50 years in the making – Patrick Baskeyfield retires after five decades with Johnson Tiles

Pat loves to travel for pleasure too, and hopes to use his retirement to see more of the world. “I’d especially like to go to Hawaii,” he told BBC Radio Stoke, when they too interviewed him recently about his experiences. “I’ve seen so many changes over the years. I’ve also made a lot of good friends.

“It was the first time I’d been to South Africa,” Pat said. “It was quite an experience. The day before we arrived, a bomb had gone off at the airport, and when we reached the Manhattan Hotel we witnessed a man holding a gun to another man’s head because he’d lost his goat! But no-one got shot.”

On the night of the inauguration, 10^th May 1994, he and his team went along after the crowds left “to see what it was like” and found Mandela had given his address from behind a bulletproof glass partition.

Spending his career with Johnson Tiles has by no means meant staying in one place for Pat, however. Thanks to his expertise and our global reach, he has had some amazing opportunities to travel, in particular, setting up plants and networks for Johnson Tiles around the world. One particularly memorable experience was travelling to South Africa in the mid 1990s to install new machines and training staff at the Johnson factory in Pretoria. The visit coincided with the inauguration of South Africa’s first black president, Nelson Mandela, following the end of the country’s Apartheid regime. 

In five decades, Pat has witnessed first-hand the huge changes to the company, at the forefront of the industry, and particularly with advances in manufacturing technology. In the early 1970s he was even featured on BBC’s TV series Tomorrow’s World to talk about the incredible developments happening on the factory floor, a very proud moment. He leaves us at the end of this month having helped to set up the most advanced digital machinery available in the world today, all in the same local area he has lived his whole life.

August is a big month for our Glost Operator Patrick Baskeyfield, who is retiring from Johnson Tiles after an incredible 50 years of service with the business.

In 1965, while still a teenager, Pat started working in the warehouse for Richards Tiles, which merged with H&R Johnson Tiles three years later, where he became an engineer in the floor tile factory. “My first week’s pay packet was just under £2 for a week’s work,” he told The Stoke Sentinel,when interviewed last week.