Jack Caple worked for more than 33 years with Fletcher Jones, firstly at the Man's Shop in Warrnambool and then at Pleasant Hill, where the company moved as production increased and more space was needed. Jack became FJ's Trouser Production Manager.
Jack, like Fletcher Jones himself, was a war veteran. He said the rapid growth of demand on the company's manufacturing capacity, as it struggled to keep pace, was a memorable time. "I finished up running the whole floor and that was a very busy time. I remember it was like a battlefield! You might get the flow of a trouser and then all of a sudden it backed up because there wasn't sufficient operators and it was so important to keep that flow going."
Jack was a Rat of Tobruk and at the time of the video interview below he was 96.9 and one of the few surviving WW2 veterans of that campaign. Jack travelled from his nursing home in Melbourne to attend a morning tea with other FJ workers in 2015 and this interview was recorded in the afternoon before he returned home to Melbourne by train! A pretty remarkable day for a man of his age!
