The second job, back in 1982, that Joseph Gallagher took on for his independent, newly created subcontracting company was a tunnelling and open cut project in Hastings on the south coast. “It was summer, and with Hastings being a holiday resort, we had to be off the project by the middle of June. I asked the chap who was in charge of the main contract: ‘Will we be testing these pipe sections as we’re installing them?’” He replied, “‘No, no, we won’t be doing that until we’ve competed the whole line.’
‘So, what happens if it fails?’” I asked. And his answer was fairly unambiguous: “‘Josie, these pipes have never failed.’”
This was my first big job. I’m not naïve, but I’ll admit that back then, on this occasion, naïve I certainly was. I had worked with this chap at two other locations and I took him at his word.
And so off we went: we laid all the pipes, completed the job and then we went for a beer the night before the test. The chap turned to me and said: “‘I won’t sleep a wink tonight, Josie.’” To which I politely enquired why.
“’If that test fails,’” he said, “’my company will have to pay a hefty fine and your company will probably never do another job again…’
‘But you told me the pipes never fail.’” And his reply?
“’Josie, you would never have taken the job had I told you the truth!’”
“And, so I thought, ‘Welcome to the world of sub-contracting!’ and, believe me, there were two of us who did not sleep that night.
“The next day we put on the test: it failed within two minutes. The test was supposed to be on for 24 hours and we were allowed to lose one litre of water over that time, but it wasn’t holding any pressure at all. So, I went along each access shaft, just to check. A fitter had left a valve fully open and water was pouring out of it. I don’t think I have ever been as relieved to see anything in my life as that. We closed the valve, ran the test again, and it was a success. And here we are today.”
‘We’ being the Joseph Gallagher Group, the UK’s largest civil engineering and tunnelling subcontractor. It is also a main contractor in its own right, with expertise in hand tunnelling, TBM tunnelling, pipe jacking, auger boring, HDD, microtunnelling and much more besides.
The company recently celebrated its 40th anniversary with a big event for current and past employees at Arsenal football club’s stadium. During those 40 years, it has grown into the largest tunnelling subcontractor in the UK and has worked on such major projects as the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, various London Underground projects, Hindhead road tunnel, and Crossrail. It has a turnover in excess of £100 million, and though it has crane hire and compressed-air machinery subsidiaries, its core business remains tunnelling.
Yet its chairman and founder Jospeh Gallagher, known to one and all as Josie, learned his trade in an era that is all but forgotten now – as a manual digger of tunnels. And stories like the Hastings tunnel are just a part of the tales he can tell.
He is Irish by birth and background. “I come from a small island off the coast of northwest Donegal. I left school when I was 13 and came to Scotland to work on a farm with my dad and my brothers. That’s what happened back then where we came from in Donegal.”
In Scotland it was digging potatoes, moving muck with a shovel, digging ditches with a pick, all for £6 a week. “My dad took the £6 and gave me 50 pence pocket money.” It was hard work, and it had to be, and that lesson has stayed with him.
“Back in Ireland, I had done pretty well at school and my headmaster had wanted to send me off for secondary education but there was no way that that could happen. I regret it immensely to this day. My family say to me now: ‘Had you gone on to secondary education, you probably wouldn’t be where you are today’, and they are probably right – I wouldn’t. My family of seven children all have gone on to higher education and I am immensely proud of that; though as I tell them, you can be the smartest person in the world, but if you haven’t got a good work ethic, it doesn’t mean a thing.”
In the UK, he became a miner – by which he means a digger of tunnels – generally by hand, rather than an extractor of coal. “You followed the dollar and went wherever the work was, and there were very few towns that we didn’t work in. Back then, to be a miner was a good profession to be in: you were part of an elite group.” There was a reason for that: “ I could tell you about the pain barrier. You don’t get anyone to talk about it today, but it did exist. To be a miner, you had to go through that every day. And that pain barrier taught you pretty quickly that life was serious.
“Every morning that you went to work, you had a target. So many rings had to be dug and built: nothing else mattered.
“When you went down a tunnel back in those days, you would never go without having a bottle with you. We called it pop, but it could be water or lemonade or cold tea. Everybody going down would be carrying this bottle. Today they don’t need to, but each day back then, there would come a time when you needed to have a drink. But, let me tell you, you had to be certain that you had 70 % of your work done before you took one mouthful of that bottle. If you dared to take a gulp any earlier, five minutes later you would need another drink, and another. So, you dared not touch that bottle until you were in the run-in to the end of your shift! If you did, you’d be paying a heavy price. Did I ever go down without my bottle of pop? Only once. I regretted it pretty quickly.”
He started as a teaboy and rose. “I reached the status of miner or leading miner, and then shift boss. When I became the shift boss, I’d done everybody’s job on the way. That meant you were the master of whatever happened underground and you could control the situation.”
“I started on the Victoria Line in London and worked on all the lines that followed on. There was the Dockland Light Railway, the Jubilee Line before that, more recently Tideway and now there is HS2.”
Technology progressed. So did he. From wielding a shovel, he thinks he may have been the first driver of a TBM in Britain. He started his own company: legend has it with just £5 in his pocket – though he says that the story has been exaggerated (although he did put down £5 as the initial deposit with what was then the Midland Bank).
