SKILLED BUT UNLETTERED

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 49, 26 August 1938, Page 18

SKILLED BUT UNLETTERED

A curious story was told in a case in Devonshire of a boy who pleaded that he passed a "Halt" road sign because he could not read and on whose behalf it was said that it was true that ha could riot read but that he was a clever mathematician,, says a "Manchester Guardian" correspondent. Such a case is not unprecedented. I remember a good many years ago talking with a man who had worked for a public works contractor who had undertaken considerable railway and other contracts. As was the case with most of those men in the earlier days, this contractor was illiterate. Most of them had risen from very small beginnings as bricklayers, carpenter-s, and so forth in an age when "schooling" was much more difficult to come by than now. With great labour this man could just sign his name; contracts and letters were read to him; but he had a remarkable faculty for mental arithmetic, if that adequately explains what seemed almost an ' instinct. He could look at a piece of brickwork and estimate its content without measuring it, and he could also tell its value at so much the cubic foot. And my informant liked to add: "You'd 'aye to get up mighty early in the morninV mister, to get the better of old 'X,'"