Carol Wootton on Shipbuilding

Lisa: Can you just talk me through … you said it was a two-year apprenticeship. Exactly what sort of things were you learning in those two years?

Carol You learnt how to use a pen. I’ve still got the ridge on here because it was a quill pen. When we first went there, ‘cos it was all done by hand, you know the writing on it, and I haven’t got anything anywhere, I chucked it away, but you had to do the letters and the numbers.

You were just practicing, basically writing, with a pen and ink ‘cos that’s what it was, and then we had … see I chucked all the stuff away … that was the quill pen and then we had pens like that you screwed up to get the different width of it, to get the ink lines to … the Draughtsmen drew it and then we put the paper on our linen on the top and coloured it basically, covered it with ink and then you did your writing or whatever you were doing, if it was electrical there was a lot of writing ‘cos it was … otherwise it was the curves of the ship, boats, and not so much writing on there.

There was the Electrical Drawing Office which … that was different. That was smaller bits but a lot of writing on it, and then there was the Design Office and then there was another one. Now, what was that called then?

There was four offices that we did tracings for. Maybe it would be the Interior would be in one and the others would just like the outline of it.

Then you might have a slice across which you’d do ‘cos you’d have the end of it and a front of it. It’s a long time ago I can’t remember you see.