The Company's works school has recently been accepted by the Lancashire education authority and is reported to be the only one in the county area that is satisfactory to continue under the proposed county college scheme. During the year it provides a half-day's schooling per week for some 700 probationary and trade apprentices and part-time classes for 300 college and school apprentices. It also affords general and commercial education (half a day and one or two voluntary evenings a week) for 350 girls under twenty-one and some older women.

The apprentice's association, run by themselves, provides a range of social and intellectual functions for 1500 members—about 1000 trade and 500 college and school. Its governing body, the apprentice council, coordinates and controls the enthusiasm of the 'c. and s.' and trade sections, and also of the Rotor group which produces the apprentice magazine. Annual events such as inter-section sports and dances, section dinners, and the c. and s. revue are far more than highlights of the social year: they are opportunities for the development of character, which is no less essential than the acquisition of technical knowledge.

A year's inflow now amounts to about a hundred graduates and another eighty professional apprentices together with about 230 trade apprentices. Though most of the latter are subsequently employed as craftsmen, a large number become technicians or professional engineers.

Many ex-apprentice readers will acknowledge a debt to Sir Arthur P. M. Fleming, who since the beginning of the century has guided and helped young men to success both within and without the Company, and to Kenneth R. Evans and his staff: on the college and school side T. Owen, who for nearly thirty years has countered inexperience with patience, and on the trade side F. Bateman, who is still assisted by G. H. Wilson and W. J. Wood. Lighter memories will recall with gratitude the capable hands of Miss W. M. Wellard and Miss C. M. Lofthouse from whom not only the shy or susceptible have derived encouragement.

A large number of apprentices stay with the Company. Three have become directors, and forty-four of the present seventy-five heads of departments began their careers with a college, school, or trade apprenticeship. Others have taken their abilities outside, often to quite different fields of engineering, and shown themselves capable of holding the highest executive positions. (This country alone can boast of ten ex-M-V professors.) Many have gone to leaven the lump of the non-industrial world: parliament, the churches, the civil service, the armed forces, the police, the B.B.C. and the press are among the institutions they adorn, and doctors and missionaries, coffee planters and graziers, schoolmasters and barristers are some by-products of the education department. An ex-apprentice register, of which the third edition will soon be available, contains 10,000 names representing sixty-seven nationalities of worldwide origin.