Engineering in Coventry

At Woodlands, we had metalwork and technical drawing lesson twice a week. Metalwork involved the basics at first and then progressed onto machines such as basic lathes, horizontal and vertical milling machines, we were also taught how to braze metals.

It was different at Bablake Mick. We did woodwork and metalwork until the third year, once a week for an hour, a term of one then a term of the other. That was it - in the first year I did more Latin than either. IIRC we didn't have any lathes or anything like that, although we had a forge(?) which I used to make a trowel.

At Churchfield, during my time just post war we had a choice of woodwork or metalwork, I believe for one year as memory serves. We didn't have any workshops and so had to walk from Brays Lane to Frederick Birds in Swan Lane for classes and of course back again after. Our facilities at Brays Lane were very limited, in fact in the sixth form three of us taking chemistry had to cycle to Stoke Park girls school as we did not have a suitable lab. Needless to say on the way back we always stopped off at the Cafe Sinclair in Clay Lane and when asked claimed to have been delayed at Stoke Park. Of the three of us who took chemistry, maths and physics for A level I was the least academic and went into radio and then electronics, the other two went into engineering and one of them was very successful in his field finishing up in America.

A few of my mates at Uni were engineering students. Usually they had come from Technical Colleges not "posh" schools. They were affectionally known as "spannermen". And the graduates who did best back then seemed to have all studied law.

Law, medicine, dentistry and some business graduates still hit the top of the pile but the gap is narrowing. University matters too. While top law degrees get higher starting salaries, lesser universities see graduates get similar success to engineers. English and languages used to be highly rated but not anymore.

Not all Coventry but started in Coventry. I entered engineering because of my grandfather's enthusiasm. He spent most of his life with Jaguar when they moved to Coventry in the early days of the company. He was involved in the development of the XK engine to the XJ6 before he retired. He worked closely with Bill Lyons, Lofty England and Norman Dewis and frequently was driven round the test track, by Norman, in the boot to identify the rattles in the rear of the car. He ended up training the service engineers from service facilities all around the world. When I was ending my schooling in KHVIII I remember having a conversation with the Careers Advisor and when I said I was interested in engineering the conversation was quickly ended. I realised that wasn't the career that the advisor was concerned about! I was taken on by the CEGB (Central Electricity Generating Board) and admitted into a five-year sandwich course. This was a very enjoyable course integrating academic instruction with hands on engineering including metalworking, welding, turning and everything practical. It was considered that engineers who had to supervise others had the experience of working with materials. I then became an electrical test engineer in Croydon Power Station, which is now an IKEA centre. I decided to look abroad and became a consultant on the first steam powered generating station in Sharjah, UAE. After a few years I was employed by GEC Rugby on a project, based in Bremerhaven, with dynamic positioning of vessel in the North Sea, before GPS was used. Luckily I chose the light electrical engineering option in university, which then enabled me to retrain with BBC Radio, which was a great experience as I got to meet a lot of famous people in Broadcasting House and Maida Vale Studios amongst other venues. The travel bug eventually re-emerged and I went to Saudi Arabia, initially seconded to SCECO, the electricity generation and distribution system in the Eastern Province. I then returned to Aramco to work in the Channel 3 TV and four radio stations that they operated for the employees (about 55,000 at the time). I finally left Saudi Arabia and moved to Spain were I got heavily involved in the BBC Little England project, later named as Eldorado. I was involved from a year before the project got the green light to the end, 156 episodes produced and I eventually became the Post Production Supervisor and the Technical Manager (2 roles combined). After Eldorado I moved to New Zealand, where I got involved in the Audio-Visual Department of the University of Auckland. Then I relocated to Queensland, Australia and again got involved in the Audio-Visual Department of the University of Queensland and then Griffiths University. The audio-visual systems aligned with IT networks, and the control systems were developing into black boxes that were programmed and controlled over the networks. In retrospect I really enjoyed my working life and engineering has been the core subject which enabled me to make choices and visit many places in my career. I once heard that a career was an "uncontrollable dash downhill"!

What a fantastic career and uphill too

Now why doesn't that surprise me! I had exactly the same experience at said school. It's interesting reading this topic, that so many others have made a career out of electrics and electronics. Despite excelling in languages, frankly I found most subjects taught in school boring, and electricity and later electronics had been in my blood since the age of 5 years old. I can almost hear some readers muttering "Sad. Should have gone to law school"! Chalk and talk bored the pants off me most of the time. Back to the careers advisor. My father and I had a meeting with Herbie, and although he would not admit it, deep down I'm sure he was disappointed that electricity was in my bones. He taught German, and hoped I would make a career out of modern languages. Wrong. At A level, they had to teach set books. Two things wrong there. Most of it was ancient stuff, like learning a new language, a bit like teaching Shakespeare to young foreign kids. We had to do Macbeth for O level, and if it had not been explained by the teacher, I wouldn't have understood it. Secondly, it was fiction - aaaargh - against the grain. In all my life, I've never understood why anyone would want to live in a dreamworld. So when this mostly ancient fiction was thrust upon me, that's where my interest in Latin, French and German suddenly ended. Herbie quickly brought the meeting to an end by advising me to speak to Mr XXX YYYYYYYYY, the careers master. I won't name the person, but when I did approach him, the elderly gentleman merely pointed me in the vague direction of the appropriate library shelf and said "you'll find everything you need there". He was busy reading a magazine and smoking his pipe at the time, and clearly engineering did not sit well.

My days, we had an external careers officer. He thought everyone who wasn't going on to University ought to be an estate agent! I will be eternally grateful to 'Fairy' Light for encouraging my interest in electronics and electrics. The life served me well, despite my changing tack several times.