Knitting amputees’ socks keeps this Geordie fit

Press, 29 July 1978, Page 6

Knitting amputees’ socks keeps this Geordie fit

By

KEN COATES

George Craig, aged 74, New Zealand’s top stump sock maker (he makes socks for amputees) is as fit as a trout and looks like a man in his fifties.

George won’t retire. He loves work, even though he doesn’t need to. He won $24,000 in the Golden Kiwi a few years ago, but says it didn’t change his life, or his attitude to work.

“I gave most of the money to my three daughters, Ruby, in Nelson, and Maudy and Glenda in Christchurch, who are all married,” he said yesterday. “1 spent the rest on fixing up the house, and put a little bit away in the bank for my old age.”

George works a 7j-hour day standing at a handoperated knitting machine. He and two assistants, Sam Guillen and Kevin Kiesanowski, aged 17, an apprentice, turn out between 45 and 50 variously shaped stump socks a day. They work for the Artificial

Limb Board and George Craig says they supply 6000 amputees throughout New Zealand at the rate of 1000 socks a month. There is more than meets the eye in the stump sock business — each has to be carefully knitted to one of about 300 sizes and all are shrunk and bleached at a clothing factory. George says he keeps fit by the constant arm action

needed to work his knitting machine, and he cannot sit down either. He claims he would be bored if he stayed at home, and reckons that many men who retire at 60 or 65 die without reaching 70 because they have nothing to do. "Many do nothing to help themselves.” Bom a “Geordie” in Northumberland, George Craig started work in a coalmine aged 14.

“The kids these days don’t know they’re alive,” he said. “1 worked for eight hours 20 minutes each day with 20 minutes for lunch for 3s 2d a day.

“We had to lie on our sides and get the coal out of a 2ft seam with a pick.” But George thinks his wages went further when he was young than they do today, “I went with rhe Mum and

Dad to Newcastle to buy me first long pants,” he recalls. “We bought a dark blue suit off the hook, a short, a pair of socks, shoes and they gave me a tie—all for 43 shillings.

“I was on contract in the mines by then with the average wage of £2 5s weekly. “You couldn’t get a suit of clothes, shirt and shoes for a week’s wages now,” he says.

The Craig family emi-

grated to New Zealand in 1926, and it was not surprising that they settled on the West Coast.

George again went down the mines and spent 35 years as a miner at Runanga. In his younger days he was a boxer and “I never had a cigarette, a drink or a woman until I was 23.”

He doesn’t blame today’s youth for their changed habits—“l’d be like them if I was young again,” he says. George has been churning out stump socks by the thousands for 18 years. His workmates say it is not an easy job and 27 different assistants have come, and gone. Most can’t stand the pace, and the job does not exactly allow free reign to creative effort.

George has no intention of knocking off yet a while, although he might finish a little earlier on August 4 when he celebrates 50 years of marriage to Maud Lillian Wick, and shouts for his workmates.