Woman on a raft suggested that I write on what us old time Engineers were put through to gain a qualification.
A bit of back ground, to begin this saga, that you’ll soon start to be bored to tears with.
I came from a fairly affluent middle class family (The Teddy bear factory will be featured in a separate post). Anyhoo, I was educated in a prep school and passed the common entrance exam and was accepted by a good public school. The bugbear, however, was that my twin did not pass. This posed a bit of a quandary, and the long and short of it all is that my parents decided to send us both to a fee paying, Prison camp Naval training school.
My education there was abysmal, but finally I left and applied for a career with the Royal Fleet Auxiliary.
That first day at Poplar technical college was a real eye opener. Not only was I in the environment of the East End of London where the dockers spent a large amount of their time in the pub, but I was pitted against others who had so many more O levels than me.
What surprised me that I was accepted with O levels in maths, english, seamanship, and navigation. Not an engineering bent at all.
From then started my enlightenment into the world of Applied mechanics, Thermodynamics, Naval Architecture, and everything else needed to make a good Marine Engineer.
The one thing that I noticed straight away was that I was in a minority. Most of all accepted had come from technical schools which were abundant in that Era. They’d learnt technical drawing, metalwork, etc. This was to me, equivalent to learning to how to walk five years too late.
Too be continued………………………………(Maybe)
