Our industrial heritage

Think of industry, and what do you think of?  It probably depends upon your age, your education and your nationality.  And possibly your politics.

Those lucky enough to have studied the industrial revolution to the level requiring a day trip to the Ironbridge Gorge Museum will not only have learned about steam engines and the incline plane, but also, if their school trip was anything like mine, learned the point at which warm fish-paste sandwiches cause the ice-cream container you use as a sandwich box to pop!, the number of Skips that you can dissolve on your tongue at any one time and that the energy given off by a coach-load of Skip-crazed adolescents in close confinement could, if used for good, power a small city for months, but will also know that long before apps were invented, children were playing games that tested their skills and reflexes.  Games like ‘dodge the spinning Jenny’ and ‘untangle the loom’.

This is big industry.  The industrial revolution put paid to cottage industry, which was a stupid idea that involved skilled craftsmen turning out bespoke products for individuals.  In the twenty first century we laugh at such an idea, unless you can afford it, in which case you pay two grand for a chair that’s really comfy, and even if we can’t we watch television programmes about those that can.

Cake.  Suit.  Furniture.  Just three things that are better made by a craftsman to your requirements than in a factory to the design of a committee.

Industry means production lines.  It used to be, back in the days when History was in black and white, that production lines were men with facial hair making cars that looked like prams with steam engines attached to them.  Then came the seventies, when black and white bypassed sepia altogether and moved on to shades of brown, mostly nylon overalls, and mostly worn by men standing in car parks voting not to make cars.  Fast forward a few years and the production lines still feature cars, but the brown clad workers have now been replaced by yellow-armed robots.  Bolted to the floor in case of an uprising, or strike.

Coming right up to date, industry involves a person in a production line, this time dressed in white, making an iPhone.

For me, industry looks like a workshop.  Alexi Sayle rightly said that “Anyone who uses the word workshop outside of light engineering is a twat”.  He is, of course, right.  I don’t care how ‘hard’ ‘work’ your ‘theatre’ is, unless you are operating a lathe, then you are not ‘workshopping’ your ‘bold’ all-male dramatisation of The Diary of Anne Frank, you are faffing around in a room over a pub.

Workshops are where things get done.  I am sure NASA needed all those big buildings and an assembly line to get the Space Shuttle flying, but if it had been made by a small company based on Solihull employing seven blokes who smelled of Swarfega and fried eggs from Monday to Thurdsay and Swarfega and beer on Friday, the USA would still have a space programme, and they would have made a Space Shuttle Bi-Plane by now.

Practical engineering is, or was, the heart and soul of this country.  I think nothing epitomises the seriousness of the British quite like the ability to take a problem, any problem, and find a solution that involves punching and twisting metal.

I love small engineering companies.  The ones that make bolts, but the best bolts in the world.  The best bolts in the world can be the bolts that hold together your baby’s cot, or your bookcases, or your birdtable.

Or they can be extremis bolts.  Bolts that go on helicopter winches designed to dangle over stormy seas, bolts that attach weapons to RAF jets, that attach aid to parachutes being slung out of the back of RAF jets.

My view of British industry?

British industry doesn’t wear a face mask and a CSI white overall and work in a clean room.  It wears an overall that probably bears a Swarfega stain or two, and makes products that may be ‘simple’ but which never, ever, ever, let you down.

Climbing the scaffold

Property prices being what they are, and inertia being what it is, many are choosing, instead of moving house to get more space, to go up, up, up and convert their loft, hitherto only used for the storage of Christmas decs, porn, and the desiccated corpses of deceased family members, into an extra room.  This means that houses all around the country have been sprouting cubes of shrouded scaffold wrapped around their roofs, turning them into giant Minecraft mushrooms.

Scaffolding is an interesting trade, you turn up, you erect a framework of metal, you wrap it in plastic sheeting then, after a couple of weeks, you rock up and unwrap the sheeting like a giant Christmas present – revealing a roof more or less exactly as it was before, but now sporting a dormer window.

Scaffolding is an all-weather profession and the scaffolders in the village at the moment are in their summer plumage – tee shirts and shorts.

It’s unusual for professionals not to be health and safety obsessed.  Your average builder is head-to-toe armoured like a medieval knight, from hard-hat to steel-capped rhinoceros-hide boots, with a high-vis jacket in the middle and, probably, Kevlar knickers.  The scaffolders’ sop to safety is that their shorts are cut-off denim jeans.  The only leather they sport is their tool-belt.

Possibly their swashbuckling attitude is party a result of their profession, they swarm up their framework with the confidence of animated monkeys and the assurance of a tall ship sailor going aloft for a spot of grog and buggery in the Crows Nest (the lookout point on the ship, not the popular homosexualist pick-up bar in Portsmouth).

The only people that exceed scaffolders’ disregard for health and safety measures are, well, the public.  Specifically, anyone that doesn’t work in the building trade but has a job to do that involves hiring equipment.  Very specifically, anyone who hires a chainsaw.

And I mean a Chainsaw.  Not one of those hedge-clipper things that are one step up from a male grooming product and run on electricity, no - a chainsaw, the sort that runs of petrol.  Leaded petrol, a machine that runs on dead prehistoric trees and the remains of dinosaurs and is wielded in popular culture by men wearing checked shirts, or masks made of teenagers unwise in their choice of vacation-spot.

When the hire company hire out a chainsaw you also get the safety kit, and a lecture even more frequently ignored than the ones given at the start of airplane flights.  The safety kit involves overalls, gloves, and a helmet with a mask (Perspex, not tanned teen).  All you need is a shield, lance and charger and you could joust the tree to death if you wished. 

The trouble is that in the shop, they show you the chainsaw first. 

Now, from first seeing the chainsaw, a chaps attention span before he succumbs to images of himself plying a manly trade, honestly despoiling the environment through deforestation rather than the usual method of being too lazy to recycle, is about ninety seconds.  This is long enough to cover the basics – petrol goes in here, pull this cord here to start the saw, make sure it is pointed away from you.  It does not extend to cover the safety briefing.  While the shop guy does his best to explain the precautions and equipment required to ensure that, should the fellow ever want to take up a career as a juggler in the future, this remains an option, and the bloke’s wife is nodding along, our hero has moved on from fantasies of Sylvanian desolation and is wondering what sort of damage this surprisingly heavy bit of kit could do to, in ascending order of disturbing – fruit, a marrow, anything for the barbeque, that old shed he’s been meaning to knock down and that fucking cockerel his neighbour has acquired.

Of course, the most effective safety briefing for a hired chainsaw is the first time you fumble and it buries itself in the ground half an inch from your big toe.  A ten minute break to change into all the safety gear, and new trousers, and you’re ready for action.