STATE LIBRARY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA J. D. SOMERVILLE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION

OH 657/5

Full transcript of an interview with

DEAN EVANS

on 11 December 2002

By Karen George

Recording available on CD

Access for research: Unrestricted

Right to photocopy: Copies may be made for research and study

Right to quote or publish: Publication only with written permission from the State Library OH 657/5 DEAN EVANS

NOTES TO THE TRANSCRIPT

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J.D. SOMERVILLE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION, STATE LIBRARY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA: INTERVIEW NO. OH 657/5

Interview with Mr Dean Evans recorded by Karen George in Adelaide, South Australia, on 11th December 2002 for the Adelaide City Council Balfour’s Oral History Project.

TAPE 1 SIDE A

This is an interview with Dean Evans being recorded by Karen George for the Adelaide City Council’s Balfour’s Oral History Project. The interview is taking place on 11th December 2002 in Adelaide, South Australia. First of all I’d like to thank you for agreeing to an interview and taking the time to come over here today.

Good.

Can we start by you giving me your full name?

Dean Evan Evans.

Evan Evans?

Good Welsh name.

What’s your date and place of birth, Dean?

Twentieth of the eighth 1943 in Adelaide.

Can you tell me just a little bit about your parents, what their names were and their backgrounds?

My mother’s name was Mary Effie Orr – she was actually the name Orr, O-double-R – from Goolwa, and my father was William Henry Evans, who has been a little bit of a secret to me. My mother and father got married late in life and my father was in the first landing on Gallipoli, so he was quite old by the time I came along – I think he was about fifty-four. My mother died when I was quite young. But he was a cake decorator, and that’s how Balfour’s came into it.

Tell me a little bit about his business, I suppose.

He was what they call an ornamental cake decorator. After the War he couldn’t settle down so he kept going back and forth between England and Australia, and he was a baker by trade. He then went over to England, to Glasgow, and he did his trade over there as an ornamental cake decorator. In those days it was like the wedding cake tops that go on wedding cakes, and that was very big in those days. A

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lot different today. And his main thing was he learnt by one of the best cake decorators in the world at that stage –

Who was that?

– called Lampard. Guy by the name of Lampard. He brought out a lot of big decorating books. They were quite unique in those days. So Dad studied under him for a year or so. And then he come back to Adelaide, tried to settle down, couldn’t, went back to England again, and what I’ve found out [is] that he travelled most probably about twelve times back and forth to England, even to the point of being in the merchant navy. And in the end he’d gone through a divorce to a lady in England, come back here, met my mother, who lived at Goolwa, and he bought the bakery at Goolwa. From there they come to Adelaide – I think that was round about the time I was born. He had a deli on Goodwood Road, which was quite a large deli in those days. In those days delis were like the mini-supermarkets. Like the one on Goodwood Road that he had was just over the tram crossing there and it was – at one stage I can remember maybe four to five girls working in it, so it was quite a big type of deli. In that he used to do a bit of decorating. He made moulds, what they called moulds, for – they were made out of plaster-of-paris, which you would make up a plastic icing and you would make these – carve these things and you’d mould them. And that became the bridegroom and all those. He used to supply Balfour’s in those days. We then shifted around to fourteen Devon Street, Goodwood, and that was early ’50s, I think, early ’50s. He built a warehouse – or not a warehouse but a factory – at the back of the house. It was quite a big factory in those days in that sort of area. And he employed three girls and they used to make wedding cake tops, he used to go all around Australia interstate, and one of our main suppliers or one of our main people were Balfour’s that we used to supply Rundle Street, King William Street, the shops. And I remember when I was a kid I used to get in the car with my father. We’d batch them up in boxes and bring them in, deliver them, in an Austin A-40 car. So it was quite a – not like today, you couldn’t get away with it, but we used to put them in the boot and on the back seat and you name it, that’s where they used to go. And we used to bring them into town. When I’d done my – in those days – I did my schooling at Goodwood, Goodwood Primary. I then went on to Goodwood Tech, and then from

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Goodwood Tech I was going to go on further. My mother had taken a massive stroke and was very, very sick. So for three years we virtually had to do everything for her. So my father tried to run a business and look after Mother at the same time. So in the end I just turned around and said, ‘That’s it. I’ve got to go out and work and help.’ The idea was to work at Balfour’s, get an apprenticeship. But in those days, to be quite honest, I had about three jobs I could have gone to. In those days you didn’t have to worry about where you were going to work, it was what you wanted to do.

Had you had an ambition to follow your father’s –

No.

– in your father’s footsteps? No?

No.

What did you want to do?

I wanted to travel more than anything, because I think I got in – it’s Dad’s brain about it. I wanted actually to become an electrician. (laughs) That was one of the things I wanted to do. And I really had no ambitions of going into the bakery because I’d seen the hours my father used to work, so it was like ‘I don’t really want to do that’ because your social life was not – in those days I was, you know, like most kids, pretty wet behind the ears but a bit wild in some ways.

What sort of hours did your dad work with his own bakery?

My father used to work all night and sleep during the day. He didn’t have to do that, but that was his training from when he was a young – in the Army, right through his life. He got to the stage that – – –. So he used to find it more pleasant working with night-time, listen to the radio, do his work, do his moulding, and the girls that he had working for him, three girls, two of them were actually cousins of mine so they knew the business just as well as him. They didn’t have the, I suppose, the skills that he had, but they would do the – – –. We used to do Easter eggs, thousands of Easter eggs. That’s how I used to get my pocket money, piping Easter eggs.

So you started as a kid working in there?

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Oh yes, I started when I was maybe – oh, I think I started to learn to pipe when I was about six years of age, seven years of age, to get pocket money. I’d only do it when I wanted to. But Easter time was always a big time because he used to do the sugar Easter eggs which are unheard of now. But we used to make them from little small ones that were as big as an egg to some that would be a foot and a half, foot long, big one, which my father used to actually put presents in them and cut the top of them and you could look down into them. Or there’d be a scene in there, an Easter scene, or things like that. Magnificent things. And so that was how I started. Of course, when Mum was very ill my father and I kind of, I suppose, drifted a little bit because of his working life and that, so I just said that I wanted to give up work – I wanted to give up school and go out to work. And he was talking to one of the directors of Balfour’s – who was not the director at that time but was the actual personnel manager, by the name of Ralph Potter, who knew Dad very, very well – and he was telling him about me wanting to – because I’d been going in there since I was a kid, so Ralph knew me as well – and he said, ‘Tell him to come in and talk to me.’ So before I knew it I decided I would go in and have a talk to him, and before I knew it Ralph had signed me up! (laughs)

How old were you then? What year was that?

I was sixteen and a half, I think – yes, about sixteen and a half. So it was in November I signed up my first apprenticeship papers.

1959.

Yes, ’59. So it was a big shock to the system, I’ll tell you. In those days I used to start at six o’clock in the morning, so I used to ride my bike from Goodwood, across the parklands, down Morphett Street in about – and I did that. But in those days we worked long, long hours. It was massive hours. It would be nothing for me to get to work at six o’clock in the morning and still be there six o’clock at night. Now, that wasn’t just one night a week, that would be four to five nights a week. We did a lot of hours. None of the – it’s very fortunate now for apprentices. In my day you learnt everything during your day at work. Now you get your blocks of apprenticeships where you go off and go to trade school and you’re learning more of the technical things. In our days you learnt by your mistakes.

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Well, tell me about – well, can you remember your first day, turning up and your first impression?

My first day. My first day I walked in there and they gave me a nickname.

What was that?

‘Leftie’. Because I’m left-handed. Everybody in Balfour’s had a nickname in those days. It was just like a badge you wore. And some of the guys there, to be quite honest, I would be struggling to remember their names. I’d remember their nicknames. We had one called ‘Panicky Bob’. He used to work in the dough area. Now, the dough area was an area where you used to really – you had to work, it was very back-breaking work, it’s not like today. But you used to – you had what they called the old overarm machines. They used to kind of fold the dough. And these guys used to have to bend down in these bowls and turn it, then they’d have to lift it out, physically cut it by a big knife and lift it out. And they would lift up twenty or thirty kilos at a time and then dump it into another bowl, because there was nothing. There was nothing like today of automation. So when you go back to my first day, that would have been my most memorable thing. I think the second thing that I ever remember of Balfour’s was trying to get glucose out of a bowl. Now, I don’t know whether you understand what glucose is about, but glucose is a sugar base thing, it’s clear, and you’re supposed to wet your hands to get it out. But if you never wet your hands to get glucose out, and when you dip into the bowl and nobody tells you to do it and all of a sudden you’ve got this glucose that sticks to you like glue, you don’t know how the heck am I going to get that off and get it into the bowl, and it starts to dribble on you because it’s like a toffee, but a little bit more liquid than that. So you’re trying to lift that out, put it into a bowl – and half of it’s dropped onto the floor by this time – and you get it out, and then you’re trying to wipe the rest off. So then you walk over and wash your hands. Then they don’t – some of them, what they don’t tell you is that the guy before you has actually dropped some on the floor, too. And we used to have big metal floors. Still in most of the bakery now. But those metal floors used to have clear glucose on it, so if you stood there for a while, and as you went to walk out your shoes would stay where they are and you’re standing there with your socks on. It’s quite an experience. But I think

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that’s what I loved about my apprenticeship, that you learnt by your mistakes, you learnt to do it the right way, and I think I’m a bit critical sometimes today because the young tradesmen of today don’t learn to make mistakes so that they can redo them again, you know? So we used to have those sorts of bits of fun and everybody would stand there and wait till you’re going over and doing these stupid things. And they knew what you were doing but they wouldn’t let on.

So how many apprentices –

That was the old tradesmen. Hm?

– how many apprentices started when you were on?

When I started there was myself. There was a lad before me called Ian Osmond, which we called ‘Ozzie’ Osmond. He was a year earlier than me. And then there was a lad as well by the name of Gear – no, Galea – his father used to work there. He didn’t like it, he didn’t like the early hours, and that’s how I actually got my apprenticeship is because he left to go in the Navy and that’s how I ended up getting his apprenticeship job. So it was interesting, it was a lovely time of your – it’s a nice time of your life because the fact that it’s like going out into a workforce where in those days most of the guys were older men. The bakery was made up of a lot of older men.

Who do you recall, can you tell me about some of the people?

Oh, there was – my biggest admiration for any person would have been a guy by the name of Charlie Brooks who was my boss. Charlie was a short, very thickset man in the decorating, he looked after the decorating area, and he was so muscly – he was short, muscly – and it was mainly because of the work they did in those days. Everything was physical. And he would have been, I reckon, the best boss I’ve ever had in my life.

Why?

He had compassion, he used to hit you – (laughs) which you couldn’t do these days. If you didn’t do it right and you couldn’t keep up with him you’d soon get a thump on the arm. So we’d be on these belts, conveyor belts, spreading stuff, and he would come along and he’d say – and you would most probably have been standing there for a half hour, three-quarters, so you’re getting a bit tired doing it – and he’d come

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along, ‘Come on, Evans, keep up with me,’ and he’d be going. And he’d be pushing them down and you’d be trying to put the next layer on. And if you didn’t do it properly he’d say, ‘Come on!’, and he’d give you a whack. I can remember going home sometimes – maybe I should blame him for my crook shoulder – but I can remember going home so many times where I couldn’t even lift my arm because it would be so sore. But he made – in that way he was still the same guy that used to turn around and say to you – he loved his caravan, he had the old caravan, he used to go down Christies Beach – and he’d say to me and my then girlfriend who’s now my wife, ‘Get Joy and come down over the weekend and come down and have a few beers with us.’ You know, that was the sort of man he was. He was just – he had that other side of him. And you got to know him, you got to know his wife, and it was not like today, you know? I couldn’t tell you half my work colleagues’ wives because you don’t socialise unless they’re in your area, you know?

So how did they teach you in those days? I mean, how did you start and what did you do first, can you remember?

What did I do first? Caught on the end of a machine for twelve months, virtually an icing machine that you used to do the toppings on the cake. And for twelve months I used to catch this cake as it come off and maybe help now and again decorate it a little bit with the comb – they used to what they called combing it – and learnt to run that machine in the end so it becomes part of you.

Tell me a bit about that machine. What was it, what did it do?

It was a big, long machine. It would have been about – oh, look, in metric – but it would have been about fifteen metres long, I suppose. It had two big hoppers, what they call hoppers on it, and a conveyor belt, and you used to put the cake on one end. And they used to have guidelines so the cake was in a block about a metre long by about seven hundred wide, five hundred wide, and so it would be – yes, it would be about four hundred wide – and you used to put it on the belt and then let it go through under this hopper, what you called hopper, that used to lay a piece of icing on it, I would describe it as icing. And you would then comb it or you’d put walnuts on it or you’d put nuts on it and all that. Then you’d catch it at the other end, put it on a tray, put it in the racks. And we’d do thousands of those, we’d do thousands of them.

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What kind of cakes were they then, do you remember the names of them?

Yes. Actually, we still do them today.

Still doing them?

