Freddy Gomez: Maintenance Skills Which Surfaced at London's Hilton Led to Promotion and Travel
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19 August, 2007 08:05
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Though polymath and eccentric Freddy Gomez had walked Gibraltar’s coves and cliff-side paths as a lonely teenager, his first serious encounter with the Rock came when he was 28 – soon after he had emerged from almost a decade of self-imposed social isolation – when he took his sixth job, working for the PWD as a skilled labourer, helping maintain the water catchment areas.
As we reported last week Freddy had taught himself improved reading and writing skills and, after completing his compulsory National Service with the Gibraltar Regiment in 1970, took a series of varied jobs as he attempted, with considerable success, to expand his knowledge of as many skills as possible. By the time he joined the PWD, the young Gomez had worked as a construction apprentice for the city council, as a plasterer and bricklayer for a private construction company, and as a bell-boy and handyman at the old Montarik Hotel.
But where his work experience widened and his self-learnt knowledge continued to broaden and challenge his mind, his social life was almost non-existent. Gomez, perhaps surprisingly, bears no apparent resentment for the local class structure that placed him at the bottom of the working class heap. And it was this semi-ostracism that encouraged him to develop his solitary interests and a drive for knowledge.
FLOWER POWER
But 28, and with a new reasonably-paid job all this was to change. “Flower power” and the “Summers of Love” of the 1960’s seem not to have reached Gibraltar. And the global birth of Hippies and all they stood for was late in arriving on the Rock…
“For me, the late ’70s became not only Hippy years, but happy years,” Gomez smiles, and briefly there is a faraway look in his eyes. “I stepped out of my shell, began to mix with a few people socially…and met my wife, who was quite a bit younger than me. As I say, they were happy times – though with hindsight I realise that neither of us were really prepared for a married relationship.”
Still looking to widen his experience - and “find a better relationship with my wife…we were happy but both knew that something was missing” - Gomez took advantage of the recent opening of the border to move to Cadiz where he spent the next two years working variously in construction as a translator and as a barman. “I always managed to find work, always managed to earn my keep” he says.
ADOPTING A CHILD
From Cadiz the couple headed to Newcastle and then Sunderland where they settled in a flat and Gomez found work in the municipal market. “We both wanted to have children, or at least I thought she shared my view, but we couldn’t,” he reflects sadly. “ Then one Christmas – the first Christmas we were in Sunderland – I read a report about a baby that had been abandoned and began to think about adoption. It wasn’t a case of doing it for us – though that was part of it – but more a wish to give some child a greater opportunity in life…”
He spent the next two years “going through the hoops, filling out forms and attending interviews to establish whether I or we would make suitable foster parents. There was a large airing cupboard in the flat – a small room really – and I converted it into a nursery. And then I walked from place to place. It was a long and tedious process, so you can imagine my delight when, after all that time and effort, I was told that we could adopt an orphan and that the authorities had found someone they thought suitable – a three-year-old boy.
“I was over the moon and rushed home to tell my wife. Her only response was ‘If I’ve not conceived it, I don’t want it.’ I had built a castle of hope and the foundations had collapsed. Can you imagine how I felt?” Rhetorical. The words spoken sadly with remembered pain.
It spelt the end of Gomez’ marriage and a few months later he moved to London to join his brother in Acton and find work away from the city which held such painful memories.
“I arrived at King’s Cross at about six on a Sunday morning and set off on the tube for Acton, but I felt growing hunger pains and got off the train a Shepherds’ Bush. Across from the station a Greek restaurant was just opening and I popped in there for a cup and something to eat. There was a sign in the window saying ‘Help Wanted’. The waiter happened to be Gibraltarian and I asked him about the job…which I eventually got peeling potatoes, sweeping floors, washing dishes…The point is, that it is always possible to get a job – even on Sundays – if you want one badly enough and try hard enough.”
In a sense that sums up Gomez’s philosophical approach to life.
Working mornings and evening Gomez had from 12.30 to 7 p.m. free to spend hours in job centres…and in libraries. Through the former he found a job as a handyman in the Hilton Hotel and in the latter he continued his programme of self-education. From handyman - and a badge denoting his name as “Frederick” … recognition at last for his yen to be called by his full Christian name – he was promoted to the engineering maintenance section and eventually was made “plant engineer” – in which capacity over a three-year period he visited hotels in the Hilton chain in Holland, Germany, Switzerland and Wales to maintain or install new plant.
