They used to call me the old school plasterer. I never asked for the nickname, but I reckon it came from how I started — the hard way.
Back in the early 1970s, building sites were more like the Wild West than workplaces. Health and safety didn’t exist. You had no job security. It was survival of the fittest. And if you couldn’t keep up, you were out — simple as that.
I remember my first job clearly, mostly because it didn’t last long. I was sacked after a few weeks. They called me a cowboy and told me I’d never make it as a plasterer. It knocked me down a peg. I’d gone in cocky, full of myself, but I left feeling like a scared kid.
Luckily, I found another start with a small local building firm doing new builds. Monday morning, I turned up with my tools in a sack over my shoulder and reported to the site foreman. He walked me over to a half-built house and said I’d be working with their main plasterer — a bloke called Louie.
Louie was older, bigger, and rougher than I was. He spoke with a thick Scottish accent and had a temper to match his size. The best way to describe him: intimidating. He swore so much it sounded like a second language. It wasn’t just that he swore — it was the way he swore. Like he’d weaponised it.
The first thing he said to me was that I’d better work hard — he wanted his bonus. He didn’t ask my name. Just called me kid.
So I got to work. Mixing backing plaster in an old tin bath, loading up my spot board, and starting to put on my first wall. I was just beginning to find a bit of confidence when I heard a sharp, piercing whistle. Like a referee’s whistle, blown hard. I froze.
A moment later, Louie burst into the room, furious. He started ranting about the site foreman and how much he hated him. Said the whistle drove him mad. The foreman used it for everything — brew breaks, lunch, start, stop, end of day. Louie was seething.
Next morning, I turned up on time. Louie was already there, working away with a grin on his face. He said we were going to have some fun. Then he pulled a referee’s whistle from his pocket. He’d broken into the foreman’s hut and nicked it.
At 9:45, he leaned out of a window and blew the whistle. The lads across the site stopped what they were doing and headed to the brew shed. The foreman was left standing there, confused. Louie kept it going all day — and the next. The lads didn’t know what was happening, but they didn’t care. Free extra breaks. The foreman never figured it out, but he also never used a whistle again.
Louie 1, Foreman 0.
Because of Louie’s thick accent and foul-mouthed outbursts, he was known on site as Louie the Lip.
We moved on to the next house. First thing Louie said was to grab my tin snips. I asked why, and he told me he’d show me. That’s when he launched into a rant about sparkies — electricians — saying he couldn’t stand them. Then, room by room, he started snipping the wires that had been left sticking out of the electrical back boxes. He cut every single one, making sure they were too short to reuse.
That’ll teach them, he said. I just stood there in disbelief.
A couple of days later, we were nearly finished when the sparkie turned up. Louie marched up to him and proudly announced what he’d done — said he’d cut off all his tails and laughed in his face.
The sparkie went white, ran from room to room checking the damage, then sprinted to the foreman’s hut.
Minutes later, both of them came bursting in, demanding to know what was going on. Louie calmly said he’d done it because the sparkie was a rat and a twat. Then he picked up his plastering trowel and threw it at him.
Chaos broke out. Louie punched the foreman. The police were called. He was arrested for assault. I was quietly moved to another site.
When I arrived at the new place, I could tell the foreman already knew who I was. He wasn’t exactly welcoming. He told me I’d be working with the gang that was screeding floors.
Back then, plasterers didn’t just do the walls — they screeded all the floors too, using a mix of semi-dry sand and cement. It was heavy work, no frills, no shortcuts.
At brew time, the gang were fuming. No price had been set for the screed work. The foreman kept dodging the question, saying we’d sort it later. That didn’t sit well.
The next day, we had a plan. We brought the mix into a new house and dumped it in a big pile in the middle of the living room. Then we fetched the foreman. Told him straight — no agreed price, no screeding.
He wasn’t happy. But we got the price we wanted — a decent one, too. We earned good bonus on that job. Once the last floor was down, the foreman sacked the lot of us.
Another day, another site.
But that’s how it was back then.
Lath and Plaster 