“I need to go at 1pm today,” my father said.
“That’s alright Dad, I’ve got some lads coming from the alternative provision school for a workshop experience,” I replied.
My dad comes into the workshop one day a week. We spend a few hours chatting while tidying up, sorting jobs, or making a start on whatever needs doing. If I’m honest, after spending most of the week working alone, I enjoy the company.
That morning we were clearing benches and going through my risk assessment for the students.
“Why did your Grandad Bill give up stonemasonry?” I asked. “Was it because of the depression?”
“No,” Dad replied. “He carried on until after the war. He also worked as a master plasterer. He could polish plaster.”
The conversation drifted, as it often does, from one trade to another.
I told him about a BBC programme I’d watched about farming in Lothersdale. One of the farmers was explaining why his sons wanted to farm. It wasn’t because he’d pushed them into it. It was simply the world they had grown up in.
Then I mentioned a conversation I’d recently had with a friend about his apprenticeship.
Apart from college, most of what he learned had come from an older engineer who worked alongside him every day.
Dad thought for a moment.
“It wasn’t like that when I worked at Renold Gears.
I spent months applying for jobs after I left school and in the end Renold Gears was where I got in. All the new apprentices were sent to Bradford College first for basic engineering training. After a few months there we moved into Renold’s own training workshop.
The first thing we did was make tools. We had to make our own toolbox and various engineering tools that we’d use later on. I don’t know what happened to most of the tools I made.”
At that point I told him that I still had the toolmakers’ clamps he had made as an apprentice. I went and fetched them from my toolbox and showed them to him. He turned them over in his hands, looking at them closely.
“Christ,” he said. “I haven’t seen those in years.”
“We used to file things by hand,” he continued, “and the instructor would come round with a straight edge checking the work. If it wasn’t right, you carried on until it was.
After about a year they started moving us around the works. We’d spend time in different departments, machining, fitting, inspection and so on. At the same time we were still doing theory work and exams.
In the end only three of us got through all the exams and were offered jobs in the drawing office. The others just filtered out into jobs on the shop floor. No one failed. They just found where they fitted.
The thing is, you were learning all the time. Not just from the instructors. The older engineers taught you as well. You’d be working alongside them every day and they’d show you things you’d never find in a textbook.
I remember one lad wanting to machine a part on a particular machine and an older hand stopped him. He told him not to use that end of the bed because the ways were worn there and it wouldn’t hold the tolerance. Nobody had written that down anywhere. He just knew the machine because he’d spent years working with it.
Another time we built a very large gearbox that was designed to step down the speed of a shaft. The engineers had done all the calculations and on paper everything looked right. But when it was built and tested it snapped the shaft. The startup loads were creating far more torque than expected. In the end they found the bearings were too small and the whole thing had to be redesigned.
That taught you something. Just because something works in theory doesn’t mean it works in practice. The real world has a habit of finding the mistakes.
And it wasn’t only engineering you learned. The older blokes would look after the younger lads as well. They’d tell you not to drink too much, not to get carried away gambling on the football, how to conduct yourself properly. Some of them could be hard men, but they took an interest in you.
Looking back, Renold’s wasn’t just teaching people how to make gearboxes.
It was teaching people how to become engineers. It was teaching people to become adults.
My father’s stories reminded me of another conversation.
The more oral histories I recorded, the more I realised that learning a trade often began long before an apprenticeship.
When I interviewed Kevin Sayles, Britain’s longest-serving framebuilder, I asked him what first drew him into cycling.
His answer had nothing to do with careers advice, qualifications or employment opportunities.
“I think what got me into cycling was the machine, the mechanical part of the bike. I loved cycling because I liked the machine.”
Later, his father bought him a Woodrup track bike.
“I got the Woodrup in ‘68 and it just fascinated me. I thought: I want to be able to make these bikes.”
That simple statement stayed with me.
Before Kevin ever became a framebuilder, he could see framebuilders.
The work was visible.
The people doing it were visible.
The path into the trade was visible.
When he left school in 1970, he didn’t sit down with a careers adviser and discuss his options. He got on his bike and knocked on the doors of the firms he admired.
“I remember going in and saying, you know, I’d like to be considered as an apprentice framebuilder.”
First he tried Woodrup.
“We haven’t got any jobs, but I’ll put your name down.”
Then he went to Bob Jackson.
“We’ve got no vacancies, but we’ll take your number.”
So he found other work and waited.
A few months later he came home to find a message waiting for him.
“My mum said, ‘You’ve had a phone call from Bob Jackson’s. They want you to go for an interview.’”
The interview took place on his birthday.
“That was it. That’s how it started.”
What strikes me about this story is how ordinary it would have seemed at the time.
Framebuilding was not hidden from view. Neither were engineering, toolmaking, machining or dozens of other skilled trades. Young people encountered them through family members, neighbours, local employers, magazines, clubs and everyday life.