There’s Albert cake, chocolate highlight cake, madeira cake – all well-known cakes that Balfour’s have kind of grown up on. So they’re all still there. Napoleon cake, which is, I suppose, one of the most popular cakes that Adelaide knows. If you go to New South Wales or that or you’ve got friends in New South Wales that come from Adelaide, one of the first things they’ll say to you, ‘Are you still making Napoleon cake?’ And I say yes. But we still make that. Then we used to have to go, take it downstairs, let it dry out – the topping would dry – then you’d have to cut it. And that was our jobs as apprentices, doing – you used to do all the manual tasks and doing bits and piecees.

When you say ‘putting nuts on’, were you doing that by hand?

Yes.

All by hand.

Yes. No, there was no machines to do those sort of things. We used to sprinkle them on and they used to have two catchers on each side of the cake as it went past, so you’d sprinkle it on, make sure you didn’t get it on the floor or something like that because it was waste, and then they’d go off at you. But it was an interesting time. Then I went on the mixing machines where you learnt to make cream and the highlights that you used to put on the cake.

Tell me a bit about those machines and how you made those things then?

They were like, they were huge – they’re just like a huge Mixmaster standing maybe two metres tall, huge motor on them. They had a huge bowl on them, stainless steel bowls. Used to put your mixing in, which it would either be icing sugar, water, margarine – in those days it was what they called a Highlight fat – and you’d mix it to a ..... thing, you’d colour it, you’d make half of it this colour and half of it that colour, you’d put it into a bowl ready for it to go onto the machines. You would make creams, like we still use a cream called ‘Bulla imitation cream’ – it’s still one of the best creams. It’s not a real cream but it’s a mock cream. We still use that.

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That used to be a unique thing to do, because you can either over-beat it or under- beat it. So they were things where you learnt that you touched the icing or you touched that, you’d know that if you put a curl on the top it was the right consistency. If it flopped down straight away or it stood up, peaked, it was too hard or it was too soft. So it all became by touch. Today you can’t do that. You know, it’s not – today it’s all timed. But in those days you used to do that because bakers live by the feel. It’s not a – it’s really a science with baking, you know, and that’s where these days there’s too many – not too many, but there’s pre-mixes out there. You don’t have to be a baker to be a baker these days. In my time, when I was doing confectionary or doing that side, you had to learn how to do it. I don’t know whether I told you, but the instance about meringues. We used to make meringues and make them into little like we called ‘mushrooms’ – they used to go on top of cakes. So you’d make this little dome or two and then you’d put a little flat dome on the top. It looked identical to a mushroom. You’d put cocoa on the top of it so it had that brown on it and you’d stick them on together and you’d make this cake, mushroom cake, it was a chocolate mushroom cake. And I can remember at one stage my boss sitting in there – Charlie Brooks – sitting in an office watching me use these eggs that were no good. And I’d been there since about five o’clock in the morning, and the last job – the apprentices had to do this job, and I was in about my third, fourth year, third year of apprenticeship – and he watched me, and it was about four o’clock in the afternoon when I’m hoping I should be going home – I’d been there from that time in the morning – and at six o’clock I’m still making these meringues. And I’m nearly in tears. ‘Charlie, I don’t know what’s wrong, don’t know why they’re – – –.’ ‘Go and get another bowl, go and get it, wash the bowl out, do that.’ In the end he said, ‘I’ll tell you why. The eggs are off.’ That was the first thing he said. ‘So next time you go and get some eggs’ – because we used to get them in these tins – and he said, ‘next time you’ll understand, just go and smell the eggs first.’ Things that, you know, are just common sense.

So they’re already broken, the eggs, or they were like – – –?

Yes, they were egg whites, they were egg whites, frozen egg whites. We used to get them out and thaw them, because sometimes you’d leave them out or somebody

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would leave them out overnight and of course they’d be no good. And what I was doing was I was picking up the same tin of eggs and trying to make these – because you only used a small amount of egg. I’ll always remember that. These are things that you learn and it sticks with you for the rest of your life. And they’re only simple things but you think to yourself, ‘I’ll have to remember that.’ These days, if you go down and you say something to the guys they look at you and say, ‘Well, how do you know those sorts of things?’ Well, I learnt the hard way. (laughs)

Have you any other examples like that that you can remember – – –?

Of mistakes?

That you learned by, yes.

There’s been many mistakes made in my life. Look, offhand no, I suppose – I can remember when I started to learn to pipe. We used to – and piping is with icing sugar, and those things you used to – you kind of used to go from one job to the next. You kind of progressed until you looked at guys that were in their fifties and say, ‘One day I’m going to be like them,’ you know, ‘wow’. But when you stop and looked at it, they’d never tell you things because they didn’t want you to kind of become a young buck. You were the young buck there. But I can always remember that I used to have to do icing cakes, ice the cakes, and you had to get them as smooth as anything. And you used to use a little wooden pad and you’d pick the icing up with your hands and you’d drop it over the cake which had a board on it, and you’d drop it over and you’d smooth it. And the guys would never tell you exactly how to do that. And you’d rub and rub sometimes this cake trying to get a shine – you’d rub through it, you know? All the little bits of mistakes that you made that they’d sit there smiling at. Funny.

So you talk about you being a ‘young buck’ – was there that sort of relationship between –

Oh yes.

– people that had been – – –?

Yes.

Tell me about that.

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Yes, well, there was the oldies and the young ones. Another man that I admired greatly was Ken Cunningham, the radio announcer, his father, he was in charge of all the drivers, and he ruled with an iron fist. But he was a man that – I had a lot of time for him. And of course I can remember Ken coming in when he was young. His father would take him home, you know, he’d walk around and his father would take him home, so I knew Ken very well. There was another guy by the name of Clarrie Gurr, who was a huge man, but he was a typical baker like one of those – – –. We all used to have to wear whites with a white apron and that. Clarrie Gurr used to do no work but he used to know everything, and he would know when something’s gone wrong. He had that sixth sense of the oven, someone’s got something in the oven, or it’s not right. And they were the sort of guys that were in their sixties when I was in my twenties or early twenties. So you looked up to them as the skilled guys. And they were. There was no doubt about this type of people. They had no formal education, but you put them in front of a – to do something like a cake or anything like that – unbelievable.

Had they been at Balfour’s for a long time, those sort of people?

Yes. Charlie Brooks had been there over thirty-odd years. Bob Jarrett that you were talking about had been there forty-odd years, and Bob – in those days he used to be the supervisor, foreman, which Bob was, and then there was junior foreman, which I became and then I become foreman and then I become supervisor and then I did a traineeship.

Tell me a little bit about Bob Jarrett as a foreman, then?

Bob Jarrett was a lovely guy. He was one of those guys that was not as skilled in the decorating side of things, but he was a very good worker, very – it was either black or white with Bob, there was no greys. Charlie would sometimes let the grey come in, but Bob wasn’t. But Bob had a way – you either liked Bob or you didn’t like Bob. We had arguments, I had many arguments with him over different ways – if I felt like I’d want to go, he’d want to go, and I was like his junior foreman in those days. But he still taught me a lot of the skill bases. And the thing about Bob was that he, as I said, he was very fair, and he was like Charlie in a lot of ways. I think he lived under Charlie’s shadow because Charlie – Charlie died very tragically, or not tragically but very quickly. He went home one day and just dropped dead. And

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he was just a man that everybody thought would never – he’d be there until he retired. And so Bob had to go straight into that room. Going into that room kind of, I suppose, Bob had a lot to live up to. And I don’t think he ever made it in that way because everybody said, ‘Oh, well, there was no-one ever like Charlie.’ And that was from the senior management up, always had Charlie up here, you know? But no, he was a nice guy and, as I said, I learnt a lot off him too. But a different type of person, totally different type of person. He was a doer. Charlie would show you once and expect you to learn it and learn it the right way and give you a bit of a nudge or a kick or a kick up the butt just to say, ‘Hey, that’s the way you do it.’ Bob wouldn’t do that. Bob would be patient with you and let you go through it. So there’s two ways of learning.

So tell me a little bit about the rest of your apprenticeship. You say you spent a year doing this one cake thing.

Yes.

What happened after that? What was the gradual progression you talked about?

I went from then to looking after – you become like a team leader. But during my apprenticeship I didn’t go too far out of the decorating room which was on the first floor. It was like there was ‘them below’, which was the bakers, and ‘us up here’ that were the decorators, and we always classed ourselves as a little bit above them because we didn’t have to get up as early and we didn’t have to – we worked in a more – – –. (tape ends)

END OF TAPE 1 SIDE A: TAPE 1 SIDE B

[there was ‘them below’, which was the bakers, and ‘us up here’ that were the decorators, and we always classed ourselves as a little bit above them because we didn’t have to get up as early and we didn’t have to – we worked in a more], cleaner environment, we worked with our hands and we were skilled, you know, because we used to do wedding cakes. But, as I said, I went from catching cake and learnt all the little bits and pieces. Even in those days in an apprenticeship the last thing of an apprentice, when you’re an apprentice, everybody would go home, you’d have to sweep the floors. That was your job. Scrape the floors, sweep them, before you went home.

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Was that a hard job, was it very dirty in there? I mean, can you give me some idea of the conditions?

No. Oh, it was dusty. There was a lot of flour and a lot of icing sugar and all that around. Yes, and there was cream on the floor. But that was your job. They had cleaners there, but you still had to clean up after you. If you used a machine you had to wash it down and you had to do all the bits and pieces. So if the cleaner was away you’d have to clean the toilets. There was no, ‘Ay, I’m not doing it.’ It was, ‘Evans, get in, your turn to clean the toilets,’ so you did it. But I wouldn’t like to go back to those days, the way it was, but you had fun times. It was like hard work, long hours, you know. I can remember at one stage I started work at four o’clock in the morning and I went home at nine-thirty that night. I had to ride my bike home, you know? And that was around Easter time. That’s the sort of hours sometimes you worked. It wasn’t all the time, but many a day I put in twelve hours. That was just it.

You said you started in November, didn’t you? Did you [experience] –

Yes.

– what was your first Christmas like? Did you experience it as – – –?

I didn’t really get much of the Christmas. Christmas, you know, I was kind of just there and I was kind of like wet behind the ears and it was just virtually, thinking about it, it never really affected me too much, Christmas.

So Easter was your first sort of busy period.

Yes. Easter’s always been our biggest time, a lot bigger than Christmas. Christmas is a long period, Easter’s a short period of doing so much in ...... times. But I think my progression was from there to go and ice cakes, do piping with – piping cream, cream piping, on the conveyors and doing cream cakes. I then went into – well, as I said, icing the cakes then decorating them. And you had to kind of learn that. It was a skill, it was a skill.

Tell me some of the things you were learning in terms of the decorating side, then.

How to pipe, how to write names. Do you know, even today I cannot write. I can print, I can’t write, because you used to make these bags up, these little bags, and you’d have to stand there and print names, you know? Dean, Joe. Happy birthday. Congratulations. And you would do – oh, could do in sponges, I suppose, alone,

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you’d ice the sponges, put fondant on the top, you’d do five or six hundred a day, you know, between the team of us. And then you’d have to put the decorations on and off you go. So that was a skill that you had to learn, and then, after you’d done that, you used to then learn how to do cakes because cakes are a different thing. They had the icing on the side. So then you had to learn how to pipe with a different thing, with tubes and that. So they’d sit you down and you would sit at a desk or a table and you’d draw all over the desk, you’d pipe on the desk, and you’d do drop – what they call ‘drop piping’.

What’s that?

Well, they get an icing – it’s like as thick as a lead pencil. And you would start in the corner, you’d have a what they call a ‘decorating wheel’ and you’d sit there on a stool and you’d drop this piping. And you’d drop it down – so remember it’s icing coming down – and you’d loop it, and you’d loop it all around. The skill in that is that you don’t let it drop, because if it drops it breaks. And then you go over it again, and then you go over it again so you’re building it up, and you’re doing those sorts of things. So that was – you never could progress onto that. That was kind of like, well, ‘One day, son, you’ll get that.’ (laughs) One day! So you became quite a good – – –. It was like you had to learn to crawl, walk, run, progression from there, and that went right through the bakery, didn’t matter what you did. You had to do the dirty jobs and move on.

You talked about, what, five hundred, six hundred cakes a day with the team. What sort of numbers were there on the team in the decorating area then. This would be in the early ’60s, I suppose, would it?

Yes. There was about eight of us, seven or eight of us.

All men, were they?

Yes. And one girl that used to do the – there was – no, sorry, two girls. A girl by the name of Anna Tabachi, and Rose – now, I don’t know what her name was, can’t think of her, Rose – she used to live at Goodwood, too. But they used to do the finishing off. So they’d put the – for wedding cakes we’d do maybe twenty wedding cakes a day. There could be something like fifty or sixty birthday cakes, there’d be five hundred-odd sponges. And they used to do the finishing off. So they’d put the

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flowers on them and the pillars and, you know, just do the pretty bits at the end. The guys would – but they never had women in those days doing any of the piping.

Was that a Balfour’s thing or was that a general decorating trade thing?

It was a general thing, it was a general thing. Then, when I was doing – when I got into the supervisory side, I got some of the girls to start doing it because really they had the better skills in being able – or more fastidious. And some girls did become very, very good decorators. So yes, it all changed over a period of time, but it took a long time to do it. It’s like if I was working there, Mr Balfour walks through the factory – which he did every morning at nine o’clock – he used to be one of the scariest guys I can remember for an impression you’d get of a person.

