The Concrete Detective
Created | Updated Nov 21, 2010
I have worked with my father ever since completing my schooling at the age of twelve. He is a good man, an easy, a patient man and I could not have wished for a better teacher or instructor to pass on the family trade. For four generations, if you include myself, we have owned and worked a small quarry and lime kiln where we devise and manufacture lime mixes for mortars and concretes. Now, coming up to my twenty-first birthday, I think I can say that I know the business well. I know, almost instinctively, which lime, from which part of the kiln, to use for which application. I know which mixture of aggregates makes the best concrete for a particular purpose, and how much of which type of sand to put in the mix to aid the set required. That is my particular speciality, always seeking the perfect mix. I suppose I am a little full of myself, as father reminds me often, a little presumptious and arrogant, but if he is the best in the county - as I believe him to be - I would place myself not so very far behind, although, as you will understand, the reputation of our little company - we have six men with us now now - rests entirely with him for the present.
People often call on father when they have a problem and we are beginning to make some small profit from this "consulting" work, solving problems for the good folk of Somerset, or at least for the builders and constructors of the county. That seems to be where the future lies for us, or for myself I should say, for it will not be so many years before father retires. Perhaps it is merely the restlessness of youth that troubles me, for there are times when I am not so accepting of the life laid out. for me. I wonder if others who admire and work with their parent are similarly troubled. The post carriage brought us a letter from that fancy new store in town, 'Pratts Department Store'. You will surely have heard of it, and doubtless think of it as just that; the first department store in the whole county, the first west of Bristol. But we, father and I, know of it for different reasons. Old Mr Pratt had wanted the whole place to be the newest and best, so he commissioned a new construction technique, new to this part of the world at least, an iron-frame method, from a grand architect from Paris, in France. He barged the columns and girders down the Severn from Ironbridge in Shropshire and didn't use our local concrete at all. We were too traditional for him. He wanted some novel manufactured cement from Rugby, way up in the midlands, supposedly stronger and more reliable, the architect's agent told father. But now, twelve months after completion, the store up and working, they wanted assistance, they desired advice: hence the letter.
Of course Father was a touch too proud; he had taken the lost order hard, and preferred not to go himself. But we were both, nevertheless, very curious and wanted a good look at this new building method, and he required me to take his place, requesting me very particularly to report back in great detail. If it ever became the fashion, if everyone started using this method of construction, it would not bode well for us, not well at all. With our lime-kilns and aggregate quarry, and with the years of investment in all our grinding and mixing equipment, we needed architects to be thinking about artificial stone, blocks made to look like portland stone and constructing buildings, especially the larger civic buildings, of concrete, not iron and steel. We had discussed several times the implications of the successful construction using this new-fangled method, not without a measure of pessimism.
"Well, young man, this looks straightforward. Time for you to take charge."
He was right. It seemed, from the letter, simple and straightforward: a poor mixture, lack of water, too much water, no wetting agent. It would doubtless prove to be something of the like. Someone, somewhere, was trying to save money, as was usually the case in these straitened times. However, as I said, the real interest for us was the building itself. We had heard all about it, read everything we could about it. Cast iron columns were to support it creating a great deal more space for the shop floor, with girders bolted together to form the frame. And the simplicity meant that the whole three stories were completed in less than a year, inside and out. It seemed to us incredible, and we worried that it would be irresistible to developers. At the base of it, though, they depended utterly on solid pads, concrete plinths, to support their delicate structures, and, if the concrete plinths had failed, it would not be good for them with their 'new' methods, not good at all. Equally though, should it come to that, a failure of the concrete, it wouldn't be good for the reputation of any of we concrete people, even if it had nothing to do with our particular cements. The best outcome for us would be a conclusion that the new type of manufactured cement from Rugby had caused the problem, leaving the field open for a return to our natural lime cements.
