Bishop Alfred Ancel found work as a labourer thanks to the connections he had made whilst serving as a priest in Prado
Alfred Ancel was not on the labour market when he decided to work as a manual labourer.
It was amongst his acquaintances – people with close ties to the Prado de la Guillotière – that he found an employer. This is clearly stated by Cécile Mathias in her book, Gerland: in the footsteps of its past. The David family had had links with the Prado since the time of the Second World War. There was just one small problem in Alfred Ancel’s life. It was not at the age of 14 that Alfred lost an eye and became one-eyed, but at the age of 19, on 30 December 1917, during the Battle of Monte Grappa in Veneto; «He had suffered the loss of his right eye as a result of a gunshot wound» (Olivier de Beranger, Alfred Ancel).
Two family-run businesses in Gerland, the firms Tony David and Guignardat, also played their part in the working-class life of the neighbourhood, one on Avenue Jean Jaurès and the other on Boulevard du Parc d’Artillerie.
The parent company of the Tony David stores, which originally specialised in cutting fabric, both in batches and to order (for example, cutting lace for ladies’ veils), was situated at 19 Rue Montesquieu. The purchase in 1937 of a joiner’s workshop at 6–8 Boulevard du Parc d’Artillerie enabled the company to expand its fabric-cutting business; this led to the manufacture of fabric polishing discs (made from felt, cotton, wool, etc.).
Customers of the Tony David stores Based in Saint-Etienne, amongst other places, these manufacturers of bicycle spare parts began using a brightening agent in their electrolytic baths and therefore no longer needed as many polishing discs. The company then began supplying these in metal form. Subsequently, a new company was established at 6 Boulevard du Parc d’Artillerie, SAM (Société d’Affinage des Métaux), to develop the metallurgical business. A chemist was employed there.
During the war, operations were scaled back; the Gerland workshop was used solely as a warehouse, employing seven to eight staff, whilst the parent company continued production. The stock of nickel was transported to Prado and Beynost to prevent the Germans from requisitioning it. In 1944, the company was bombed and the equipment, including a huge, newly acquired metal shear, was completely destroyed. All that was found was a test tube and the SAM chemist’s spectacles. Everything then had to be repurchased and rebuilt, and the restart in 1945 proved difficult.
« During the war, our father would go to the family farm in Montferrat, in Isère, to fetch supplies and would bring back food, which he would distribute to the workshop staff (about fifteen people) along with their weekly wages.
»Our family, who lived on Place Raspail, had always been quite close to the Prado: as we had a car, we gave them lifts whenever they needed them, and former sex workers, whom Sister Anna looked after, were taken on by the family business.’ Françoise Coiffet and Pierre David
The factory was rebuilt in reinforced concrete, to the standards of a modern factory, with a loading bay. The plans had been drawn up by Charles Joly, an architect for the SNCF and a friend of the family. There were offices, a laboratory for the chemist and workshops, including one for electrolysis, one for metalwork, and a large workshop for fabric preparation (to give the fabric the abrasive properties required for polishing metals) with a calender, a dryer and secure finishing tanks, one for cutting, one for edging… There was a very large external chimney and an automated coal-fired boiler inside (one of the first of its kind at the time) which produced the pressurised steam required for the finishing process. The company drew water from the groundwater and had its own water tank on the roof. In the 1950s, a new finishing process was developed to produce shrink-wrap fabric.
«As regards SAM’s metallurgical operations, a number of research projects were carried out on Boulevard du Parc d’Artillerie. The development of the mercury distillation process produced toxic vapours inside the workshop, so our father had set up a makeshift shelter made of planks on the pavement to carry out his experiments there. Subsequently, the mercury distillation was outsourced.”.
Our father made extensive use of recycled materials, which was ahead of its time, both in terms of fabric (World War II canvas covers, parachutes, etc.) and metals such as scrap nickel from all sorts of sources, a mixture of nickel and copper, tin, cadmium and distilled mercury – used, amongst other things, by dentists and also found in the US Army’s radio lamps… From these metals, he obtained a pure product through electrolysis or chemical processes. He worked in collaboration with professors from the Catholic University, who were chemists.
Another important idea developed and put into practice by our father was that of subcontracting: the smelting of nickel was carried out at the forges in Bompertuis, in Isère, as there was no furnace powerful enough on site. Sometimes, the first casting was carried out by our father or our uncle – his brother, who worked with him – so as not to put the workers’ safety at risk.
Other tasks were carried out by home-based workers, such as sewing protective velvet gloves, which were needed by workers handling sheet metal. Similarly, bales of rags were processed and brought up to the company’s standards by former prisoners supervised by Father Capetier, from Le Prado, as part of their rehabilitation programme at Saint-Léonard, near Albigny, for which he was responsible and which operated somewhat like a CAT. In 1940, he also had political prisoners at Saint-Léonard who worked for us. Father Ancel, a ‘worker’s bishop’ living in the Prado community on Rue Hector Malot—an intellectual from a prominent silk-merchant family—was barred by Rome from working in a factory. He, too, cut fabric for our father at home for three or four years, but, having been blind in one eye since the age of 14, his output was very low. He had learnt the trade at Saint-Léonard between 1954 and 1958.
In the 1950s, around sixty people worked at Gerland, the vast majority of whom were women. There were two managers (our father, a sales representative, and our uncle, an engineer), an executive secretary responsible for payroll, another secretary, an accountant and a delivery driver; a maintenance manager, workshop foremen and workers. The work was dirty but safe and largely automated. There were also staff of Algerian immigrant background. The company was paternalistic and the staff were very loyal to it. So, as the family owned a block of flats on Rue Jangot, whenever there were vacant flats, they would let them to their employees.» Françoise Coiffet and Pierre David
The company’s clients included the Peugeot, Seb, Tefal and La Solac factories (tin-plating, tins), and Formica (polishing of Formica mouldings) Anything made of metal that shone (cutlery, watches, cars, tins, frying pans, etc.) was polished using David polishing discs. The company also manufactured polishing paste on Rue du Béguin. Its only competitors were the Germans.
Excerpt from the book Gerland: in the footsteps of its past, by Cécile Mathias and the residents of Gerland, published by Éditions du Mot Passant, 2010, pages 30 and 32.