Alex Smith was an Engineer with Wimpey for about 30 years.  Surveyor and then Site Engineer on Baberton Mains Estate from the late 60s.  Still resident on the estate. 

Present  at the interview: – Alex Smith, Liz Beevers, Helen Ogg
LB – Let’s explain the recording so that Alex isn’t worried.  We’ve done 1 or 2 of these interviews and what we do is record you if we may, then we take it away and type up a transcript which you get back and then if you want to change anything you can or you can add to it.  Let’s compare my map with yours.
AS – Yes, that’s the older map. But my computer is all mucked up now and I can`t bring up the old maps. I started surveying that field (indicated Fernieflat) in the late 60s, but they called it off – we were only filling in time over the winter.  In those days we were in there for a month and we barely covered half of it, whereas now with the modern instruments you could survey that whole field in 2 days max.
HO – With the laser technology?
AS – Yes, at the finish I had an electronic theodolite which followed me wherever I went, you could see the wee turret turning all the time, but it cost a fortune.
LB – And that would cover 2 men?
AS – Well there used to be 5 of us, but at the finish I could do that just myself.
LB – How many acres were you working on?
AS - I honestly couldn’t remember – we surveyed the top half, we didn’t do the Baberton Mains Lea (where I am now) and then later on I did the bottom bit – up to Baberton House.
LB – We think that may have been a different owner?
AS – I think it was, aye, but that was Russell that had that because he used to come down – I think he lived at Spylaw – and lean over the fence and moan to me about how little he had sold the ground for and how much we were selling the houses for. 
LB – You said you were surveying in the late 60s, so when did Wimpey actually get it? 
AS – I’ve no idea. The farm was there but Wimpey had options on land all over Britain.
LB – We’ve got a picture of it.
AS – Oh no, there were 3 or 4 cottages – I think the farm must have been away when we came.  I know the chap who used to own that farm (indicates Wester Hailes Farm).
LB – Alan Smith? Do you think he knows about Fernieflat?
AS –I don’t think he knows too much about Fernieflat – although he said they used to get access over the land because they used to dump rubbish at the side of the golf course
LB – Forgive me if I am treading on toes but it strikes me this must have been in the green belt?  I just wondered how they were allowed to build?  When you look at a big map like this – you must have known the bypass was coming?
AS – Oh no, nobody knew – I don’t think we even knew they were going to put in the dual carriageway.  ‘Cos the first I heard of the bypass was when I was surveying down at the Gyle (we owned where Marks and Spencers’ is – or we had options on it) but the Council owned land at the Gyle and they wanted to build houses on it between the station and M&S and we did a swap – the Council had the M&S land and we got the land to build the houses on.  Well, I was surveying that ground and I reckon that was 83/84 and when I was in that field I came across pegs, which I thought was strange, near Redheughs House, and one day there was a girl walking up through the field and I went across to speak to her to see what these pegs were and it turned out she was an engineer from the Council and she said “Oh that’s the line of the City Bypass” and I’d never heard of that before.  So I asked when was this taking place?  So she said it won’t be this century!
LB – So round here we think this is one of the first bits?
AS – The first bit was the Terrace.
LB – Sorry I meant the bypass.
AS – No, the first bit of the bypass was the other end.  Because they opened it during the Commonwealth Games and they used it.
LB – Was there a plan for the whole site?
AS –I can’t even remember what the survey was like now, because what I did they didn’t use because we weren’t fast enough and then all of a sudden they must have got planning permission because they did an aerial survey.
LB – That must be tricky with a site like this.
AS – Oh no, these were very accurate.  The first time I ever saw an aerial survey was the very first job I did with Wimpey at Penicuik and there was this beautiful plan, contoured and everything and the engineers had designed this road and it went up – and it was a funny thing because the road was a right mixture of the contours and we couldn’t figure out what this was and we had a flat field and the contours ran right through the middle of a haystack.  So we didn’t do the Baberton site – it was done aerially – it would have taken us months.
LB – So was Bobby Russell still around?
AS – Oh aye.  And the cottages were still there.  When I came there, coming up through Fernieflat before you came to the cottages, we set up a temporary compound.  Maybe the farmhouse was there, but it wasn’t like that.
LB – Well, we got this picture from National Monuments and also from the census we have picked up that there were at least 4 cottages.
