VETERANS OF INDUSTRY

Kaikoura Star, Volume LXX, Issue 51, 6 July 1950, Page 4

VETERANS OF INDUSTRY

ENGINEERING SKILL BEHIND INDUSTRIAL MIDLANDS. Laurence Stapley, a talks producer in the BBC’s Far Eastern Service, recently went to a party that was surely unique. The eight hundred guests at this enormous gathering were all elderly people who in the course of their lives had given fifty or more years of service to one firm. Not all these veterans of industry had worked for the same firm, but ail shared the distinction of long service. One man at the party had been employed for fifty-one years by a firm of axe makers: they must have expected him to turn out a stayer for his father had worked for them for sixty-nine years and his for seventy-six years, whilst twenty-nine other members of the same family had also been their employees. Stapley talked to those veterans of industry, and said that when lie met them he realised, as he never had before, “the long years of traditional engineering skill behind the products that come from the industrial Midlands of Great Britain,”