Bristol Technical School, Bristol

By Hand and Brain

Bristol Technical School began not as a school at all but as an evening class for working men. It traced its origins to 1856 and the founding of the Bristol Artisans' Institute, a modest venture of the mechanics'-institute movement then sweeping the industrial towns of Britain, in which tradesmen, fitters and apprentices gathered after their long working days to learn mechanical drawing, mathematics and the principles of the machines they spent their lives operating. Its founding spirit was an autodidact engineer named Ezra Wishart, a millwright's son who had taught himself geometry by candlelight and believed, with the fierce conviction of the self-improved, that a working man's mind was worth educating quite as much as a gentleman's.

For four decades the Institute led a hand-to-mouth existence on subscriptions and goodwill, until the wider nation caught up with Wishart's idea. The Technical Instruction Act of 1889, and the so-called "whisky money" that followed it, at last allowed local authorities to fund technical education from the public purse, and in 1893 the old Institute was reconstituted and properly endowed as the Bristol Municipal Technical School, moving into purpose-built premises of red brick and iron in the industrial east of the city, hard by the railway and within smell of the docks.

It took for its motto three plain English words — By Hand and Brain — and the choice was deliberate. A mile across the city, the ancient grammar school carried its elegant Latin pun and trained the sons of merchants for the universities and the professions; the technical school answered it with a phrase borrowed from the dignity of labour, a flat refusal of the old notion that thinking and making were separate things done by separate classes of men. The two institutions stood, for more than a century, as Bristol's two competing ideas of what an education was for: the one polishing minds for the drawing room and the bar, the other arming hands and heads for the workshop and the slip. The city needed both, and esteemed them very differently, and the technical school spent its whole existence quietly insisting that the difference was a prejudice rather than a fact.

The Workshops of an Industrial City

In its first decades the school was the industrial city in miniature, and its curriculum read like an inventory of how Bristol made its living. It trained fitters and turners for the engineering works, draughtsmen and pattern-makers, electricians and instrument men; it taught the chemistry of the great tobacco factories where so many of its pupils' mothers and sisters worked, the carpentry and ropework of the docks, and the signalling and permanent-way craft of a city that had been one of the cradles of the railway age. Day classes filled with apprentices sent in by their employers mixed with evening classes filled with grown men improving themselves on their own time and their own shilling.

The defining connection of the school's twentieth century arrived in 1910, when the Bristol Aeroplane Company was founded at Filton on the city's northern edge and an entirely new industry began clamouring for skilled hands. Under its long-serving Edwardian principal, Joseph Marwood, the school threw itself into the new aeronautics, and a steady river of its fitters, riggers and sheet-metal men flowed out to the Filton sheds to build the aircraft that would carry Bristol's name around the world. For three generations the fortunes of the school and the fortunes of the aircraft works were bound tightly together, and to have trained at the technical school was, for a great many Bristol families, the first rung of a ladder that led to the most exacting and best-paid skilled work the city had to offer.

Among the men formed in this era was Cyril Beddoe, a labourer's son who entered the school as an apprentice fitter, taught himself stress analysis in its evening classes, and rose to become one of the unsung design engineers of the Filton works, his name on no aircraft but his calculations inside a good many of them. He was the kind of figure the school produced in quiet abundance and the wider world never noticed: not the gentleman-engineer of the universities, but the practical, self-made man who actually knew how the metal behaved.

Two Wars and the Aeroplane

The two world wars made the school's value suddenly, urgently plain. In both conflicts it ran at full stretch and round the clock, turning out fitters, machinists and inspectors for the munitions works and, above all, for the aircraft industry on which Bristol's war effort so largely depended. Its workshops never went dark; its instructors taught war-emergency courses to anyone the factories could spare, and the ordinary distinction between pupil and worker dissolved into a single national scramble for skill.

The Second World War brought women through its doors in numbers for the first time, as the call-up emptied the workshops of men and the aircraft factories turned in desperation to anyone who could be trained to rivet, wire and machine. Among them was Edna Pomeroy, a draper's assistant who walked into the school's wartime classes knowing nothing of engineering and walked out an aircraft inspector at Filton, and who, when the men came home and most of the women were quietly let go, fought her way back into the trade and qualified, years later, as one of the first women the school ever certified in engineering. She used to say that the war had let her in by the back door and she had simply declined to leave by it.

