of how it took large furniture vans to collect the proceeds of their pilfering and how the police found items that the CO-OP didn’t even stock, such as Waterford Chrystal. My first flat was a CO-OP one which became available when one of the lesser lights of that gang died from shame during his trial. Others lived to serve jail terms.
UPDATE 03/08/2021 While walking with my wife in The Glen (Pittencrieff Park) this morning we heard the town bells ring in uneven tune and at an usual time and concluded that there must be maintenance work being done. This got us talking about my wife’s great grandfather William Dawson (1839-1914) who was born in rural Aberdeenshire and lived an interesting if itinerant life ending up in Dunfermline in 1890. William, a Mason, was made a member of The “Lvdge of Dunfermling” No 26 at Rosyth and within no time was making a noise. That is he was appointed “Ringer of the Town Bells” at a meeting of the Dunfermline Burgh Council on 10th December 1900. This job carried a tidy salary and a prerequisite for the position was Masonic membership. When William died his son John Hay Dawson took over the title, and when he died his son, also John (1912-1958) took over. In about 1957 when John had fallen ill his son, also John stepped in to help his father (he said the belfry was a great place for winching) and when John Snr. was on his deathbed a councillor approached young John about taking on the title, but he would have to join the Masons. John told me he told the councillor to stick the job and the Masons up his arse!
More to come.