A LESSON LEARNT
But the promotions were not always smooth sailing. While still working as a newcomer to the maintenance staff he admits that he “nearly came a cropper.”
“A large new pump had been delivered to the hotel but even when it was taken out of its crate it would not fit through the basement door, “Gomez recalls. “It reminded me of a situation when I was a child and my parents were moving from the rather slummy area of the Spanish Pavillion to the more up-market Laguna Estate. My father made a special wooden crate to take the crockery and ornaments and other breakables and it was only after this had been carefully packed and the lid nailed firmly in place that he realized it was too big to go through the door…
“I thought I could overcome the pump problem and suggested to the head of maintenance that if he left me on the night shift roster for a few weeks I could get the pump into the small basement room. He agreed. I bought a box of coloured chalks and slowly took the pump to pieces marking each bit carefully so that I could put them together again. And after three weeks of working every night the pump was in its proper place, ready to go.
“The boss came down to look at my work, picked up the manufacturer’s loose-leaf handbook that had come with the pump…and a couple of joints I had rolled the previous night fell out. He frowned but said nothing and I stuffed them into my pocket. However, when I reported for work the next day I was told he wanted to see me and thought I would get my marching orders.
“I admitted that I smoked a bit of pot from time to time, but when I assured him that I had never smoked on the premises and went outside at night during my tea break to sit on a bench in Holland Park to smoke a joint, the incident was never mentioned again. And the next payday, when I opened my wages packet I thought someone had made a mistake as there was £300 more than my usual wage – and £300 was a small fortune in those days.
I went to the boss and told him I thought there had been a mistake. ‘No”, he told me, ‘that’s a bonus’.”
LOVE OF GEOLOGY & HISTORY
And his progress up the Hilton maintenance ladder continued. But by 1986 he “had had enough of Europe” and returned to Gibraltar and his love of its geology and history. Which led to a certificate in sedimentary geology from the University of Durham ten years ago.
And that was another of Gomez’s “beat-all-obstacles” achievements. When in the early 1990’s he rented a Government flat in Laguna estate the previous tenant had left behind various bits of broken furniture and a broken phone with an answer-phone slot. He mended and repainted the furniture, and “used the broken answer-phone as a sort of money box.” He was working at a variety of jobs but each week took a £5 note from his pay packet and placed it in the slot for the answer-phone tape.
“At the end of each month, I would buy a postal order – for £20 if it had been a four-week month and £25 for a five-week month – which I posted off to the university until I had saved enough with them to pay for tuition…”
And that’s pretty typical of Frederick Gomez, too.
As we reported last week Freddy had taught himself improved reading and writing skills and, after completing his compulsory National Service with the Gibraltar Regiment in 1970, took a series of varied jobs as he attempted, with considerable success, to expand his knowledge of as many skills as possible. By the time he joined the PWD, the young Gomez had worked as a construction apprentice for the city council, as a plasterer and bricklayer for a private construction company, and as a bell-boy and handyman at the old Montarik Hotel.
But where his work experience widened and his self-learnt knowledge continued to broaden and challenge his mind, his social life was almost non-existent. Gomez, perhaps surprisingly, bears no apparent resentment for the local class structure that placed him at the bottom of the working class heap. And it was this semi-ostracism that encouraged him to develop his solitary interests and a drive for knowledge.
FLOWER POWER
But 28, and with a new reasonably-paid job all this was to change. “Flower power” and the “Summers of Love” of the 1960’s seem not to have reached Gibraltar. And the global birth of Hippies and all they stood for was late in arriving on the Rock…
“For me, the late ’70s became not only Hippy years, but happy years,” Gomez smiles, and briefly there is a faraway look in his eyes. “I stepped out of my shell, began to mix with a few people socially…and met my wife, who was quite a bit younger than me. As I say, they were happy times – though with hindsight I realise that neither of us were really prepared for a married relationship.”
Still looking to widen his experience - and “find a better relationship with my wife…we were happy but both knew that something was missing” - Gomez took advantage of the recent opening of the border to move to Cadiz where he spent the next two years working variously in construction as a translator and as a barman. “I always managed to find work, always managed to earn my keep” he says.