AS – Well the cottages were occupied and they had been given a date to get out.  One tenant was a retired chemist and in the outbuildings he had a lot of chemicals and jars stored.  But I can’t remember the building (points to the photo of Fernieflat) like that.
LB – And that would be about 1970?
AS – We moved in in 1971 – November, because our training had made us keep books and record all the jobs we did – and I kept that book for years and years.
HO – Was that yours personally or did it belong to Wimpey?
AS – It belonged to Wimpey, and whoever did something there had to use that book.  That was the way we did things.  All our jobs were in these books so that you could always go back and say that’s how it was done and that’s who did it.
HO – I had actually got in touch with Wimpey – well it’s now Taylor Wimpey to see if they had any archive material but I got a total blank.
AS – There’s only one bloke I know that would have access to anything – I very much doubt that they’ve got anything.  When I left in 1999 there was a complete set and it was one of the last jobs I had to keep the archives – because folk would phone up and say “what is the pebble-dashing on my house?” so I’d go and look them up.
LB – Would there be anything left?
AS – I very much doubt it because they moved to Fife. [Coffee]
AS – That’s a good map. (the one with the overlay).
LB – We think that was the last phase there.
AS – Well, see that burn there – the one that rises in Baberton, phase 1 was on that side of the burn because there was a fence down there and someone must have been farming up the top of this at the time and we started down there – we had our compound down somewhere just short of the cottages and later we moved further up.  One day the farmer came to me and asked to borrow one of our JCBs and I said “Fine”.  He said “Fancy going to a funeral?”  “What do you mean?” I said.  “C’mon”, he said.  And he dug a hole with the JCB and buried a pig.  He had it on a trailer, tipped the pig off the trailer and into the hole and buried the pig and I never gave it a thought but see when we came to dig the founds at the foot of the Gardens, we dug up the pig and it stank for days!  He buried it right next to the fence – and that burn – well it wasn’t really a burn it was marsh, you couldn’t walk across it in the winter, you couldn’t go across there to the railway.
LB – So did you culvert it?
AS – There was an existing culvert, under the railway, taking at least half the surface water drainage from the site. This we used to get the foul water drainage to the main sewer. We drove another tunnel under the railway for the surface water drainage, roads,roofs and field drains. 3 foot pipe.  My boss asked “Can you put a tunnel under the railway?  Well, I worked with the Coal Board – I worked underground driving tunnels for miles – so I knew driving a pipe for 50 to 60 yards would be no problem. We dug a hole to the correct depth–we started on the Murrayburn side and we dropped a 3ft diameter pipe into the hole and then we put a big ram in and pushed the ram up against the face and a man went up the pipe and dug out the muck and then we put another pipe in and pushed another bit and we just pushed it straight through the railway and came out the other side and the man-hole covers are just there at the bottom of the Gardens.
LB – When you say a foul water pipe, is that sewage?
AS – Yes, from the houses and the surface water we put through the 3 foot one – the water coming off the whole site goes through the 3ft pipe.  And if you’d left it it would have scoured the burn on the Murrayburn side for miles in bad weather.  We built a big cascade underground – I reckon it’s under the allotments – and you could walk down there – it’s like steps and then it spread out into this big chamber and trickling down these steps the water lost its velocity so when it hit the burn at the bottom it didn’t scour the bankings.
LB – Did it go into the Murrayburn then?
AS – It must eventually.  See in the winter there, the road under the railway there was flooded, I reckon it was just that the gulleys were choked and the water couldn’t get away quick enough and when they were working in there it just dawned on me that must be the old pipe they were digging up.
LB – Were there any other difficulties with the site? Was there drainage you had to sort out? Cos it’s quite a steep site.
AS – No bad really.  We thought it was steep in those days but you want to see the sites we finished on.  The only problem was – see that dip in the road there (indicates round about the entry to the Place) we culverted that.  I don’t know if there was any water came through - the reason we put a pipe under that was …….Well it was a valley but it wasn’t a valley behind the houses it was a mound, that was where we dumped all the muck.
LB – Muck or topsoil?
AS – Surplus muck, clay but topped with topsoil, we always had a surplus.  We made a fortune on jobs like that, where you could dump on site, using site tractors and trailers , rather than hiring lorries and having to run several miles to a tip. At the top of the site, for the houses that backed on to Juniper Green, we had to take the muck away so that they could build houses to the correct level. This was planned for almost a year ahead   but the Council came to us and asked if we could supply muck for 3 football pitches and playing fields along at Curriemuirend so we agreed to go in early. We got a good price for the muck which was supposed to be brought in by lorries but we got big massive earth scrapers and just ran them backwards and forwards straight from our site to the playing fields without ever touching a road.