Before people can become something, they have to be able to see it.
One of the questions that increasingly occupies my mind is how many of these worlds have become invisible to young people today.
The two lads from the school arrived just as my dad was leaving.
I recognised them immediately as two of the students I’d visited a few months earlier.
“You showed us that frame that had been ridden all the way to Australia,” one of them said as he looked up at the frames hanging from the workshop ceiling.
“It’s up there.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “I’ve still got some work to do on it.”
What struck me was that he’d remembered it.
Months earlier I’d taken that frame into school as part of a short presentation. Out of everything I’d talked about, that was what had stayed with him.
After a quick safety briefing, I gave them a couple of lugs to file. The same sort of work Kevin Sayles had described doing at Bob Jackson fifty years earlier.
Both of them settled into it with far more concentration than many people would expect.
Then the questions started.
My workshop is the sort of place where almost every object has a story attached to it, and before long their attention drifted from the filing to the things hanging on the walls and stacked on the shelves.
One of them began thinking aloud.
“Can I make a fork?”
A few minutes later he had another idea.
“How about a brake for my bike?”
Then another.
“I need a number plate bracket. Can I make one of those?”
Listening to him, I was reminded of something Kevin Sayles had told me.
When he was a teenager, a photograph of a Morris Woodrup track bike had captured his imagination. Then his father bought him a Woodrup of his own. From that point on he wanted to learn how to make bicycles. Not because someone had advised him to. Not because it was a sensible career choice. Simply because he had seen something that fascinated him and wanted to become part of that world.
The more oral histories I record, the more I wonder whether this is how many people find their direction in life.
Not through abstract discussions about careers, but through encounters with real people doing real things.
Before people can become something, they have to be able to see it.
When I first began interviewing retired craftsmen in my own trade, I thought I was preserving a disappearing craft.
Over time I realised that framebuilding was simply the example closest to me.
The deeper I looked, the more I saw the same pattern appearing elsewhere. Engineering. Toolmaking. Pottery. Tailoring. Farming. Different occupations, but remarkably similar stories.
Again and again I encountered people whose lives had been shaped by workshops, mentors, communities and forms of apprenticeship that extended far beyond the transmission of technical skill.
The longer I work on this project, the more I wonder whether one of the ways we are failing young people is by making too many forms of meaningful work invisible.
I am not arguing that everyone should become a framebuilder, a potter or a blacksmith. Craft simply happens to be the world I know best. What interests me is the wider pattern.
Many of the people I interview entered practical occupations because they could see them. They knew engineers, farmers, mechanics, joiners, machinists and craftsmen. They encountered them in everyday life. These were not abstract careers. They were real people doing real work in their communities.
Today many of these paths have become harder to see. They still exist and remain essential to society, but they often sit beyond the horizon of a young person’s imagination.
The issue is not that people cannot change direction later in life. Many do. The issue is that we are asking too many young people to make decisions about their future without first showing them the full range of lives available to them.
What fascinates me is not the trades themselves, but the people.
How did they become so capable?
How did they learn judgement?
How did they acquire responsibility?
How did they develop the practical intelligence that allowed them to solve problems that no manual could anticipate?
Company archives tell us what firms made. They tell us when they opened and when they closed. They tell us what machines they bought and what products they sold. What they rarely tell us is how people learned, who taught them, what values were passed on, or how a workplace shaped a life. Those things survive primarily in memory.
That is why I record these interviews.
Not because I believe the past was perfect.
Not because I think we should recreate it.
But because these stories contain knowledge that is rarely captured elsewhere.
The archive is one part of that work. The writing is another.
Perhaps fifty years from now someone will listen to these recordings. I hope they hear more than old men talking about bicycles. I hope they hear evidence of a world that understood something we are in danger of forgetting: that people are formed through relationships, responsibility, mentorship and participation; that not everything valuable can be measured; and that the purpose of work is not simply to generate output but to help human beings flourish.
Ultimately, that is why I am recording these oral histories.
Not because they preserve the past.
But because they may help us understand the future.
At the end of the session the lads tidied their benches and headed back to school.
One of them stopped before he left.
“Next time, can I make that number plate bracket?”
“We’ll see,” I said.
Then they were gone.
I found myself thinking about my father at Renold Gears and Kevin walking into Bob Jackson for his interview.
Perhaps nothing comes of it.
Perhaps neither of those lads ever picks up a file again.
But perhaps one day they’ll remember that afternoon in the workshop in the same way Kevin remembered the Woodrup bicycle.
Before people can become something, they have to be able to see it.
Brilliant again this. As a kid I wasn’t shown anything I could be when I was older. And I had imbibed an idea that you were with good at something or you weren’t.
Paul,
I wasn't sure my comment here would be accepted, as I wasn't able to comment on your post from May 29. I mention it just in case you weren't aware of that.
Cheers,
Mark