Cockeyed Optimist

I had a two-year Graduate Apprenticeship at Rolls-Royce, which involved spending time in a variety of manufacturing workshops and foundries, engine test-beds, and offices, such as the Stress Office, where complex calculations were done on vital engine components. This was pretty interesting and I learnt a lot.

One of my first assignments was to the Apprentice Training School, where the real apprentices learnt how to use everything from hand tools to complex machine tools, such as lathes, milling-machines and grinders. Being graduates, we were supposed to be able to pick up these skills faster than these young boys, but this wasn’t always borne out in practice. Some of my colleagues made drastic mistakes, but we all survived. We had to do things like making an absolutely accurate cube of steel, precisely an inch wide, with the angles all square and the faces flat and parallel, starting with a rough blank, and using only a series of files. Not easy!

In the manufacturing shops we were tolerated, but if we could be shown up by the regular tradesmen, they took glee in it. There were a whole series of errands that a naive trainee could be sent on, like “Oh, Geoff, lad, couldst tha gow to t’stores and get us a left-handed puttin’-on tool? Quick, now, I’m waitin on it!” Of course, all the regular workers were in on this sort of thing and would play along, saying at the first store-room that they were out, but had heard that Jack Higgins at the foundry still had some - you get the idea!

“Clocking On”

Of course, we graduate trainees had a few tricks up our sleeves, too, for instance, ways of clocking-on to best advantage. Being floaters, we didn’t have our clocking-on cards in a clock rack at a fixed location, as the regular workers had. Instead, we were allowed to carry them with us. This meant that if, for instance, we were assigned to the test-bed site, way down the other end of town, we could stop off at the foundries, much earlier on our way to work, clock on there, and then take our time getting to our assigned spot.

We also soon found that if we walked briskly about, with a clip-board, and, perhaps, a tape measure, nobody in authority would ever question us. But for the most part, observing what was going on in the shops was interesting enough that we paid attention to it, and even took notes.

“Snap Tins”

And there were very interesting sights, too, like the guys in the heat-treatment shop, whose job was to heat up components in a salt-bath to very high temperatures, then plunge them into cold oil suddenly. I was watching one day at lunch time; this man took a packet of sandwiches out of his ’snap-tin’ (lunch pail). He then balanced the opened packet on the edge of the salt-bath, and started eating the sandwiches. The salt-bath was encrusted with a layer of white crystals. Later I asked what salt they were using, to be told ’sodium cyanide’.

When I went to Derby first, I shared digs with a couple of the other graduate trainees, but after enduring the landlady’s cooking for a couple of months, we decided to find a flat. I shared the flat until February 1957, when I went off to Cambridge to get married. I’ll go back in time a bit and tell you how I met and got engaged to Ann.

It was like this:

At Cambridge, as I have related, I was an Engineering student, which meant that my fellow-students were all males. Rumour had it that there was a girl in the year ahead of us, but she was only glimpsed from time to time, like a will-o-the-wisp. At the time there were only two female colleges, Newnham and Girton (a third, New Hall, was added in 1954), so female students were a very rare and prized commodity. So how were we to meet girls? These were very primitive sexist times.

One strategem I heard of was to have a party, and ring up the Porter at Addenbrooke’s Hospital and ask him to tell the student nurses, in the nurses’ residence, where and when it would be held. They were very poorly paid and were always hungry, so they would jump at the chance of snacks.

Another more sophisticated and less brutal way, which was adopted by my mate Charlie and myself, was to go to dancing lessons at the Dorothy Ballroom, a cafe that had a three or four-piece band and ran ‘the-dansants’ (tea dances) in the afternoons. Upstairs was the Betty King School of Dance, where Charlie and I signed up. As soon as we had met a suitable girl each, we abandoned the lessons. So Ann and I started a relationship which lasted through four children and a move to Australia. We became engaged as soon as Ann had turned 18, and then we were married in Girton Church, in February 1957.

[Back to the main narrative.]

So the first home that Ann and I had in Derby was two rooms in the house of an elderly lady and her spinster daughter. That didn’t last long, because the woman insisted that Ann did everything the right way - “Now dear, when you buy soap, you must unwrap it and put it in the airing cupboard; that way it will dry out and last much longer.”

We then moved to a boarding house run by an eccentric woman married to a Polish man who had come to England to join the forces, and was now working on the railways, Derby being a key centre for the railway system. The other tenants were mostly Poles, too, which was fine, but too convivial for a young, reserved, English couple.

“Me and my Scott”

So we found a flat next; the picture shows me with my Scott Flying Squirrel, outside our ground floor flat, one of three flats in a Victorian house. The others were occupied by another young couple with a baby, and a woman with a teenage daughter who visited her from time to time. The flat rent was three pounds a week, out of my eleven pounds ten shillings and sixpence pay, we usually spent a couple of pounds on groceries, and then there was electricity, gas and the phone, but we managed (just).

So I went on with my training program spending times at several Rolls-Royce sites around Derby: foundries, machine shops, stress office, welding, and assembly of jet and turboprop engines and testing them in test-beds. The jet engines were assembled in a vertical position on a platform that gradually descended into a pit, so as each section was added, the platform went down ready for the next section.

There were some huge machine tools that had come from Germany as war reparations. I was admiring one once, and the technician in charge of it said “You know, if you go round the works, you’ll see that most of the lathes, milling machines and so on were either supplied by the Government, or like this, came from Germany. Meanwhile, all the German factories have been stripped, so that when they start up again, as they are doing, they will have all new tools, and they will have the edge on us.”

So, for two years I saw a great deal and at the end of this program I was offered a job in the Project Assessment Office, where I prepared graphs and tables on the performance of engines being designed and developed. The office where I worked contained a couple of recent trainees, like me, and some more experienced engineers. We prepared our calculations and graphs using calculators and french curves. There was a computer centre on site, but that was only for very important jobs, and not for the likes of us. Instead we had a couple of ladies in the office whose job was to use calculators to prepare sheets full of figures for us to plot; inevitably, they were called “the calculating women.”

But I was restless, and after a few months, one of the other men in the office, a mathematician, applied for and got a job as a lecturer at Adelaide University, in Australia. This got me thinking, and when I had been in that office nearly a year, I started applying for jobs myself.

If you liked this, why not treat me to a coffee (or a bone for Kafka)? Thanks, mate!

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