Unique Pillars For The New Midland Bank

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 288, 25 February 1928, Page 26

Unique Pillars For The New Midland Bank

Faced with Verdite As Hard As Diamond FITTED LIKE JIG-SAW PUZZLE There is nothing in the world like the green pillars of the Midland Bank’s new £2,200,000 headquarters building in the city section of London. Never before has green verdite been used for decorative purposes on so large a scale. It is so rare as to be almost a precious stone, and so hard as to be almost unworkable. Ambitious architects have previously used a few square inches of verdite at a time; but in the Midland Bank’s new building Sir Edwin Lutyens, one of the foremost British architects, has used it to face whole columns measuring 18 feet in height from base to cap. A little more than a year ago no stone mason anywhere in the world could have assembled so much verdite. It had to bo prospected for like any other semi-precious stone. From the Transvaal in South Africa some had previously obtained, and it was necessary to organise an expedition to locate it, quarry it and ship it to England in the rough lump. A number of outcrops were located in the Eastern Transvaal and claims were staked out. The village of Verditeville sprang up to house the black labour gangs and the white engineers. There was wild game in abundance and hippopotami were sometimes sighted, but the greatest danger in clearing away the overgrowth from the outcrops was the deadly puff adder, one of the most venomous of South African snakes. The quarrying was all surface work, but even when the outcrops had been located the task was difficult because the rock was so hard and so remote from railway communication. Actual quarrying had to be delayed too until samples from a number of outcrops could be sent to England and examined for colour, grain and hardness. Then the hundreds of tons of verdite necessary for the bank’s new building in London were ordered from the samples. Blasting operations brought out the verdite in lumps, none larger than a cantaloupe. These were sacked and hauled on wooden sleds down from the higher outcrops to the valleys, where they were loaded on wagons and hauled to the railway by long-horned Transvaal cattle. Getting the verdite out of the ground proved to be little more difficult than getting it down to the docks at Delagoa Bay, whence it was shipped to Torquay, England. It was so heavy that in one of the first consignments several freight cars ran off the rails, turned over and scattered their precious load all over the place. “But it didn’t injure the verdite,” one of the engineers says somewhat sourly. The terrible hardness of the stuff, a nightmare in the minds of the engineers who were quarrying it, was to become even more of a nightmare when it reached the Jenkins stoneyard at Torquay. The biggest lumps proved wholly unworkable. Obtained at great expense, nothing could be done with them but split them, select suitable fragments and throw the rest away. Pieces of a quarter of an inch in thickness had to be cut. The steel saws usually employed for such work proved useless, so that special carborundum machines had finally to be devised. Carborundum is nearly as ! hard as diamond, yet wheel after wheel broke on the stubborn verdite. When ' the cutting was successful, however, it left the verdite with almost a polished surface. The next difficulty ai'ose through the variations in colour. The hundreds of tons of verdite, reduced to very small, thin pieces, were found to show about twenty shades of green, varying from dark to lighc through all the yellowish and brownish shades. Polishing brought out the shades and revealed one of the most beautiful of all stone surfaces. When the entire shipment had been reduced to many thousands of small thin pieces, :he work of fitting them to the pillars in the Midland Bank’s new building was at last ready to begin. The pillars themselves are of Belgian granite; the verdite forms a veneer made by affixing from SOO to 1,000 tiny pieces to each pillar. For this work it was necessary to call a colour expert to direct the matching of the hundreds of pieces on each pillar. Forty men worked at it for months, fitting on the pillars pieces in a veritable jig-saw puzzle—wholly irregular shapes frequently requiring trimming before they would fit at all. But so nicely grained and matched are the pieces that no casual observer would know they are not great slabs of verdite.