It wasn't just the construction that I wanted to study. I was equally impatient to see for myself a strange pneumatic tube system they had had installed and that was already the talk of the district. All the way from America to Somerset! The system worked, somehow, by creating a vacuum in the tubes, and little canisters whizzed along the tubes carrying money and receipts. It sounded impossible. Everyone I spoke to who had visited the store was excited by the sight of their money whizzing around to some hidden central cashier and their receipts returning in a matter of minutes by the same mechanism. I wanted to see this new technology in action and to try and understand its workings.
I was up good and early for the ride into Bridgeminster. I saddled up, and was away by six. It was a soft morning after a night's rain, a quiet blue sky with just a few light white clouds floating off the Mendips and the low sun sparkling in the wet trees. We, Blackie, my best horse, and I, trotted in to town a few minutes after eight, in good time. The store was very impressive at first sight, far larger than I had expected. The livery stables were just behind the store - and they even had some spaces put by for automobiles even though there were only three in the whole town at that time, with a strange looking fuel pump. That's forward thinking for you. Old Mr P was nothing if not progressive.
Who would have thought! A great department store here, in Somerset, in Bridgeminster built three stories high plus a basement. Even the livery boy was uniformed. I handed him Blackie's reins and was met, at the side door of the store, by a similarly uniformed flunkey. He led me directly down a flight of iron stairs. This was going to be very interesting day.
I followed him into the basement, glancing around me. The whole space was open, used as a giant storeroom - there were all sorts of things piled high - but you could see clearly the rows of cast-iron columns all set on concrete plinths supporting a grid of iron girders. Timbers, great joists, like railway sleepers, fitted in the girders, supporting the floors above. There were several sets of steel stairs and all around there were pipes, the gas pipes for the lighting, hot water pipes - there must be a furnace somewhere - cold water pipes, other pipes I took to be drains. Above all, I took notice of a skein of paired shiny brass pipes which I supposed were the tubes for the pneumatic system I was so curious about. The brass pipes all converged at the centre of the basement where a most odd structure sat. It looked at first sight a little like a park bandstand, but smaller in diameter. It put me in mind of the centre of a giant cobweb, with this open booth at the centre in which sat - I could see as I approached - the most enormous woman I had ever seen in my life. Dressed completely in black, with a fleshy red face, she sat squeezed in the booth surrounded by the descending tubes. She seemed to be talking loudly to herself, taking notes and money from the tubes and writing at great speed in a huge ledger and a receipt book, her hands a blur for she was working so quickly.
My first thought was a little ungracious: I wondered how on earth she managed to get in and out of the space, and how - for she did not seem especially old - she had come to this, if, indeed, her plight was as it seemed. She was totally oblivious to my gawping as I passed; following my flunkey to Mr Pratt Jnr's office, for it was he that had written requesting the visit.
I should tell you also that I couldn't help noticing the plinths on which the columns stood. They were, I knew, concrete, but very finely finished with a marbling technique that the Belgians use, based on particular, very fine, fast setting cement from the Ardennes. Impressive. Certainly on first sight the layman might think they were marble. I knew better, for we had seen the technique, father and I, at an exhibition in Bristol not two months previously.
Pratt Jnr., a man of my own age, stood in his office, the basement plan spread out on his desk, though my attention was immediately drawn to a photo on the wall behind him. It showed four people stood at the centre of a huge hole in the ground, which I took to be the site for the store. Old Mr Pratt and young Mr Pratt were standing either side of a tall, handsome looking man and an equally tall, strikingly beautiful and strongly built young woman. Young Pratt caught my gaze.
"The architect, Monsieur Legrand" he said. But it was the woman who interested me.
"Is that his wife?" I asked. An older, wiser, more polite man than I would not have asked, but there was something about their stance, their impatient gaze at the photographer, that suggested an intimacy.
"No." Pratt replied abruptly, "My sister. You just passed her. If we may turn to the matter in hand?"
I had passed no-one like that, no woman at all. Just the... could he be referring to the lady in the booth, the "Black Widow" as I had characterised her in my mind already. Surely not. I gazed distractedly at the plan as he pointed out the two failed plinths.
