Tomorrow morning Building Manager S Springbett will arrive at Lagos to start on his new task of building houses for the Company’s employees in Nigeria and to carry out other building plans which the Company has in respect of its West African organisation. He expects, at the moment, to remain in West Africa for approximately a year.

He left Heathrow yesterday afternoon arriving later the same evening in Paris from where he took another plane this afternoon which is to take him on to Lagos.

Mrs Springbett and his two children will continue to live on Bata Estate.

It was in 1934 that Springbett first joined the Company’s building department in a junior position and at that time there were only three single storey buildings and part of a fourth on the factory site, and on the housing estate there were the houses in Bata Ave only. He has had some part in the building of the three storey factory buildings, the erection of Community House and the remainder of the houses on Bata Estate in addition to considerable modification, alteration and extension of a number of the factory buildings.

For nearly five years during the war he was employed on the construction of aerodromes and military and R.A.F. camps, returning to the Company in 1946 since when he has had charge among other things of the building of the new houses in King George VI AVe, the first row of houses in the new Thomas Bata Ave, the laying out of the new road and the construction of the first traffic roundabout on the Estate.