Crushing victory

From Spitfires to metal-crushers, Les Ellis has seen it all. HUGH DE LACY meets the Christchurch industry veteran.

Les Ellis was bound for the quarrying and civil construction industries from the day he left Technical College in Christchurch and started his time as a draughting apprentice with local engineering firm Booth McDonald.

It was a comprehensive apprenticeship that went far beyond merely draughting, encompassing fitting and turning and welding as well. It set him up for what eventually became a lifetime of often pioneering work as a builder and operator of quarrying and dredging equipment.

But hardly had he come out of his time in 1939 than a chap called Hitler started World War II, and Ellis found himself enlisted in the Royal New Zealand Air Force and undertaking fresh training as a fighter plane armaments serviceman at Wigram Aerodrome in Christchurch.

Shipped to England at the end of his training, Ellis arrived just after the Battle of Britain had been won, but he stayed there working on Supermarine Spitfires, and later the wood-framed twin-engined Mosquitos, at famous fighter air-bases like Biggin Hill in the south of England until almost the end of the war.

The Allies decided in late 1944 that they could finish Hitler off without further assistance from the former Christchurch draughtsman, and Ellis was sent home on the liner Queen Elizabeth, which was at that point being operated by the Americans. To lessen the boredom of the long voyage home, Ellis volunteered for work on the ship, ending up as a clerk on the bridge where he rubbed shoulders with the great liner’s most famous passengers, singer Bing Crosby and dancer Fred Astaire.

If the war had put Ellis’ career on hold for five years, he was not slow in getting back into the swing of things. While doing his time with Booth McDonald, he had put in many hours on the

metal-crushing and screening equipment the company had been manufacturing. Thinking it would be a good idea “to have a screening plant in the riverbed,” and confident he could build the equipment himself, he took out a £1500 ($3000) rehabilitation loan.

He didn’t get into a riverbed, but rather into the then Paparoa County Council’s shingle pit at the back of Wigram Aerodrome, and began supplying basecourse on a royalty basis. With partner Noel Burke who left the operation a year or two later, Ellis built his own rotary screener, conveyor and bins, and within four years had worked the pit to a depth of nearly 20 metres. That was well below the water table and he was in effect dredging for metal.

At the time there were only two other aggregate suppliers in Canterbury – British Pavements, which itself used everything it quarried, and Farrier Waimak. Not that there was a lot of demand for aggregates in 1950, but as the Paparoa County pit ran out Ellis became aware that the government was establishing a housing division of the Ministry of Works, which would create a big demand for subdivision roading gravels.

So Ellis took out a lease on 12 hectares of gravelly land adjacent to the old pit and started building more gear, beginning with two portable crushing plants he operated for the first 18 months, then a fixed base-course plant.

“Everyone who came to work for me found themselves with a welder in their hands,” Ellis says. But to really gear up his new operation he bought a huge English-built Parker crusher from the French firm EEE that had been building Bluff Harbour.

“It was a beautiful big plant with its own hammer mills, jaw crushers and screens, and we broke it down in Bluff, railed it in bits to Christchurch and reassembled it,” Ellis told Contractor. “It also had a small cone crusher, so it could produce sealing chip and pre-mix as well.”

Various means for feeding the plant were used, ranging from bulldozers to tracked-loaders to a loader-in-the-face and a 15 metre scraper, but in the end trucks and a big dragline proved most efficient.

The new quarrying operation was a success, and Ellis and one of his three sons, Rusty (Phillip), continued to run it until 1974 when the local authorities began to get squeamish about a quarry so close to the city. Rather than start up anew somewhere else, Ellis sold the business and retired to look after another of his sons, Gregory, who was on dialysis.

Long before then though, he had branched out into dredging, mainly because in the early 1960s nobody else seemed to be doing it. In 1964 he won a contract to dredge a marina at Havelock in Marlborough. The contract was worth about $100,000 – big money in those days – and it took him a year to complete using a dredge he built from the ground up.

That achievement gave him the confidence to try for a bigger job, and a year or so later he landed the $500,000 contract to cut a canal across a flood-prone bend in the notoriously unruly Waipaoa River near Gisborne for the Poverty Bay Catchment Board. Ellis built another dredge powered by a 15 tonne Petter two-stroke diesel, delivering 500hp at 500rpm, as well as a five-tonne pump that was 20 inches at the suction end and 18 inches at delivery, and railed them to Gisborne for assembly.

That project struck a problem however when a layer of huge trunkless tree-roots was struck at a depth of five metres that frustrated the dredge and blocked the pump.  Ellis had to renegotiate the contract and buy new gear that included three dump-trucks, a TD25 International bulldozer and a Ruston Bucyrus dragline. He completed the contract just as the Christchurch operation was winding up, and he ended up selling all the new gear into the Auckland market.

The dump trucks were leased by Stevensons and spent the next 10 years stripping overburden off the coalmine at Maramarua – which incidentally led to Ellis’ third son, Steve, joining Stevensons where he is now in charge of the company’s quarrying operations.

Though he formally retired in 1974, Les Ellis, now nearly 90, for many years ran a small engineering works where he built gearboxes for Pontiac TransAm racing cars. These days he’s put that activity behind him in favour of reflecting on a working lifetime that has taken him from crushing plants to Spitfires and all the way back again.