After fifteen years as a poacher I became a gamekeeper!

The Engineering Industry Training Board's job - a statutory one - was to secure the necessary numbers and standards of skilled manpower for the future needs of the industry it sought to serve. In common with most of its 'field' staff I was assigned a geographical 'patch' within which I was to carry out that mission.

After four years in an American company the culture contrast at the EITB was marked. I also found that I already knew a lot of my new work colleagues: one from my days in the Scouts and another from an even earlier period in the church.

I was settling in, having undertaken a period of induction training, when of course it was time to re-organise! My 'patch' was changed, I got a new boss and became a member of a new team of work colleagues. Then they gave me what I felt to be my first 'proper' job. I taught time management to a group of Indonesian Air Force officers!

This must have gone down well because I found myself being given more and more management training to do. What usually happened was that the colleagues who were working full time in this area chose those topics that they enjoyed doing - and then offered what was left to me! I didn't mind - any opportunity to get up on my hind legs was always welcome.

In the fullness of time I was able to secure a promotion to that team, but I still only got everyone else's 'leavings'!

And then, of course, it happened again - but this time with a difference. We had a Government which listened to our numerous and vociferous critics and our demise was announced in a white paper.

By this time I had become Vice-chairman of the Trades Union which represented field staff, and so was actively involved in the rear guard action which has to be fought in such situations. Ours was, however, quite different. The terms and conditions of severance were well established in a long standing agreement drawn up for quite different reasons. What we had to do was to persuade our management to release everyone who wished to go - and that was the vast majority.

We finally achieved this one hot August afternoon, and the die was cast for the following December 31st.

There was one last twist to the tale: the architect of our downfall suffered the same fate six weeks before we did. Mrs. Thatcher, the Prime Minister, was ditched by her party. Next morning I went into the office, normally an apolitical place, and colleagues were actually cheering her demise. But it came too late to save us, even if we had wanted to be!

And so we rode off into the sunset on 31st December 1990, redundancy cheques and pensions in hand, leaving behind us skill shortages ...

... an interesting, but unexpectedly early, end to a 29 year working life.

Former colleagues at one of our monthly reunions: Ted Wright, Derek Sanderson, Barry Williams, Bernard Tedeschi and Alan Giles. We meet on the first Thursday each month (lunchtime) at the Farmer Johns pub, Streetly.

IMPORTANT NOTE: I have received many enquiries from holders of EITB qualifications (e.g. modules) asking where they might obtain replacement certificates. The first 'port of call' should be EITB's successor body SEMTA, though experience shows that it is extremely unlikely that they have kept the records we so carefully maintained and handed over to them when EITB finally closed its doors in July 1991.