Why?

He was very tall. He’d been about six foot four, he was as thin as a rake, he always wore a black suit, white shirt and a black tie. You could see your face in his shoes – black shoes, black socks – and he didn’t have a hair on his head or on his eyebrows. He lost his hair overnight. And he’d walk through. But he’d never talk to the young ones because they hadn’t reached that maturity. And when, in my late teens or early twenties, I was in charge of the decorating room – because Bob used to look after the general side and I used to look after the decorating side at that stage, they kind of made me equal footing with Bob – it was quite funny because Mr Balfour would come up and go over and talk to one of the guys in the decorating that was in his sixties and ask him questions of why this hadn’t got out and why we had a problem with this, but never come and ask me. Until one day I went over and confronted him.

What happened?

I just went over and I said, ‘Mr Balfour,’ I said, ‘you put me in charge of this area, you give me the responsibility, you give me the extra pay to do it, and yet you won’t come and ask me what the problem is. You go and ask Don Lawrence or one of the others why,’ you know. ‘Oh!’ And it was just like a blunt, ‘I’m sorry, Ian.’ And we just had to get a footing. After that he and I got on very well. (laughs) It was just that he would – he used to do it again, but at least I’d got my word in that, ‘Hey, this is why we’ve – Mr Balfour, why.’

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What was he like as a manager for the company, do you think? What was he – – –?

He was a – Mr Balfour was a – you never got to know Mr Balfour. He was like the old school. He would say, ‘Good morning, Dean.’ And that was about what you got. You’d never know him personally. I knew his son, Johnny Balfour. I worked, I did my apprenticeship with John – well, part of my apprenticeship – and John was totally opposite to Mr Balfour. But Mr Balfour was very – I’d call – I always remember him as a bit of an old scary guy. I just couldn’t kind of get to him. But the one thing about the man, he always found out if you had a problem and he’d always make sure that – he wouldn’t fix it, but he would get someone to fix it for you.

Do you have an example of that at all?

Yes. I can remember different ones that have had financial problems, and I won’t mention names, but have had financial problems, and all of a sudden those financial problems have disappeared. He would find out about it and he would make sure that something was done about it. David Wauchope was the same in a lot of ways, there was a lot of compassion there. I had a very dear friend that died, who actually I did part of my apprenticeship with, guy by the name of Kevin Barton came over from England. In those days you had to kind of sponsor people out here, and Balfour’s sponsored this lad out from Wales, Kevin Barton, and his wife and they had a little baby. And he was out here for about two years, and Kevin and I and my wife and his wife, because we were around about the same age, we used to go everywhere together, weekends and that. Tragically, Kevin had a bad accident on Unley Road coming to work one morning about three o’clock and – had an old bomb of a car and the front wheel fell off and he hit a Stobie pole, and he lay in the car for a couple of hours before they found him, because nobody realised that he’d actually had such a bad accident. So he had a broken leg. So we used to go and pick him up and take him everywhere together, Joy and myself, and I could always remember I used to bring him in to work with his – he’d get sick of staying at home so I’d go down and pick him up. I had an Austin A-40 in those days. And I’d pick him up, put him in the back seat – he was a huge guy, he was about six foot two, six foot three – and I’d have to put him in the back seat and put his leg over the front seat. I’d bring him

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into work, though, just so he’d come into work and hobble around for a while. The week before he was going to come back to work he had a tooth pulled out and it never stopped bleeding. His wife rang, his wife Angela rang me and said, ‘Dean, I can’t get it to stop, Kevin’s tooth stop bleeding.’ So I went down there, took him into the Adelaide Hospital because it was a Friday night, they took some tests, he had leukaemia. He died within a week. But where the compassion come in, I got called in to the board room by Mr Balfour and David Wauchope and they said, ‘You do whatever you have to do, but just make sure that Angela has everything.’ Every Wednesday – I think we got paid on Wednesday then, every week, a weekly pay – every Wednesday Ralph Potter would come up with his pay and I’d have to knock off a bit early and take it home to her. They actually paid for a fare and all her belongings to go back to England – she decided she wanted to go back to England with Jarrett – and so I had the day off to go and get the truck, go around to her place, couple of guys, pick up everything and get her all fixed up. They put her in a hotel for a couple of days after we’d sold the house and then they took her, paid for everything for her to go home. You know, that’s the sort of things they did. When I had – I had a bit of a bad turn when I was younger, I had a blood clot go for my heart, every week there’d be somebody ring me, send you flowers, send Joy flowers. It was just great, you know. So they had a lot of compassion in those years. They were still hard.

Is that where that sort of – I’ve heard of Balfour’s called a ‘family company’, particularly in those days. Is that where that sort of comes from, do you think?

Oh, no. I suppose the family bit comes because they were all family, the Wauchopes and the Balfours were family. But you were the extended family of that. There was no two ways about it. There was that extension of people that worked at Balfour’s to become part of that family of the older guys there and the – everybody seemed to work there. It’s just like everybody – you bumped into somebody in town and they’d say, ‘Oh, I used to work at Balfour’s when I was young.’ You know? I didn’t even know until my old auntie that I looked after for ten years after her husband died that, talking to her one day, that she used to work in the café over at seventy-two Rundle Mall, you know? And when she got a bit older she started reminiscing about the old times, you know, and I find out that she used to work

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there, and different ones like that, it’s just become a bit of a thing. So I suppose that’s where the family bit comes in.

Can you tell me a bit about, I guess, the atmosphere of the workplace in those, say, in the early ’60s – the pace of the work, the kind of feeling in the workplace.

Hectic. I don’t think – whether you got the amount of – there was pressure all the time. In these days we don’t – we still have pressure, but you didn’t have the automation then and so if something went wrong it was back to the basics and start all over again. When I first started working there there was – you had to be a privileged – it had to be a privilege to become a Balfour’s customer. It wasn’t like today: ‘I want to become a Balfour’s customer.’ ‘Yeah, I’ll sign you up, we’ll go out.’ In those days, every second deli was a Balfour’s shop, but the one in between, if you were in between, you didn’t become a Balfour’s shop.

Why was that?

Mr Balfour had a way that he didn’t want everybody to be a Balfour’s shop because if that happened it would virtually take away the mystique of ‘being a Balfour’s’, you know? You had to kind of earn your stripes to get it. But then again, you know, things changed, the Wauchopes came in, David Wauchope was more of a goer, and so in doing that he changed that aspect of it. But Balfour’s – see, Balfour’s had been around for many, many, many years, and like with Mr Balfour, he was, I would say, a ‘money person’ in Adelaide. You know, you have the families like the Browns that used to be in the old days, the wealthy people of Adelaide – that’s how Mr Balfour was. So he had this – every morning he’d come into work in a Jag. The mechanic would then take his car around to the garage and leave it there. The mechanic would wash it every day. Johnny Linke was his name. And he would wash the car, he would then take it at lunchtime at twelve o’clock it would come around the corner of Franklin Street and Morphett Street, there used to be the office right on the corner there – Mr Balfour had the corner office, right in the corner – and he would toot the horn once, Mr Balfour would get up from whatever he was doing, go out, get in the car – there was no Rundle Mall then – he’d take him straight down to Rundle Street, park out the front of seventy-two Rundle Mall and bring the car back to the garage. Mr Balfour would have – there was a mezzanine floor on the top of seventy-two, him and some of his mates – a couple of judges and all that – they’d

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sit down and have lunch every day, discuss the world, the world problems there. And he would then – maybe if he didn’t feel like it he’d ring John and John would go around in the car again, pick him up, bring him home. Back to work. That was – you know, you don’t see that happening now, you don’t see that sort of thing happening, but that was part and – – –. And there was nothing wrong with it then, that’s how you kind of brought it up, it was just common practice. And I can remember seeing Mr Balfour walking out of a hotel one day and I was horrified. He was walking, he walked back from seventy-two and I was walking up Franklin Street and it was the Thistle Hotel which is (sound of mobile telephone interference) pulled down now. My wife used to work in the Norwich Union, and I looked over and here’s Mr Balfour walking out. And I went, ‘My God – didn’t know he drank.’ And it was quite amazing. He looked at me as though, oh, a bit of shock, you know, ‘I’ve been seen.’ But, you know, it’s amazing that things like that happened, you know. I still have fond memories of it because I think it gave you respect for people, you just put them up there and that was it.

You talked about his office being on the corner there – can you perhaps talk a little bit about the layout of the place when you first started –

Oh, yes, yes.

– and how it’s different from now?

Totally different now. When I started there, the front office, which is now the dough room, and when you go in if you have a look at it you’d think how does ever – – –? But they had, what they had there, they had Mr Balfour’s in one corner, Mr Bateman was another director. Now, Mr Bateman was a Sturt footballer. He was always very ill. He had like a bag, he had part of his bowel taken out, and so you didn’t see much of him. He used to be called the ‘Old Grump’ – he was a bit of a grumpy old guy around the place, he never – – –. But there was him. They had the two front offices. Then there was like a personnel manager’s office, there was three pay girls in the front office part, all in this one area that’s no bigger than this room, no bigger than this room. And then on the other side there was David Wauchope’s office and I think his secretary’s office. Now, these offices were only this big, only small little dog boxes. And then upstairs you had two sales people. That was Ray Picks, and

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that would be a man that you should get into your file, Ray Picks, but you may have to go out and see him.

That’s fine.

But he was a wonderful man, Ray Picks. He was a driver become a salesman by default, become sales manager by default, but knew everybody in Adelaide and would fix – anything that ever wanted to be fixed, he would do it. He just knew everybody. So that was a part of the – that was that front little bit of the building. From there there was the decorating room, bakery, cellar, and it went – we had about, I suppose, two hundred, two hundred people working there, hundred and fifty – and it went down to about where – no, sorry. There’s a new part of the building – it’s hard to describe to you – the decorating room on Morphett Street side, that was only a single floor. When I was apprentice, within about four years of me working there, five years, they put a top floor on it. So they virtually doubled the size of the decorating area. The bakery was about the same size as what it is now, and then they extended – all the girls that were in the wholesale and the ’phone areas and all that, they used to work out of seventy-two Rundle Mall, and then we built the bit on the side along Mellor Street there which became twenty-one Mellor Street. So that was all built. And then in the late ’70s, I think it would be, we built the big pastry bakery out the back and that was a massive job, that was a huge job to get that one done. Still kind of – well, it queries me why we did that bit there. It should have been more up to the front and the drive-in down the back. We could never buy out Citizen Fisher’s on the corner. If you look at it there’s that little Citizen Fisher’s on the corner – they’d never sell. They wanted everything for that. At one stage they wanted us to buy the block of land that was opposite that’s still vacant on the other side, they wanted us to buy that. There was a row of cottages there, they wanted us to knock that all down and build a garage for them there for the same price as getting that little bit of area, and David Wauchope then dug their heels and said, ‘No, we’ll build around you.’ So they built around them. (laughs)

So you said they doubled the size of the decorating room in that period – was that due to demand, or – – –?

Yes, yes. In those days the decorating room was a very active place. We’d do sponges, for instance, we used to do what they call mini-sponges – they’re a little

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min-sponge about six inches in diameter and they used to cut them in half and they used to put cream in them. Now, we would do four or five thousand of those a day, just cream them, put icing sugar on them, send them out. There was a lot of that. Fudge cakes, which we still do today. We used to do a thousand of those. Demands for those have kind of dropped down, we don’t do the mini-cakes any more. But there was a lot of demand more for specialised cakes. These days it’s more women in the back yard doing them, more women are being taught as a hobby, so they decide they’ll do so-and-so’s wedding cake and you often go to parties these days and somebody – Auntie Flo’s made it or something like that.

Can you talk a little bit about those specialty cakes, how that worked and how the designs worked and how you’d do them, et cetera?

We had what they called a – when I first started we used to just do plain flowers. Even a man, he’d get a row of – a spray of flowers and ‘Happy Birthday, Bill’ on it, ‘Happy 50th Birthday’ on a sponge cake. Then we went really mod and we did what they called ‘stencils’ on it. And I mentioned Kevin Barton, but one of the cherished jobs I had with him prior to him dying was we spent quite a few days designing up new designs for the cake with what they call stencils – like kids do today with the stencil. But what we used to do, we used to make them out of brass. So you’d get the brass and it’d be like a cowboy or a horse or a cow or a football, or something like that, and all you’d do is you’d just lay it on the cake and spread the icing over it and then you’d decorate around it. But it was a quick way of putting all the different little motifs on cakes.

So did you draw those? How did you make those designs?

We’d draw them up, him and I would sit down and we’d draw them, and then we got the engineers out the back to cut them up and, you know, finely cut them with a little tooth saw. Very easy to work. We’d pay them an extra amount of money to do one of these little – something like about maybe two pounds or something – no, two dollars or three dollars just to cut one of these things out. And then that became our template to do all these sorts of things. From there we really went flash – we ended up getting what they call a ‘copycat’ machine, so you then had all these cards that you would put in an overhead projector that would actually project down onto the – you’d sit in a box, a square box, throw the thing over you, put this card in and it

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would give you an outline of whatever, and then you’d draw it all in and then you’d flood it in, what they call ‘flooding’ it in. So you would be able to do quite nice work with that.