HO – Archie Clark said that had been artificially made.
AS – Well that was one of the jobs I did setting out these football pitches to the set levels and we scraped all that.  We made a fortune on this site – everything that could go right went right.
HO – When we moved in down the road, Jackie Ritchie was promising the earth – there was going to be a pub, a shop and goodness knows what.
AS – Well, Jackie was a brilliant salesman, but I would say he was reasonably genuine
HO – He was always trying to get people to buy the house that was the next model up.
AS – I would say at the time he was the best salesman we had but it was unfortunate that he just missed the boom times.  He just retired as the real boom came along.
LB – Was he on commission?
AS – Yes, but the commission was rubbish, the houses in the 60`s almost sold themselves, people were desperate for houses. During the 60s you couldn’t fail but in the middle 70s and thro` 80s it got more and more difficult.  On this site it was just build, build, build!    We were building 6 a week at one time.
LB – How many men would be on site?
AS – About 1000 possibly.  
There was a big site office down the road.   They used to get filled rolls from Isobel Marchbanks.   She lived at the corner near the Gardens and had a caravan up at the office.  Her husband was one of the foremen on the site.  The site office was in a caravan at the farm at the beginning.
The first office was up behind the Dell and then later down by the corner near the railway bridge.  I can’t remember the last bit I did but I came back down for two or three months and put the road down by Baberton Mains Lea…where I live now.
At the start of the site there was a certain gentleman who was stealing slabs at night…… He was a client and he even stole the plants out of the showhouse garden ….we could not prove anything nor would you want to prosecute a client but after that as soon as the slabs came in we took a paint brush and painted up the side so we if there was a dispute we could show the yellow paint up and down the side of them and  could say they were stolen .
HO When we went in first we got the keys and there was no bath panel and when Robert went into the loft there was no insulation…..
The drain for the garage was usually a meter behind the back of the house
HO In this house the meter is eight or nine feet down below the house. And it goes up…!
AS I find that strange !  I put them in and cannot recollect a house drain being so deep- it would have under mined the house…………
We were working at behind Juniper Green and a woman came down her garden and said what are you doing here? And Duncan, who liked to kid on, said “I don’t know Missus but I’ve been told it’s an abbatoir but I don’t know what an abbatoir is…………………”
We were there for years….it was a pretty good site all round.  We made an absolute fortune here.
The mound [the green space in the middle of Baberton Mains – adjacent to BM Place etc] was a hole when we came here:  It was just to get rid of muck we did that on umpteen sites This big valley ran right through.  It ran up to the golf course.  We started off with the idea of levelling it out…………  That was just to get rid of the muck ……so we didn’t have to run lorries: just run tractors to it. 
 There was a masterplan of the site.  We knew how many houses we had to do nine hundreds and odds.  We started off in the boom time and built to plan along the top but when we came down by the golf course there was a lull in the sales we changed the design because the detached villas weren’t selling and so we went onto the semis again   See Wimpey always built at the cheap end of the market and went for the bulk of the market. Then Barrett undercut us …..up to then there was no competition because we had the money to buy the big sites we controlled the private housing in the 60`s.
We had 680s the 2 bedroom terraced houses in the Gardens, 112s were the 3 bedroom, semis were  120s ,130s was the chalets , 30Ss was the detached villas ……….the only bungalows were up at the school. We didna build bungalows usually.   The stepped ones on the Hill…they were horrible to build!    You’ve got make sure the lower one doesna get dampness from the higher one.  There’s  two in the Lea and some other ones .  There are 4 bedroom ones in the Wood but I don’t remember then. I wasna there when that happened : people must have become more affluent.
I began working here in November 71 when Wimpey started working here …….to 75 It was basically finished then. But then they opened up the Baberton Mains bit  and they started again that’s when they had the offices down by the bridge .  
AS I remember doing the edges up by the dual carriageway, by Wester Hailes….digging the banking out to the right shape up there.  

