Engineering Education and German U-Boat Engines: Colin's Memories of the Generator

Stories and Memories: an interview with Colin Salsbury

Colin Salsbury joined Loughborough Technical College in 1963, teaching engineering subjects to apprentices from local firms. In this interview, he shares his memories of teaching at the Frederick Street building during a time of industrial growth in Loughborough, and offers unique insights about the German U-boat engines that once powered the Generator.

Colin Salsbury, interviewed by Pasha Kincaid

Q: Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and what your connection is with the Generator building?

Colin: I might begin by saying that when I came to work in Loughborough, it was just after the original Loughborough College had divided up into four separate entities. One of these was Loughborough College of Further Education, which later changed its name to Loughborough Technical College. It taught mainly apprentices who had left school and were employed by local firms, and I taught them engineering subjects of various kinds.

Q: Do you know what firms might have employed them?

Colin: Yes, the principal employer of apprentices was the Brush company. At the time I joined their staff, we were told that Brush had taken on that year an additional 70 apprentices on top of what it was already training. They really expanded the scope of their training program, so our department had to expand its staff considerably to cope. There were other firms in Loughborough that provided a fair number of apprentices—one of them was the crane makers Herbert Morris, and also the textile firm that made knitting machines called Cottons.

That meant that the staff in the College of Further Education expanded by about 30 members, and I was fortunate to be one of them.

Q: Approximately what year was that?

Colin: I think it was 1963.

Q: Were you teaching in the building on Frederick Street, at the corner of Frederick Street and Pack Street?

Colin: Some of the time I was. The rest of the time was mostly spent in the building on Green Close Lane, on the right-hand side as you go away from the town centre.

Q: Were you in the front part of the building that faces onto Frederick Street or the back part of the building that faces onto Pack Street?

Colin: The entrance I used was the one on Pack Street. There was a staircase that took me to the very top of the building, where I taught engineering drawing to first-year apprentices who hadn't really done very much in that direction.

Q: Was that on a mezzanine level?

Colin: No, it was a floor with separate classrooms in it. There was another entrance on Frederick Street where there was a lift to all floors, but we were not encouraged to use that because it meant cutting through other people's classrooms to get to the place where I taught.

Q: What sort of things were you teaching in that particular room?

Colin: I taught the basic principles of engineering drawing. It was more to encourage or improve their ability to read drawings that they were given, rather than to actually make them—although some of them had ambitions to become engineering draftsmen.

Q: What kind of memories do you have of being there?

Colin: It's a bit remote now, but as far as I can remember, the students were always a bit distracted by what they could see from the windows at the top of this very tall building. One view was into the art college buildings on William Street, which included the room where one of the models prepared for a life class—which was a big distraction to my students!

Q: Has being part of the Generator building influenced your life in any way, for example, your working life?

Colin: Not really. Eventually, the College of Further Education, which became known as the Technical College, acquired premises in the new buildings erected on Radmoor Road, and we nearly all moved to that site. Life was a bit more coherent then.

Q: Did you have an awareness of the actual physical generators in the space, or had they been moved by then?

Colin: The engines had been removed as far as I can remember, but some of the switchgear was still in position and control gear for the electrical system. They were rather unusual because of their origins as U-boat engines that had been dismantled as one of the prizes of the First World War.

I believe the engines were made by a firm called MAN, which is quite well known in Germany.

Q: Have you been to the factory?

Colin: Yes, I've been to Germany as a private visitor.

Q: What's their specialism?

Colin: They principally make very large diesel engines of this calibre or even bigger for ships. A lot of ships use what we would call heavy oil engines rather than diesel engines, but that's the principle on which they operated. They had two factories, one in Augsburg and one in Nuremberg. "MAN" stands for "Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg," meaning engineering factories in Augsburg and Nuremberg.

These engines would have been built in that firm's operation. They were instrumental in providing facilities for Dr. Diesel to experiment with his invention when it first emerged. Before then, there hadn't been any diesel engines, and Dr. Diesel was given facilities by this firm. So it's been quite interesting to follow the fortunes and to note that some of them ended up in Loughborough.

Q: I understand you taught students from different parts of the world. Can you tell us about that?

Colin: I had a group of Arab students who were sponsored by one of the oil companies—I think it was Shell. They lived in what is now known as the West Bank in Israel. They were very industrious and insisted at one point on having their photograph taken with me so they could show it to people back in Israel.

I do remember one of them, their leading light really, had a surname which I recognised when there was some recent disturbance in the West Bank. I think it was a relative of his—I hope he's not suffering as a result of it.

Q: How did they cope linguistically? Did they all speak English?

Colin: They all spoke English adequately. In fact, I think it was a requirement to start on the course. I'm afraid I couldn't speak their language.

Q: What was the teaching methodology at the time?

Colin: Very much "chalk and talk," but a lot of the course I taught them—physics actually—was in a physics laboratory, so a lot of practical work was done there. The students that came from these Middle Eastern countries were not very capable in the laboratory; they hadn't done very much practical work, even though they'd got up to virtually what we'd call O-Level to enter the course.

We ended up having to connect up electric circuits for them because they didn't know how to go about it. Gradually they got used to it.

Q: How old were the various students?

Colin: The students from Middle Eastern countries varied a good deal, depending on the oil company's selection system. The apprentices that were working for Brush and Herbert Morris would have just left school, so they were about 16.

Q: With it being a technical college, was that related to the old grammar school system?

Colin: Not really, no. The system is called "further education," meaning people who continued education after leaving formal school training.

Q: Were the apprentices then guaranteed a job?

Colin: If they were apprentices, it was almost guaranteed, yes. But I didn't always teach apprentices. Like these Arab students—no doubt they would be entering into jobs that the oil company had prepared for them.

