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  Fast forward a few years and the production lines still feature cars, but the brown clad workers have now been replaced by yellow-armed robots.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.

Postcard from Norfolk - behind the scenes at Wells-Next-The-Sea

Obviously, I’ve always known that Wells-next-the-Sea is a working port.  The clue is all the fishing boats in the harbour, occasionally one putt-puttering along the channel and out to sea.  Then again, most of the time I see the boats I’m looking down on them as they lay beached, thanks to a vertigo-inducing low tide taking them far, far below the harbour wall.

The tide, it would appear, is anti-social, and usually puts in an appearance in the early morning, meaning that fishermen have to get up very early to get their floating boats out there, catch some fish, then back in time for market, breakfast and bed.  No wonder they are all such grumpy bastards when they are interviewed on telly, and it can’t all be the fault of the EU.

More than the boats, it is the crab and lobster pots stacked up in the harbour that reveal the port of Wells to be working.  Downwind, you can tell that a few hours ago, these were immersed in the sea and probably home to a clacky, annoyed and ultimately and unfortunately for the resident, delicious crustacean.

Today though, we walked past the harbour and instead of taking a left at the chandlery and looping up past llamas to the pub, walked on.

Wells has a sailing club!  I mean, of course it does, why wouldn’t it? but they have boats, all varnished and shiny and everything.  And a club house, with a little marquee attached to it which simultaneously announces to the world ‘barbeques are a frequent occurrence here’ and ‘our members like to smoke’.

The racing dinghy’s of the club, uniform in colour, were an incongruous bookend to the fish crates stacked along the harbour, looking for all the world like somebody who was playing Tetris as art.

Yet somehow both were Wells, and epitomised the very picture that everyone has of Wells, the beach huts.  No two exactly alike, but all the same basic design, a shed on stilts, the sort of thing an Englishman exiled to Indonesia or some other flood-prone country would have in his back garden to ensure his mower and trowel stayed dry, yet all different colours.

Past the club house, you come to the real working area of Wells, far (well, twenty steps but metaphorically far) from the whelk stands and rock shops, here are the sheds and warehouses of the fishermen.

I love industry.  Proper industry.  The sort of industry that is all about a proper workshop, home to about seven or eight chaps, who are simply superb at what they do, and smell of swarfega.  You can stick your robot assembly lines right up your arse, if you want something done right, you get a craftsman with a regional accent.

I got the same feeling here.  This was a place of serious toil.  There are some who would say that this sort of thing is unglamorous, and maybe that’s why you have to peek behind the curtain, or at least walk past the pub, to see it.

I wouldn’t agree.  I think there’s a sort of beauty to be found in places like this, where people work hard at difficult jobs, especially when they are not around, when the buildings themselves seem to be resting.  The sheds may be weatherbeaten, but there’s not a stray rope or a scrap of litter to be seen; untidiness and fishing, or industry, do not mix.

Well’s beach huts line up in the sand like sentinels.  Red, white, blue, sometimes red white and blue, they are colourful and characterful.  No less colourful and characterful are the boats bobbing at anchor or, more accurately, by the time I get down the harbour, the boats resting at anchor.  But how good, how reassuring, to know that behind the colour and the character is the substance.