AS    I’m positive a three bedroom semi was £7200 (a 112) but they quickly went up.  There was an argument about it between two employees the most senior got it.  The next group went up five or six hundred pounds or so.  A Wimpey employee got five hundred off the price and Wimpey didn’t take a deposit off you if you were employed by them so you could buy it and sell it and make a profit.  In the late 60s it started that you have to have your own house. 
HO   At the bottom, the last lot, our wee two bedroom was £ 13950 in 1977.  The deposit was £50. 
AS   That was Edinburgh! If you’d gone to Penicuik :Greenlaw Mains you’d have got it for £2,500 less.
AS   The first lot were built to imperial units: I used the old imperial staffs on this and then eventually moved to metric. I’ve worked in all the measurements under the sun………I started on rods, poles and perches.  
HO   Why was it called Baberton Mains?
AS    Maybe Fernieflat was a bit too like Fernieside……..across on the other side near Gilmerton… The local authority sent us names and addresses. There was always a reason for it……………
The salesmen worked funny hours. They’d start maybe at lunchtime and work on till about seven at night . Jackie Ritchie was always immaculately addressed: how he did it on site I’ll never know.   He was in a wee hut of his own.  He was one of the really good salesmen. Jackie was a gentleman…Jackie sold! 
We used the entrance from the Terrace at first.  When we started off we had access to everything apart from the Lea end. We drove that road from the old Fernieflats road the one with the kink in it under the old railway bridge.  That old bridge is still there at the back of Wester Hailes road.  It’s the access to the new medical centre.  It’s got the benchmark on that all the levels were set out from for this site. I put the roundabout at the top of the site in but I can’t remember when. 75 ish!   They said “How you’re going to put it in?   I said “With a tape and a string and run round to make a circle!”   and then all you’ve got to do is tilt it so it drains properly! They thought it was a big design but it wasn’t!  
There weren’t animals in the fields then. Right down from the top to the burn that run under the railway but you couldna get across that because it was really marshy..  If you get two or three days now it still gets really sinky. 
We put in all the roads and sewers first.  As soon as we got a road in and tarred we got the showhouses up and we started building.  We went up and round the first wee bit and down into the Gardens.  We were in the Gardens in 72/73.  The speed we were building was unbelievable. Six houses a week! 
There are no wooden floors in Baberton.  Wimpey didn’t do wooden floors here.  They’re all concrete: we only ever had bother with two. Fife had wooden floors. When we started off here we didna do central heating: we started with chimneys. See when someone came when the house was nearly finished and specified central heating ! There were some horrendous central heating jobs with a half inch pipe coming down the wall with a big knuckle on it…… … 
Some of the chalets were done with plastic preformed stuff. We tried a few things.  Some were done in English system with the window built on the outer skin.  The Scottish system is to build on the inner skin. 
 A semi 112 and 130 was 36 foot by 27 foot  6 .  A 102 was 35 foot by 21foot 6.  We didna need to use drawings we had done so many  it just sort of rolled out of our heads.  A typical example would be It’s 11 foot six along there then the window’s four foot wide ……….”  But the brickies were shifting the window that little bit so that the bricks would just fit in. You don’t want half a “facing” brick….They just did their way showing experience over design.
Lots of Wimpey sites were all called Spam valley (because the houses on them were so expensive anyone buying one had to eat Spam all the time )…that’s a typical nickname  …anybody buying a house was vastly overstretched ( in the 60`s we said they’d all be living on raisins and  apples) but wages were rising so fast so that by next year the mortgage was easy . It was really in the 60`s that tradesmen could get mortgages, prior to that you had to be salaried.
There was a proper coal fire in some of them.  Others had a special gas flue: a very narrow flue : they change the rules every few minutes. If you look at the semis….  the fires look  back to back they are offset so the  flues were side by side so that the two flues could go up the same wall of minimum thickness…The walls were 11inch cavity  walls  but the party wall was a nine inch brick wall –solid brick –but the fireplace wall was 18 inch to accommodate the flues. Wimpey always had dinette areas. Simple designs! It was what people could afford. If we had built four- bedroom detached houses people would not have afforded them.
I worked for Wimpey for thirtythree  years. The only contact I had with Baberton House was when I was surveying in the bottom half of the field when we were ready to do the Lea and that.  I was standing in the field between the railway and the woods with a theodolite, book and a pencil and these two big Dobermanns came bounding out the woods and I thought “What do I do here? Do I stay here and get eaten alive or do I stick them with a pencil?  “ And the last minute this woman came out of the woods and gave them a roar to