The five years

Nearly every man on the roll call arrived the same way: a letter, an interview, an indenture. The apprenticeship at the Tank ran five years, from the day a boy left school at fourteen until the works called him a man at twenty one, and everything about it was designed to turn a boy who wanted to drive engines into a tradesman who could build them.

The letter and the desk

The old site's own apprentice memoir keeps the sequence exactly. A boy applied to British Railways at Gorton Tank, got a letter asking him to attend with his father, and walked down the corridor of the main offices on Cornwall Street to a desk larger than anything his house contained. Two things from that interview stayed with the apprentice forty years later: being told that train spotting was nothing like working on locomotives, and the moment a schoolboy understood the works was hiring him to make engines, not to admire them. The distinction was the whole point of the five years.

The indenture

An indenture bound both sides. The boy gave five years and his father's signature; the works gave a trade. The wage was small and rose by year, the hours were the works' hours, and the indenture said plainly what the works expected: time kept, tools respected, trades learned in the order the works set, not the order the boy fancied. The indenture was the first entry the works wrote about a man, and it stayed on the file for the whole of his service.

The round of the shops

An apprentice did not sit in one shop for five years. The works moved him: a spell on the bench learning the file and the scraper, a spell on the lathes, time in the erecting shop watching engines assembled from the parts he had helped cut, time with the inspectors learning what the gauge forgave and what it did not. The round was the syllabus. A tradesman who had only ever seen his own bench was half a tradesman, and the works knew it.

The men who taught him

The teachers were the foremen and the older fitters, and the roll call remembers them by name and nickname: the head foreman of the machine shop, the foremen under him, the fitters whose benches the apprentice stood beside. What a boy learned from them was not only the trade. He learned when to speak, when to hold the light still, when a joke was allowed and when it was not, and which of the works' hundred small hierarchies he now belonged to.

What five years made

At twenty one the indenture ended and the works called him a journeyman: a fitter and turner who could be trusted with the motion of an engine at sixty miles an hour. Some stayed forty years. Others took the trade out into the world. Either way the five years were the works' longest investment, and the book keeps them as the entry the whole roll call hangs on.

The five years, measured

Five years of an apprenticeship is five winters of dark mornings at the gate, five summers of a shop too hot for the job, and roughly thirteen hundred days of the hooter. The memoir of the Tank's last apprentices measures the term differently: in the trades learned, the foremen survived, the mistakes that stayed with the man long after the works forgave them. A five-year term was also the works' deepest form of record-keeping. It filed a boy under a trade, a shop, a foreman and a year-group, and it filed him so well that the roll call sixty years later still reads him under the same entry.

The entry, checked

The surviving memoir of a 1960 apprenticeship, kept by the earlier gorton-tank.com site, is the spine of this entry, set against the published record of the works itself in the sources below.