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Opportunity for Youth

Future scourge of the trade unions, Robert Carr, observes new engineering apprentices when there were indeed many more opportunities for youth in manufacturing industry.

Promotional 1958 6 mins

From the collection of:

Logo for Yorkshire Film Archive

Overview

The later employment secretary under Ted Heath, Robert Carr, here gets a chance to see some young machine makers at work in a newly opened apprentice school for Forgrove Machinery Company at their Dewsbury Road works in Leeds in 1958. Made at a time when apprentice schools in engineering were much more plentiful, the film makes for interesting comparisons with the current school leaving situation, when the issue of apprenticeships is back on the political agenda.

Forgrove Machinery Company, which made packaging machinery, had opened a new works at Seacroft on the other side of Leeds in 1957. These apprentices, about 30 that year, may have been recruited to produce the new “Flowpak” machine at Dewsbury Road, designed to wrap ice lollies. It was claimed that it was, “A school where a 15-year-old ex-secondary modern school boy sits with a public school boy and both have an equal chance of rising to a seat on the board of directors”. At the time Robert Carr was a junior at the Ministry of Labour, and although he may not have had much factory experience, having attended Westminster School and Cambridge, he did have a metallurgy degree and his family had a metal engineering firm.