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I have fond memories of Hackbridge & Hewittic.
My parents met there and dad worked there for a large part of his working life. So my brother and me went to the children's Christmas party every year and for things like car rallies where families drove round and collected clues.
When I was old enough for a train set, the track and the train came from Tri-ang but the power supply came from H&H. Of course H&H didn't make transformers that small so it must have been custom designed and built. It was in a wooden box, nailed together.
When I left school in 1970 I joined H&H as an apprentice (link to the booklet I got when I joined), soon after that it was announced that the transformer production at the Hersham factory would be closing, so I must have been one of the more shorter serving employees. Still it was an interesting experience and I could see how skilled the design and manufacturing work was. I remember someone had the idea that the apprentice school would make some small transformers for photocopiers (small by H&H standards but very big compared to transformers in domestic appliances). So we stacked the cores (although we didn't do the winding) and put them together. However they made a very loud buzzing noise and were unusable. Its not that we didn't try, its just that things like stacking transformer cores is a skilled job. The problem is that, if its been done wrong, you don't always know until the whole transformer has been built and if it can't be put right its scrap.
I guess the need for such skills is why H&H had sports clubs and looked after their employees.
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