Rye Harbour Image Library

Picture No:	98
Courtesy of:	Michael Alford
Year:	1960

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Shingle grading plant

Date guessed!
Picture Added on 25 March 2006.

Comments

This shingle grading plant was of course Hall& Cos. I would say this picture must have been taken in the early to mid 1950s. I remember it well because as a child I spent many happy hours playing on a huge sand mound, that in this photo was built up to the right of the church, in front of the ballast hopper and crane. The ballast came up to the crane area in barges and then loaded into the hopper by the crane and then went up a conveyer belt to the plant. It then graded the shingle into different sizes, from pea beach right up to cobble size. The sand was separated from the shingle and made into sharp sand or into fine sand. You can just see the fine sand chute under the conveyer belt coming out of the left hand side of the plant. This picture has bought back so many memories as a child playing on the sand, and later when I left school at 15 I ended up working for Hall & Cos in the office which was just behind the plant, as an office boy and tea and coffee maker, my bosses then were I remember Geoff Butler and Tony Boots, who I recall were dab hands at cribbage!!! which they played after working out the weekly wages. People I have spoken to about Hall & Cos have told me they thought it was an ugly building, but it gave local people much needed work in very hard times, it was part of the old Rye Harbour, when it was a closely Knitted community, much smaller than now, who all knew each other by their christian names, and could go out to the shops or the mothers meeting and leave their windows and doors open in the summer without worry of theft or damage. All that's left of the plant now is the mechanics house and a big hole overgrown with weeds where it used to be and just memories.
Added by Bernard Clark on 25 March 2013.

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