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A Record of the BAGE Family History In response to a request in the Newcastle Evening
Chronicle for articles about memories of the first day at work, for the magazine
‘Remember When’, I wrote the following article which was published along
with others in 2002. (John Bage - website author) My First Day at the Office
By John Bage When I was at school in the early sixties one third of my lessons were related to technical subjects. Whilst my classmates dreamed of sailing off to distant shores in the Merchant Navy I was quite happy to do what I liked best, and that was Technical Drawing. I wanted to be a Draughtsman and I never considered doing anything else. I wrote to local firms where I
thought they would have a Drawing Office and soon had an interview with a Mr
Chisholm, the Personnel Manager of John Readhead & Sons, a long-established
Shipbuilding Yard in South Shields on the River Tyne. These were the days when
there were plenty of ship orders around, and the yard was a hive of activity and
offering excellent future prospects. I was offered a position as an
Apprentice Draughtsman and was to start in two weeks. I wasn’t too nervous on
the first day as I was pleased to have what was considered in those days to be a
good job with a reasonable salary
and conditions. For my first weeks pay I proudly took home £3 8s 8d, half of
which I gave to my mother for my ‘keep’, and I still had something left at
the end of the week. I was required to wear a suit and tie, and polished shoes,
as were all the other staff, but it was O.K. to take the jacket off when
working. Swearing was discouraged and respect was to be given to older staff and
management. In fact when the Managing Director, Harold Towers came round on an
inspection the place was so quiet you could easily hear a pin drop. The drawing office was in a very old building. It smelled of stale tobacco smoke, but that was acceptable in those days as nearly everyone smoked. The walls were all wood panelled and there were only a few draughty, single glazed sash windows giving very little natural light. Large canopies with fluorescent lights in them hung down on chains from the ceiling, over every drawing desk. These desks were large, heavy wooden sets of plan storage drawers with horizontal tops to which the drawings were pinned. The drawings themselves were produced in ink on a waxed linen which had to be pinned and stretched out on the desk top and then rubbed over with powdered chalk. One tedious task the apprentices had to do was to scrape a block of chalk to ensure sufficient powder was available for everyone. I remember one morning an older draughtsman said the coffee, which was made by apprentices twice a day, tasted like chalk. He was overheard by one of the trainees, who duly made the afternoon coffee for the complainer with a liberal dose of powdered chalk and which he drank without comment. The office turned out to be very
friendly and in fact was more like family, something I haven’t really
experienced in any of the many drawing offices I have worked in over the last 36
years. My years there were a pleasure and I met some very fine people who became
a source of encouragement for me for the rest of my life. I will never forget the sights
and sounds of the shipyard as the steel plates were formed into magnificent
ships which would go on to sail around the world to so many different places for
years to come. We were so proud of every one of them. The people in the
North-East shipyards were unique, and this has been said many times by many
people. I can confirm that they were very special from my years working with so
many of them in and around the shipyards of the Tyne and Wear. Nowadays I work in an
air-conditioned office, sitting on a padded swivelling chair, at an ultra modern
desk, and use a state-of-the art, powerful computer to produce drawings by
creating 3D Parametric Models. We have come a long way from the conditions of
that first office I started in, to the present-day working environment. But
there have been changes in people too, and how they relate to each other.
Nowadays people sitting within a few metres of one another often communicate
with each other by internal e-mail. The lunch-break no longer features a
thriving card school, but instead individuals play games by themselves on their
P.C's. That ‘family’ feeling so apparent in my first job doesn't seem to
have a place in modern times. Our society has advanced tremendously in terms of technology since I first started work in the shipyard drawing office, but it is so very sad to see how people relationships have deteriorated in just 36 years. Fortunately for me I have fond memories of that first office and my first job in the ‘grown-up’ world. |
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