In January 1972, at the age of 21, in the middle of the Power worker's "go slow", which caused a 6 hour blackout every day, I ran from home during a family crisis and ended up in Birmingham for 6 days before I came home again, and while there I found three days work by hanging around the front yard of the Mermaid waiting to see if a sub contractor or "subbie" would pick me up for work, at £4 for an 8 hour day. On the first day, a thursday, there were about 20 men waiting there in the cold and most of them got collected by regular subbie gangs, leaving about 5 of us who gave up at about 09:00 and waited in a nearby cafe and got to know each other, and a nice little Irish guy called Chris, with long straight black hair and some front teeth missing advised that one subbie yet might come along and sure enough, a tall serious chap with a big black coat and curly hair and strong accent soon poked his head around the door and asked who could "drive" a shovel. I though he meant a JCB but it was just a metaphor for a bit of hard digging and Chris told me to put up my hand anyway and he took all 5 of us in his grey Consul Classic about 7-8 miles out to a housing estate under construction.
One day driving home he had 9 of us in that car in the pouring rain, and the wipers had bust, but he got us home without hitting anybody, using a technique of hitting the brakes when the red lights of the car in front got brighter, as that was all you could see. I can't remember his name, but he had a mate about the same height with curly red hair, whom we called "Red".
All sorts of funny things would go wrong, especially things like service pipes and border markings getting buried and lost by accident, and our group of hand shovellers had to dig them up again!
This was life on the "lump" as this kind of work was called, and I spent another three mornings at the Mermaid front yard, and on friday evening to get paid, I went inside where the subbie had set up his pay station actually inside the pub!
I seem to remember in those days the "Mermaid" featured a prominent and colourful statue of a mermaid, right in the top centre of the main frontage, in the style of a ship's figurehead. However I can't find any photographic evidence, all that shows in photos is a bas relief. Is my mind playing tricks on me?
The subbie activity at the Mermaid was featured a few months later in a TV "expose" about tax avoidance, but nothing illegal was done at the time. They were nice guys to work with and paid you promptly. I had to go home without the last two days pay but went back several months later and the subbie still had it waiting for me and wrote me a cheque on Allied Irish Banks.
One website implies that all the Mermaid subbies actually only worked for the J J Gallagher construction firm, can anyone back this up?
By Ben McDonnell