What’s flooding?

You’d get the icing sugar and you’d make it – or the royal icing, and you would bring it down to like – it was like a syrupy effect. Like a jelly, you know. And then you’d just flood it all in and bring in all the features you wanted and the colours and all that. And that was good fun. I still wonder whether someone used to sleep behind there, as I can remember. (laughter)

So how many different – were there heaps of different designs, or – – –?

Oh, yes. We would have a hundred, hundred and fifty different designs you would be able to do, different things. And you could just copy anything off it just by – it was just like a projector. Had this square box with the projector light in it and the light coming down, you used to have to just slide this card in it and it would just project up and straight down onto it. So you’d have a twelve inch sponge and you would lower it or heighten it to give you what size you wanted over the card. And then you had like a magnifier, you used to be able to magnify it to get sharper features out of it. And then you’d sit there and – oh, you’d sit there for sometimes a half-hour just piping around it and making sure everything was right.

So people would order a specific one, or what would they do?

Oh yes, yes, they’d ring up and they’d say, ‘Oh, I’d like one with a doll on it,’ or ‘I’d like one with an elephant on it.’ ‘Cowboy on a horse,’ you know, all those sorts of things. They were kind of like the most popular ones for kids and all that, and then you’d have the girls would have the dollies and the boys would have the horses on it or a car, vintage car – the Monaro, I remember when the first Monaro came out we did one up for the first Monaro, you know. Good fun.

I’ll just change the tape.

END OF TAPE 1 SIDE B: TAPE 2 SIDE A This is the second tape of an interview with Dean Evans being recorded by Karen George for the Adelaide City Council’s Balfour’s Oral History Project. The interview is taking place on the 11th December 2002 in Adelaide, South Australia. So you talked a little bit about the birthday cakes. Tell me a bit about how the

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wedding cakes worked did they have different kinds of designs that people could order?

Yes. You had about twenty-odd designs. In those days a lot of the designs are totally different [from] today. You used to what they call ‘crimping’, so you’d actually crimp on the cake. So the icing sugar you would pinch and make a design out of it, and then you would pipe over that to give it a – to build it up. A lot of the – I mentioned first about my father and Lampard, there was a lot of his type of work what they did where they used a lot of ornate, very ornate, type of work, very heavy – young kids of today would hate it. It was just too heavy and too much fanciness in it. But the crimping kind of stayed for a while and you could see that moving out, and then it was coming more into the finer work. And you’d have about twenty different designs – you used to call them ‘one, two, three’ – there was no – you know, you couldn’t kind of give them a name. And so somebody would ring up or they’d go into seventy-two Rundle Mall, or we had some of the bigger customers would have books in their shops and they’d go into them and they’d open up the book and they’d say, ‘Oh, I’ll have number twenty-one, thank you, and I’ll have a three-tier, I’ll have it – – –.’ And when you say a three-tier, we used to have different sizes in three-tier, so you’d say ‘an eight, four and a two’ or you’d say ‘a seven and a three’ or ‘a five and a two’ in the two-tier, and these were the pound cakes. So it was an eight pound cake, four pound cake, two pound cake. So that’s how people used to order things. And in the book it would say ‘You get x amount of cake cuttings out of this for a party of so-and-so.’ So that order would come in on a piece of paper or we used to have these little order books, I think, and it would say, ‘It’s for Mrs Jones of seventy-two Rundle Mall,’ and it would have to have the date on it, what we took it, when it had to be done by. We usually looked at about two weeks’ notice. At the bottom it would have any comments. So she might say, ‘Oh, the bridesmaid’s going to be in blue,’ and she might have a clipping of a piece of a blue colour, so you would put that blue somewhere into the cake if it was required, you know. So that was virtually all they used to do with wedding cakes. People would just sometimes say, ‘Oh, I want it with magnolias on it,’ or ‘I want it with roses on it’ or ‘I don’t want any flowers on top.’ I think the most unusual one we’ve had is the frog cake ones where people have wanted frog cake wedding cakes. But we did have one woman asked years ago for a black wedding cake. Now, whether

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that was (laughs) something cynical there I don’t know, but I can always remember doing that one.

So would that cake be your job, or it would be one person would work on that cake, or – – –?

No.

No?

As I said to you before, when you’re an apprentice sometimes you’d do the icing and then they’d go onto the next one and then the girls would finish it off. So that slip and everything would go through. We got what we call the word ‘coffin racks’, where there used to be these things called ‘coffin racks’, and they used to put all the wedding cakes on. So it was like three tiers, big racks with – oh, about as long as this table and half as wide –

Which would be what?

– be, what, five metres by metre and a half wide, I suppose – and you’d put all the wedding cakes on that in their arrangement of what you want. And then the girls would just come along and pull one off and finish it, and then put it back into another rack which was the finished rack, so they would go downstairs. But yes, the wedding cakes were a big part of the business in the decorating area. It was quite a massive thing.

How much of your time would be spent – say, can you describe a day in decorating back then when you were working there? What would you be doing?

Oh, come in the morning. I’ve always been fairly lucky, I suppose, in some ways, that when I started there my first job was I’d have to organise the work. So you’d organise how many wedding cakes were on for that day, how many sponge cakes were going to be done, how many birthday cakes. So you’d sort all out the slips and that and then give them to each one and say, ‘Well, this is what you’re going to be doing today, that’s what you’re going to do, that’s what you’re going to do.’ And it was like a – was just like a conveyor line of people doing different things each day to get them done. And these guys that were decorators were skilled people, and they were treated like skilled people. As I said to you, I think, before, there was ‘them and us’ – it was like the bakers and the decorators. But they were guys that would

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never overwork themselves, but they worked to a point where they knew that they were doing the best, you know? And we had some very good decorators and we were noted for that – Balfour’s were noted for our decorating skills, you know? So it became quite a thing that if you got a Balfour’s wedding cake you got a good cake. And our cakes never varied. The cake itself, the dark rich cake that we used, that was a hidden secret. Nobody – you wouldn’t let that out of the thing, that was – – –. We used to use the best of fruit, we used to use the best of – and we still do, but they were virtually – how can I put it? – I’ve lost the word. But it was something that you kind of – if you were going to have a Balfour’s wedding cake your wedding was going to be good, the cake was going to be excellent. So it just was the way it was. We had a lot of – they used to do a lot of – you know the frog cakes we do today? They used to do all different designs in those, so weddings, people would come and buy a wedding cake but they’d buy what we called ‘fancies’ cakes, and they would go in the wedding. So each one in front of their wedding, you know, the guests, they might have a nice little fancy cake in front of them. Always Balfour’s. So that was kind of like their sweets and that.

So they’d be sort of a small cake the size of a frog cake –

Yes. Yes.

– but some other kind of design.

Yes. Yes, with little flowers on it or a bit of jelly on it – we used to do thousands of them, thousands of those. They used to be quite a big business. But it was quite a – the decorating room used to really be humming all the time. We’d work from five o’clock in the morning till six o’clock, seven o’clock at night. And that was every day that was going on. And we had some people that would come in at two o’clock in the morning to start making some of the mixes. Only a couple would do that. But we had some really good characters there. The amount of people that we – I was laying in bed last night and this funny – I didn’t even – it didn’t even cross my mind that I was coming here today, and I said to my wife, I said, ‘It’s amazing,’ I said, ‘I would love to know where Rocky is.’ Now, Rocky was a guy that worked for Balfour’s and I was his boss – he did an apprenticeship there – but his name was Ian Muller. He was as wild as they come but a lovely guy, lovely kid. I went to his wedding. And he lost his leg in

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a motorbike accident and he went rather wild. Now, I can remember him coming to my place and saying goodbye to me and saying he was going to Queensland, ‘and I’ll keep in touch,’ and I said to my wife last night, I said, ‘It’s funny.’ Now, that was going back fifteen years ago and I’d still love to know where he is. And I said to her last night, I said, ‘I would just love to know where Rocky is – I hope he’s still alive.’ That’s my feeling about it because he was so wild. But we had another kid there called ‘Sprouts’, and I couldn’t even tell you what his name was, his second name was. (laughs) We called him Sprouts. And just kids like that, that you – and there’s hundreds of kids. Because I’ve been a buyer for many years now – and it was nice the other day; I went to one of the Association’s presentation nights for the baking industry, the BIA, Baking Industry Awards at the Convention Centre. And I’m sitting there and my wife was having a chat – there was about a table of ten that I got invited along to – and this guy come up and started chatting to me and then he turned to my wife and he said, ‘He used to be my boss.’ And she said to me afterwards, she said, ‘He’s nearly as old as you.’ And I said, ‘Yes, well, that’s right,’ you know. And a lot of these guys that I was either in charge of them or I knew them from way back, they’re still in the food industry but they’ve gone on and become sales people or they’re actually managers of different areas, you know, different wholesalers and that.

You mentioned your youth – how was it that you were chosen to – did you express an interest or were you chosen to sort of take over a foreman’s role after your apprenticeship?

Just chosen, I think chosen. I think – you know, I was always a bit pushy. Not pushy in a pushy way, but I always wanted to learn. My idea was that once I’d finished my apprenticeship I was going to go and work for my father and I wanted to go to England and study over there. And, as I said, my mother was very ill and my father and I kind of drifted. We didn’t kind of see eye to eye after my mother took ill for a while. Then I planned to go to England – Mr Balfour actually got me a job over there for two years. I was going to go over there and do another kind of traineeship and do the bits and pieces there. Unfortunately, the two guys I was going with – because in those days you had to actually have a job to go to – the two guys I was going over with both pulled out and I thought, ‘Well, I’m not going over to

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England on my own.’ I wasn’t going to – I just wasn’t game enough to do it in those days. And I was only just twenty-one, I suppose, when I finished my apprenticeship and that’s when I was going to go. These days I’d jump at the chance, but I thought, ‘No, I won’t go.’ Then my wife came along and so I didn’t go. But I regret that part because I would have liked to have gone over and learnt a little bit more on the baking side. Not that I do any baking now, (laughs) but it just gives you – it just broadens your outlook on life, you know, what you want to do. And I think that’s what I’ve always loved about Balfour’s, that it’s not a job where you can just go in there and say, ‘I’m going to do that.’ It takes a lot of frustration, takes a lot of time, lot of understanding, to be able to work in a place like that. Because it’s a day-to-day business. You cannot stockpile stuff. It’s like you go in today and there’s a problem with the flour. You go in tomorrow there’s a problem with the milk. The next day there’d be a problem with something else. It’s not like you’re going in and you’re getting a piece of iron or you’re a metal worker and every day it’s the same sort of thing going in. You’ve got to be thinking all the time of, ‘How are we going to do it, what are you going to do?’, you know. And everybody’s day-to-day requirements are different. Today it’s twenty-three degrees so it’s a good day for eating pies, it’s not over- hot. And eating cake. Come Sunday, when it might be thirty-five, not going to eat pies, not going to eat pasties, you’re not going to eat too much cake. So our business is very much on demand and that’s what I love about it, it’s a challenge all the time. You’ve got to be at it. And the buying side, which I love now – as I said, I’ve been in it for a long time – is because – and I think where you get the appreciation is that because I’ve worked in the other side, you know the demands that are required. You can’t kind of say, ‘Come back and see me tomorrow, I’ll get it tomorrow,’ because Mrs Jones wants her cake today, not tomorrow.

Well, tell me a bit about progression. You moved from – you’d sort of become a foreman, you say, in the decorating area.

Yes.

Then how long were you doing that? When was that – – –?

And then I was going to leave. (laughter)

What year would this have been, more or less?

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’60 – met my wife, got married in ’66, so I suppose back in – just prior to that, about early ’60s.

And you would have remained in that position as foreman –

Yes.

– for a while, or – – –?

Yes. Right up until around about nearly the ’70s.

What stands out there – it’s almost, what, a ten year sort of period, is it?

What stands out in that period?

Yes, in that role as foreman in the decorating room. What – – –?

Just the people. Just the people you get to know and the people that have gone through that you hope that somewhere along the line you’ve been able to do the right thing by them, you’ve been able to – a lot of young people going through, you know, and that’s what I really enjoy. I have got a short fuse sometimes, but I always look at it this way, that that was the way I was brought up. I most probably will never be able to get out of that, but I look at it and say a lot of those people that have gone through there I’d bump into in the street and they’ve got kids, you know, and they still come up and they’ll still give me a kiss on the cheek or say, ‘Hi, Dean, how are you going?’ Now, that’s what I like about it, it’s just the fact that you go back to a family. But that’s what it’s always been, you know? And so it’s not so much the work, it’s the people that go through the place and the people that you meet on the way.

Pam Cobbledick talked about you doing private lessons and training in the decorating – is that that period, or is that later on you were doing that?

My father did that. But yes, Pam’s a lovely lady. Pam – because I did a lot of decorating, my father used to do – he was a cake decorator, an ornamental cake decorator, and he had one of the biggest schools in Adelaide for cake decorating. Hundreds of people went through. He was actually just on it a while ago with the – from the cake society, they put out a booklet and they put them out as – and they wrote an article on him. And so a lot of the women that belonged to that association actually learnt through my father. So I used to go down there – I told you my father

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had this factory – so he’d teach of a night-time these women, cake decorating. So maybe he was the one that got them out of – maybe it was that. But he had hundreds of people went through him. Women – even men. Vili actually learnt off my father. So people like that have learnt how to decorate, how to pipe, and I think that’s where my skills come in, that I was brought up with one. I really knew how to pipe before I could know how to really write properly. It was part of my upbringing.

