Safety First, Safety Last...

I guess in some ways BT did a good job on this often reluctant and frankly usually unclubbable son of the Midlands. I have found myself watching voluntarily, this evening, workshop safety videos on YouTube. This might seem sad or even risible at first hearing, but I think on balance that it's better to stay alive and as physically intact for as long as is humanly possible; given my continued usage of frankly quite scary and intimidating machinery. I also wear steel-toe-caps when doing any work at home; even in the garden and never, ever wear jewellery using power tools: I've seen some pretty 'orrid HSE videos at work, pre-retirement...

Most of my workshop lessons and experience started at home, watching my old man in the workshop; later tinkering in there on my own. But my first day at Lordswood School introduced me to a lot of common sense workshop safety stuff through the estimable personage of one Mr. 'Dicky' Betts, my metalwork teacher, in the first actual class I had there: three periods of metalwork on the first afternoon. The whole of that first afternoon was devoted to metalwork: the school at that point was still designated a 'Technical School'; ie aimed at producing engineers to enter the industries we still had in those days, in Birmingham in particular and focussing on all the subjects that it entailed.

The school quickly mutated into a bog-standard 'grammar school' over the next couple of years, but initially the engineering focus was right at the forefront. With Betts, we learned the basic skills that factory apprentices would learn: from marking-up, filing, tinplate work; right through to hot metal forging, lathe work, casting and so on.

That first lesson's first lesson was the most basic of basic workshop safety: blazer off and tuck your tie into your shirt [school uniforms were still a big thing, then] and roll your sleeves up. I got my first house-points [an archaic, pseudo-public school contrivance adopted by aspiring state schools] that afternoon from Mr. Betts, because I rolled my shirt-sleeves up well past my elbows: just like the old man always did when he was working. Those early lessons and fifteen years of HSE indoctrination in BT have stuck with me. I still have all my fingers and toes at the last count. Long may it continue, even if it does mean watching some frankly boring, if extremely worthwhile, videos.