CHAPTER THREE
A Time-Served Engineer

Has anybody seen my hammer?

In 1907, when he was fifteen, Rudston began his apprenticeship in Lincoln, at the engineering firm of Clayton and Shuttleworth. This introduced him to the technologies of the internal combustion engine and also the gearbox; knowledge which was to be put to great use only a few years later.

He witnessed an incident at Clayton's that made a profound impression on him. A workmate had a heart attack and was on the floor in agony. The foreman came over and said two words:- 'Sack him'. The firm could avoid a compensation claim if the man died outside their employ. Rudston was deeply shocked. Although nominally a Tory, he was actually politically ambivalent, with marked, grass-roots socialist leanings all his life. I believe this incident was responsible in part for the great respect and regard he had for blue-collar workers and the care he took of them later in his life.

Rudston had digs with the head of the Cathedral maintenance team, in one of the gorgeous little terraced houses actually inside the Close. The two men became firm friends, and Lincoln Cathedral became one of the great loves of Rudston's life. Even in this relationship, he was learning; this time about structural engineering. It was a little joke of his that the beautiful nave pillars are actually concrete. They were falling apart in his time, and were pressure injected through holes drilled at the top and bottom. Rudston believed that this was the very first time the technique had been used. Rudston knew a great deal about what I consider to be England's loveliest Cathedral. I can only assume he must have spent a great deal of his spare time there, pottering about and listening to his beloved settings of Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis as rendered by the choir and Willis organ.

In 1908, Rudston left Lincoln to serve his time with the Great Northern Railway at Doncaster, probably because the standard of training given to railway apprentices was at that time regarded as the highest in the country.

The railways were top dog in engineering for around a hundred years. The reason is that a steam locomotive is deceptively simple; it is easy to make but extremely difficult to make well. On a multi-axled locomotive with connecting rods, everything has to be exactly right. Errors of a few degrees in the set of a wheel on its axle, or of little more than the thickness of a human hair in the length of a connecting rod or the 'throw' of a crank pin, compound up. Even the wheels have to be precision-turned to exactly the same diameter. Errors result in a bad locomotive; it runs roughly and noisily and wears quickly. And railways engineers, in the fierce spirit of competition between the railway companies of the time, were not in the business of making bad locomotives.

To make things even harder, everything is on such a gigantic scale, compared with the yardsticks of engineering today. For example, a lathe that can 'throw' a workpiece ten inches in diameter is considered average in size. The lathes at the country's great locomotive works had to be able to accommodate driving wheels that could be as much as ten FEET in diameter - and they had to be capable of the same precision as their more normal brethren. The only industry operating on a larger scale was the ship-building industry, and they, it has to be said, are largely strangers to great precision.

It therefore took a special breed of man to be a railwayman when Rudston began his apprenticeship with GNR in 1908. He could have chosen from three locomotive works; the Great Western's at Swindon, the newly-emerging Midland's at Derby and the Great Northern's at Doncaster. In the event, he opted to join the rough West Yorkshiremen who made the new breed of locomotives needed to serve the country's high-speed East Coast line from London to Edinburgh. They were, in fact, probably the best. They certainly considered themselves to be. They had only two standards: Either something was a 'reeght job' (that is, perfect) or it was scrap.

The standard of training at Doncaster was extremely good, though his workmates certainly didn't give Rudston an easy time. His cultured, public school voice stood out among the rough Yorkshire dialects and was cruelly mimicked. His tools were taken and hidden to provide an opportunity for mimicry of his plaintive 'Has anybody seen my hammer?'

His apprenticeship was normal; he first learned to use hand tools correctly and then spent a period in each of the work's departments to learn the skills appropriate to that particular trade. In the beginning, measuring aids such as micrometers were forbidden. Every thing had to be accomplished by hand, using only a precision steel rule and inside and outside callipers as measuring aids and the right file as the cutting tool. The ability to work accurately with such tools is the mark of a great fitter, and Rudston could file to an accuracy of two thousandth on an inch. It is a matter of feel. A workpiece has a very special sort of glide between the jaws of the callipers when it is exactly to size.

Rudston, I know, had to endure the ordeal of the hexagon. This is a sadistic training method; introduced at an early stage of apprentice training, probably because a man with minimal experience would have the sense not to try it. First, a piece of rolled steel plate is cut and filed to a perfect square. Next, it is draw-filed to remove the oxide and produce a mirror finish - and what a lovely finishing operation draw-filing is. Far more satisfying than rubbing with emery cloth. Then the apprentice has to cut and file a perfect hexagon in the exact centre of the square. This involves coating the steel plate with engineer's blue dye and scribing an exact hexagon from a perfectly-placed centre pop.

The apprentice then has to make a male hexagon from another piece of plate which is an exact fit in the hole he has cut, and will slide in place, in any of the six possible positions, with that 'glide' of a perfect fit akin to the feel of silk on a woman's thigh. And when the instructor holds the finished job up to the light, there must be no chinks anywhere.

