LOADING BUTTER.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 250, 22 October 1935, Page 5

LOADING BUTTER.

ROMANCE OF TRADE. BUSTLE OF THE WHARVES. A THEME FOB A KIPLING. I New Zealand butter is well into the hundred and twenties on the London market, and the market is firm. Stocks are short; there is about a week and a half's supply instead of six. Steamers well laden with produce are thrashing Home as fast as their twin screws can send them. A nation must have food. There is romance about it. It is the sort of theme about which Kipling ought to write.

It is with this background that one ought to go to the wharves where more butter is being loaded for London. There seems more than the ordinary activity. The donkey engines are jabbering "Hurry, hurry, hur-r-r-y." The cranes whirr into a faster sound. The boxes, anxious to be loaded, roll down the conveyors from the trucks and leap on to the- tables. The men seize them and thrust them on to the trays and away they go. The cranes whirr. Another set of boxes arc to be stowed away in the hold.

These men have loading down to a fine art. And it is no light work, either. They work in two relays; with two men to a relay. In all the medley of noise which surrounds the loading of a ship there is a definite system. To tlie passer-by who pauses in his morning walk to watch a while there seems at first to be little but confusion. Men are shouting. Machines are clattering. Cranes and donkey engines are adding their quota. There is a scrape and a heave as boxes are shifted, and a sharp crash as they come from the truck and are half-lifted, half thrown on to the loading trays. The System of Loading. Perhaps the trucks on the wharves are being moved. Men are shouting instructions loudly enough to be heard above

all other sounds. Perhaps, too, there is other work going on on board the vessel. Men are tap-tap, tapping the steelsheathed sides. Even this sound, short, sharp and unceasing, seems to be urging greater haste.

Yet all this is part of a system essentially orderly. One laden tray is borne aloft and away over the ship's side and down into the hold. There is another tray waiting. The two men whose turn it is seize it and heave it conveniently close to the steel-topped table near the truck. A butter-box rattles down the conveyor and out on to the table. It is grasped by waiting, hands, and down on to the tray it goes —but not anywhere on the tray. It must be put into the key-place, for there is a special way of loading these trays. They are square in shape. The first box is placed dead in the middle of the side of the squaie farthest away from the men. The next box goes alongside it, and the third on the other side of it.

In the first layer of boxes on the tray there are 15. Then comes the next layer. The first box of this layer goes on top of the first box that was placed on the tray. The layers are loaded in the same way, until three sets of 15f boxes are lying there. The final layer consists of only 10 boxes, for the pile must be of such a shape as will "carry." When the crane heaves it aloft there must be no chance that any box will fall off. The shape of the pile, therefore, is something like a pyramid, tapering from the base to the apex.

Few Minutes' Work. i Right! The tray is ready. Down j whirrs tho crane-cable. Four pairs of j hands lift the slings, carefully place them round the edges of the pile on the tray for greater support. Lift the loops I over tehe hook on the "crane, and t-lie | number of boxes in the hold is added to j by 15. And r 11 that has taken about ■ three minutes. The next relay of two I men step forward. The two men pull i their empty tray forward to the foot of | the table; and the whole process'begins ' again. There is co-operation between the men working the conveyors inside the truck and the men loading the trays. "Whoa, Bill!" yells one of the men loading. "Steady, not so fast." And not so fast it is. When they load, the men do it with a sort of swingthrust from the table to the place in

the tray where the butter is to go. .The box seems to leave the table and lincl its place all in one movement, like a halfback getting the ball away from the serum —or like the way lie ought to do it.

There are "danger" notices, lettered in red, for the passer-by where sucli loading is going on, but the thought of danger never seems to strike these men. They never look aloft to see that the trays arc not slipping. They never look round to see that the empty tray being returned by the crane will not jab them in the back.