Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Co. Ltd

Reminiscences.

I "left home" the day before my eighteenth birthday in September 1963. My uncle worked at MV and as I had a technical bent, when I left school the family organised me a "college" apprenticeship - a year at MV on either side of a degree course at what was then known as The Manchester College of Science & Technology - later U.M.I.S.T. So I left my parental home in Yorkshire, and moved in to lodgings on Barkers Lane in Sale. Of course, by this time MetroVick had in fact lost its identity and been subsumed, with its sister and rival B.T.H. into its holding company A.E.I. A tremendous account's solution to the problem of internal rivalry between BTH, and MV - eliminate two world-famous trademark names!

There were three of us new apprentices in one attic room - no heating, in winter the temperature fell to freezing. We were paid £7 10s 0d - £7.50p a week, we paid 10 shillings tax and NI and our lodgings cost £4 - for which we got bed, breakfast and evening meal, all meals at weekend, and our washing done. In that house there were two more postgraduate engineers, the landlady and her husband, and her nephew.

I can well remember what it was like going to work in those days. As apprentices we moved from department to department, spending a few weeks in each. On the shop floor we started at 7:45, on "staff" at 8:30. There was no leeway at all - one minute late and you were late. I remember later on, getting hauled up for "persistent lateness" - a total of 14 minutes late in 3 months, as I recall. I used to bicycle, with literally thousands of other people, down Washway Road and in through the South Gate. As you approached the works in the morning there was just a vast tide of humanity, on foot or on bikes - and as it took 10 minutes to walk from one end of the works to the other, what department you were in made a big difference. If the wind was in one direction the smell was of hot grain blowing in from Kelogg's - if in the other it was of vulcanising rubber, coming from I know not where.

I remember my first works department was Large Steam Turbine Production - no computers in those days. On the first day I still had a schoolboy tendency to call grey-haired men "sir", and it took some getting used to call the production clerks by their first names. I remember copying part-descriptions into ledgers, and going out on the shop-floor to find bits of turbine - searching through countless bolts, nuts and castings for particularly labelled parts. really hard when parts for a multiplicity of different jobs were backwatered and mixed all over the shop floor.

I remember too in that department being told-off for doing a week's work in a day. I soon learned to pace myself. Tea break was just that. One in the morning, and one in the afternoon. A bit before time one of the senior clerks would go and turn on the tea boiler and on time, we would all go with our mugs, and make tea or coffee. In every desk there was a jar of powdered coffee, and a can of Fussel's milk, with two holes stabbed in it. The out-hole all yellow with dried condensed milk. I don't think tea-bags had been invented.

Other departments I remember were Heat Treatment, where red hot turbine blades were quenched in oil baths, and the workers would scare us new boys by getting us to pick items up off the floor. Underneath was a mass of leaping white crickets, revelling in the warmth, and I suppose eating the oil. Then there was my least favourite - the moulding section of the Foundry, where sand moulds were created from which castings would be made. In that department a transient like me had almost nothing to do, the moulder and his trade apprentice knew exactly what they were up to, and weren't going to let a clot like me mess things up. Some departments were more forgiving - the pattern shop, where wooden patterns were made from which moulds would be made was pleasant, as it smelled of wood, and you might be given a corner to sandpaper all to yourself. There were vast numbers of patterns - some huge, up to maybe 10 feet high, in serried ranks behind the foundry, and on sunny summer days there were those who climbed into the nooks and crannies on top of the larger ones and took an illicit snooze.

Shop floor jobs in general were the hardest to cope with, because as "college and school" apprentices, we didn't spend long enough on a job to become useful, and when we were given something to do, as often as not we would make a mess of it. The very first time I held and used an electric drill was to drill a single small hole in a 20 ton turbine casting, destined to be one of four screw holes for fixing an information plate. Of course first I broke the bit in the hole, and then I drilled the hole completely askew. But I'd never practiced on anything before that. I still got told off though! In the office jobs, we were more useful, as most clerical jobs were pretty straight forward, although I wasn't always clear why I was doing something.

It's hard now to believe what a different world that was, especially my pre-university year, 1963-4. Manchester smogs were still a feature, few people had cars, and life had more in common with the black and white films of the 1940s than the "swinging sixties". Smoking was commonplace, and allowed on the upper decks of buses, and the garment of choice for men was the fawn raincoat, so the journey to work was a drab smelly nightmare. Nevertheless, we had a great time, and in the evenings would go to the Apprentice Club in Stretford, to Sale Locarno or Odeon, and I, at least, used to spend half-a-crown on a Tuesday night to go to "The Cadman School of Dancing" where I eventually got a bronze medal for modern ball-room, and my first real girl-friend.

Jim Lawton

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