The Yorkshire Film Archive collects, preserves, and shows film made in, or about Yorkshire. Our collections are non-fiction, dating from the 1890s to the present day, and providing a rich and visually compelling record of all aspects of lives, cultures, landscape, industries, major events and everyday activities, many of which are available to watch, free of charge, on our website.
This film is part of Free
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.
From the collection of:
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.
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