So did you take on a teaching sort of role then, as a foreman, or – – –?

I did. At work. I used to love to make sure that everyone did it right and how they did it, and as Pam would most probably have discussed – I don’t know what she said all of it – but yes, if somebody had a skill to be able to do it I’d like to make sure that they learnt it the right way and then went through that way. And yes – no, there’s different ones at work there. Alex, you know. Alex would never be a decorator as far as it comes because he just didn’t have the skills, but you knew that. But at the same time he’s a good baker, he’s good in other areas. So it’s not everyone’s going to just become a decorator because, ‘Oh, well, I want to become a decorator.’ I’m left-handed so I’m very – it’s hard for me to teach people how to be a decorator, because I go backwards to everything how I see them. So that becomes a challenge and all that. But it’s good fun, it’s good fun.

So what happened from there? Or perhaps we could just – are there some products back then in the decorating room that no longer exist, and things that you can remember that you worked on a lot then?

(sighs) Well, there’s a lot of products have gone through. We used to do things like called Dolly Vardons – they were like a cake with a lady on the top. My father used to make tops, we used to do the decorating of the Dolly Vardons. So, you know, it’s like a Dolly Vardon like that, with the hat, the big-brimmed hat. So there was those sorts of things that you – nobody would buy them now; they’re too ornate again. The Boston pies, they used to love Boston pies.

What’s a Boston pie?

Boston pies were a sponge, just a single layer sponge cut in half – it was about an eight-inch, I think, it would be about eight-inches – I’d go with eight inches on most things. About an eight-inch sponge. Had custard – and it was a nice custard – in the middle of it, you’d pipe it in. You’d start it in the middle and you’d work your way

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out, put this piping custard on. You’d put cream on the top, which was only a butter cream, and then you’d get flaked almonds and you’d flake almonds over it. But you had to eat them then, when they were nice and fresh. So those things are gone, mini- sponges are gone, and there’s a lot of the small, intricate work has gone out of it. But we still have the things like Kitchener buns and the finger buns and all those that have always been around. Kitchener buns have always been Balfour’s, you know. Custard tarts have always been Balfour’s. Custard tart – why are our custard tarts better than anyone else? Because we used a different milk than everybody else. So it’s all these sorts of things that become part and parcel of the trade, how we do.

You talked about that freshness like the Boston pie – how fresh was it in those days, how would it – – –?

Oh, we’d do it in the morning and they’d go out that day. So an hour and a half or two hours prior to us doing it you could be sitting down eating it at some function or something like that, you know, that’s how fresh they were. It was just part and parcel of – everything had to be fresh. I can remember we’d do Kitchener buns in the morning. The girls would start on Kitchener buns at four o’clock in the morning, so the drivers – in those days the drivers would go out at, say, seven o’clock so not like today they’re going out at two o’clock in the morning, so we’re bringing the clock around. So you’d have Kitchener buns on a terrible hot day – I can remember it being forty once, it was over forty – and of course bakeries aren’t air-conditioned. It’s not like sitting in our offices that we have today. Then you’d be there and you’d be piping it, and as you’re piping it and you’re putting them down the cream’s running out (laughs) the other side! So that was always a funny – now, that was a funny thing. I always remember one thing that you’ve made me reminded now: Mr Balfour always had pride and joy – – –. When we did something as a Balfour’s standard it becomes part and parcel of you. I still look at these Kitchener buns today and I go past sometimes and I want to pat them down. I’ll tell you the reason. A Kitchener bun is a round bowl of dough, you cut it in half and then you put cream in it. So you’ve got a piping bag or we’d got what we call a piping – it’s a sputnik thing now that we pipe it in, it’s pressed air that pipes it in – but when you opened up the jaws and you’d got this cream, you’ve got an area at the top and at the bottom that is exposed to the air. Now, if we did that when we were young and left that

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exposed like that, that was a no-no. You had to push that down so that the cream come right to the edge of the cut so that nothing in that area would dry out. And I can remember we did these Kitcheners and it was so hot, and we had a whole run of about eight days of this very, very hot weather, shocking weather – and I’m saying in the hundreds. I think we had about six days in the hundred degrees and that days. And Mr Balfour came up with the bright idea that we would put butter cream in them instead of our normal cream, because normal cream wasn’t even lasting until you’d get down to the trucks. So we put butter cream in. Butter cream is – you either like it or you loathe it! – it’s a very fatty type of thing. So we put it in, this – didn’t tell any of the customers, but even by the time they got to the shops they had melted. And some that had got there and the customers – we had so many complaints on that day, Mr Balfour came up and made an instruction right through, ‘Never ever again use butter cream in that product. The customer deserves that, and if we cannot make them on that day we don’t make them at all. But we will not upset the customer.’ And oh, it was like he’d spoken, you know. You had to do it that way. But he really got egg on his face that day because he thought you should take it out to the customers – we’ll do it with butter cream because it will hold up better.

Did those kinds of comments from customers ever come back to the floor, the positive and the negative things?

Oh yes, yes. Yes, you’d get – oh, I think in some ways the communications then were better than they are now. I think we live too busy a life now and you forget about that. But I do think we had very good communication. And in those days you’d get a kick in the butt if you did something wrong or you’d get a pat on the back if you did something right, and that was a good way of working. And I can remember after I’d left the decorating area – most probably a bit later on – but I can remember an old lady writing to me and thanking me for a – – –. I worked in business development for a while, and this lady wrote to us thanking us because she’d opened a cake up fifty years after and she could still eat it, and she’d like to send us a bit for us to try. And it was fifty years old. And I tell you what, that cake was nearly as good as what we used to be making.

Fruit cake, it would have been.

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Yes, it was our fruit cake. Still had the icing on it, and she’d cut a little piece off. They were celebrating the seventieth – no, fiftieth wedding anniversary, and she came from Port Lincoln.

So let’s talk about where you went from – you said when we first met that you were sort of chosen to – it was a sort of management training sort of thing that you went through –

Yes.

– all aspects of the company.

Yes.

Perhaps you can tell me a little bit about that.

As I said to you in my statement there, I was going to leave Balfour’s. I decided at one stage that I wanted to do something else. My father had passed away and I tried to look after my father’s business, I worked at my father’s business of a night, I worked at Balfour’s during the day. So I was putting in maybe – I had three girls working for me in those days – so I used to get up at five o’clock in the morning, go to work, I’d come home about three o’clock in the afternoon and I’d work down in the factory at Goodwood until maybe ten o’clock at night, go home, and I had two young children. So this went on for two and a half years. My father actually said to me prior to him dying, ‘Sell up everything and go overseas. See the places of the world that I haven’t been,’ you know. I never did that. Well, yes, I did, but (laughs) I decided that, after two years of that, I ended up at thirty-three years of age with an ulcer, very bad ulcer, and I thought, ‘No.’ So I went to David and I asked for – I said I would resign. And he said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘Well, one, a challenge,’ I said. ‘I’ve sold my father’s business, and,’ I said, ‘I just want a challenge and I want to get out of doing what I’ve been doing for so long.’ And I said, ‘I can’t just stay at work all this time.’ Forty-three years later I’m still there. And he said, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ And I said, ‘I want to do everything.’ I said, ‘And the philosophy of my father was always go and sit in the boss’s chair and if it feels comfortable always aim for it.’ And David said, ‘Well, don’t want you to go. What do you want to do?’ And I said, ‘Well, David, I just want to get out of decorating, I want to do something different.’ He said, ‘Rightio, we’ll put you doing anything you want.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’d like to do a traineeship.’ It wasn’t heard of with

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Balfour’s, they never did anything like that. So I did, I went and I learnt – I drove the trucks, I went out with the drivers, I went into retail, I worked on the pie cart, and that was – in those days Balfour’s were going through a very big expansion, huge expansion thing. There was a guy by the name of Ted Rix who was the Chairman of Directors then, he was a wonderful man and he was a buyer. He was actually one of the original Rix that used to own Rix Cakes here, which is part of the Myer’s that Myer’s used to have, bought them out, and Ted came over when Myer’s bought it and sold the bakery to Balfour’s. And I used to often just go in and listen to him. I’d go in and work with him. If Ted wanted something done I’d get in the car and go and do it, and if David wanted or Mr Balfour wanted – I actually went through – no, Mr Balfour wasn’t alive then. No, he wasn’t alive then. It was David. But I’d go through and I’d do anything. I’d go and negotiate things. I used to come down here. When the Adelaide City Council wanted to heritage list our building I had to come down here and go through all the files and look up what Mellor Street was and when – – –. (tape ends)

END OF TAPE 2 SIDE A: TAPE 2 SIDE B

[When the Adelaide City Council wanted to heritage list our building I had to come down here and go through all the files and look up what Mellor Street was and when] we closed that part off I come down and went through the Lands Titles department to find out if we owned both sides of the laneway whether we could claim it, which we did. So if the Adelaide City Council want to blame me for taking some of that, that was me. But I learnt a lot, I learnt a lot of investigating, how to do things and what to do in those areas. We were doing a lot of building so I’d work with the architects, and we did the laboratory, built the new laboratory bit there. We built that big bit at the back. I did all the liaison with the architects and we’d get the tilers. And then I went on to building maintenance, so I’d look at if anything needed doing – which there always was in a company where you’ve got three and a half acres – I’d do it. I’d get the builders in or I’d get the contractor in and I’d negotiate on price and we’d do it. I never had any building experience, but it was just something – I loved the negotiating part of it. We bought into Glover Gibb’s and so I’d spend a lot of time out there. We built a big warehouse out there, huge big place out there – it’s got three hundred and seventy-five pallet spaces in it. I built that with

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the help of the architects. Where there was any problems, I’d do it. It was like that was my job. Redevelop seventy-two Rundle Mall when we were doing the first lot of redevelopment on that, the front of that, I used to come down here and talk to the guys here from the Adelaide Council what we could do and what we couldn’t do. The front part of that, one stage they went through and decided, yes, that they would turn around and paint it all these colours, and I put up an act that it should be kept in kind of an old worldy look. So I used to get up on the roof of that and stand over it and watch it while the painters were painting it to make sure that they were painting all the filigrees. And I suppose that’s where my decorating part come out of me. From that part I liked all that sort of thing.

So from doing that were you able to put a personal aspect of yourself into Balfour’s, with all this sort of thing?

Oh yes. Yes, I suppose in ways. I’ve still got Mr Balfour’s desk at home, his original desk that Mr Balfour sat behind. I did all the – now, you wouldn’t think it now if you went to Balfour’s because we’ve gone through a bit of a chequered career – but when we refurbished anywhere I used to spend a lot of time doing it. So the board one day actually thanked me by giving me – Mr Balfour had died, and this desk used to sit down in his old office and nobody – (lowers voice) I used to say, ‘Gee, I’d love that desk, I’d love to get hold of it and do it up.’ I still haven’t done it up, but – – –. And so they called me in the board room one day as a thank you and gave me the desk, you know? But when you say ‘put a personal thing into it’, my colour schemes, if I wanted something in the place I’d put it in. We did all these big murals on the walls up in the lunchroom because I wanted to brighten the place up – I didn’t want it to be just a dull place – where people could walk in and sit there. David said to me one day, ‘Why don’t we put all our products up on the wall?’ I said, ‘People want to get away from what they work in every day. It’s like going to Holden’s: you don’t want to see a Monaro sitting up on the walls every day or Commodores.’ So we put all these fancy – didn’t work, but I thought it was great to just put a big splash of colour everywhere, you know? We put all green dado lines around everywhere, all the fire doors, before even fire doors were supposed to be green and white I went around and painted them all green and white to give colour, you know?

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So yes, there’s a lot of things that I suppose, in some ways, I stamped my kind of – what I wanted to see. Unfortunately with that place, it was too old to be able to do too much with. So a lot of it was just basic maintenance. I bought property in Sydney – sorry, in Melbourne. Went over to Melbourne and I bought seven acres in Melbourne that we were going to make into one of the biggest bakeries in Australia, and that never eventuated. We had the land now, but never got to fruition. When we were looking at Gibb’s, when we bought Gibb’s, I went out there and bought an extra three acres of land at Gibb’s where I believe we should have still – today we should have been out there. The council should have had that building ten years ago if we’d done the right thing. We should have been out there.

Why do you think that?

Because it was a purposely built bakery that just needed extensions on it to be able to do it. But David went a different direction than most of us went, I think, and unfortunately it didn’t happen that way. The man had a few faults and one of them was that he had this idea that there’s Balfour’s and that’s where we would stay, and he used to listen to some people and others he wouldn’t listen to, and in the end he lost the business, unfortunately. But we went through some traumatic times over the years. We went through some very, very good times and then we went through some traumatic times.

Do you want to talk a little bit about those – the good and the bad, I suppose?

