Beaumont quarry 1951

I remember the Winter of 1951 as probably the coldest that I ever experienced, not so much that my life was at a low ebb, but more so, that I no longer had a place to call home, and really the only warm spot in my life was that I had met Barbara a few months previously. This had made me realise that my first marriage had to come to an end, not only because of the ongoing conflict with my wife, but the fact that her actions had finally convinced me that her future lay with a long time family friend, to whom she was now pregnant. So I started divorce proceedings, which in those days was a far more serious and complicated matter than the slick mutual separation proceedings of today.

It was hard to walk out on the two young children, Meridi and Robin, but I reasoned that children should not be parted from their mother, and although we disagreed on discipline, she was a good mother. So almost the entire proceeds of the subsequent sale of the home that I had built with such high hopes for the future, went to them in a form of trust, something that was later changed into a cash settlement to allow my former wife and her new husband to buy a second-hand home. Secondary to all this was the fact that I had to have somewhere to eat and sleep. My parent's home had been tried for a few days, but due to their perceived view of my impending marriage breakup which they refused to accept, and my confused state of mind, I chose to set up an old army camp bed under an iron roof in the old quarry hole at Beaumont, just above the Beaumont Common.

I had a well paid job with V.P. Keane at that time, and basically my employment prospects were well established. The company had recently moved it's workshop operations from the tiny cramped old building at Ackland Street in Adelaide, to the no longer operating Beaumont quarry, and a large old engineering lathe had been purchased, and installed against the low vertical blasted rock face in one corner of the wide flat floor of the old worked area. Over the lathe we built a low corrugated galvanised iron roof from second-hand materials, this was roughly enclosed on two sides, the third side being the rock face behind the lathe, and the remaining side open to the elements, mainly to give easy access for the large shafts, that were backed right up to the lathe in a truck. and then by man power alone installed in the lathe for machining.

Apart from the lathe, there was a heavy duty pedestal mounted grind stone, and a forge used for sharpening stone drill bits, and a small corner where massive crusher shafts were rolled in from the outside and built up with metal using a large heavy duty arc welding machine, installed under cover outside the shed. It was in this spot that I somehow managed to find room to set up my bed in the welding area! An old packing case that was our lunch table became my breakfast table, with a tiny portable methylated spirits stove, and the few food articles that I used, tinned fruit, breakfast food, butter and milk and an old electric toaster. There were no refrigeration problems, the whole place was always freezing cold, and in any case almost every day someone would go down to the shops at nearby Hazlewood Park to buy lunches. There was no phone connection and so outside working hours, it was a place of complete, but lonely peace. After my two companion workers had knocked off for the day, I would be left to have a quiet evening meal. This sometimes meant jumping on my scooter and going off to a café and having a good meal, but most times I just snacked, the highlight of the meal usually being canned peaches and condensed milk which I loved, this small luxury somehow making light of my situation.

At this time I had installed a new BSA twin engine in my 3-wheeler (self built car) but I was carrying out a major rebuild on the whole of the rear suspension. For the past three years that it had been on the road, broken rear axles had been a constant worry when overloaded or driven hard, and this project took up all the spare time that was now available to me. I would work on till the early hours of the morning, keeping the forge alight for a small amount of warmth in a shed that, open to the winter elements as it was, seldom rose more than a few degrees above freezing even in the daytime – on one occasion it actually snowed! Under these conditions I would sleep fully clothed, removing only my work overalls, and boots, although there were times when the overalls stayed on!

The good times were Saturday and Wednesday, when I would visit Barbara, and we would go somewhere to the movies or a dance. These visits meant that in the early hours of the morning I would have to ride back to my quarry hole in freezing conditions and sometimes rain, so it wasn't long before I was stopping over for the night, soon to be followed by full weekend stop overs. By the time I had the 3-wheeler back in service, Barbara had persuaded me to move into the spare bedroom in her cottage. This came about when after some pestering by her, I finally took her up to the quarry on a Sunday outing. and showed her what had by now become quite a refuge from the outside world for me, but she didn't see it that way, and so my cozy corner that had been improved over the weeks by some building additions, became a thing of the past, quickly taken over as additional work space.

For those interested in small details, the quarry area was in those days fairly isolated, the suburbs had reached the area below the Common quite a few years previously, and stopped because of the hillside and bad roads and none of the vital services, we were lucky to have electricity installed. Dashwood Road below the quarry was bounded by a grove of olive trees on the north, and open hillsides on the south, and what is now Bayview Road and Nioka Court, was just a rough metalled track up the hill into the quarry. A few yards further up the track there was another small quarry face, that was still being worked entirely by hand by the then owner of the area, Gordon Tregenza, and his mate. Their days were taken up in removing flat slabs of stone from the old face, using crowbars, and lifting them on to the flat tray of Gordon's International truck, when the truck was loaded, the excellent pavers were delivered to private homes around Adelaide. There were no garden supply places in those days and Gordon had a very lucrative, though rather labour intensive business venture.
The old quarry holes were eventually used as a council depot as far as I know, and by now would almost certainly be covered by housing development, nothing remaining to show that for a few weeks it was home to a temporary hermit!