It's impossible. Oh, it's easy enough to get a perfect fit in one of the six possible positions. Try the next one, and it won't go - or it will be tight. Ease it off, and it will be slack in the first position. There is no engineering exercise better for teaching the engineer the two fundamentals to his craft - infinite patience (measure twice and cut once) and the need for hand tools in perfect condition. How frustrating that a modern press tool can make the two parts to a perfect fit in about half a second.

I never saw a perfect hexagon, though I saw some goods ones (mine included). I never saw one of my sadistic instructors make one, either. But it is alleged that Sir Henry Royce could file a perfect hexagon, and that is significant later in our story.

Unskilled mechanics tend to regard files as very rough tools and abuse them accordingly. They are not; in the right hands, they are more precise in what they can do than a surgeon's scalpel. I had the same training as Rudston but was nowhere near as good as him. More than forty years later, I bought my first car and Rudston and I restored it between us. I remember that a tiny casting in the windscreen wiper motor was broken - a rather complicated three-dimensional structure. Rudston put an elastic band round the bits to hold them together, put them on the bench in front of him and filed up a replica from a scrap bit of brass, by eye alone. It worked first time. Later, I 'ran' a crankshaft bearing - rather a common happening in those days. The normal procedure was to take the car to a specialist machinist. Rudston crawled on his back under the car and 'felt' the crankpin with his outside callipers. He filed a piece of scrap steel to size as a gauge, which I took to the bearing shop. I remember their rather startled looks when I said 'Make me a new one to that'. It fitted perfectly. I did many thousands of miles on that bearing.

At the other end of the scale of precision engineering, Rudston learnt how to cast, using techniques unchanged from Abraham Darby's day. The making of a mould from a wooden pattern - an exact duplicate of the casting required - is akin to making a sandcastle on the beach. Exactly the right degree of dampness, and the sand holds together. The apprentices detailed for pouring carry the white hot ceramic crucible over to your mould, and for a few moments the world becomes a scene from Dante. Everything seems to be lit from beneath as the molten stream, so much brighter than the crucible itself, emerges and enters your mould in a cloud of smoke and steam. The radiant heat is intense. Then the agonised waiting, until the molten metal begins to emerge from the breather holes you have made in your mould. Has the mould collapsed? Is the casting porous? Will it crack as it cools (it often does)?

He also worked at the forge, heating iron and steel until it was malleable and beating it into immensely strong, intricate shapes. This is real man's work. My own instructor had hands like shovels with massive calluses which he would shave off with a pen knife every Friday to get some feeling back in his fingers so that he could enjoy his marital rights. A lovely man, and a great character.

Not all apprentice training is at the bench. There were classroom sessions on day release to Doncaster Polytechnic in which Rudston became a very proficient draughtsman and also learned the fundamentals of stress calculations in structures. It was there that Rudston developed a great love for craftsmen, and always spoke fondly of his Doncaster peers. He told me about a friend; the lad next to him in the training school who was a good fitter, but unfortunately suffered from the form of petit mal in which the mind blacks out for a few seconds and the body makes sudden convulsive movements. Rudston said that the trick was to gauge the length of his arm, add the length of the tool he was using at the time and make sure you were just that bit further away.

Discipline was harsh at Doncaster, working conditions atrocious and the hours were long - 7.30 a.m until 6 p.m. with a half-hour lunch break. Only three lavatory breaks were allowed per day, and these were timed. You had to clock out and in. It was just your bad luck if you had a stomach upset. Apparently, the lavatory wasn't much to write home about when you got there - just a plank of wood with holes in it, over a trough of running water. One merry prank Rudston described was to set fire to a newspaper and drop it in the trough at the input end. The payoff was the chorus of receding yelps as the paper moved down the line. Rudston lived in digs in Doncaster but I cannot recall him ever talking about them. I suspect this means that they were neither good nor bad.

Rudston regarded Edwardian England with its 'long garden party' as a very mediocre period in our history. This seems strange, because, from a distance of a century, the period appears to be one of intense technological creativity. Rudston, though, was (I suspect) referring to the decline in standards from those adhered to by the High Victorians. He saw the country move into foppishness and arrogance; Edwardians knew they were the greatest so there was no longer any need to take action to retain their lead. He lived through this period and not I, so I only have his word for it that it ended, not with the outbreak of war in 1914 but with the sinking of the Titanic on her maiden voyage in 1912. He spoke contemptuously of the impossible arrogance of sending a passenger ship to sea with a single-skinned hull, half-height bulkheads and an incomplete complement of lifeboats, and justifying engineering that was bad by any standards on the grounds that, since she was British, she must be unsinkable. He maintained that after the Titanic was lost, nothing was ever the same again.

