The roll call

The old gorton-tank.com site kept a page it called the Roll Call, and it was the most honest page on it. Not the history, not the photographs: the list. Bill Grundy, head foreman of the machine shop. Freddy Mitchell, Tommy Hagan, Bill Batters, foremen. Peter and Dave Gosling, the Faulkner brothers, Eric Bond, Denis Wild, Geoff Newton. And then the names no company file would have kept: Spike, Daz, Sarge, Cosy Rosy, Juicy Lucy, Madge.

A congregation keeps its people the same way a works kept its men, and the roll a congregation kept in Waco reads by the same grammar: names, years and what each one did for the place.

What a roll call is for

A works kept its men twice. Once in the pay office, where they were numbers and grades, and once in the memory of the men who worked beside them, where they were names and shops and the joke that stuck. The roll call is the second record written down. Its entries are short by design: a name, a shop, sometimes a job, sometimes a star for the men the keeper knew himself, and italics for the names he remembered without checking. The form is modest. The claim is enormous: these men existed, they worked here, and the works was them.

The grammar of the list

The old roll call's rules were precise. Names in italics were known to the keeper; names marked with stars were known personally. Apprentices were coloured blue, because an apprentice's year-group is a family. Misspellings were apologised for in advance, because a name spelled wrong is a man half-remembered. And the page carried an invitation any works' roll should carry: if you worked here, add your name; if you want your name removed, say so. The list belonged to the men, not to the keeper.

Names against institutions

Institutions remember in lists because the list is the only form honest enough for the purpose. A paragraph can be flattering; a name cannot. This book keeps the roll call's method for the same reason it keeps the works' cotes: a record is only a record if a man could stand up in a room of his old mates and say, that is true, that is how it was.

The names the record forgets

The roll call also admits its limit. The keeper wrote the men he worked beside in his own years, the early 1960s, the last years of the works. The foremen of 1910, the boiler makers of the Grouping, the shedmen of nationalisation: they are in nobody's list now, unless a wage book or a works photograph surfaces with them. The book says so plainly. A roll call that claims to be complete is a roll call that is lying.

The keeper's own line

The old roll call kept one more name worth noting: the keeper's. Dave Gosling signed his own entry as an apprentice of 1960 to 1963 in the machine shop, and the whole site was, in a way, his own line written large. That is the honest genealogy of works memory: a man serves his time, the works closes, the man writes the list. Every roll call in every industry begins the same way, with one man who decides the names are worth the ink. This book exists because that decision was made once already for Gorton, and the names deserve a second keeping.

The entry, checked

The names quoted here come from the roll call as the old site kept it, and the method described is the method it used. The works' own record, where it survives, sits in the sources below.