Feb. 15, 2013, 10 p.m.
LET me tell you a story. It's about a remarkable 92-year-old Maitland resident with a forgotten tale to tell about the birth of BHP's once giant Newcastle Steelworks.
The vast works, built on a barren swampy stretch of land beside the Hunter River, changed the nation's fortunes forever.
The importance of the Newcastle Steelworks opening in June 1915 cannot be underestimated, as Mrs Pauline Lobb would readily agree.
And she may just have a priceless, unknown relic of early BHP to recall that historic era.
"As you get older, you downsize, but I've kept this paperweight because it has special family significance," she said. "It came from part of the first steel billet produced at BHP at Port Waratah. I know because my father was one of the first American specialists recruited and brought out to help start the steelworks."
And the odd paperknife-like object (pictured) doesn't appear in any normal Newcastle BHP histories.
Tapered at one end, the other end features a mini-rail stamped with the words, "BHP Co Ltd" on one side, and "Australia" on the other.
When BHP officially opened its Newcastle steel mill on June 2, 1915, more than 220 guests were presented with their own treasured memento.
These special paperweights were T-shaped pieces of rail, chrome polished and wafer-thin sliced. All were inscribed 'April 17, 1915', although our first steel ingot was actually rolled on April 9, 1915.
Newcastle Museum now has two of these shiny commemorative items behind glass on display, but staff have never seen anything like the Pauline Lobb memento.
Newcastle industrial heritage expert and former BHP staffer Bob Cook said the object seemed "early and rare, even extremely rare".
"Such one-off items were usually made to mark the first of something. It's unusual in that it reads 'BHP Co Ltd', not proprietary, as in BHP Pty Ltd, and why would you inscribe it 'Australia' unless it was to remind you of somewhere you'd been," he said.
Newcastle Steelworks, which survived until 1999, was originally built with American expertise guided by consulting steelworks engineer David Baker, of Philadelphia, USA.
"My father was one of the first 50 American steel specialists brought over here by Baker," Mrs Lobb said.
"Luckily, the first blast furnace had been built by then [in a swamp].
"Daddy's name was Wilbur Johnson Spencer. Johnson was a family name. He came here, married and stayed at BHP until he retired. A lot of them, though, went home.
"They had the right to extend their initial three-year contract here, or go," she said.
"My father was a specialist in Bessemer steel, the earlier main steel manufacturing process [from 1870-1910], but they didn't ever use it here," she said.
BHP instead used the new open-hearth process, but in recognition of Mr Spencer being one of the pioneering steel men in Australia, he was later invited with others to the opening of BHP's Port Kembla works.
"That was many years later, long after he'd retired, though," she said.
Early newspaper records confirm 20 steel workers from Baltimore and Pittsburgh accompanied by their families arrived in Sydney by the ship Sonora from San Francisco on Tuesday, March 9, 1915. All were bound for the new steel works in Newcastle. A second lot of skilled workers were also coming on the next steamer.
"Britain was at war by then so Dr Baker went to [neutral] America to the Bethlehem steel company in Boston and recruited 50 workers to come out," Mrs Lobb said.
En-route to Australia the ship Sonora briefly stopped in Hawaii.
"I remember hearing they arrived in Honolulu on George Washington's birthday [February 22] and with all that sun they wanted to stay there, but were told Australia had similar glorious weather.
"Now daddy had also been an ice hockey player so all these wool sweaters were tipped over the side of the boat, but when they got to Australia people were sorry they had done it.
"When they came up to Newcastle it was much colder than they had been led to believe.
"BHP put them up at the old Great Northern Hotel. There was once a photograph of them hanging out windows looking down on Scott Street as they had never seen an electric tram running down the middle of the road."
"The men used to have to go across to the BHP site by ferry from Newcastle. Daddy was here about 2½ years when there was an accident and he lost an arm. He then had to walk down to the dyke wharves at BHP to be taken across the harbour where he was met by a horse-drawn ambulance on the Newcastle side. This drove him up to the old Newcastle Hospital in the East End," she said.
"Mummy and both her sisters trained at the old Royal. That's where mummy met him. She was his night nurse. And in those days the isolation ward was creaky and windy.
"You'd go to bed at night and the building leaked in the rain. Many a time the nurses got in trouble for going to bed with an umbrella up.
"Later back at BHP, daddy then had some duties around the blast furnace. But I know that the man who cut his arm off, a crane operator, well, daddy never looked at him again.
"I believe only about three original US workers stayed here, but in the meantime, other workers had come out.
"Old Tom [Gallaghan] stayed on and registered his children with the American embassy, but daddy never did. Young Tom Gallaghan then got called up by the US Army during the Second World War.
"Daddy had a full life and loved sport. The Yanks after 1915 even formed a couple of baseball teams. So, baseball's not new here," she said.
In World War II, Mrs Lobb's family lived at Stockton where her father was an air-raid warden during the 1942 Japanese submarine attack on Newcastle. But that's a tale for another day.
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