Nevertheless, Edwardian England must have been an exciting, rewarding time for a teenage boy with mechanical aptitude and some means at his disposal. Our Industrial Revolution had placed Britain, and particularly England, well ahead of the rest of the world technologically, and hobbies were actively encouraged, not only by numerous small hobby specialists such as electrical shops and foundries, who plied much of their trade by mail order, but by a whole range of excellent, inexpensive publications that not only explained how things worked, but also how they could be made. Perhaps because the technologies of the period were relatively straightforward, boys were expected to make, not toys, but artefacts ranging from scale working models to full-scale replicas of the machines of the era. They could turn their hand to almost anything they chose: carpentry, telephones, electrical devices such as intricate lighting set-ups, dynamos and motors, steam, internal combustion and hot air engines and even motorised transport; in their chosen discipline, the publications showed them how to make all the parts they needed themselves. The builder of engines, for example, was expected to buy un-machined castings and finish them to close tolerances by hand or with simple machine tools.

Rudston, not surprisingly, favoured engines. He established his own workshop at home, with a little lathe driven from a treadle by a round belt and which cost him one guinea by mail order, and acquired a good set of hand tools. He built a very nice compound stationary steam engine and a Gauge 0 steam locomotive with oscillating cylinders, which I think was put together from a kit. I am told he actually built a car with the aid of his mother Alice, who did all the trim work. Rudston never threw anything away, and all these tools were still in his workshop, in apple-pie order, when he died.

Rudston was quite old enough to remember the earliest luxury cars; the old sleeve-valve Daimlers favoured by the Edwardian royal family of nearly a century ago (before anything German became rather suspect), proceeding in reasonable silence but often largely obscured in a cloud of white smoke. The 'Silent Knight' sleeve valve engines, an American design used by Daimler at this time, were very advanced in engineering terms, with two reciprocating sleeves surrounding the cylinders, but hard to make. Lubrication problems were never solved, so that the sleeves wore quickly and deposited engine oil in the exhaust ports. The Knight design was basically flawed, and the problem was ultimately solved by Rudston's friend, the great Harry Ricardo, who plays a significant role later in this book.

But the hand-built beauty of Edwardian cars, created regardless of expense by craftsmen for the elite, were not for the likes of Rudston. I have no record, in fact, that his family ever owned a car at all. To keep himself mobile, he had to make do with the many variations that were played on the theme of the motor cycle, in the days when safety was not a prime consideration. One of these was a contraption known as a forecar; the back end of a motor bike with the front replaced by a frame in which two people could sit side-by-side. The thing was steered by a tiller, and was absolutely lethal in a collision. Rudston travelled many miles as a passenger in one of these, and had a strange story to tell about it. One rainy night, the owner found it very hard to start, which he put down to the weather, and curiously unresponsive to the throttle on the way home. The following morning, he discovered that the carburettor had been stolen, and the thing was running on neat petrol, sucked in from the open end of the petrol pipe. Forecars were too risky for family men, and father's married peers moved the carriage for their wives to the nearside, giving birth to the motor bike and side car. When the little ones arrived, they occupied the side car and the wife was moved to the pillion.

Another hair-raising vehicle of the period was the cycle car, a four-wheeled device with a motor bike engine that a man with a little skill could put together himself. Cycle cars were often steered by Bowden cables, which were prone to break under stress, and were virtually brakeless. They were equipped with a sprag, a thing like a shooting stick attached to the chassis which the driver could let down if he stopped on a hill to discourage the car from rolling backwards. On a steep hill, father told me that the car often overran the sprag and was then unstoppable. The thing to do then was to abandon ship.

When he had served his time, therefore, Rudston was an unusually skilled engineer, with expertise in most of the disciplines of the day. He continued with the Great Northern as a locomotive inspector and assistant engineer until 1914, during which time he achieved every Edwardian schoolboy's ambition of learning to drive a steam locomotive. He did the usual spell as fireman before qualifying as driver. He told me about his fireman, a rather melancholy man who rarely spoke, and whose lunch was invariably a meat pie that the man would heat by putting it on his shovel and holding it in the firebox. Once, Rudston earned very low marks by turning on the blast to draw up the fire during this process. The pie disappeared through the boiler tubes, and the fireman retained his resentment for some considerable time.

From his reminiscences, it was quite clear that Rudston's time with the outspoken Yorkshiremen of the Great Northern was supremely happy. He retained a deep love for all things Yorkshire for the remainder of his life (perhaps not surprising for a man born in Filey). But the world that was supposed to last forever had changed forever. The dark clouds gathering over Europe; the stupidity of the ridiculous jingoism of the era, must have seemed another world to Rudston. When war was declared in 1914, he joined the Royal Navy as a leading mechanic, but ships were not to be his destiny. The newly-formed Royal Flying Corps, then effectively an army regiment, provided opportunities for commissions for time-served engineers. In 1915 he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the RFC. And the pages of history had begun to turn.


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