In the time I worked with "Bush" Morley, I came to the realization that he had a bit of a chip on his shoulder about Head Office and particularly Staff Department. Normally he was a very reticent man – he just sat down and worked through his days, saying little to anyone. After hours, whisky loosened up his tongue quite a bit and he would become quite loquacious and several times he told me that he believed someone had put in a bad report on him at some stage in his career and that he had a black mark in his staff file. I doubted it but he insisted.
One evening after supper in Carletonville, we were walking around looking in shop windows and at a furniture shop, he spotted a pile of what looked like a giant octopus lying in the shop. I explained that they were draft excluders – long stuffed vinyl tubes with a dog’s head on the one end and a tail on the other. He chuckled a bit and thought it was a pretty good idea to keep winter’s cold from creeping under one’s front door.
The next morning he came down to breakfast, smiling broadly. He had dreamed that he found himself alone in Staff Department and spotted the massive cabinet where all the staff files were kept. Gleefully he opened the drawer, thinking the black mark mystery would now be finally resolved, speedily found his file and opened it ……….. to find that it had nothing in it but long sausage dogs, which popped out in a tangle!
My old mother had a couple of those “dogs” in her house and after I had told her the story they became known as “Morleys”, as they still called in our family, to this very day.
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