The good times was when we were flourishing and we bought the pie cart and we expanded to the point where we were, I believe, at our pinnacle. We couldn’t go any further in Adelaide so we really had to look at interstate. That was the good times, I believe, and everybody trusted one another. Then there was a lot of in-fighting within the board itself, and that’s when the sad times came in, to the point where – I’ll just go back one step on that. After I’d done my bit of traineeship of everything, and that was over a few years, and as I said I used to sit in with Ted Rix and listen to him, how he negotiated the supplies and how we’d get them in and all that sort of business. And in those days we used to – everything was done in the big book ledger, you had a big ledger and you’d write everything down you bought and whatever. It was an interesting era then. Ted died and we decided – well, David

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decided – that he would take a different direction, and in taking that different direction a lot of people got upset with the company.

What do you mean, a different direction?

Religious. It became a very religious company. And it was like – I think he wanted to make it another Sanitarium type of thing, the hidden agenda of everybody belonging to the thing. So that was sad, that – and it all happened over a very short period of time because, as I said, David Wauchope was a very compassionate man, a very – him and his family were very compassionate. But all of a sudden it changed. He used to go over to America to these baking federation things where most of these people were from Christian bakeries. So he got wrapped up in these more and more, and you could see it happening.

How did that affect the factory in a general day-to-day type of way.

It didn’t. It did in ways that I think it affected middle management more than it affected anybody, because we could see it happening. The bakery people couldn’t, but I think the bakery people treated it as a little bit of a joke, you know, because of, ‘Oh,’ you know, ‘you guys have got to go and pray,’ you know.

Oh, you’d do it in work?

Oh, you were asked to.

Oh, okay.

Didn’t mean you did. (laughs)

What, you mean at certain times of the day?

Yes. Every Monday morning he used to do a prayer meeting. You were asked to go in the board room. And I never went in. I have my own beliefs and that was the way I wanted to work. And I think that kind of put a little bit of resentment between David and some of the staff there. So when he decided that he wanted to go and buy the directors out, he sacked some of the directors, he sacked the – one, two, three – three of the directors at that time because they wanted to sell out to another company, all their shares. And if you stop and look at it, hindsight, he would have still had control of the business today. He most probably would have still been sitting there today if he hadn’t said, ‘Well, I want to be a hundred per cent owner of

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this company.’ So he goes and borrows – look, I think it was around about eighteen million dollars at about twenty-two per cent, and that was when everything was booming and interest rates were up as high as they were, and all he needed was fifty- one per cent to say, ‘Hey, I still own the place.’ So he bought out people like myself. I had – in the old days you had – you were one of the chosen few if you got shares in the company, and it was an honour to get them.

How did that happen that you’d get them?

The board would come along to you – the first lot I ever got, the board came along to me and said, ‘Would you like to buy some shares in the company?’ And I thought, ‘Ooh!’ because I’d heard about these shares. ‘Yes, I would.’ So they offered you, say, a hundred dollars of shares which was fifty shares, they were two dollars each, but you would get twenty per cent on those shares every year. Every year you would get twenty per cent on them. So because I worked for Ted a lot, Ted Rix, I used to say to him, ‘Gee, why can’t I – I’d like to buy some more shares, Ted.’ And I’d sold my father’s business so I had some money there. And he said, ‘Well, write a letter and put it in.’ So I did. So I’d write a letter and that’s how you actually did it. And the board would meet and they’d say, ‘Oh, yes, we’ll give – – –.’ A lot of people never got them and a lot of people never even knew how the system worked, but you were given so many and then I found out that if I asked for twice as many as I got they always cut it in half so I’d end up getting – I got called in the board room one day and asked why I had so many shares, and I said, ‘Well, Ted Rix told me that if I doubled them up – – –.’ And ‘Oh!’ (laughs) And then David decided that he would give us a bigger interest in the company by letting us buy shares – there was a Balfour Wauchope share and there was another share. And so what he did there was – which was good – he lent us, I think there were ten of us or something, lent us – which we had to pay back – eight thousand dollars that we bought shares with. So we bought all these shares and they were very nice. Then David went into this thing of religion and everything like that, didn’t trust anybody, so demanded that we sell all our shares back to him. And it was virtually a demand, it was nothing less than a demand. So I sold them back to him, but the good thing about that – I tripled my money, so I was happy about that. And that’s when we started to go downhill. He

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brought his family in, he brought in another gentleman that was very, very religious, and I at that stage was in purchasing so I was immediately taken out of purchasing.

How did you get into purchasing in the first place?

By listening – with Ted. And it was quite unusual how I got into purchasing. I used to go in, as I said, with Ted and do this, listening to all his negotiations, and Ted was in charge of two purchasing officers. And both of these guys resigned on the same way, so Ted went into a mad panic and called me in and asked me to step in. I said, ‘No, I’m not stepping in that.’ So they called me into the board room, and David and Ted and Ralph Potter at that stage said to me, ‘Dean, just get in there and keep the company running.’ I never knew a thing about purchasing in those days. You know, I knew the basics and I knew what Balfour’s were and what they ...... So I learnt the hard way, I really did, I learnt by some very, very sleepless nights.

How did you do it, teach yourself?

By bluff. (laughs) I think that’s where my negotiating skills come out. Because I’d been dealing with architects and builders and all that I found that the best way to do anything is ask somebody. Never sit there and worry yourself. If you don’t know how to do it go and ask somebody else how you do it. So when these guys resigned on the same day – and virtually within a week they were out, and there was no, ‘Please, I want you to stay’, or ‘I’ll give you a bit more money’; it was ‘Goodbye. Dean will take over.’ So I used to ring. I’d get in there in the morning, I’d get in there at six o’clock, five o’clock in the morning, and I’d sit there and I would look at what we had on our stock sheets, and then I’d start ringing at eight o’clock. And I’d ring all our suppliers and say, ‘How much do we usually order of this?’ and ‘How much do we usually order of that?’ In those days we used to order about three million a year, three million dollars a year. And they’d tell you. ‘Oh, on a Wednesday, Dean, you’d get this amount in. Dean, you’d get that amount in.’ So ‘Okay, bring it in.’ I’d write out an order number and give it to them and that’s how we worked. We worked like that for a couple of years until I got a handle on the whole thing, so that did take a long time getting – – –. I got another guy to work for me and then I got another guy, and then I took over – I used to look after the buildings and I looked after the supply side as well. And there was a few hectic

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years there, I must admit. Then we got the computers in and we started from there, which made things a lot easier when we computerised a lot of stuff.

How did that change it – that would have been from, you were saying, the old ledger?

Yes. From there you knew what you had and where you were and what you had on the shop floor and what you had in the bakery. So you knew what prices you were paying without going back over them, and you could automatically bring up and order number and off you went. So that was a lot easier to go into those sorts of things.

And when we first met you said something about suppliers, something about being hard to get into Balfour’s and hard to get out or something?

Oh!

Can you tell me what you – – –?

Well, what I mean by that is that in the baking game – and specially being in Adelaide, it’s a very small niche of suppliers, it’s a very small niche of bakers. As I said to you, Balfour’s set a standard and that standard has to be met. And now with HACCEP1 and quality controls have come in it’s making it harder and harder to get into. If you were a supplier and came in to me and said to me today, ‘I have this here, a sample. I’ll give you the best price in the world for it and this is it,’ you know, I’d say, ‘Well, where’s your specifications for it,’ boom, boom, boom, all that, and then I’d have to send it to the laboratory, then it has to be analysed by them, has to come within our standards or our guidelines, and then from there they’ll come back to me and say, ‘Yes, Dean, that’s okay, you can use that as an alternative supplier or whatever.’ Usually they’d say, ‘Up to you. If you can get your price on it, go for it.’ When I said about being hard to get in and hard to get out that is one of the reasons. The other reason is that because it’s a small niche of people here you get to know your suppliers, you get to know who they are, you know their standards, you know their strengths, you know their weaknesses, so what you’re trying to do is get a relationship with them. Once you’ve got a relationship with a supplier it becomes – I can ring him up at two o’clock in the morning if I need to, or I’ve got

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his after hours number, and I can ring him up and I can say, ‘Hey, we all make mistakes,’ you know, ‘we’ve had a disaster. Can you get us something?’ ‘Yeah, I’ll do my best.’ And usually they’ll do it. So that’s where you’ve got a supplier that will do anything for you, bends over backwards for you. (sound of mobile telephone interference) So you’ve got this relationship with this guy and you know that, hey, he’s performing well, he’s doing everything right. Then all of a sudden, knock on the door, somebody else comes in and says, ‘I can supply it but I’m going to give it to you three cents cheaper.’ You can say, ‘Well, is that three cents worth it? Is that really worth it when I’ve got a supplier here’ – and you try to use a South Australian supplier if you can – ‘Why should I use you? You’ve got to prove to me that you can do equally as good a job and save me a bit more money than what you’re trying to save me or the company, so that I can do it.’ So that’s where the hard to get in, hard to get out bit comes into it as far as I’m concerned. We’ve got to have trust in our suppliers; we’ve got to be able to say – so when they go to bed of a night-time they’re not going to get up the next day and say, ‘Oh, I wonder if I’ve still got Balfour’s.’ You know? That’s not the way to work business. The way to be able to work business is if I get some supplier comes in to me and says to me, ‘Dean, I can give you the best deal you’ve ever had,’ I will ring my old supplier and say, ‘Look, I’ve been offered this,’ you know, ‘what can you do about it?’ And if he says, ‘Oh, I’ll match it, Dean,’ – because he wants to do it, right? – I’ll say ‘Rightio, okay. We’ll go.’ If he can’t, well, we negotiate. Sometimes you have to negotiate. But it’s always that business. As I said to you – I think I said to you when we were talking – I had a supplier that came in for two or three years and couldn’t get his foot in the door, you know? He said to me, ‘Dean’ – one day he actually swore at me – and said to me, ‘I’ll never get any bloody work out of you, Evans,’ as he walked out the door. And I said to him, I said, ‘Kerry, just keep trying.’ And about a week or two after that he came in and he said to me, ‘I’ve got a deal you cannot refuse.’ And I said, ‘What is it?’ And he said, ‘I’ve got some coconut here,’ and I looked at it and I said, ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’ll take a ton of it.’ And he went like that, you know, nearly fell out the seat. That guy today works for a company here in Adelaide and we’re buying over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth a year off him. This year

1 Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point.

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we’ll most probably – or next year we’ll probably take five hundred thousand dollars’ from him. So that persistence on him and the standard that we’ve set, he knows he can’t mess about with it. He can’t turn around and today give us coconut from Singapore and tomorrow – sorry, from Malaysia, and tomorrow he’s going to sell us Sri Lankan. We won’t buy it. He knows that. So he knows our standards now, so he’s got it all down to a ‘t’.

Does that mean Balfour’s have links with long-term suppliers?

Oh, yes.

Have they been – – –.

We’ve got Primal Meats down at Cheltenham, Cheltenham Road, Cheltenham – they would be supplying us for thirty years, forty years. Thirty years at least. Holco’s used to supply us thirty years ago; we’ve just started buying meat off them again. The guy said to me – another one that said to me only a while ago from there, he said, ‘Dean,’ he said. He said, ‘I’ve been trying for years to get in here.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, well, Des, you just – – –.’ I’d been out and inspected the place and his standards weren’t quite right, so he’s done a lot of work to get the standards back up – and he said to me the other day, he said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s been a big turnaround.’ He said, ‘We used to supply you,’ he said, ‘twenty years back, and now we’re supplying you again.’ But we’ve had Mauri Brothers used to be – they’re now Kerry Food Ingredients, but that was – Mauri’s were around for, oh, years and years. An old English company actually, going back years ago. We’re still buying off them but it’s now Kerry’s. We buy margarine, used to be from the Adelaide Margarine down in Wright Street. We still use a formula of margarine that Meadow Lea bought Adelaide Margarine out. We insisted on that margarine being like that what we call Margol, they still produce it for us in Sydney and we’re the only ones, they produce it for us. And we go through about twenty tonnes a week of that same material, and it’s still – we won’t alter off it. So it might be a new name but it’s still the same, going back.

Something that occurred to me when you said about the lab and the quality control, before you said you built a lab. Before the lab actually existed, how did that happen?

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Well, we had a lab, but it wasn’t as sophisticated as what it is today. It was like a little room with a couple of little instruments in it and that was it. Now we’ve got a laboratory that’s got acid-resistant benches and its flooring and everything’s spot-on. It’s got an emergency shower thing there for anybody that if they did have an accident – thankfully, it’s never ever been used – but, you know, there’s all the bits and pieces. We’ve got a firewall oven there as well. But in the old days you didn’t have those. Now everything gets tested. Our flour gets – our protein in our flour gets tested every day. Our milk gets tested, our meat gets fat content tested, so all those things have been things that have gone on over the years to get to where we are now.

Was there testing done in the old days? Would there be test bakes of different things, or nothing at all?

No, not really. Not really. I think I said to you at first, when we first started producing product it was a baker’s skill, the hand feel. When I started there, in the dough room, for instance – and you’d never do this now – the guy would get the salt and he’d pick up a handful of salt and he’d just throw it in. And you’d think, ‘How much salt’s that?’ and he could tell you down to the grams, virtually, the weight, the feel of it, you know? All that sort of thing. You’d get the – there’s an old saying, there’s an old baker’s saying: they get the ‘squeak’ of the dough. So they can get it and they rub it together and it squeaks. That’s when they know the dough’s ready. These are the sorts of things. So with flour and that, yes, it would come in. But an old baker would get it and he’d look and he’d say, ‘Oh yes, that’s all right, that’s okay, it feels okay,’ put it back. That was the amount of testing that was done.

