Southwick in Sussex is my home town. My Mum worked at a Hairdressers which was within one of the houses on the far left of the photo above, it was on the south side of the A259 coast road that passes through the town…… As a young lad in the 50’s I often used to go down to a small beach by the side of the locks and sit by the boats whilst mum was working, a part of that beach can be seen on the extreme left….. As for the other side of the road, most of the shop fronts, including the church had gradually over the years been bought out and used by the Grange Press, a local printing company, this was to accommodate the continuing expansion of their business.
In 1965 I worked for an Electrical company and at that time all the shops and the church were to be demolished. Numerous numbers of flats were to be built to replace the old row of houses that you see in the picture….. Our job was to move all the usable electrics and equipment, including (Three-phase equipment) out of those buildings. All of this was intended to be reused in the new purpose-built Grange press building that was being built south of the railway line off Grange Road and Butts Road..
I was close to being electrocuted in that church hall…… Having been told all power had been isolated, I was to go and search all the buildings along the A259 road in the above photo for such equipment…… I had a trolley and a screwdriver and was told to remove any of the electrical equipment that had been tagged……I was also assured that no power existed within any of the buildings……
This I did for the best part of the day until I got to the Church Hall. The church had been used as a staff canteen by the Grange Press for some years, but now it was just an empty hollow space which I remember as being quite eerie…. There was one large electrical box on the wall which had a tag on it. I opened the cover and saw that it had (at one time) been a 500-volt three-phase bus bar unit which meant there were 4 heavy brass rods inside and I was about to put my screwdriver between the bars to unscrew the box from the wall……. For some unknown reason, (bearing in mind I had been doing this all day) I felt uncomfortable about putting the screwdriver into the unit….. I looked at it for a few seconds and decided to throw the screwdriver across the brass rods to confirm it’s disconnection, so I did. The bang was extremely loud in fact, it was more like an explosion. The resulting electrical short took out the electricity company’s substation down the road, which was situated at the bottom of Southwick green.
Half of Southwick had no electricity for some hours. People appeared from everywhere, running into the Church expecting to just see a pair of smoking boots, but I had survived, all be it quite dazzled and it took a few minutes to get my eyesight back to normal…… As far as the bus bar boxes survival, well it had become married to the screwdriver and they were now as one and quite inseparable………. My Nan, who at that time lived just north of all this in Southwick always told me I was being looked after.
Well on that day I certainly was. But I nearly wasn’t.
ONLYVFR 
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