Building a Swimming Pool (continued)
Digging the hole
It was only four months after the project had been first discussed at the Parents' Circle meeting that the site was marked out, in mid February 1962. A certain amount of preliminary work had already been done during the Christmas holidays, with the shifting of railway sleepers to make rough tracks. Half a dozen old pupils came to give some welcome help on the site during the last few weeks of the Spring term, and one month after the marking out, the big drag-line excavator came to dig the hole. Just before this happened, we were enabled to save the top-soil over the whole site by the kindness of a neighbouring farmer - an old pupil and present parent of the School - who bull-dozed it aside until it should be needed again when the pool was complete. The expert in charge of the excavator may well have managed bigger machines, for when he was one day asked by an interested spectator "if he had done this sort of work before", he replied: "Yes, Kariba Dam." So he had. It was a whole week's work, for which the firm of Stutely charged the nominal sum of £100. The last ten days of the term were employed in trimming the hole to the exact requirements of the job, and on the first day of the Easter holidays actual construction began.
At the planning stage it was felt that the School could not afford a full-time professional foreman, even if one could have been found who was both competent as a concreter and willing to teach children. Just before work on the project began, however, a foreman fell from heaven, or more accurately from Edinburgh, in the person of a young member of the staff who was employed at that time in the school gardens. Michael Pooley was a designer-craftsman whose previous experience had been mainly in ceramics, but, in the words of the Engineer, "he quickly became an extremely competent foreman, and had a remarkable capacity for handling practical engineering problems". He devoted his whole time to the swimming pool, being in charge of all the work for the next year and a half.
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Casting a steep slope "kicker" section.
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