The Barrel Works

During the years when I was five to nine years old, I lived next to the barrel works in central London. We moved from there to Windsor in January 1958.

Until the second half of the 20^th century, there was a market for large barrels made of wood.

The house where I lived backed onto the yard where the barrel works piled the boards they used to make the barrels. There was barbed wire at the top of the fence, but you could get over it by climbing the junk piled behind a neighbour’s garage and jumping over the wire onto the top of the stacks of boards.

Barrel boards were curved and tapered so the barrels would be wider in the middle and narrower at the ends. These boards were stacked so that each layer of boards was set at right angles to the ones above and below. What looked like one stockpile of boards was actually a huge set of crisscrossed towers stacked against each other.

The kids in our neighbourhood made forts in the piles the way people play Jenga (www.jenga.com ), that game with little squared logs where you try to remove logs without the pile collapsing.

Today I imagine how dangerous that was and I wonder how none of us got crushed in a cave-in. We did have cave-ins, but we always wormed our way out.

The key to not getting caught by the barrel yard workers was to build the fort in the middle of the stockpile that could be a dozen or more stacks long and four or five stacks deep. We would make a shaft from the top by taking the boards out one at a time and adding them to the surrounding stacks so they wouldn’t be noticed.

We learned to leave the outer boards in place so we could put the top two layers back so the fort would not be found. That meant the outer boards had less weight securing them, so climbing was precarious. One time we got a nice shaft built and we figured out how to remove some boards in adjacent stacks to make a couple of rooms. It’s a wonder we weren’t maimed or killed when it collapsed.

When the barrel workers were retrieving boards to make barrels, they would find a fort. That led to somebody coming up the street knocking on doors to tell parents that kids were playing in the barrel lumber piles. Our mothers would say, “Stay out of the barrel works” and we’d say “Okay Mom.”

Even today, if you read this and you know my mother, don’t mention forts in the barrel works.

If you would like to see where the barrel works was, on Google Maps go to Hamilton Road and Little Grey Street, London, Ontario. The barrel works was in the area between the houses on Rathgar and Pearl Street and between Little Simcoe and Little Grey Streets. After we had moved to Windsor and the market for wooden barrels ended, the barrel works became a geared-to-income housing project.