The war touched the school in harder ways too. The German raids that fell on Bristol in the winter of 1940 and 1941 were aimed squarely at the docks and the aircraft works, and the industrial districts around the school were among the most heavily bombed in the city; the school lost outbuildings, windows and, on one terrible night, two of its evening-class apprentices, killed in a raid on their way home. It patched itself up, as the city did, and carried on training the hands the war was consuming.

The Middle Child

The Education Act of 1944 ought to have been the making of the school, and was instead its quiet tragedy. The Act divided the nation's secondary education into three supposedly equal kinds — the grammar school for the academic, the secondary modern for the rest, and, between them, the secondary technical school for the practically gifted — and Bristol Technical School duly took its place as one of the new technical schools, charged with educating the skilled technicians and craftsmen on whom a modern economy would depend.

It was a noble idea that the nation never properly funded. The secondary technical schools were always the rarest and poorest-supported tier of the three, starved of buildings and status while the grammar schools took the cream and the prestige, and a boy who arrived at the technical school did so, more often than not, having "failed" the eleven-plus examination for the grammar — labelled a second choice before he had laid a single tool to a single bench. The school spent the post-war decades waging a stubborn, dignified campaign against that label, insisting to every boy who came through its gates that the ability to make a thing well was not a consolation prize but a calling, and turning out, year after year, the toolmakers, technicians and skilled tradesmen who actually built the prosperity the grammar-school boys would later take the credit for managing.

It produced, in these years, men like Walter Gane, a docker's son and technical-school product who went into the trade-union movement and rose to lead his union nationally, and who never made a speech about working people without reminding his audience that he had been taught his self-respect, along with his trade, in a Bristol technical school that the country had never thought worth paying for properly. The grievance in that remark was the school's grievance too, and it was a just one.

The Tide Goes Out

The settlement of 1944 did not last, and what replaced it served the school no better. The comprehensive reorganisation that swept English education from the middle of the 1960s dismantled the tripartite system, and the secondary technical schools, never numerous and never loved by the planners, were among its first casualties; most were closed or folded into comprehensives. Bristol Technical School survived only by reinventing itself, merging its secondary work into the city's further-education provision and clinging to its workshops and its purpose while the ground shifted beneath it.

Worse than any reform was the slow disaster of deindustrialisation. The world the school had been built to serve came apart within a single generation. The city docks fell silent and closed to commercial traffic; the great tobacco factories contracted and shut; and at Filton the aircraft industry, after its long glory of fighters and airliners and a share in the building of Concorde, slid into decline, shedding the skilled jobs that had been the school's reason for existing until, in time, even the famous runway fell quiet. A technical school is only ever as strong as the industries that need its leavers, and as Bristol's making and mending economy hollowed out, the school spent two bleak decades watching its purpose drain away, training fewer and fewer young people for work that existed in smaller and smaller quantity.

Reinvention

That it survived at all was a testament to the stubbornness Ezra Wishart had bred into it. It reinvented itself more than once to stay alive: it spent a stretch of the late twentieth century as one of the new technical colleges, was for a time refounded as a city technology college in the wave of such institutions in the late 1980s, and was at last, in the early 2010s, refounded again as a university technical college, sponsored by a city university and by the aerospace and engineering employers who had belatedly rediscovered that a nation which makes nothing has nothing to sell. In this final incarnation it returned, with a certain weary vindication, to almost exactly the purpose Wishart had given it in 1856 — the practical education of fourteen- to nineteen-year-olds for real work in engineering, construction, rail and the trades — as though the country had spent a century and a half arguing its way back to where the technical school had been standing all along.

It went on, in this renewed form, sending its leavers out into the engineering firms and the building sites and the railways of the region and beyond, among them, in the middle of the 2010s, a quiet, practical track layer named Adolfo James Forte, whose later road would carry him a very great deal further than the school's records would ever know.

The Honour of Making

The school never won the argument it spent its life having. It was always the poorer and the plainer of Bristol's two great educational ideas, always the second choice in a country that said it valued skill and persistently paid and praised it as though it did not, always fighting to be seen as a calling rather than a consolation. And yet across more than a century and a half it had done something the city could not have done without: it had taken the children of dockers and factory hands and labourers, and had given them, along with a trade, the unfashionable and durable conviction that to make a thing well with one's own hands and head was an honourable way to spend a life. Ezra Wishart had built it on that single idea, and stripped of every reform and reinvention the idea had never altered. By hand and brain, the old motto had said, and the school had spent its whole existence proving, against the grain of a country that kept forgetting it, that the two belonged together.