ADOPTING A CHILD
From Cadiz the couple headed to Newcastle and then Sunderland where they settled in a flat and Gomez found work in the municipal market. “We both wanted to have children, or at least I thought she shared my view, but we couldn’t,” he reflects sadly. “ Then one Christmas – the first Christmas we were in Sunderland – I read a report about a baby that had been abandoned and began to think about adoption. It wasn’t a case of doing it for us – though that was part of it – but more a wish to give some child a greater opportunity in life…”
He spent the next two years “going through the hoops, filling out forms and attending interviews to establish whether I or we would make suitable foster parents. There was a large airing cupboard in the flat – a small room really – and I converted it into a nursery. And then I walked from place to place. It was a long and tedious process, so you can imagine my delight when, after all that time and effort, I was told that we could adopt an orphan and that the authorities had found someone they thought suitable – a three-year-old boy.
“I was over the moon and rushed home to tell my wife. Her only response was ‘If I’ve not conceived it, I don’t want it.’ I had built a castle of hope and the foundations had collapsed. Can you imagine how I felt?” Rhetorical. The words spoken sadly with remembered pain.
It spelt the end of Gomez’ marriage and a few months later he moved to London to join his brother in Acton and find work away from the city which held such painful memories.
“I arrived at King’s Cross at about six on a Sunday morning and set off on the tube for Acton, but I felt growing hunger pains and got off the train a Shepherds’ Bush. Across from the station a Greek restaurant was just opening and I popped in there for a cup and something to eat. There was a sign in the window saying ‘Help Wanted’. The waiter happened to be Gibraltarian and I asked him about the job…which I eventually got peeling potatoes, sweeping floors, washing dishes…The point is, that it is always possible to get a job – even on Sundays – if you want one badly enough and try hard enough.”
In a sense that sums up Gomez’s philosophical approach to life.
Working mornings and evening Gomez had from 12.30 to 7 p.m. free to spend hours in job centres…and in libraries. Through the former he found a job as a handyman in the Hilton Hotel and in the latter he continued his programme of self-education. From handyman - and a badge denoting his name as “Frederick” … recognition at last for his yen to be called by his full Christian name – he was promoted to the engineering maintenance section and eventually was made “plant engineer” – in which capacity over a three-year period he visited hotels in the Hilton chain in Holland, Germany, Switzerland and Wales to maintain or install new plant.
A LESSON LEARNT
But the promotions were not always smooth sailing. While still working as a newcomer to the maintenance staff he admits that he “nearly came a cropper.”
“A large new pump had been delivered to the hotel but even when it was taken out of its crate it would not fit through the basement door, “Gomez recalls. “It reminded me of a situation when I was a child and my parents were moving from the rather slummy area of the Spanish Pavillion to the more up-market Laguna Estate. My father made a special wooden crate to take the crockery and ornaments and other breakables and it was only after this had been carefully packed and the lid nailed firmly in place that he realized it was too big to go through the door…
“I thought I could overcome the pump problem and suggested to the head of maintenance that if he left me on the night shift roster for a few weeks I could get the pump into the small basement room. He agreed. I bought a box of coloured chalks and slowly took the pump to pieces marking each bit carefully so that I could put them together again. And after three weeks of working every night the pump was in its proper place, ready to go.
“The boss came down to look at my work, picked up the manufacturer’s loose-leaf handbook that had come with the pump…and a couple of joints I had rolled the previous night fell out. He frowned but said nothing and I stuffed them into my pocket. However, when I reported for work the next day I was told he wanted to see me and thought I would get my marching orders.
“I admitted that I smoked a bit of pot from time to time, but when I assured him that I had never smoked on the premises and went outside at night during my tea break to sit on a bench in Holland Park to smoke a joint, the incident was never mentioned again. And the next payday, when I opened my wages packet I thought someone had made a mistake as there was £300 more than my usual wage – and £300 was a small fortune in those days.
I went to the boss and told him I thought there had been a mistake. ‘No”, he told me, ‘that’s a bonus’.”
LOVE OF GEOLOGY & HISTORY
And his progress up the Hilton maintenance ladder continued. But by 1986 he “had had enough of Europe” and returned to Gibraltar and his love of its geology and history. Which led to a certificate in sedimentary geology from the University of Durham ten years ago.
And that was another of Gomez’s “beat-all-obstacles” achievements. When in the early 1990’s he rented a Government flat in Laguna estate the previous tenant had left behind various bits of broken furniture and a broken phone with an answer-phone slot. He mended and repainted the furniture, and “used the broken answer-phone as a sort of money box.” He was working at a variety of jobs but each week took a £5 note from his pay packet and placed it in the slot for the answer-phone tape.
“At the end of each month, I would buy a postal order – for £20 if it had been a four-week month and £25 for a five-week month – which I posted off to the university until I had saved enough with them to pay for tuition…”
And that’s pretty typical of Frederick Gomez, too.
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