"Of course" he said, "if it is just these two that have a problem, then there is no significant risk to the building. The steelwork will hold firm and we can repair the plinths with little or no inconvenience to the store." He left unsaid the opposite. If there was a fault with the concrete generally then the whole building would have to be dismantled and they would be ruined.
We strode off to the suspect plinths and passed the central booth again as we did so. The woman, Miss Pratt, seemed very disturbed and was wailing and moaning her additions and subtractions in a subdued and pitiable way at the pipes, but we, her brother and I, presumed to ignore her and proceeded to the west of the basement, where he showed me the two columns. He turned, by hand, the bolts that secured the cast iron pillar to the concrete plinth, thus illustrating the problem.
I guessed immediately what had happened, but held back. I wanted, I suppose, to appear more professional so I took a chipping hammer from my leather holdall, and tapped lightly at the 'marble'. It fell away as a quarter inch layer. I used a sharply pointed awl to press into the concrete beneath in several places. I could hear behind me an increase in the keening from his sister far behind us. I saw sweat breaking out on Pratt's brow. I scrabbled around a little on the top of the plinth disturbing crumbs and pellets of the concrete. I chipped a couple of samples from different parts of the plinth and also packeted some of the larger crumbs. I could have drawn out the drama, but decided to pronounce straight away, as it was obvious to me what had happened.
"Subject, of course, to confirmation from our laboratory, this" I said, a touch condescendingly I suppose, "is a 'double set'. The concrete has started to set, been disturbed before the chemical reactions have completed, and then the too large half-set particles have tried, and failed, to bind together properly. Once we have that confirmed - no more than two or three days time - I suggest that you simply demolish and re-cast these two plinths. Leave them undisturbed, covered in damp hessian, for 30 days to set in the usual way. You may need to bring in special craftsmen to re-create the marble finish, but that should, from what I have seen, solve the problem. Do you have the same situation elsewhere?"
"No" said Pratt, I've looked at all the other plinths. It is just these two."
His relief was palpable. I was thinking how to invoice sufficiently high to reflect the fact that I had just saved the family from ruin. Little did I guess then that the opposite would so swiftly prove to be the case. We walked back across the basement. I made a show of inspecting more of the plinths along the way, passing again his sister, who still seemed to be wailing her arithmetic to herself. In the photograph she was not a slim woman, but how could she come to this? I couldn't help myself asking Pratt.
"Your sister seems much changed from the photograph in your office." I said, once out of her earshot.
He looked at me quizzically, as if querying my motive for asking. "Yes," he said "My father died very soon after that photograph was taken. She felt his loss unbearable."
It may have been that inquisitiveness that lost us the work, not that it was such a big commission. Certainly I think we, father and I, would have handled the situation with a great deal more sensitivity than those who eventually did, for, in spite of my astonishment at her appearance, I felt within me a great sympathy toward Miss Pratt. Her obvious continual distress, contrasted with the evident competence of her work, presented a conundrum that teased at my mind then, and for days after the visit.
We prepared and sent by post a fairly substantial invoice (considering the minimal work that had been involved) a few days later. It was paid promptly but we were not asked to offer a quotation for the work. We heard, nor thought, no more about it until the story appeared in the local papers, reporting the trial.
The bodies of two new-born babies were found, one in each plinth: hence, one assumes - the disturbance of the setting concrete. Miss Pratt, Virginia was her name, was charged with infanticide of her new-born twins, and sent to an asylum for the rest of her life.
On the occasional trip to town, the gossips, when not complaining of the wait for settlements at the store, suspected the Architect, mainly it seemed on no greater grounds than his nationality. It may well have been so, I knew nothing of the people involved, and the atmosphere of the photo certainly spoke of a relationship, but something made me feel there was more to it. Her father, the root, according to her brother, of her grief, had been found drowned below the town bridge – some say by suicide, but why would he take his life with his the foundations of his much vaunted store only just laid? – seven months before the twin infants were born, the very date that the concrete was poured for those last two plinths.
