Apprentices & Potatoes

September 1973

I never met Roland Robertson, but it was because of him that I got my first lecturing contract. I’d just finished my PhD, and hadn’t yet got my first research contract. I was at a loose end, and looked in the local paper to see what jobs were about.

Six week temporary lectureship in Motor Vehicle Engineering, at the local technical college, caught my eye. My first degree was in Mathematics, but I’d done a couple of modules in Mechanical Engineering, one of them in workshop practice; for a while between school and university I’d worked as a fitter in the bus depot where my Dad was a driver (that’s another story in itself); my PhD was in engineering applications of mathematics; and I’d done all the repairs and maintenance on my own cars and some for other friends and family. I thought it was worth a shot.

It turned out that Robertson had gone to Egypt for six weeks, working at a technical college there. He was helping them to set up a course similar to the one he was running in England.

I got the job, teaching apprentice garage mechanics a bit about engineering theory. Each day of the week I had a different batch of a dozen apprentices on day release, so I got to deliver the same material five times in a week, and then something different the next week.

I was working to a predesigned course, with good course material provided by Robertson, and the apprentices had course books with sections for them to fill in, as well as excellent text and diagrams. I had some demonstrations to do, but most of my time was spent wandering around keeping an eye on the apprentices working through their books, and explaining things to them as and when they ran into difficulties.

For three of the six weeks, the afternoons were spent in the workshop, dismantling and re-assembling various sections of old cars. Three afternoons wasn’t enough to cover all the sections they had to know about, but most of them had worked on some of the required sections at their garages, so it was a matter of covering the others. Not too difficult to organize. The really important thing wasn’t so much them learning about the engineering anyway. It was observing the way they worked, and making sure they learnt to avoid unsafe methods of working, or unsafe behaviour.

It was quite fun. Most of the groups were good lads. I was a little worried that they might take a while to get used to the idea of an engineering lecturer who was female and half their size. I started the first session by lifting a heavy, dirty differential onto my desk and getting them to crowd round while I showed them how it worked, and that seemed to have the desired effect.

The Friday group had a couple of troublemakers in it, and regretfully I had to report them to the authorities for horseplay in the workshop, which lost them their jobs. I’d tried to warn them...

Robertson went to Egypt for six weeks again the following year. The college wrote to me and asked if I was available, which I was. They didn’t even bother to advertise, so I presume they thought I’d done a reasonable job!

The best potato crop I ever had was from some I bought to eat, that decided to sprout.

The landlord, Mr Oldfield, had for many years leased the back garden of the old vicarage where I had a flat to the local council, to use as a nursery for shrubs for the parks and gardens in town, and for flowers for council functions and suchlike. Then they started to use it as a depot for machinery – mini-tractors and mowers and things – and he fell out with them, and got the lease annulled. He asked us four tenants if we wanted to take over the garden, and we did. I just shoved the old tatties in the ground.

The garden had been a nursery for so long, and had manure and compost as much as it wanted, so the soil was wonderful. One of my potatoes weighed just over 1.5 kg. One potato.

I also got a decent crop of (green) chick peas, at six hundred feet above sea level, in Yorkshire. The garden had seven foot high walls on three sides though, which also helped a lot I’m sure.

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