Faith in people, he says, is what made the company survive and grow and which, despite knife-edge moments like the Hastings one, it did. “What set us apart was our work ethic,” he says – the one he had learned the hard way with a pick and a bottle of pop. If you didn’t work back then, you didn’t survive, and he carried that lesson into his company.
The other thing that his company had was people. “The guy who had so scared me on that Hastings job came to join me seven years later. We were together 23 years and we went from strength to strength.
“We were the sort of guys who couldn’t say no to anyone, which is not normally a great characteristic in business! But people would come with a job – often at very short notice – because they knew we would deliver. That’s how the company got off the ground, so to speak. We succeeded because of that: we never said no.“
Even so, it remained a small company. “For six years or more, the biggest project that we handled was worth maybe £300,000, and we’d have perhaps fifteen guys working on a project like that. All of a sudden, we won a project for £11.5 million. That couldn’t possibly happen today, but it could back in 1988. I think it was because of our reputation: that we never lost a client or let them down.”
The project was the Docklands Light Railway. “We priced the job – and we got it. There were two things we didn’t take into account initially. One was the concrete lining segments. Until that time, segments had been pretty light and could be manhandled. All of a sudden, these ones were four times as heavy. Instead of being able to do it manually, you had to use crown bars and winches. That all takes time and our production target was a high one. I could tell from day one that it was going to be a huge challenge but one we were able to overcome. We used miners from Manchester, who had a reputation for being good and fast at excavating. Also, when I could, I would pair each team with a miner from London: London miners had a reputation for being good with timber shoring, because London was where the biggest tunnels at that time had been built.
“The other thing we hadn’t catered or planned for was the Channel Tunnel, which was just starting then. To a miner, it was like Alaksa in the Gold Rush: it was where everybody wanted to be. Who would want to be in Docklands when they could be digging their way towards France? So that presented a tremendous challenge in terms of recruitment and being able to get the men.
“The project was massive, but we made it through successfully. It is important to always remember that a large part of success in business can be due not necessarily to genius or skill (though that’s obviously a key ingredient), but that luck can play a crucial role too. You need to have luck on your side at some points along the way. That and treating your people fairly, and making them know they are valued. In the early days, my first question to a team would be ‘How much have you dug today?’ but nowadays it is, ‘How are you all?’”
And he is passionate about safety. “When I was young, you took risks. Everyone took risks. Normal work was physical and hard. You might be on a big project working under compressed air without worrying about the damage it could do. When I go back to Donegal, I see my friends – fellow miners my age – and there’s not one without a bad back, a damaged knee or some kind of health issue.
“My company at that point was no worse than any other company on the safety front but no better either, but it is absolutely paramount today.”
He had an epiphany in a layby on the M25 after attending a course, with other top people of other companies, on health and safety at work. “At the end of it, the course leader said, ‘If you are driving home, pull off the road before you get there and ask yourself how you would feel if one of your employees did not get home safe after a day working for you.’ And I did exactly that.”
His solution was to bring in a behavioural company to run a huge safety campaign and instil a new safety culture named LIFE (Living Incident Free Everyday) across the business. This remains at the forefront of the business today and is at the heart of everything that goes on in the company – both on site and off it.
In addition, Steve Harvey, Group CEO, Paul Gallagher, the Managing Director, and also Josie visited every employee individually to communicate the message and drive home the importance of safety to the business. He also went to the extent of appointing a new Safety Director for the company: himself.
“When I was young, back in the day, nobody took any notice of the safety director. He was unfairly thought of as someone who had been given the job after failing at every other job on the site. I thought if people saw me as the safety director, they would realise the importance of safety – both to me and to the business as a whole.”
In 2017, he was awarded the prestigious James Clark Medal by the BTS. The criteria for the award are a contemporary achievement in tunnelling; or innovation or responsibility for a large project; or a major contribution to the tunnelling industry.
The BTS said he had easily fulfilled all three of those criteria. Josie seemed to find it rather surprising: ‘You could have knocked me over with a feather,’ he said at the time, ‘because normally the people who receive it are at the top of blue chip companies, consultants, designers, people responsible for huge projects. For me to get it was a massive honour. It meant my peers thought I had made a contribution.’
Most recently, he has just returned from Kuwait where the company completed a project of recovering a TBM from under the seabed almost two kilometres from shore. He is justifiably proud. “It had dug the second longest sea outfall in the world. We had 16 different nationalities on the job and they all gelled together wonderfully. It was only the second time it had been done that way – the first time was nine years ago when we brought one up off Brighton. That one had been a success, with just a few glitches, and we learned from them.
“Off Kuwait, we had barges and airbags and a crane, and all sorts of dignitaries were present and watching for this huge machine to rise out of the water, and few of them were experts. Someone said to me, ‘This huge machine could come up fast and jump out of the water…’ and the man was not wrong! The one at Brighton had done exactly that: it had bounced 600 millimetres above its floating level before settling back. It had been safe enough, but since this one in Kuwait weighs over a hundred tonnes, you wouldn’t have wanted that to happen with all these senior people around.”
As it was, the TBM came up gently just as it was supposed to: no-one in the vicinity got splashed. “Everyone just took it for granted,” he says, a sign of the skill and engineering expertise on display. If the bystanders did not recognise that, he did and gives him the greatest of pride in what his team achieved.