Pratt himself went into a catastrophic turmoil. The business was bankrupt within a year, the accounts, apparently, in chaos. The architect never returned to the country and no more buildings were built in this way for a great many years. This was good, I suppose, for us. But I could not let it go. There was, I felt, more, much more, to discover. I debated with myself, and with father, should I or could I involve myself in affairs of detection, and to what end: what use would it serve? Could I make a career for myself as a Concrete Detective?
People often call on father when they have a problem and we are beginning to make some small profit from this "consulting" work, solving problems for the good folk of Somerset, or at least for the builders and constructors of the county. That seems to be where the future lies for us, or for myself I should say, for it will not be so many years before father retires. Perhaps it is merely the restlessness of youth that troubles me, for there are times when I am not so accepting of the life laid out. for me. I wonder if others who admire and work with their parent are similarly troubled. The post carriage brought us a letter from that fancy new store in town, 'Pratts Department Store'. You will surely have heard of it, and doubtless think of it as just that; the first department store in the whole county, the first west of Bristol. But we, father and I, know of it for different reasons. Old Mr Pratt had wanted the whole place to be the newest and best, so he commissioned a new construction technique, new to this part of the world at least, an iron-frame method, from a grand architect from Paris, in France. He barged the columns and girders down the Severn from Ironbridge in Shropshire and didn't use our local concrete at all. We were too traditional for him. He wanted some novel manufactured cement from Rugby, way up in the midlands, supposedly stronger and more reliable, the architect's agent told father. But now, twelve months after completion, the store up and working, they wanted assistance, they desired advice: hence the letter.
Of course Father was a touch too proud; he had taken the lost order hard, and preferred not to go himself. But we were both, nevertheless, very curious and wanted a good look at this new building method, and he required me to take his place, requesting me very particularly to report back in great detail. If it ever became the fashion, if everyone started using this method of construction, it would not bode well for us, not well at all. With our lime-kilns and aggregate quarry, and with the years of investment in all our grinding and mixing equipment, we needed architects to be thinking about artificial stone, blocks made to look like portland stone and constructing buildings, especially the larger civic buildings, of concrete, not iron and steel. We had discussed several times the implications of the successful construction using this new-fangled method, not without a measure of pessimism.
"Well, young man, this looks straightforward. Time for you to take charge."
He was right. It seemed, from the letter, simple and straightforward: a poor mixture, lack of water, too much water, no wetting agent. It would doubtless prove to be something of the like. Someone, somewhere, was trying to save money, as was usually the case in these straitened times. However, as I said, the real interest for us was the building itself. We had heard all about it, read everything we could about it. Cast iron columns were to support it creating a great deal more space for the shop floor, with girders bolted together to form the frame. And the simplicity meant that the whole three stories were completed in less than a year, inside and out. It seemed to us incredible, and we worried that it would be irresistible to developers. At the base of it, though, they depended utterly on solid pads, concrete plinths, to support their delicate structures, and, if the concrete plinths had failed, it would not be good for them with their 'new' methods, not good at all. Equally though, should it come to that, a failure of the concrete, it wouldn't be good for the reputation of any of we concrete people, even if it had nothing to do with our particular cements. The best outcome for us would be a conclusion that the new type of manufactured cement from Rugby had caused the problem, leaving the field open for a return to our natural lime cements.
It wasn't just the construction that I wanted to study. I was equally impatient to see for myself a strange pneumatic tube system they had had installed and that was already the talk of the district. All the way from America to Somerset! The system worked, somehow, by creating a vacuum in the tubes, and little canisters whizzed along the tubes carrying money and receipts. It sounded impossible. Everyone I spoke to who had visited the store was excited by the sight of their money whizzing around to some hidden central cashier and their receipts returning in a matter of minutes by the same mechanism. I wanted to see this new technology in action and to try and understand its workings.
