near Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.

  In the Falklands Islands in the South Atlantic our steelwork is to be found at San Carlos and four at Port Stanley. Even those tiny mid‑Atlantic islands of Tristan de Cunha, St Helena and Ascension have sent us small orders to enrich our daily diet. At Las Palmas in the Canary Islands the cinema and nearby market buildings were made by us.

  At the Brazilian port of Bahia there is a soap factory, at Santiago in Chile, just a few thousand miles off, a transport depot, recently joined by a large Naval aircraft hangar and the new Presidential Flight Hangar, and at Rio Verde a warehouse. At Georgetown, Guyana several large

 warehouses and sugar stores. Just over the border in Suriname we recently supplied a large workshop for the mining industry. In Central America, on the Pacific seaboard of Costa Rica near Punta Arenas, there are factories, while in Belize further north we supplied the Civic Centre and Auditorium in Belize City and many other industrial and agricultural buildings as well as the bridge over the Rio Bravo and another for the Southern Highway.

  In the Caribbean hundreds of REID structures have gone ashore in the Dutch Isles of Aruba and Curacao, the Cayman Islands, Grenada, Antigua, Montserrat, Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, Dominica, St Kitts, St Lucia, St Vincent, The Dominican Republic, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Anguilla, and the French islands of Martinique and Gaudeloupe.

  In spite of the efforts of several Caribbean hurricanes, one of which blew away most of the bananas in Jamaica in 1951 and deposited a large cargo freighter on the wharf in Kingston, our structures are still there and many have been shipped since.

  For New Providence Island in the Bahamas we spent many happy hours in 1986 designing, making and finally supervising the erection of a huge 86,000 sq ft brewery for Heineken so that they could refresh the parts that other lagers don't reach. They must have been pleased because they asked us to provide another in the Cameroons to help refresh the inhabitants of those parts too.

  For the Turks & Caicos Islands we designed and made the steel frame for a new bank.

  Since then we have shipped many other breweries and distilleries to Africa, including 3 for Coca‑Cola.

  Further to the North, amongst the pink coral of Bermuda, 774 miles from New

York and 3,445 from London there are numerous large Reid warehouses and garages. The Police Barracks includes no less than 5 of our buildings.

  On Sao Tiago in the Cape Verde islands a few hundred miles west of Senegal, we supplied the structure for yet another brewery, complete with offices, to brew Carlsberg lager.

  In West Africa our buildings are almost everywhere, from Mauritania, Senegal, Liberia, the Ivory Coast, Benin, Dahomey and Cameroon right down to the Congos and Angola. For Zambia we made a hovercraft hangar. A multi‑storey hotel building at Banjul in The Gambia is helping the tourist trade whilst further up the river Kanifing are a variety of stores and warehouse buildings. We also supplied all the steelwork for the new fish and meat market. A lot of our work is to be found in Ghana, including the recent terminal building at Kotoka Airport. Eastwards, Uganda, Tanzania, Madagascar, Mauritus and the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean account for at least 100 of our buildings between them. At the port of Beira in Mozambique there is a new warehouse of 10,000m² designed and made by us. We supervised the erection work too.

  In Nigeria, school buildings at Kano, cinemas at Jos, a distillery in Lagos and a tyre factory at Warri etc., cover thousands of square metres. For the Nigerian Air Force we designed, made and erected at Kainji 400 miles north of Lagos, a large hangar of 4,500 square metres with a clear entry width of 90 metres for C 130 Hercules transport aircraft. Although there were many technical intricacies involved in erecting such a huge building way up country, the most hilarious and memorable matters which occupied our erectors was bargaining for local meat and taking care not to annoy the large families of baboons that came from the wildlife reserve to watch. They seemed keen to become engineers.

  We even contributed to the road system nearby, between Wawa and Kaima, by supplying several large multi‑span beam bridges using no less than 17,000 welded 24mm shear connectors for the composite decks.

  At Freetown in Sierra Leone we constructed the framework for the Centenary Building and a large clinic at Kenema as well as many warehouses and factories.

  At Gao Airport in Mali there are no less

than 26 of our smaller buildings and the old air route across the desert to Algeria was pyloned in 1935 with another 36, roofed in red and white glazed enamel sheets and spaced one every 14 miles.

  In Lesotho, that land locked Republic (surrounded by South Africa) a ring road has been built right around the country for which we designed, made and supervised the erection of the multi‑span hot dip galvanised double lane steel bridge at the Maphutsapeng River Crossing.

  In mainland China we provided the Sun Oil plant at Shekou in the province of Canton of which we also supervised the erection, followed by five large port warehouses in 1985 at Jiuzhour Harbour, Zhuhai in the province of Guangdong and more recently steelwork for a ceramic factory near Shanghai.

  In 1992 we shipped 3 buildings for duck processing plants at Qing County in Hebei Province. At Huaibin County and Huangchuan County in Henan Province there are two more buildings for feed mills at Qing County and Huaibin County. We also supervised the erection at all the sites. In Hong Kong we supplied a dye processing building and in Macau an Aircraft Hangar for Air Luxor.

  In Myanmar (Burma) we built a rice store amongst the temples of Rangoon. In

Vietnam, on the rubber plantations of Am‑Nhon‑Tay and Pho‑Thanh near Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), are latex stores, and to the Philippines we shipped a large cable making factory.

  Around the sparkling blue Mediterranean, in Cyprus, Turkey, Malta, Greece, Gibraltar, Sardinia and Corsica there are factories, cold stores, packing sheds, garages, cinemas, warehouses and multi‑storey apartment blocks of our manufacture.

  In Iceland, that fascinating island of the midnight sun and hot water springs, we provided many dock warehouses and herring factories and cold stores at Reykjavik as well as several agricultural buildings.

  In the United Kingdom much of our production has been used to build complete industrial estates, aircraft hangars, warehouses, football stadiums, supermarkets,

garages, boatsheds, agricultural buildings, indoor tennis courts, riding schools, even covers for floating docks, North Sea oil terminal depots and work for the Ministry of Defence.

  A few of our buildings are on the sea bed too. It is really surprising how many ships sink each year. Wherever there is any geography at all we try to get there. One of the most fascinating jobs we helped to make was a church for the owners of a vast 2,000 peon estate in the back blocks of Venezuela

in 1937. That Church totalled 280 packages and bales (including a peal of bells and boxes of coloured glass) and every one of them went on muleback over the mountains through the Oveida Pass. Finished with a belfry and steeple like a proper Church, it was a proud job needing five month's drawing board and machine‑shop work.

  There's poetry and romance enough in structural steel if you think of the travels of our work and any man who can handle a spanner can erect the buildings of his choice in whatever far away land it may have pleased him to pitch his tent.

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