JOHN BULL'S FIRST JOB

Goodbye to All That

By ROY HATTERSLEY, MP

WHEN I was twelve I was desperate for the ownership of the steel industry to pass into different hands—mine. I was not moved by the national interest, filled by a desire to stimulate production or fired by a determination to rationalise investment. I just wanted to own some of those big black chimneys and deep golden furnaces.

I compiled an envious list of the great names of Sheffield steel—Osborne, Doncaster, Vickers, Tozer, Firth, Peach and Tyzack. I knew the gaunt grey houses they had built in the smoke-free south-western suburbs. I could recite lists of their overlapping directorships and recount which

grandfathers had played •' baccarat with Edward VII at Tranby Croft.

During the annual taxi-ride which completed my summer visit to Mablethorpe or Bridlington I travelled from the station with my nose pressed against the window, intoxicated by the billets and blooms in the stockyard below the station approach and hypnotised by the red glow that hung over the Wicker and Shaksmoor. I was in thrall to the steel-masters, to their steel and to the huge corrugated iron sheds in which they broke and bent it.

When I am old I shall certainly pretend that at twenty-one the finger of fate beckoned me home to Sheffield, and that replete with a new and shiny BSc (Econ.) I determined to become, if not a captain of my native industry, at• least a corporal. But it will be an old man's fantasy. I returned to home and steel simply because I was not sure of where else to go. My boyhood love affair with togging and stamping had been eroded by youthful cynicism and overlaid by an all-consuming passion for politics.

Throughout my finals year I had toyed with the nation's great manufacturing companies hoping—irrationally and vainly—that an academic miracle would free me from industry altogether. The miracle mirage faded, the Ford

'What sort of day have you had?'

Motor Company lost patience and five weeks before finals and seven before my wedding day

I was still potentially unemployed. Then it hap-

pened, the 'makers of high quality steel pressings, forging, extrusions and drop stamping: estab- lished 1781' came into my life. Undeterred by the unfavourable omen of appearing for inter- view at the Ellicency Department on the wrong day, I gave the managing director a short lec- ture on mobile lifting gear (having seen an advertising film the day before) and offered my services. The lecture apparently forgotten and the confusion of dates overlooked incredibly I was offered the job and began to re-create the relation-

ship that steel and I had once enjoyed. Having returned from the Trojan War I found my old love still waiting, weaving her endless tapestry of crankshafts, propeller blades, car valves and steel balls.

Sometimes it was easy to re-live the old emotions. At six o'clock in the morning it was the most romantic place in the world. The furnaces glowed a friendly red instead of the fearful white that they shone later in the day. The hammer drivers struck speculative blows and there was so much rolling of sleeves and flexing of muscles that it was possible to forget the holes in the roof and the oil on the floor and believe that every day brought a new technical breakthrough.

But for the rest of the day it was simply purgatory. For one thing, nobody really believed in graduates. There was a grudging acknowledg- ment of their existence, but an outright rejection of the notion that they could be helpful. I was a concession' to modernity and no one was going to waste time or money pretending anything else. In the early 'fifties some firms wasted their graduates' talents by flinging them into manage- ment innocent of any experience of the way their industry worked, believing that they had nothing more to learn. It was not so with me. I was taught nothing, not because I already knew enough, but because I was adjudged industrially ineducable.

There was the occasional period of character- building, usually a painful lesson in humility. One morning an Oxford historian and I poked about in a blocked-up drain with pieces of in- effectual wire. Most of the time I stood about watching other people work. Occasionally I held a stopwatch in my hand as part of an elaborate, but ill-fated, campaign to convince the workers that piecework rates were based on a more rational calculation than a shrewd guess at how little the management could get away with.

For long periods I did virtually nothing. I arrived each morning a little late but appreciably before other employees of my grade. The day began with tea made by an ex-submarine officer who, splendid in flat cap and long brown dust coat, then went off to fulfil his duties as heir apparent to the manager of the saw shop. 1 then read the previous day's Express and awaited instructions.

Sometimes they never came. Sometimes I did simple calculations with all the complicated pre- cision of a totally unnecessary slide rule. Some- times 1 looked at stock cards and sales records seeking to understand them in order that they might be improved. if they are better now than they were ten years ago, no credit is due to me. The secrets of only a few were vouchsafed to me. The occasional improvements that I recom- mended were invariably turned down. Often •I just talked to the 'lads,' elderly employees past hope and retirement, who shuffled about sweeping floors and making tea if there were no graduate trainees about to do it. We shared the despair

that comes from inactivity. The fearful prospect of becoming a 'lad' myself seemed at times to stare me in the face.

But it was not the sheer indestructible hope- lessness of it all that finished me. I could stand the refusal to employ engineers because of their tendency to agitate about new machinery, and I could survive in offices kept down to a dingy overcrowded minimum to ensure that executives were encouraged to 'get out into the works.' It was the uncongeniality that was beyond endurance. I was in daily contact with people who really did believe that art galleries hung Picassos upside down and no one knew the difference, who really did Suspect that all poets are homosexual and were certain that 'politics is a dirty business.' And then came Suez. The moralists who uslAallY., confined their wisdom to the proposition that all decent men and women are at home by half past ten found a new scope for their virtuous advice. One morning as I read Brideshead Revisited (carefully keeping it free from the bacon grease that ran out of the sandwich I was eating) a phone call told me of a job in adult education. I lost a hundred pounds a year but gained for almost the first time the approval of the management. 'You have made,' they said, 'a wise choice.'

I left with no regrets and little experience but two things remain. The first is the absolute con- viction that something must be done about the steel industry. The second is the, imperishable feeling that as far as I am personally concerned the steel-masters can keep it.