Socially Mobile
Although I'm solidly middle-class in nature, petit-bourgoise with all its connotations, I think that I have always aspired to be an artisan, a skilled manual worker. Is "aspiring" the correct word in these circumstances? Yesterday I drove the van to Loughborough and back, as the car was in to be serviced but had not been returned by the previous evening. I think that I enjoy driving the van more than the car on long trips. It''s not so comfortable nor so quick, but there's a certain pleasure in its grinding tractor-like noise and steady progress, and of course the views are wonderful from being perched so high. And instead of a rep I'm a white van man, with all the prejudices which that entails.
For the first dozen years of my proper working life, following graduation, I wore a boiler-suit more than either a lab-coat or jacket-and-tie. I liked the feel of it as a uniform, imagining that it gave me an aura of competence and familiarity with the masculine worlds of machinery and tools. Indeed, my work at that time DID give me such skills and knowledge. Then, twenty years or so ago, I was a competent jack of all trades, able to tackle plumbing, electrics and mechanics as the need arose. I'd be pressed to do that now.
My ideas of industry were limited by experience, of course. Teesside was a centre for the heaviest sorts of manufacturing, bulk chemicals and steelmaking. Nights always had the glow from the flare-stacks of ICI, just a couple of miles away from home. With the wind in the wrong direction, we could see and smell the acrid nitric acid fumes as they drifted towards us rotting the clothes on the line. My walk into town was past the foundry wonderfully named Light Pipe Hall Road, where they cast iron pipes for the world. I knew, as well, that minerals needed to be mined from school and family trips around our area. There was coal to the north, iron to the south, salt and potash to the east, and lime and lead from the west. No wonder we were surrounded by industry.
And yet, there were aspects of manufacturing with which I was completely unfamiliar. My first contact with computing was for a company providing monitoring systems for discrete manufacturing, counting widgets being made. And as well as widgets, we looked after weavers. The country used to be full of them. In my patch, they varied from the silk ribbon makers near Crewkerne in Somerset to the Amxinster carpet weavers in Devon. I was unprepared, at first, for the dust and the clamour of those sheds: as a youth I had mentally dismissed this "soft" material manufacture as being of an inferior nature, when it was in truth an important industry upon which half the wealth of north-west England had been built. I know better, now, but the industry itself has gone the way of so much, exported to Asia.
:-]
For the first dozen years of my proper working life, following graduation, I wore a boiler-suit more than either a lab-coat or jacket-and-tie. I liked the feel of it as a uniform, imagining that it gave me an aura of competence and familiarity with the masculine worlds of machinery and tools. Indeed, my work at that time DID give me such skills and knowledge. Then, twenty years or so ago, I was a competent jack of all trades, able to tackle plumbing, electrics and mechanics as the need arose. I'd be pressed to do that now.
My ideas of industry were limited by experience, of course. Teesside was a centre for the heaviest sorts of manufacturing, bulk chemicals and steelmaking. Nights always had the glow from the flare-stacks of ICI, just a couple of miles away from home. With the wind in the wrong direction, we could see and smell the acrid nitric acid fumes as they drifted towards us rotting the clothes on the line. My walk into town was past the foundry wonderfully named Light Pipe Hall Road, where they cast iron pipes for the world. I knew, as well, that minerals needed to be mined from school and family trips around our area. There was coal to the north, iron to the south, salt and potash to the east, and lime and lead from the west. No wonder we were surrounded by industry.
And yet, there were aspects of manufacturing with which I was completely unfamiliar. My first contact with computing was for a company providing monitoring systems for discrete manufacturing, counting widgets being made. And as well as widgets, we looked after weavers. The country used to be full of them. In my patch, they varied from the silk ribbon makers near Crewkerne in Somerset to the Amxinster carpet weavers in Devon. I was unprepared, at first, for the dust and the clamour of those sheds: as a youth I had mentally dismissed this "soft" material manufacture as being of an inferior nature, when it was in truth an important industry upon which half the wealth of north-west England had been built. I know better, now, but the industry itself has gone the way of so much, exported to Asia.
:-]
posted by Moses at
3:03 pm
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