Speaker at the 8th May meeting was club member Eric Dewhirst who took as his topic the ‘pitmen painters’ of Northumberland and the story of industrial training.
This Ashington Group - the pitmen painters - was a small society of artists who met regularly between 1934 and 1984. Mostly miners with no formal artistic training, the Group and its work became celebrated in the British art world of the 1930s and 1940s.
We heard that the impressive exhibition at the preserved Woodhorn pithead colliery, shows how the art developed from naive to accomplished. Early materials were just what was to hand - rough paper, cardboard, plywood, metal, muslin - and paint mostly Walpamur - or even household gloss. But the subject was always the life and times of the working men.
The paintings record a hard and dangerous life. But Eric continued his talk by focussing on the fact that there were escape routes. He described the importance the Ashington Coal Company placed on education for boys, who typically left school at 12 or 13 to work in the pit. The pitmen painters were of the last generation to do so.
The company operated a Continuation School nicknamed the Miner’s University from 1920. Each selected pit boy attended the school for 2 days a week and was paid as if he was in the pit - which he was the rest of the week. Having received a thorough training in the running of a coal mine the boys were eligible for the mine managers course.
Other companies of the time took a similar approach to technical or engineering education. Shipbuilders Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson made attendance at an approved arts and science course a condition of employment. Research from 1907 showed a third of railway companies allowed daytime school attendance to supplement night classes.
Coming closer to home the first professorship of engineering in the UK was established at Glasgow University in 1840 - Cambridge waited until 1875 and Oxford 1908. Although an important feather in the cap for Glasgow, the UK was well behind Europe where, for example, the Ecole Polytechnique was established in Paris in 1794.
Lewis Dunbar Brodie Gordon was the first Regius Professor of Civil Engineering and Mechanics at Glasgow. Born in Edinburgh he was a student and assistant to Isambard Kingdom Brunel, during the construction of the Thames Tunnel. He made a great impact on the development of engineering science at Glasgow, collaborating with William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin of Largs).
The talk concluded with a comment that we seem to be coming full circle, with the value of high-level apprenticeships being recognised and promoted by UK governments. Some urgency perhaps being reflected in recent newspaper reports suggesting the UK has a shortfall of 20,000 technically qualified people a year. Perhaps those old Victorian masters got it right.
A vote of thanks was proposed by Charles Thrower.
