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WARSASH SCHOOL OF NAVIGATION - SENIORS JULY 1961

4 Mid-Apprenticeship Release

plaint oft heard in the sea-going community was that the educational
Arequirements of the navigating department were so particular that
the progress through the indentures, qualifying sea-time for tickets, and the
difficulty of the tickets themselves produced a stable of men, and only men, who
knew a great deal about very little. This issue did not arise among engineers, who
could readily transfer their skills to innumerable branches of their craft, but in
the real world the skills required for, say, calculating a ship’s list or boxing the
compass were little called for, other than for the teaching of those same arcane
skills to similar ciphers. In addition, the wastage of trained persons of sea-staff
was very high, particularly in a company like P&O, where the average (white!)
officer could see at first hand the great opportunities available in Australia, New
Zealand, Canada and the US, all of which nations (with some others) were
physically less decrepit, were economically- rather than class-conscious societies,
and which were actively seeking educated immigrants. To staunch this wastage
of the highly-trained, the powers-that-be in the Merchant Navy, in particular
Captain Wakeford (of whom more anon) set about broadening the scope of
training offered to navigators in particular. With the Government being in the
process of creating a number of new universities (mainly the transformation of
polytechnics and technical colleges) and upgrading the nation’s skills-creating
facilities, the whole post-1945 training ethos seemed almost Luddite, especially
because it became very apparent in the first half of the 20th century that the
technical training of the German artisan and engineering classes was far better
than was the British, which was part of the reason for manifestly superior German
armaments and innovations during the two European wars.
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