The Apprentice? Not Hired

My father is an expert at outings. Not for us the day out at Legoland or Thorpe Park. When my father organised a day out it would be to somewhere much more exciting, like the Royal Mail’s underground railway, Whitefriars glass blowers, or the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. Today’s panegyric is inspired by a trip he and I once took to the Englefield pewter works in the East End.


Englefield is now defunct and I forget exactly which year we made the trip. However, it can only have been a few years before the demise of the Bethnal Green institution that had been a major presence on Cheshire Street since 1700. It had by then fallen into the ownership of the Malaysian firm Royal Selangor and the concern was clearly doomed, but it was a fascinating visit nonetheless. The men there were craftsmen who had taken the best part of their lifetimes to acquire their skills and the chief of them was the ‘father of the shop;’ a true master craftsman.

He was way past retirement age, though he looked like he had no plans to give up his life’s work, but, in the absence of a pulsating aura, jar of ambrosia, winged helmet, or other outwardly visible signs of immortality, I asked him what would happen when he did retire. “This place will close.” He replied. Naturally I asked him why. “Because there is no one else to take over.” Could not, I remonstrated, one of the other craftsmen take over? “Yes, but who would take over from them. Each task has a man that does it, and there are no apprentices.” Why, I crashed on, were there no apprentices. “Because the young men of the East End do not want to work here. They would prefer to sell mobile phones.”

Work and education in Britain are scarred by our culture’s wider obsession with class. Just as we are fixated with the idea that more and more people should go to university, regardless of whether university is good for them, or they are good for university, we are equally blind to the other side of the coin. People who would be better off not going to university should do the things that better suit them, which would be good for them and good for everyone else too.

I once asked my father what was meant by the professions. A professional, he opined, was someone who would give you advice that was not necessarily in their own best interests; the surgeon who tells you not to go under the knife, the solicitor who warns you that you will lose your suit. I have always treasured this definition for the joyous reason that it means that journalists, bankers and estate agents are not members of the ‘professions’, whatever they may like to think.

Anyway, the point being that professional employment in England enjoys higher status than vocational, or artisanal activity, despite the fact that many people in vocational occupations earn considerably more than many people regarded as being in professional occupations. Put another way, activities regarded as being more like the ‘professions’ stand higher than those that resemble them less. Engineering is perhaps a fine example. In Germany an engineer is regarded as a high status individual. In the UK he or she is not, with the result that the term is often applied to a man with a spanner or a screwdriver, who in no way is in possession of anything approaching an engineering qualification than a spanner or a screwdriver. The man who comes to install your telephone is, by no stretch of the imagination an engineer.

Brewing provides another example. In Germany brewing is recognised as a skilful activity and is awarded high status as a result. In a German town the brewer shares the status of the doctor, or the mayor. In England it is seen as a technical activity and therefore of lower status. It is rare, therefore, in the UK for a qualified brewer to be on the board of directors of a brewing firm. Incredibly, then, the vast majority of beer drunk in Britain today is made by companies run by people who know almost nothing about the products they make. A fact one’s sense of taste daily confirms. This theme I shall return to on other days.

Another pet theme of mine is that manufacturing creates wealth, but that services merely move it around. Making items out of pewter creates wealth. Making mobile phones creates wealth. Selling mobile phones does not. Mobile phones are more twenty-first century than pewter tankards and we should not continue to make pewter tankards merely because we have been making them since 1700. However, if we are going to abandon manufacture in pewter and at the same time decide that we are not going to manufacture mobile phones, then we had better have a very good idea of how we are going to earn our place in the world, because the old mantra of the Thatcherites that ‘services’ would take over from manufacturing has been exposed, if anyone missed the 2008 banking crash, as the big lie of the ‘greed is good’ generation.

Englefields didn’t close because its products were no longer suited to the times. Sales in 1987, for example, were 120% up on 1986. It closed because even in a depressed area of London where jobs were scarce, potential apprentices saw unskilled sales roles that involved wearing a suit as higher status than learning an ancient craft. Our nation’s peculiar class system predates London ‘s pewter industry, but perversely we have consigned the one – which was profitable – to the dustbin of history, whilst the other – which makes our country less profitable – continues to pervert and distort our employment markets and education system to the detriment of us all.