Dave Ackrill
proper brummie kid
Solihull (Wharf Lane, Solihull). There was also a building in Water Street (bottom of Snow Hill, opposite Summer Lane) where they did silk screen printing for producing advertising posters.
Yes, I think that the names Wharf Lane and Moat Lane were interchangeable, and If I remember correctly, the Gas Board had a bigger depot behind the MEB depot. PowerGen did inherit the old Eastern District/Southern Division offices and it was a surreal experience to walk through what had been the Mains Engineers office, where I'd been a 3rd Engineer after passing my apprenticeship and then doing the one year as a supernumerary engineer, past where my desk had been and seeing other people occupying that office for PowerGen. I also remember that the Gas Board bought the area off PowerGen and now it is a housing estate, as are the old depots at Kings Road and George Road, and the old HQ at Mucklow Hill...
By the time I joined in the 1970s some of the offices had been closed or amalgamated, but I remember that there was a printing place just down Mucklow Hill on the same site as the commercial development facility. I think I may still have some of the pink cardboard development give away articles that I used as a Commercial Engineer before I left to join PowerGen.
For anyone who was not in the ESI, there were 'Mains' Engineers and 'Commercial' Engineers. The 'Mains' did the development, installation and maintenance of the electricity system, the 'Commercials' promoted the use of electricity in competition with gas or oil based systems. Normally, when you decided which way to go, that was it, but I swapped from Main to Commercial because there were better career opportunities when they got rid of a couple of layers of engineers above where I was at the time. That was not well received. Even worse, I left MEB for PowerGen and leapfrogged to a better pay scale than some of my ex-bosses were on at the time...