Cyril Beazer

I have not got very far with the pineapple. Every morning last week I would have to make a drawing for a potential client who keeps changing their mind.

I am still hacking off lumps with this pistol grip air hammer. I have four air hammers, and this one is the most violent. It is shockingly violent and very good at removing large amounts of stone quickly. It is also the least expensive to buy. The three others are Italian and cost about £400 each the last time I checked, but luckily burglars do not know that.

I can make about one blow per second with the traditional mason's hammer you can see to the left, but the air hammers' pistons have a frequency of hits roughly the same as an Uzi sub-machine gun - when you actually get around to using them. They also sound very similar to an Uzi.

Ordinary masons are obsessed with speed. A group of masons in a workshop become very competitive, very quickly. If they are all working on identical pieces, the race becomes obsessive. The first mason to finish his piece will slam the tool onto the banker ('banker' is the term for the robust benches used in masonry) very loudly to let his fellows know, then casually saunter out of the room exuding a sense of pride which you can almost smell.

This spirit of competition was nurtured by the bosses hundreds of years ago with obvious motives. The quicker you are, the more money you make for your employer. Within the group there are fixed rules regarding the race which you break at peril of losing respect from your peers. You may not, for instance, sneak back into the shop before lunch or a tea break is over, and you may not work late to finish a job. The guilds and unions saw to that. You cannot cut corners without losing your reputation as a good mason.

Bath used to have a building company called Beazer. It was formed by a mason called Cyril Beazer, who made good money by rebuilding the poorer parts of the city which were destroyed by enemy action in WW2.

Beazer became very wealthy, but prided himself on spending one day a week in the workshop, using the tools which brought him his success. For the rest of the week he would chair board meetings as his company became international, and he kept up his one day on the tools right through to retirement.

Cyril Beazer utilised the traditional competitive spirit of the banker shop ingeniously.

Two rooms of masons would naturally form two separate teams who competed both with each other and the other team. Beazer would go to one team and tell them that the other was prepared to work for a few pence less per hour than they were being paid, and unless they agreed to be paid the same, the other team would get all the work.

He then went to the other team and said exactly the same to them. The competition became even hotter.