This article is the first of a series from a new contributor. The series arose out of a discussion we had at a FolkWorkshops session about how some of us finished up being folk music enthusiasts. Much of it is to do with either where we grew up or where we went to earn a living after leaving school. My own discovery of folk music is revealed in the earlier article entitled, Memories of the Troubadour, while here you will see that this particular musical journey starts with the drawing of a map.
Dacier.
‘So You Like Maps?'
Following the end of World War 2, Great Britain was a shambles, with an economy almost bankrupted by the cost of war, huge social problems, much of it's urban housing destroyed by bombing and an industry and workforce geared entirely to a war effort. With so many problems requiring immediate attention, it was not until the early fifties that any real growth and redevelopment of towns and cities, and transport infrastructures could be contemplated. It was then realised that before you can build anything, you need accurate and up to date maps and plans of the existing topography, and that the mapping of Great Britain was hugely out of date. Britain's mapping agency, The Ordnance Survey, was, after the war only just ticking over and obviously the first thing to be done was to increase it's capability and it's output. A massive increase in staff was required.
And so it was that the beginning of the 60s found me, fresh from leaving school at the age of seventeen, travelling from my home in Hereford to Southampton, where the O.S. had it's headquarters, to begin my training as a cartographic draughtsman. I had gained (by the skin of my teeth) the necessary five O levels, which had to include maths, english and geography, and undergone a fairly rudimentary school careers interview. Q." What is your favourite subject ?" A." Geography." Q." Why ?" A." I like maps "..."Well ,you should join the Ordnance Survey." Of course there were still hurdles to be negotiated, Civil Service Commission exams and interviews, and tests to ensure that I was not colour blind, but eventually I was Southampton bound.
At that time the O.S. was housed in a variety of locations around Southampton. The Surveyor School was in a large town house in University territory at the top of The Avenue, Small and Medium Scale Mapping was in an old barracks at Crabwood on the Romsey side of the city and Large Scale Mapping, Photo, Printing and The Drawing School were housed at the edge of the city centre on London Road in a range of elegant victorian buildings that had once been a lunatic asylum. Some said that we were maintaining continuity with the the original purpose of the premises.
The throughput of the Drawing School was incredible. Trainee draughtsmen and women arrived from all over Great Britain, mostly straight from school, though a few had tried other jobs. A new course, containing between twenty and thirty students, started every two to three months. The basic course lasted for nine months, and to graduate at the end of this 'gestation', your final piece of work had to be of a standard suitable for publication. Failing to meet the required standards meant being asked to find another career, but in fact the assessments carried out at intervals during the course ensured that very few 'no hopers' got this far. Much later in my career I became an instructor in the training department and experienced for myself the agony of having to tell a young person that they really were not cut out for the job that they had chosen.
We were taught all aspects of Cartography, it's early history, projection theory, scales, typography and basic design, but the bulk of the course was taken up with learning to draw with consistent accuracy to exacting standards. Line work was produced at a standard thickness of seven thousandths of an inch, we had a graduated microscope to check this so no variation was tolerated. Pecks (broken lines) were produced at eight to the centimetre, that meant eight pecks and eight spaces, each peck being twice the length of a space. This was no place for an impressionist !
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To be continued.
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