So are those baking skills, I guess, have they been lost over the years?

Yes. Yes. They have been. They have been lost to a point where today there’s so much automation, there’s so much there to help people, that yes, the skills have gone. I think that’s where a lot of the – you’ll see a lot of young kids, when they do their apprenticeship, will go and work for Woollies bakeries and all these other little bakeries because they’re getting another grounding, they’re getting back into what they think is the right way of doing it. It’s like they want to get their hands dirty, right? You know, it’s get in and do it. Where, if they come to our place now, it’s so mechanised and that that they learn more at the trade school, where when I went

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there was no trade school. David Wauchope – there’s one thing I will admire about David Wauchope – that if it wasn’t for him we’d most probably still be back in the dark ages with our training. Because he actually – the old – what were they? The migrant hostels down at Islington – not Islington, down that way – I can remember going down with him when I was doing my traineeship and we actually went down there and they started up the first trade school down there. And him and I went down there to interview a couple of the bakers that were going to be in the – first lecturers that we had for baking, and he started that up. Now, you’ve only got to look at the school that they’ve got there now, which David was chairman or on the committee of that for many, many years. So I will give him that: he did a wonderful job in that area of getting the skills up for these young kids.

So that automation, you would have watched – when you first came in I guess there was very little automation.

Oh yes, nothing.

Perhaps – I’d better turn the tape over – perhaps we can talk a little bit about the change that brought in some of the machines that you would have seen come in over those years.

Yes, yes.

I’ll just stop there.

END OF TAPE 2 SIDE B: TAPE 3 SIDE A

This is the third tape of an interview with Dean Evans being recorded by Karen George for the Adelaide City Council’s Balfour’s Oral History Project. The interview is taking place on the 11th December 2002 in Adelaide, South Australia. Now, we were talking about automation, that’s right, what you’d seen come in from, I guess, some of the hands-on work that you were doing in the early days that’s now disappeared.

Oh, yes. I suppose the biggest automation that we’ve had in the place is the new pie machine that we’ve got now. The pie machine is virtually computerised. In the days when I was there there used to be – it used to be, a lot of it, it was even just rolled out and tins and that used. We then went from like a very basic roll-out pin thing where you press the doughs in it to get it, to a machine that everybody thought was the ant’s pants. I think we’ve still got it somewhere in the archives somewhere. But that was built by Bill Cowley who was Cowley’s Bakery. So he made our sausage

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roll machine as well. Now, they were brand new machines when I was a kid there. We’re still using the sausage roll machine today.

How does that work? Is that going to be – will that be something that will be retained?

No.

No. So tell me – – –.

No, we’re getting a new one of those when we move to the new Dudley Park. But it’s amazing that in the ways of automation, all our packing was done on a bench. So all the drivers had to come in the morning and pack their own benches. And they had these benches – they’d put all the product up the top and hand – there was no gloves, there was none of this, you know, hats and beard nets and all the things you do today. And now we’ve got an automatic system there, Colby system, where it all comes down over a picking line and the girls pick from it, it brings up what they need and what they require. So that’s taken a lot of the stress out of that area.

So can you tell me about that sausage roll machine? As it won’t continue on, it might be worth just describing how it operates.

The one that we’ve got at present is like you’ve got a – to describe how it works – you’ve got a sheet of pastry coming down that’s got cutters on it, and the cutters are set at a certain – the width of the sausage roll wrapped around. So actually what you’re doing is you’re actually cutting the pastry and as it comes down along this belt, you’ve then got about six tubes that are actually centred right in the centre of that strip of pastry, so instead of one big strip of pastry you’ve got now six strips of pastry going down. You’ve got these tubes like about the size of a garden hose, and actually what it’s doing is pushing sausage meat down through that tube onto this pastry. So as this pastry’s running along, moving along, there is then a form roller that actually brings the pastry over so it – I’m trying to do it with my hands and talk doing this – like it rolls it over to one side. So it’s lipping it, it’s bringing it over. And then there’s a roller that rolls it down one side. So if you look at a sausage roll today you always see that crusty bit on one side? That’s because it’s rolled over and that thing’s formed. Then there’s a cutter that just comes along, it’s on a big drum and about – I think there’s three cuts or so, three – and that’s just rolling around. As it’s rolling around it’s just cutting the sausage roll at a certain length, so you can

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make it a ten-inch or a six-inch, whatever you want, by the size of your diameter. Then it goes along a bit further through a metal detector which was put there a couple of years ago, and then onto a tray and then into the oven. The new one that we’re going to get will be paperless so we won’t have that paper, so during the year we use about twenty-five tonnes of specialised silicon paper just for those, to put underneath that thing. We will stop using that. So in some ways you might say, ‘Well, it’s sad to see the old stuff go,’ but we will not be cutting down twenty-five tonnes of trees as well.

Is that like a baking paper type of thing, is it?

Yes. And it’s greaseproof. So it’s not environmentally friendly. So that’s the sort of things where we’re going to. What we’re going to do is a sausage roll machine which is the same – sorry, the pasty machine. Same principle, but you’re putting a dollop of vegetable in the middle, and that actually has a cup that comes over and cups it to give you that D shape, what’s called a D shape. And that has a paper on it as well. So those two machines are going to be formed in the one machine, they’re developing it so there’ll be one machine that’ll do sausage rolls, and when we’ve finished sausage rolls we’ll do the pasties.

So when those machines came in, was that something that was an exciting thing –

Oh, yes.

– would you run down there to have a look at how this worked?

Yes.

Can you remember them coming?

I cannot remember the sausage roll machine. I can remember the pasty machine coming in. But it’s like things, you know, it’s like a new car. Go down, everyone’s got to go down to have a look at the new model, and in those days they were the new model. But the good thing about moving on is you’re taking a lot of that manual work out, the manual handling and the environment thing – things that you’ve got to really look at and say, ‘Hey, well, we’ll move on from now.’

What sorts of manual handling things are there now, I guess, that will no longer exist when you move?

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Moving things from one rack to another rack, putting them on pallets and moving them round the factory, so that what we’ll be doing is actually producing those sausage rolls, going straight into a tunnel oven, so the tunnel oven will – they’ll move straight into the tunnel oven, they’ll come out the other side, they’ll go into a cooler, they’ll come out the other side of that cooler. From that cooler they’ll go into a wrapper and they’ll wrap them directly from that. The girls will just pack them straight in the trays and they’ll go straight out. So where at the present – I’ll just take you through the life of a sausage roll – we form that sausage roll and put it on silicon paper which comes up from the bottom of the machine, onto a tray, the tray is then – they’re steel trays, big steel trays – they’re then put onto a pallet –

So they’re lifted manually.

– yes, manually lifted up, put onto a pallet, then wheeled from there a distance of maybe fifty feet or more. They’re then picked up, each one, put in the oven, feed it in the front feed of the oven, they’ll go through the oven, at the other end of the oven there’s another guy there takes them off, puts them back down onto a pallet and then wheels them from there over into a cooling area, then they stay there for a few hours till they cool down, and then they get wheeled from there maybe – ooh! – two hundred metres or a hundred metres down to a wrapping area where the girls then pick them up, the tray, put it on the machine, individually feed each one through, wrap it, at the other end there’s the plastic trays that Balfour’s have got around Adelaide, girls standing there packing those on, they’re then put back onto a pallet, then they go from there out into the cool rooms. So the amount of lifting and bending – – –. When we go to the new place that product will come directly off that directly into an oven, so it won’t even be touched nowhere – won’t even be a tray – through the oven, out the other side into what they call a Greer cooler, which is as big as this room, maybe, as the freezer, goes through that, comes out the other side down to a certain temperature that we nominate, they’ll come out individually as ones, that’ll go straight into a wrapping machine, the girl stand there watching them being wrapped – boom, boom, boom, boom, just like they had a biscuit machine, they do biscuits like that – and the girl at the other end will just pack it. So all that will be taken out.

So there’ll be less people will be working on that machine?

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There’ll be less people working on the machine but there will be less manual handling accidents, you know. But those people will be allocated to other areas, so it’s not as though you’re going to lose a huge amount of staff. It’s a matter of making sure that people – their working environment is not – – –. I would hate to go back to the days when I worked – I really would. First of all, they wouldn’t do it. We used to have to get a hundred pound bag of flour and put it on our back, and that’s why I think I’ve got a bad back now. I don’t know, but that’s how we used to do it, you know. If you wanted to pick up a – couldn’t do that these days.

Tell me about some of those other things that were – I mean, the heavy and hard parts of the job when you – that have gone.

The main things were the bags of flour. Bags of flour. Coconut used to come from the Philippines, we used to buy Blue Bar coconut. They come in a hundred-pound bag. Flour used to come in a hundred-pound bag. And then they went to a fifty- pound bag. Now, fifty pounds is a lot of weight. And you’d have to pick that up and bring it above your waist height to tip it into a bowl to make this up. These days you press a button and the flour comes down automatically at a certain weight of what you want into it. So there’s a lot of problems there that we’re going to alleviate and make people’s working conditions a lot better. Now, these days, I dare not buy anything over fifteen kilos. We do have some that are twenty, twenty-five kilo bags, but most of them are round about the fifteen to ten kilos now, so that we’ve cut that down. The big rolls of silicon paper we get in which are the wrapping paper, we don’t do anything more than thirteen kilos on those, twelve to thirteen kilos. In the old days you’d have to pick up maybe twenty-five pounders of those or bigger – rolls like that – and put them above your head height and put them onto a machine. Massive things, you know? And if you got somebody to help you were a weakling, you know? (laughs)

Tell me a bit about the decorating area, because I understand that’s changed a lot and has been amalgamated over the years

Yes.

– with the bakery. What kinds of hands-on types of skills have been left behind, I guess, in that process of change?

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What’s been left behind? People don’t learn, I suppose – these days it’s – I’ll take, for instance, doughnuts. Doughnuts are done in a different area now so that’s been taken out of the decorating room. But now we’ve got a machine that actually puts the fondant on. In the old days you used to dip your finger in the fondant (laughs) and wipe it around! Now, you say, ‘Well, jeez, that’s not hygienic,’ and it isn’t. But in those days you used to wipe it around, but it was the skill of trying to get that around and making sure it didn’t dribble everywhere, and that was part and parcel of the things you did. There’s not so much of the piping with the cream bags like they used to do. The spreading – we used to have to do all our sheets of Swiss roll and that, you’d spread them by hand. They don’t do that now; it all comes out on a – layered on, I suppose. A lot of those things have gone, that I’d say the hand co- ordination that a baker used to have you don’t need now. It’s more using less of your brain and a little bit more – – –. And really now you’ve got to be a little bit more – have a little bit more of an engineering background, you know, to – or computerised – and that’s where the kids today are very good because they pick it up straight away. I look at the big machine downstairs that we’ve got, the big new Pieline, and I look at the big panel it’s got there and I think, (whistles) ‘Wow, I couldn’t do that.’ You know. Because it takes a lot of skill now to do that. But you get a young kid in there, it’s like when he’s home. The first thing he does is he goes in to the keyboard and he picks it up and straight away he’s into it. That’s where it’s leaving the older generation behind.

How did people adapt to – I mean, did you watch people who couldn’t adapt to that kind of thing?

Well, I had to adapt to it, I had to adapt to it, and it is difficult. I will never be the greatest whiz-kid on a computer. I’ll work my way through it because it’s my job, you know, but I think that’s the hardest part for a lot of the old bakers. Bakers are never – that’s where it is frustrating when you work for a bakery. Bakers don’t – they hate paperwork. Their job is to get there and produce something that you are going to eat and love. Bakers don’t enjoy writing recipes down, they don’t enjoy going to the keyboard and putting in how much of this they used today, because what they put in today I can order for them tomorrow. But they don’t want to do that, that’s not their job, you know. ‘I’m there to make stuff, I’m there to get it out

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and I’ve got to get it out on a certain time.’ So the baking – a lot of bakers, the old bakers, you’ll find when it gets to that side they will say, ‘That’s too hard for me, mate. I would rather go over and – – –.’ Or ‘I’ll leave, I’ll go to a little bakery where they don’t use that sort of thing.’ The skills that they need now is more computerised. Especially with waste management and the way we’re heading. We’ve got a SAP2 system now, a computer SAP system, which every day, whatever we used, we have what we call shop-floor papers. So, for instance, a baker will produce, let’s say, a thousand Kitchener buns. But out of that thousand he’s wasted five of them. So he’s really got to record that for us. But the old guys don’t want to do that. ‘That’s not me, no. No. Why do you want that?’ Well, tomorrow morning, when I come in to order stuff, if it was running properly all I have to do is hit the button and it will come up and say, ‘Today, with all the orders we’ve got on, I need to order ten tonnes of flour.’ But because you haven’t got that balance there you’ve still got to go back and use your own brain to say, ‘Oh yes, we’ll get this in and get that in.’ So that’s, I think, the hardest part for – give it another five years, ten years down the track and you’ll have very skilled bakers again, but they’ll be more – they won’t be what I call the ‘field baker’; they’ll be the baker that can tell you how much protein in that you’re eating, what weight it is, everything else about it, they’ll do that for you.

