Originally Posted by
AnglianAV8R
Indeed,
......................
Last, but not least. Yours truly had a chat with a careers teacher less than a decade after the Northiumbria took to sea. Having tiold him my grandfather was a welder, that was it. He deployed his enormous knowledge and proclaimed I should get a welding apprenticeship at Swans.... I responded " What for ? They'll be gone soon. Have you seen all those little Koreans building huge ships for a bowl of rice a day?" He looked at me like I was some creature from another planet. The rest, as they say, is history.
My father was a shipwright at Swans and I was expected to follow him into working at one of the Tyne yards (grandfather and uncles all worked in the various yards). Was a bit like the dockers at the time, there was always a job available if you had family working there. I told my father that I was intending to join the RAF and that caused a bit of a family ferfuffle and I became the blacksheep of the family for a while. My father later acknowledged I had done the right thing and said the Tyne was a dying river long before he had retired. He cited the same reason - the Tyne couldn't match the Korean prices plus it carried the millstone of seemingly interminable demarcation disputes that marred that industry (but that's for another discussion elsewhere).