concrete wrote:hi does any one know what happened to this company based in chatham in kent. They were are civil and marine eng firm.
Does anyone know where to find any info on the form and photos of there yard and old jobs.
thank you
I have now found my copy of the souvenir supplement of the Thames Barrier Contract and associated Thames Flood Defences that was given out in the Construction News back in November 1982.
It confirmed that John Howard carried out 6 contracts including the Fobbing House and Easthaven Barriers near Canvey Island and the Dartford Creek Barrier that was being built at the time I came in to the industry.
I can vaguely remember going twice down to the Medway yard that was next to the river and it was a typical civil engineers plant yard with equipment and form work from previous contracts lying around going rusty and a lot of marine equipment which was the type of civil’s work that Howards had a reputation for. It was a big yard at the end of a dusty road.
In the company that I worked for at the time, my director knew the manager for Howard Plant and the last of our NCK and RB crawler cranes had been sold off and we always passed our enquiries on to John Howards in case they had any in the yard between their own contracts.
If you are familiar with the Plant Hire Guide, it was pretty much the “Bible” for everything to do with the Plant Industry at the time (before the web) and if you had a full page in it – which Howards did have - you were a fair size company.
They also had Coles Cranes in their fleet which was basically what I was brought up on and these included a Coles Speedcrane and Coles Husky’s which I think had been initially purchased for the Howard Doris North Sea Oil Rig Platform’s that were being built in Scotland during the late seventies and early eighties.
I mentioned in my previous blog that Amec had taken them over but as soon as I had pressed the “send” button, I remembered it was in fact the Fairclough Civil Engineering name that appeared on the John Howards contracts that had been taken over and a couple of years later the Fairclough name was “dropped” and everything was rebranded as Amec.
About the only thing left about John Howards in Medway is their old office block in Chatham. It is a good looking brick built building. It may have been the instruction to the architect when it was built but I always thought it was a coincidence that the window frames were colour coded in the same dark Green that was the main colour in John Howard’s livery.
Hope this helps with any connection you have with the John Howard name.