Would you say that was one of the biggest changes you’ve watched over your forty-three years?

Yes.

Well, what would be some of the other greatest changes you’ve seen at Balfour’s over those years?

I think work habits are, I suppose, the biggest change. In the old days you’d get a kick up the bum and you’d get a slap on the head and ‘You do that’. Well, you can’t do those these days. And that’s been fair, I don’t want it to be relived, but that is something that I suppose you’ve got to be careful how you talk to people. You’ve got to be diplomatic in the way you go about things because you’ll hurt their feelings or something like that. I think that’s the hardest part, where in the old days you’d get

2 SAP is a German computer system – DE.

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told things or you’d get roasted and, okay, it hurts your feelings but you go on. There’s nothing. These days the manager has to really be very, very careful of the way he treats people and make sure that he’s doing the right thing. And there’s nothing nasty about that, I’m not saying there is, but that to me is what I’ve noticed over the years. You’ve just got to be a little bit more diplomatic when you say it because if not they’re going to get the union out or someone’s going to – – –. We’ve always had unions, and the unions were a lot stronger when I was a kid, very much so. I nearly started a strike there once because I took some deliveries out to Coles one day and all the drivers wanted to go on strike because I wasn’t part of the union. But these days you wouldn’t dare do it. I wouldn’t dare get in a truck and do it. I got away with it then.

How did that come about?

Oh, they just thought I was taking over their jobs, you know. But it was not really – it was just bad communication. It was a very, very busy Easter and Coles had rung up about some supplies, they wanted Easter buns. And Ken Cunningham, as I told you before, yelled out to me, ‘Evans! Can you drive a truck?’ ‘Yeah, I can drive a truck.’ ‘Get these out.’ Didn’t even know where it was, but I know I took them out there. When I come back there’s a big hullabaloo over it. Until we got over it, you know. But those are the things that happened. But I think the computer age has done a lot to make jobs in the office easier. I think it’s helped a lot of people. It’s given us a better record of where we’re going and how our financials are and what our next part of our future’s going to be, but when it goes back to the bakery side of things, I think we still have a bit of the Dark Ages still there that’s got to come out. And whether that’s going to be a good thing or bad thing I don’t know, because I still believe you’ve got to have the right person on the oven. An ovensman is a very skilled person. Because sometimes if you put a tray of product in it’s not to say, ‘Well, it’s got to do ten rotations of that oven and I’ll pull it out and it’ll be right.’ Because maybe it won’t be right. Because somebody’s put more water in it, or it’s a little bit slow up here or something like that. So it’s really up to that ovensman to say, ‘Yeah, I’ll give that another half-hour, or I’ll give it – and then I’ll take it out.’ You can’t just go and put somebody on it. Where people say, ‘Oh yes, you can

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do that, because everything’s so – – –.’ No, no. You still need those parts of – how can I put it? – disciplines that you learn.

You mentioned Easter – how have those demands – I mean, you’re talking about huge numbers of things you were making in those days – have those changed over the years in terms of – – –?

Oh, yes. We’ve always done a lot of Easter buns, but what we used to do back then is a drop in the ocean to what we do now. We last year did four and a half million, five million, Easter buns. When I was doing them, or when we were doing them many, many years ago, you’d most probably do a million, million and a half. But then again the machines have changed, too, so you can speed it up and get it through. But we did not have the Koenig machine that we have now. They used to roll them by hand. So you can imagine a million Easter buns going back many, many years ago, they used to have this little machine, they used to put this thing in, they’d pull it down, it’d roll these buns, then they’d pull them out and then there’d be bakers each side with trays and they’d get the tray and they’d put the buns on it and roll them just to make sure they were round and then they’d pay up. Now we’ve got a machine you tip the dough in the top, goes down through a hopper effect, it cuts off a billet of product, it goes through that into a prover – a prover is a humidity thing – takes it through that, out the other side, all coming out twenty-four or, say, four across, it goes down, the girl puts a tray under it or the guy puts a tray under and the belt comes along and then all of a sudden the belt whips back, drops them straight on, the girl just has to – – –. So huge difference, huge difference to when years ago guys would be working at two o’clock in the morning and they’d still be there at four or five o’clock that afternoon doing hot cross buns. They’d have to each one individually have to put them into the packet. Don’t do that now. It’s amazing.

What other things do you think have changed that you’ve seen over that time?

What, in people or what?

Whatever, I guess, in just what sticks out to you as different?

Oh, I think people aren’t as willing to be friendly – everybody used to go down the pub and have a beer once, it was like part and parcel. And I think that’s the way society’s going, people don’t want to go down the pub now and have a few beers because they have a few beers they’ve got to drive home. And I think that’s changed

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people’s way of – you go home and have a drink with your wife now, you know? In my days, when I was a younger kid, we’d go around the pub every day.

Was there a regular pub for the Balfour’s crowd?

Yes, yes, yes.

Where was that?

The one in the corner of Franklin Street and Elizabeth Street – Cumberland Hotel. That used to be the regular one. And the one up in – no, that was Waymouth Street, sorry, Waymouth Street and Elizabeth Street, Cumberland. And then there was the old Franklin up in Franklin Street. That was another one that you’d sometimes go. But the Cumberland was the Balfour’s hangout, you know. And that was – it was like every Friday was always a big day. You’d get around there about two o’clock and you’d be coming out about six o’clock. They were days that everybody used to go and have a few drinks, talk about the terrible week they’d had and go home. But I don’t see it now. Maybe I’m in a different generation now and I don’t see – I most probably don’t get invited because I’m a different age, you know? Maybe some of the drivers do and maybe some of the bakers still do, I don’t know. But it doesn’t seem to be that era that we used to do.

Do you feel that the atmosphere on the factory floor has changed in that way as well, or is it the same?

No, look, people are people. They’ll always be – I think people are always going to be – you’re going to have nice people, you’re going to have terrible people. You’re going to have people that you walk past every day and you could say to them, ‘Hello, how are you?’ and they’ll never talk to you. But you’ll have a lot of people that are – I love the factory floor. I love the young girls down there because of the fact they come in every day with the same attitude. It’s not the greatest job in the world but they’ll laugh, they’ll joke. I was down there today and one of them was slinging off at me. The first thing they do – ‘Do you know your way down here, do you know, Dean? Do you know your way down here? Do you need a map to get back?’ You know. That’s what it’s all about, and I think that’s what I like about the place. You still have that atmosphere. Maybe it’s a little bit more serious, but you still have your little crops of them.

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Well, let’s talk about the move from – how’s it going to affect you personally and emotionally as well as, I suppose, on a business level, to move from the city? You’ve been there for forty-three years.

I’ve missed – Malcolm Gibbons said something the other day, that nobody will be sorry to leave this place. I think he’s wrong there. He said that in front of a few people and I didn’t want to pick it up because he’s the CEO. And I thought, ‘No, Malcolm, I’m going to be sorry, I am really going to be sorry.’ And I hope the day that the Adelaide Council go and knock that place down that I can be standing there watching it, because I’ve spent forty-three years in that place. But I will be sad for the fact that it’s been a big chunk of my life, and a lot of other people’s, and I think that’s where the Council – and I would love them to do it – is invite some of the oldies. Like the people you just said, before you were talking about Bob Jarrett, Ray Pix, different ones like that. Even Len Schroeder worked there for – now, he’s a man that you should get onto.

Are you able to – I’ll talk to you after about possibly getting contact details for some of these people.

Yes. Yes. But I think it would be nice, instead of putting a big wall up around that place and some bulldozer coming in and knocking it down that there be a little bit of a ceremony that Balfour’s was here and some of the oldtimers might be around just to see it happen. Because I know when I get older and retire from the place my car will still come to Franklin Street a lot. I still drive past of a night now and my wife says, ‘What are you coming down here for?’ ‘Well, it’s the building,’ you know, ‘got to look at it.’ So I think in some ways yes, it’s going to be sad for me, but I’m going to be excited because I still have that fire in the belly that I want to see Balfour’s succeed, I want to see them move on, I don’t want them to be in that catacombs that we’ve got there now, so yes, I’m excited about going to the new place and a totally different environment, totally different way of doing it, but we will do it and we will do it right and it’s going to be security for a lot of people. Where if we stay there I don’t think there’s the security, because the work is too much – you know, what am I saying – I’ve lost the word. We can do it better at Dudley Park than we can do it here. So that way our efficiencies will be better, we’ll be able to produce better, so everything will be – I see it as an exciting part, but I’m still going to be sad the day they’re going to say to me, ‘Dean, your car’s not going

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to come down Anzac Highway like it has done for the last thirty-two years,’ or thirty-five years or whatever it has since we left Goodwood – and my car’s going to do a different direction and when it gets to South Road it’s going to turn left instead of coming straight into the city. So yes, it’s – but life’s got to go on, so I’m not sad in a way. All I’m a bit sad about is that one day I’m going to go past that building and it’s not going to be there, and I won’t know the day they’re going to knock it down.

END OF TAPE 3 SIDE A: TAPE 3 SIDE B

[my car’s going to do a different direction and when it gets to South Road it’s going to turn left instead of coming straight into the city. So yes, it’s – but life’s got to go on, so I’m not sad in a way. All I’m a bit sad about is that one day I’m going to go past that building and it’s not going to be there, and I won’t know the day they’re going to knock it down.] That’s really the only thing I really – really upsets me a bit.

What do you feel that you’ve gained over those forty-three years from working with Balfour’s?

What have I gained? I’ve gained a lot of, I suppose a lot of empathy for people because I’ve had to work hard with them to get where I am today, and what I hope in the future is young kids – look, there’s a kid that [works] – I got him a job there as an apprentice and I’ve had a couple of people I’ve got jobs there and they’ve let me down. This young lad, Nathan, is a lovely kid and every day – well, I don’t see him every day, but every time I walk through the factory – and he lives, his mother and father came and knocked on my door one day and said, ‘Look, Nathan just wants to be a baker.’ So I tried to talk him out of it. I really tried to talk him – I brought him up to our lounge room – I didn’t know the lad that well, and I brought him up and I sat him in our lounge room and I said, ‘Nathan, don’t become a baker.’ ‘Why? Why, Mr Evans?’ I said, ‘The early hours, the routine, all that.’ I said, ‘You,’ I said, ‘You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for.’ Any rate, he – ‘I want to try it.’ So I recommended him, and the personnel girl was saying the other day, I was saying something about someone had let me down and she said, ‘Well, Nathan’s never let you down.’ And I said, ‘No, he hasn’t.’ So I suppose what I’m saying, I love to see these kids down the track, if they get as much satisfaction out of what I’ve got they’ll be happy. You know? So.

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Well, we’re running out of time, sadly, so is there anything else you’d like to say about your time with Balfour’s while you’ve got the chance?

I’ve enjoyed it. Had some frustrating times. I think everybody has frustrating times when they go through work. A lot of people said to me, ‘How the hell can you work for forty-three years’ – forty-three years last week, it was –

Last week? Right.

– they said, ‘How can you work for forty-three years in one place?’ And some have kind of hit me and said, ‘Jeez, you mustn’t have had much in life.’ I said, ‘No, what I’ve gained out of it is that I’ve had a lot of different jobs. I haven’t just had one job, I haven’t sat – – –.’ It’s like you sitting in an office. You might sit in one office but it’s still doing the same job. If you’re an accountant you’re doing the same job. I couldn’t be a pen-pusher like that, I couldn’t do it. But I can – with what I’ve done I’ve done every job in that place, nearly, except be an accountant. I did go and do one course of how to be an accountant for one day, something like that, I did a course. But to me I do believe that, you know, I’ve gained so much out of it and it’s – – –. I’ve had some hard times there, don’t think I haven’t, but it’s still been the best job I’ve ever had, the only job I’ve ever had, and I don’t want to see another job. So I’ll retire in three or four years’ time. But, you know, it’s still going to – whatever people say, I think that I couldn’t have had a better job because mainly the people. They’ve really been great. And we’ve had – I’ve gone through two receiverships. Now, you’d never want to go through a receivership, never. Especially when you’re in purchasing, because every day you’ve got to beg for stuff. You don’t – it’s getting on the ’phone and pleading. But when I stop and look at it, it’s made me stronger. Maybe too strong, maybe too hard in some ways, because maybe some ways that hasn’t helped me with communicating with people on the shop floor because I’m a buyer, I deal with people, I’ve got to get the best out of a deal. But at the same time, I look at it and I think, ‘There’s a lot of young kids down there that one day, hopefully, will be there twenty or thirty years’ time and they’ll say, “H’m, hasn’t been a bad place.”’

Well, I’d like to thank you very much for your time today. It’s been really interesting, and I wish you well in your move and I hope you get to – I mean, I don’t know why you want to watch it get knocked down, but I hope you do!

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Oh, I just – it’s just the fact that I think – not being knocked down because of the fact that, ‘Oh, well, there’s the bloody building I’ve spent forty years in.’ I just don’t want to one day go past and it’d be dust.

It be not there, yes.

You know? I’d like to know the day that someone’s going to come in and knock it down.

Yes. Okay. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

END OF INTERVIEW.

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