The Cumberland Pencil Company is celebrating its 180th birthday in 2012 and throughout the year I'll be interviewing its staff to bring you an insight into our world. We start off with David Sharrock, Director & General Manager:
Can you give us a brief description of your role & your life away from work?
Overall responsibility for the strategic direction, operation and performance of the company.
Married to Kerrie, with two teenage daughters (!), I have been with the company for over 30 years, initially in finance, taking over my current role in 1989. We have seen many changes in the business over the years, but I believe the current Derwent team is the strongest we have ever had, and I am very proud of their achievements, and privileged to have their support.
Over the last 30 years, what have been your most poignant memories with the Company?
In the 30 years I have worked for the company I have seen and been a part of the transformation of a traditional, almost Victorian, small business into a modern global world class industry leader.
When I first arrived in 1981, the Keswick factory was a dark, depressing place, with antiquated machinery and outdated, manual systems. Recipes and formulations were kept in people’s heads, production was managed by moving tags around an enormous pegboard and the accounting records were hand-written.
The original building from 1832 was still in use and it was like entering another world with its low ceilings, wooden beams and creaking floorboards, flaking paint, tiny windows and ancient lighting which cast eerie shadows on the walls as you penetrated the gloom.
The people in the company were amazing. Generations of the same family… 40 years plus service… exponents of the ‘black art’ of pencil making, they had forgotten more than I would ever know. Sadly many of these characters have passed away, along with their hilarious stories of life in the mill. We realised too late how priceless their recollections are, and only recently started an audio archive in the Pencil Museum.
Gradually we brought the company into the nineteenth (!) twentieth and then twenty first centuries. Along the way we replaced the ancient machinery, opened the Pencil Museum, improved the buildings, updated the systems and finally moved from Keswick to Lillyhall.
Several events stand out along the way:
Introducing computers and getting information out of heads onto hard drives was a major exercise – as was introducing cashless pay. Many of our employees did not have a bank account, nor did they have any faith in banks!
Asking them to withdraw cash by inserting a piece of plastic into a hole-in-the-wall machine was as alien as going abroad on holiday. It just wasn’t done in 1980s Keswick!
Our wood waste extraction and furnace system was an amazing feat of Victorian engineering. The ignition system was technically complex - throw a burning rag onto the sawdust and quickly shut the door! A new Health and Safety Inspector came round, saw this operation and immediately issued a notice requiring its replacement, despite many years of incident free operation. The new system he specified was duly installed at great cost.
It exploded within the first month of operation, blowing out all the adjacent windows causing thousands of pounds worth of damage – strange thing was, the inspector never came back to look …
The Pencil Museum opened in May 1981 and soon became an established attraction on the Cumbrian tourist circuit. We expanded and remodelled several times over the years, held a 10th Birthday party, at which the Rt. Hon. Willie Whitelaw, Deputy Prime Minister was our guest of honour. We held a series of Arts events over Whit Bank Holiday Weekends in the nineties, the first of which, called Arts Alive, was a huge affair.
In order to give visitors some interesting subject matter to draw and paint, one of our professional artists arranged for some animals to come from an animal park in Hertfordshire… The arrival of lion and tiger cubs caused a major stir in Keswick, even making ITV and BBC TV news as they happily splashed around in the River Greta.
Our efforts to eradicate the use of solvent in our painting systems were recognised by the achievement of a Queens Award for Industry, for Sustainable Development, and I attended Buckingham Palace along with Barbara Murray and one of our painting department operators, where we met The Queen, The Duke of Edinburgh and several other members of the Royal Family at a reception for all award winners.
And finally our move to Lillyhall also received Royal approval with the official opening of our new factory conducted by The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh.
They spent around an hour with us, meeting and chatting to our workforce before unveiling the Borrowdale slate commemorative plaque. It was a truly memorable day. I also got an invite back to her place to attend a Royal Garden Party the following July, which was also a memorable occasion.
So there we have it – a great job and many great memories!
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