Re:Generation Edition 01
All for the love of a jaguar It wasn’t the work that first attracted General Demolition’s Chairman Colin McLoughlin to the business – it was the love of driving a Mk II Jaguar. Colin McLoughlin Chairman
Minder
Bomb shelter bonanza
After trying his hand selling parrafin, being a butchers boy and a removals man (“No money in any of that!” he laughs) he got a job with Arthur Caitlin. Now Arthur was a larger- than-life character who owned a skip and demolition company, and – more importantly – had a shiny new Mk II Jaguar with wire wheels. In a mirror of 1970s TV show Minder, this ‘Arfer Daley’ needed a ‘Terry McCann’-type driver to take him around – and Colin jumped at the chance. “Arthur thought I wanted a job in demolition,” Colin laughs, “But I was just interested in driving the Jag and impressing girls with it once I’d dropped him off home.” But Colin was a good driver of not just cars, but lorries, construction machines and cranes too, and he was soon working for Arthur full time. One of his extra jobs was to empty the company’s skips placed in local areas into a Transit van. In his first experience of recycling, he would keep a keen eye out for furniture and sell them back to the local upholsterer.. Before long Colin was Arthur’s right hand man, and sent off to pay workers and help entertain the company’s customers at Catford dog track.
When Arthur died, the 19 year old Colin went to his funeral. Afterwards, at the wake he was cornered by a group of the company’s workers. “They said: ‘When You take over, don’t forget to look after us and pay us our regular wages.’ I was flabbergasted that they thought I was going to be the new boss,” remembers Colin. “They mistakenly thought I was more important than I was – Arthur’s heir apparent. But I wasn’t – I was just a glorified driver.” As it turned out, Arthur’s family also thought he was the coming man, and offered him the chance to take on the company’s demolition work. He may have lost the Jag, but Colin took to it like a natural.
Soon working independently, the first big break Colin got was doing something the Nazis couldn’t – demolish the hundreds of air raid shelters around London that remained after the war. The Government offered a short term incentive to remove them, and that was the golden ticket Colin needed. “I demolished hundreds of air raid shelters and became expert at bringing them down quickly,” he remembers, “From walking the concrete through peoples houses to remove shelters in their back gardens to demolishing large communal ones like the big one in Mitcham, it was a gold mine and really got us going. After that we were in business and there was no going back.
That sums up Colin McLoughlin, General Demolition’s founder and long-time chairman. With school ‘not for him’ he was destined to end up on one of the factory jobs that were plentiful in late 1960s London. But that was not for him either. So thanks to his father’s racing connections, he used his small stature (and 7.5 stone featherweight) to his advantage, and embarked on an apprenticeship as a jockey in nearby Reigate. A couple of nasty falls later and this career path too was abandoned. “It was exciting,” Colin admits, “but I was always a bit scared of horses – they were massive!”
In this article, the first in a series charting Colin’s 50 years in the business, we look at how removing WWII air raid shelters set him on the road to victory. It’s not easy being the fourth child of six in a poor family from Croydon. Things don’t come easy, and if you want something, generally you have to go out and make it happen yourself.
Brains over brawn
“People often think that you need to be big and strong to be in demolition,” says Colin. “But I wasn’t, and so I had to do things a different, smarter way. And that’s the way we still do our work – with brains-over-brawn. And always safely. Back in the day, before machines took over, that might have meant using the weight of a chimney stack with its bottom cut out to pull down a wall, or use a ‘Dutch eve’ to easily lever walls over without the need for machines.”
“Arthur thought I wanted a job in demolition,” Colin laughs, “But I was just interested in driving the Jag and impressing girls with it once I’d dropped him off home.”
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