Several times I’ve determined to throw out my shelves of work files but abandoned the idea after opening a few which evoked memories of each job and situation. Recording those memories here has now enabled me to part with the actual files.
Following privatisation of the water industry in 1989 we had regular reorganisations at Yorkshire Water with the aim of reducing staff numbers, but I’d managed each time to get an interesting job in the new set-up until around 1997, when half my responsibilities and staff were transferred to another department. After that I felt under-used and when voluntary redundancies were next offered, in 2000, I took the opportunity, cushioned by a decent pension. Our grandson Jamie was just 2 and as an independent consultant with nobody yet consulting me, I was able to look after him one day a week, handing him back to his mother when she came out of work. I was also free to go down to the new Millennium Square in Leeds to see and hear Nelson Mandela, an uplifting celebration, with Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Hugh Masekela performing. And I was able to be part of a small choir that performed at three or four weddings, one of which was at the Linton Springs hotel near Wetherby, and another a very classy affair at Howick Hall near Alnwick. The buffet there included oysters on a huge pile of ice, but I couldn’t find a single oyster amongst the ice when I got to it.
My first job was advising Yorkshire Water who were to defend a prosecution for supplying unfit water at Leeds Crown Court. I had appeared as a witness in a prior magistrates court hearing before I left YW, and had prepared much of our defence. It was disappointing that YW decided at the last minute to plead guilty in the Crown Court so instead of two weeks of attendance in court, I had instead a couple of days writing mitigations. My interpretation of my contract with YWS was that they would have to pay me for the full two weeks and I was embarrassed when they said this was wrong – a rocky start to my new career. More encouraging was the acceptance by Water UK of my offer of a detailed critique of new regulations – the area of my expertise in YW from 1991 to 2000.
After a few months of unemployment, I was offered a series of jobs by a one-time member of my YW staff, now a process engineer at Earthtech, where I came across other ex-YW colleagues. After a meeting at their office near Barnsley one September morning, I stopped at at supermarket on the way home and went to see why there was a crowd around a television screen. It was 9/11.
Later that year I helped Yorkshire Water develop a sewage sludge disposal strategy and gave the first of a series of annual lectures on water regulation at Cranfield University. I also developed a way of keeping myself up to date technically – and advertising myself – by soliciting free attendance for myself at various CIWEM conferences in exchange for writing reports for publication. In an international email newsletter I saw a call for papers for a conference in Barcelona and was successful in offering a paper on UK drinking water quality regulation. This was a most enjoyable jaunt with great hospitality including a memorable whole sea bass encrusted in salt at one dinner. Similarly two years later I went to Faro to give a paper on UK economic regulation of the water industry. Unfortunately due to lack of convenient flights I was only able to stay one day, but I did have time before my flight home for a walk around the city, including seeing inside a church lined with skulls.
I was invited by Aqua Enviro in Leeds to develop training courses for them. I designed a one day course on materials in drinking water, but found it difficult to attract speakers or attendees, so gave two of the lectures myself and bowed out of further involvement.
Shortly after we moved to Knaresborough in 2002 I had two offers of local work which each became long term. One was to give courses on water treatment for WITA at their training centre Burn Hall near York, and the other to obtain Natural Mineral Water recognition for the new Harrogate Spa Water. WITA also had me give courses at their clients’ own sites, in Oxford, High Wycombe and Warwick. Harrogate Spa Water involved interesting aspects such as regularly measuring water levels or flows in a little stream that flows through the Valley Gardens, in a borehole at the Harrogate BC nurseries, and at the sulphur well in the basement of the Royal Pump Room, where I would bravely drink a sample of the water at each visit until they stopped offering it over concern about its safety. After successfully obtaining NMW status in 2003, I continued to visit HSWL quarterly to check their borehole levels, a job which was fraught as the 50m of wire would often spring into a horrible tangle taking ages to unravel. I always felt that the office staff would be looking out of the windows watching my struggles with amusement. This regular work and long association ended in 2014 when a new management decided to contract out all their maintenance.
However, meanwhile I had been engaged to do two more NMW recognitions, in both cases by wealthy businessmen who had bought properties with boreholes. Franco del Buono, a restaurateur, had bought the above-mentioned Linton Springs hotel and was turning it into apartments. There was a borehole on the site. After two years of work I put in the application for NMW recognition and it was about to be approved when a neighbour’s heating oil tank sprang a leak. This nearly scuppered the approval until I was able to demonstrate that there was no harm done. Franco has had me back from time to time over the years following on from the successful NMW, to do work to deal with the abstraction licence, but he rarely takes the advice he pays me for. I also advised him on water usage at the Sant’Angelo restaurant which he opened in Wetherby in a former pub. Kathy and I were invited to the opening of this venture and felt highly honoured, until we arrived and found that there was a long queue outside and a packed crowd inside – he had apparently invited the whole of Wetherby. We nearly went away but did eventually get in and had our share of a terrific buffet, although we had to stand in the crowd to eat it. Around 2018 Franco started building himself ‘Linton Manor’, a very large house with indoor swimming pool. The borehole was enclosed in one of a range of garages, contrary to my advice.