I was up good and early for the ride into Bridgeminster. I saddled up, and was away by six. It was a soft morning after a night's rain, a quiet blue sky with just a few light white clouds floating off the Mendips and the low sun sparkling in the wet trees. We, Blackie, my best horse, and I, trotted in to town a few minutes after eight, in good time. The store was very impressive at first sight, far larger than I had expected. The livery stables were just behind the store - and they even had some spaces put by for automobiles even though there were only three in the whole town at that time, with a strange looking fuel pump. That's forward thinking for you. Old Mr P was nothing if not progressive.
Who would have thought! A great department store here, in Somerset, in Bridgeminster built three stories high plus a basement. Even the livery boy was uniformed. I handed him Blackie's reins and was met, at the side door of the store, by a similarly uniformed flunkey. He led me directly down a flight of iron stairs. This was going to be very interesting day.
I followed him into the basement, glancing around me. The whole space was open, used as a giant storeroom - there were all sorts of things piled high - but you could see clearly the rows of cast-iron columns all set on concrete plinths supporting a grid of iron girders. Timbers, great joists, like railway sleepers, fitted in the girders, supporting the floors above. There were several sets of steel stairs and all around there were pipes, the gas pipes for the lighting, hot water pipes - there must be a furnace somewhere - cold water pipes, other pipes I took to be drains. Above all, I took notice of a skein of paired shiny brass pipes which I supposed were the tubes for the pneumatic system I was so curious about. The brass pipes all converged at the centre of the basement where a most odd structure sat. It looked at first sight a little like a park bandstand, but smaller in diameter. It put me in mind of the centre of a giant cobweb, with this open booth at the centre in which sat - I could see as I approached - the most enormous woman I had ever seen in my life. Dressed completely in black, with a fleshy red face, she sat squeezed in the booth surrounded by the descending tubes. She seemed to be talking loudly to herself, taking notes and money from the tubes and writing at great speed in a huge ledger and a receipt book, her hands a blur for she was working so quickly.
My first thought was a little ungracious: I wondered how on earth she managed to get in and out of the space, and how - for she did not seem especially old - she had come to this, if, indeed, her plight was as it seemed. She was totally oblivious to my gawping as I passed; following my flunkey to Mr Pratt Jnr's office, for it was he that had written requesting the visit.
I should tell you also that I couldn't help noticing the plinths on which the columns stood. They were, I knew, concrete, but very finely finished with a marbling technique that the Belgians use, based on particular, very fine, fast setting cement from the Ardennes. Impressive. Certainly on first sight the layman might think they were marble. I knew better, for we had seen the technique, father and I, at an exhibition in Bristol not two months previously.
Pratt Jnr., a man of my own age, stood in his office, the basement plan spread out on his desk, though my attention was immediately drawn to a photo on the wall behind him. It showed four people stood at the centre of a huge hole in the ground, which I took to be the site for the store. Old Mr Pratt and young Mr Pratt were standing either side of a tall, handsome looking man and an equally tall, strikingly beautiful and strongly built young woman. Young Pratt caught my gaze.
"The architect, Monsieur Legrand" he said. But it was the woman who interested me.
"Is that his wife?" I asked. An older, wiser, more polite man than I would not have asked, but there was something about their stance, their impatient gaze at the photographer, that suggested an intimacy.
"No." Pratt replied abruptly, "My sister. You just passed her. If we may turn to the matter in hand?"
I had passed no-one like that, no woman at all. Just the... could he be referring to the lady in the booth, the "Black Widow" as I had characterised her in my mind already. Surely not. I gazed distractedly at the plan as he pointed out the two failed plinths.
"Of course" he said, "if it is just these two that have a problem, then there is no significant risk to the building. The steelwork will hold firm and we can repair the plinths with little or no inconvenience to the store." He left unsaid the opposite. If there was a fault with the concrete generally then the whole building would have to be dismantled and they would be ruined.
