This Thursday we have lots going on but with things threatening to collide with each other. It is normally my shopping day but we are expecting Meg's 'floor' style hospital bed to be delivered and assembled some time this morning. The existing bed which foes pretty low but not to the floor is being replaced by a floor bed, the concept being that if Meg were to roll about during the night, she would only roll onto the floor and this is probably safer than a conventional hospital bed with sides. Our Eucharistic minister is due to call around mid morning so getting the weekly shopping done might prove to be a little problematic but we shall see.
Yesterday, I wrote about the kind of work that I was undertaking in the scientific civil service at the National Lending Library (NLL) in Boston Spa, Yorkshire. When I was recruited, the library was only a few months old and I was part of the huge recruitment and staffing drive to develop the Library as a whole. The nucleus of the collection was formed from a collection housed in the Science Museum London and a small team of civil servants was formed who worked in London to prepare the bulk of the collection for eventual transfer to Yorkshire. Occasionally, one heard the term 'goers' and 'stayers' the former being that stock that was to be moved up to Yorkshire and the latter to remain in London. The whole establishment was part of the scientific civil service (actually, at that time, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research) and taw whole atmosphere was as 'un civil service like' as it was possible to do. The middle management staff all had science degrees and they wore the kind of almost casual clothing that would have been common in the normal postgraduate common room. I was actually graded as a 'Scientific Assistant' which was the parallel grade to the 'Clerical Officer' in the more conventional civil service. The Clerical Officers would deal routine correspondence and the routine application of rules to particular cases e.g. as in the tax office. To be recruited to this grade one needed five GCE 'O' levels passed at one sitting but there was a lower grade of Clerical Assistant who did things like routine filing, some record keeping, stationery supplies and the like. But Scientific Assistants tool critical readings at establishments such as the National Physical Laboratory, the National Chemical Laboratory, the Meteorological Service and so on. Now the pay of scientific assistants was actually a bit lower than it should have been perhaps because of the linguistic comparison with a clerical assistant but the actual qualifications required (which must include a science) was actually higher. Although it happened a few months before my employment, every scientific assistant in the country effectively went 'on strike' but all taking a day's leave with the connivance of their superiors. The entire work of the DSIR ministry effectively ground to a halt and the government, and the powers that be in the civil service, were forced to take notice and the anomaly was corrected. Despite our 'playtime' in the Machine Recording section, we all did work fairly hard and conscientiously and I think there was a general feeling that we were part of a new and to some extent ground breaking new venture for the civil service. It is not often that a brand new establishment is created essentially from scratch but everybody was pretty happy in their work, even the routine work. Whilst in the Acquisitions section, I was responsible for 'file splitting' which sounds boring but was reasonably interesting. Given that the NLL collected scientific literature from practically every country in the developed world, then for example anything emanating from Bulgaria would go into the 'Bulgaria' file. But as the correspondence grew and grew, I needed to take each file and to split it into the principal sources which were often the universities and research institutes, I was given a fair degree of autonomy how I went about my task and never actually completed it because I was moved from one department to another after a year. But I did have a Public Administration student about 15-20 years later who actually was working on the same job as I was and recognised some of my handiwork (perhaps my handwriting?) from years beforehand. In one of the more obscure parts of the library, we did give some employment to the prisoners from the nearby 'open prison' and they were engaged in tasks such as bookbinding and repairing some of the stock which might have got a bit tatty or degraded. In theory, we were not supposed to speak with the prisoners but occasionally we did as they were inside for crimes such as bigamy which was not going the foundations of society. Someone had the good idea of organising a football match between the prisoners and the young male civil servants. This was a complete mismatch as the prisoners tend to be fit young men who worked out every day and we were a bunch of very unfit civil servants. I think we were beaten by a score of about 11-0 but what was fascinating was that one team was foul mouthed and bad tempered whilst the other was the model of politeness. It was the young civil servants who swore like troopers whilst the prisoners were very conscious of the fact that the match was refereed by their own prison staff and were the model of politeness and good behaviour so if you happened to be tripped up, you were always helped up with a polite 'Can I help you up?' Some of the rest of the staff contained some fascinating characters and one older civil servant who worked in my office was a very keen philatelist (stamp collector) and got stamps from all over the world. His name was 'Robert Lake' and he told us the story of a letter that he had received a letter from a correspondent in Africa that only two works on it were was 'Lake Keynsham' Somehow the letter got to England and then someone in London recognised that Keynsham was actually a suburb of Bristol. When it got to the local sorting office, Robert was well known and so the two work letter actually reached him from the other side of the world. Some of the staff had originally worked in London and were dubious about moved up to Yorkshire. However, some kind of deal was done in which they were allocated a new council house and their quality of life went up so much being located in the delightful market two that Wetherby is (population about 25,000) that none of them would dream of moving back to the London area.
© Mike Hart [2024]