He might have missed out, at his father’s insistence, on seeing the wor ld as a sailor, but he describes a job full still of freedom and excitement: r unning up and sliding down ladders, walking along 4in pur lins, standing hundreds of feet abo ve a rapidly growing London on a spider plate.
He is bluntly dismissive of the minimal health and safety regulations of the time. He says that, even where hard hats and har nesses were available, few of his colleagues used them, prefering to rely on their wor kmates to look after them.
It wasn’t all fun though. He describes a workplace accident where, working on a beam that had, unknown to him already been cut at one end, he cut away his own support and crashed 10ft close to a pile of jagged rubble. Thankfully, he walked away from what could have been a life changing or fatal accident with only slight injuries and a scar.
Sadly, not everyone involved in workplace accidents like that walked away. For many, falls would leave them unable to work, or, worse, leave their families without a husband, son or father. Cossington may have relished the freedom of his life spent in the skies, a freedom still sought out by the illegal free runners and urban climbers of today, but I think everyone in the industry now will agree it is better to see operators and riggers coming home safely to their families.
Today, without a vest, hard hat and boots, you won’t even get on a project site, let alone to the end of a tower crane jib. From the first day on the job, safe working methods are instilled in workers, and good sites will have regular tool box talks. In the early 80s, the earliest years for which statistics are easily available, construction fatalities in the UK stood at six per 100,000 workers. Today, they are less than two per 100,000.
While safety training and site working practices may have had a long way to go when Cossington started working, he benefitted from a route into a career that is offered to fewer and fewer school leavers today. He describes an apprenticeship process that started with working as a teaboy, through gradual familiarisation with the job, to working high in the air. It is, I think, a shame that that path seems to be closing. In the modern world, we should surely be able to offer the career path and pension enjoyed by men like Cossington, along with the safer workplace we have now.
