NEW TIRES FOR OLD

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 October 1942, Page 3

NEW TIRES FOR OLD

WAR TASK OF HISTORIC POTTERY. Thousands of old tires a month, are now being made new for the British Army in a pottery works in Staffordshire. Long strips of rubber tread lie piled in a storeroom which was once the decorating shop. Covers for giant tires are being vulcanised over pits where china clay used to be left to keep it damp. The finished tires are stored. Worn tires come today from the Army’s transport lorries, motor cycles and trucks, not to mention from the other services, and from buses and the Civil Defence organisations. With a fraction of the rubber needed for a new tire, they go back rejuvenated, fit to do again the mileage they have already done.

Three hundred workers have been trained by key men from Fort Dunlop to do the job of re-treading. Twothirds of them are women. In the moulding shop, once a pottery store, are miners discharged from the pits for physical disability. The pottery people have not surrendered the whole factory. In one shed the damp clay spins into “utility” teacups, and they are still milling clay in flint for the whole range of “utility” pottery. *’