Q: Did you meet any of the art school tutors? Was there any relationship or connection between the different schools?

Colin: Not really. We met them socially once or twice. I used to dine in a refectory where I was often at the same table with some art staff, and we were always on very good terms. But apart from that, there was no academic interchange—except in the family way! [Laughs]

Q: Could you tell us a little bit about the garage in the building?

Colin: The garage we inherited from the old automobile engineering department that had gone to the university. Our head of department, Mr. Jeffcott, had been in touch with representatives of the garage trade, and a lot of them were anxious that they should pass on the eventual management and ownership of their prosperous businesses to their sons who wanted to follow in their footsteps.

So Mr. Jeffcott proposed that we should run a course under the auspices of an industrial body called the Institute of the Motor Industry (IMI). They prepared syllabuses, and he laid on a course for these young men who worked full-time on their courses—they weren't part-time like the apprentices. I taught them for a long while, introducing them to basic engineering science principles.

That continued even after we'd moved to the Radmoor Road premises. But they used this garage workshop in the building at the corner of Pack Street to do their practical work on various vehicles, including vehicles of members of staff if they were brave enough to bring them in. We often took our car in and had the oil changed or whatever else, routine maintenance.

They had one or two vehicles of their own, but they were always ready to do it for members of staff at their own risk, of course. The students were very well organised and would do this routine maintenance. They'd perhaps change tyres for you and things like that.

Q: Tell us about the early computer that arrived at the college.

Colin: This was not housed in this building—it was housed in the building on Green Close Lane. It was redundant. I think it was called an ACE computer, and I don't know who designed, built, or even owned it, but it was considered scrap because better ones were now being used.

Because it was going spare, Mr. Jeffcott, I believe, put in a bid for it and had it installed. It occupied a room bigger even than this room in which we're sitting now. That was one single computer, and not a very good one at that. Not many members of staff learned how to handle it, and it was considered obsolete quite soon.

I might say that at the buildings we took over in the Radmoor site, we installed another computer that was redundant in somebody's works, and we called it the "kitchen units" because they looked like so many kitchen units with the works all out of sight inside. They filled a room about as big as this one—so much more compact than the old computer. We had to start from small beginnings.

Q: Do you have any other memories of the Frederick Street building?

Colin: I did attend—we occasionally had to take an evening class, for which we got time off during the day. For one year, I had to take a group of apprentices for this evening class on the first floor of this building, in just an ordinary classroom and not one I was familiar with.

The subject I had to pursue was a background study of a television broadcast that evening. I remember when the students arrived, rather grumpily having to be there in the evening, one of them said, "Why can't we have Top of the Pops on?" So I explained that it was to enhance their learning, and we did the other work instead. That was one evening a week for a whole year.

Q: Was it the same night that Top of the Pops would have been on?

Colin: It was indeed, yes. They were having to miss it, you see, and were very resentful and not very attentive to the work that I was trying to pursue.

Q: What else was being taught in that building, as far as you knew?

Colin: I believe the electrical engineering department—we had an electrical engineering department as well as mechanical engineering, which I belonged to—I believe they had some of the accommodation on the first and possibly the second floor, but I don't really know very much about it.

Q: When did the move to Radmoor Road happen?

Colin: We did a bit of double-ended work. We took over part of the building at Radmoor while we were still using buildings at the town centre. We used to jokingly refer to teaching staff who had classes in both rather distantly separated areas and always had to trot rather to get from one accommodation to the other.

Gradually we got everybody up to the new premises, and I don't know quite what happened to this building then. The art college got a grip on it, I think.

Q: How did you feel about your son studying art with you having been an engineer?

Colin: Oh, I didn't mind at all. He became very good at it, I might say.

Q: Was it quite unusual in that era for somebody to choose the path of art?

Colin: Well, the art college was quite a thriving body. It had a lot of support from the local director of education, who was rather proud of the fact he had a thriving art school in Loughborough, so he would give it a lot of support, of which some of us were rather envious. As one of my colleagues said, it was "the apple of his eye." I think his name was Stuart Mason in those days.

Q: Were there many female tutors at that time?

Colin: Yes, there were female staff, depending at which point in the development you considered. When we were based in the town centre, there was a department attached to our college but a little bit independent of it called the School of Librarianship, and that had quite a lot of female students in it.

It was counted as a department of our college, like we had mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, science, and so on. The School of Librarianship always had a rather free hand in how it organised itself because librarianship was a rather specialised occupation.

Q: Were there many female students in the technical subjects?

Colin: In the more technical subjects like mine, I don't think we had many female apprentices, very occasionally with an intention of perhaps becoming a tracer in the drawing office at one of the engineering firms. A tracer would produce copies of engineers' drawings by actually tracing them on transparent paper, a bit like greaseproof paper, and they were nearly always women who did this.

Q: Could you tell us about the drawing equipment used at that time?

Colin: Well, a pencil was the principal tool. The guiding was done with the aid of a T-square, which produced a horizontal base, and then lines at right angles to that by means of set squares—triangular plastic ones. You could have 30° and 60° set squares for producing angles.

I can remember my first class in engineering drawing was how to use that to draw a picture of a nut with six sides—as in a nut and bolt, not a walnut! Eventually, if you mastered the ability to compose a drawing using pencil, you could work in a drawing office where ink drawings were produced. Most draftsmen would have a complex collection of special pens and other devices. I had one myself when I was working in the gas business.

Colin Salsbury taught engineering subjects at Loughborough Technical College starting in 1963. His classroom at the top of the Frederick Street building provided a unique vantage point—sometimes distractingly so for his students. His knowledge of the famous German MAN engines that once powered the Generator offers valuable historical context for the building's industrial heritage.