Brian Verity was the founder of building developers Skipton Properties, a bluff Yorkshireman who had bought a large mill in the middle of Haworth, to which I enjoyed regular visits over the next couple of years. On the day when I was to meet the environmental health officers from Bradford Council on site, I found I’d forgotten to bring the key to the compound, but I managed to climb over the fence and persuade them to do the same. Again, the NMW was successfully achieved, but as far as I’m aware none of the three have ever used that privileged designation. HSWL had achieved excellent sales as a spring water and decided to stick with that, eventually re-naming the company Harrogate Spring Water and developing more boreholes. Franco and Brian never got organised to bottle their waters.
Brian also had a borehole in the grounds of Haw Park House, his large property on the edge of Skipton, where he had an entourage of housekeepers and gardeners. The borehole water was used to wash Brian’s cars, and apparently left streaks, so I was engaged to deal with it. I fitted a deionising unit which apparently did the trick. His property was next to a big North Yorkshire CC landfill quarry and I was also engaged to prove they were responsible for contamining of the borehole – but my investigation showed that they weren’t.
Many others have commissioned me to investigate the quality of their boreholes or springs with a view to bottling, and although most of these didn’t progress very far they involved interesting visits.
Andrew Shelley at Thimbleby Hall shooting estate on the edge of the North Yorkshire Moors engaged me in 2009 to investigate a spring on a hillside there. Ten years later he got me to do practically the same job again. More money than sense? Not far from there, at Catterick, a big soft drinks factory was built and I was called in to discuss, as I understood, the quality of their intended borehole supply. But when the meeting got under way it became clear that they wanted someone to design a wastewater treatment plant. Although I had a lot of knowledge of this I didn’t feel I was the best person to take it on, so I made an excuse and left. It’s irked me since that I nonchalantly declined their offer to pay my mileage expenses.
I had a couple of interesting visits to Congleton where a chap had bought an old waterworks site with the Victorian pump-house buildings converted to a house, and an enormous wooded plot in which there was an active spring. A contact of mine in the water company gave me copies of plans of the abandoned site, using which I was able to impress the new owner by finding evidence of more springs.
Another job involving a spring was at Manesty, in Borrowdale near the end of Derwent Water. On two occasions I went, with Kathy, to stay in one of this farm’s holiday lets as payment in kind for the work, involving issues with their private spring supply. On the second occasion we went on consecutive evenings to the theatre in Keswick.
I’d met Vince Glancy of Arup in Leeds through the IChemE Water group. In 2007 he offered me some work and I went on to do several jobs for Arup and for his own sideline consultancy. I did a lot of hazardous area assessments which meant visiting many YW sewage works and sewage pumping stations. These days there are hardly any operators, and I’d often be let into a site and then left to myself. The beauty of these visits was of course travelling to all parts of Yorkshire. In 2012 I spent a fascinating summer commissioning an ultrapure water plant at the huge Goole glassworks – a very hot indoor environment during a particularly warm summer. There were daily frightening challenges and deadlines, and for a while the obligation to be there at 7am every day to supervise the site, but all was accomplished. Another big job for Arup was to do with wastewater handing proposals in the planning application for the new potash mine near Robin Hood’s Bay.
A job involving travel around North Yorkshire but having nothing to do with water quality arose out of our neighbour Vicky talking about an offer of work which she didn’t want, but I thought it would suit me at a time when I didn’t have much else on. She introduced me and I got the job – with the local health authority, to register GPs and their staff all over North Yorkshire on a new computer system ‘Choose and Book’ and provide them with photo ID cards. I now know where the
doctors’ surgeries are, from Settle to Green Hammerton.
One year I was engaged to give weekly lectures on water and wastewater treatment to engineering students at Bradford University. There were some combative students who more or less asked me to give them inside info about the exam questions. I set the questions and was supposed to mark them, which would have been a lot of work, but at the last minute the tutor said he would do it – I think because he was concerned that I would mark them too rigorously.
Out of the blue I was asked to join a UNESCO team to design syllabuses for courses at the technical university in Tripoli, Libya, involving a week on site working with the local staff, who were supposed to provide proposals which we would then critique and improve. This was a fixed price job which turned out to be extremely demanding as, at any rate in my case, there were masses of gaps to be filled in once I’d returned home, as some of the local staff didn’t do what they were supposed to. We were expected to meet the supervisor at the hotel each evening when we returned from the university, but I and a couple of others felt this was too much and would go straight to the pool. It was a great experience to be taken to visit Leptis Magna, and to meet interesting team members who included specialists in bee-keeping. I explored the centre of Tripoli on my own on a couple of evenings, marvelling at the huge piles of rubbish in the streets and shops selling what appeared to similar heaps of junk. I felt quite safe, although when I accepted an invitation from a shopkeeper in the souk to have coffee with him in a cafe at the port, I did get a bit nervous as we walked on and on along deserted wharves. But it was all quite genuine. We eventually got to the cafe, but it was closed, and I found my way back to the hotel.
Morgan Everett was an unusual job involving a waste incinerator being trialled initially at care homes. The proposal was to dispose of the ash and the off-gases to sewer and I was to obtain consents for the trials. They never wanted to take my advice that there was no way they could legally discharge the gas to sewer. The company went bust owing me around £4000. When they were bought out and the new owners Pyropure employed me, I charged a high hourly rate to try to recoup some of the loss. This was the only job where I didn’t eventually get paid in full.
My last job, as it turned out, arose during the Covid pandemic, when Envirogen wanted me to design and validate tests on a membrane filter to remove a specific bacterium. Sourcing sufficient numbers of the bacterium to do the test was an interesting challenge, which I’d just sorted when unfortunately they apparently arranged to do the tests in the USA.
2022