We strode off to the suspect plinths and passed the central booth again as we did so. The woman, Miss Pratt, seemed very disturbed and was wailing and moaning her additions and subtractions in a subdued and pitiable way at the pipes, but we, her brother and I, presumed to ignore her and proceeded to the west of the basement, where he showed me the two columns. He turned, by hand, the bolts that secured the cast iron pillar to the concrete plinth, thus illustrating the problem.
I guessed immediately what had happened, but held back. I wanted, I suppose, to appear more professional so I took a chipping hammer from my leather holdall, and tapped lightly at the 'marble'. It fell away as a quarter inch layer. I used a sharply pointed awl to press into the concrete beneath in several places. I could hear behind me an increase in the keening from his sister far behind us. I saw sweat breaking out on Pratt's brow. I scrabbled around a little on the top of the plinth disturbing crumbs and pellets of the concrete. I chipped a couple of samples from different parts of the plinth and also packeted some of the larger crumbs. I could have drawn out the drama, but decided to pronounce straight away, as it was obvious to me what had happened.
"Subject, of course, to confirmation from our laboratory, this" I said, a touch condescendingly I suppose, "is a 'double set'. The concrete has started to set, been disturbed before the chemical reactions have completed, and then the too large half-set particles have tried, and failed, to bind together properly. Once we have that confirmed - no more than two or three days time - I suggest that you simply demolish and re-cast these two plinths. Leave them undisturbed, covered in damp hessian, for 30 days to set in the usual way. You may need to bring in special craftsmen to re-create the marble finish, but that should, from what I have seen, solve the problem. Do you have the same situation elsewhere?"
"No" said Pratt, I've looked at all the other plinths. It is just these two."
His relief was palpable. I was thinking how to invoice sufficiently high to reflect the fact that I had just saved the family from ruin. Little did I guess then that the opposite would so swiftly prove to be the case. We walked back across the basement. I made a show of inspecting more of the plinths along the way, passing again his sister, who still seemed to be wailing her arithmetic to herself. In the photograph she was not a slim woman, but how could she come to this? I couldn't help myself asking Pratt.
"Your sister seems much changed from the photograph in your office." I said, once out of her earshot.
He looked at me quizzically, as if querying my motive for asking. "Yes," he said "My father died very soon after that photograph was taken. She felt his loss unbearable."
It may have been that inquisitiveness that lost us the work, not that it was such a big commission. Certainly I think we, father and I, would have handled the situation with a great deal more sensitivity than those who eventually did, for, in spite of my astonishment at her appearance, I felt within me a great sympathy toward Miss Pratt. Her obvious continual distress, contrasted with the evident competence of her work, presented a conundrum that teased at my mind then, and for days after the visit.
We prepared and sent by post a fairly substantial invoice (considering the minimal work that had been involved) a few days later. It was paid promptly but we were not asked to offer a quotation for the work. We heard, nor thought, no more about it until the story appeared in the local papers, reporting the trial.
The bodies of two new-born babies were found, one in each plinth: hence, one assumes - the disturbance of the setting concrete. Miss Pratt, Virginia was her name, was charged with infanticide of her new-born twins, and sent to an asylum for the rest of her life.
On the occasional trip to town, the gossips, when not complaining of the wait for settlements at the store, suspected the Architect, mainly it seemed on no greater grounds than his nationality. It may well have been so, I knew nothing of the people involved, and the atmosphere of the photo certainly spoke of a relationship, but something made me feel there was more to it. Her father, the root, according to her brother, of her grief, had been found drowned below the town bridge – some say by suicide, but why would he take his life with his the foundations of his much vaunted store only just laid? – seven months before the twin infants were born, the very date that the concrete was poured for those last two plinths.
Pratt himself went into a catastrophic turmoil. The business was bankrupt within a year, the accounts, apparently, in chaos. The architect never returned to the country and no more buildings were built in this way for a great many years. This was good, I suppose, for us. But I could not let it go. There was, I felt, more, much more, to discover. I debated with myself, and with father, should I or could I involve myself in affairs of detection, and to what end: what use would it serve? Could I make a career for myself as a Concrete Detective?
