Ted Cadwell recommended me to the Tottenham and District Gas Company for an 'A' Apprenticeship, which was a five-year scheme to train future Managers. Nowadays they would be called Management Trainees or Pupils. The Company, which was among the largest in the World at that time, also had a 'B' Apprentice Scheme to produce Foremen and Supervisors.

Both schemes entailed going through all the appropriate departments, working not watching, plus compulsory attendance at evening classes at Westminster and the Laboratories of Gas, Light and Coke Company in Fulham, three nights a week. So instead of riding my bike 8 miles to Hertford I was now going in the other direction towards London for 8 miles, plus a further 8 miles to Westminster or 12 miles to Fulham, to save fares which the Company did not pay.

It was compulsory to take the examinations of the Institution of Gas Engineers and to have successful results (a) to have a professional qualification (b) to be considered suitable for promotion to managerial status. I have dug trenches by hand and 14lb hammer in roads and fields, laid gas mains, serviced street lamps, stripped down and repaired filthy cookers, fitted water and gas pipes, served in showrooms, equipment stores, drawing offices, sales representative, operated telephone switchboards, typed letters, reports and quotations, fitted gas meters, investigated gassings, explosions and suicides - you name it - I did it during those training years which were reduced to four because World War 2 interrupted.

At one stage I was based at Waltham Cross as assistant to Ted Cadwell and one Saturday morning there was a terrific explosion at the Royal Gunpowder Factory (where Uncle Jack and Mum had worked in the Great War) in Waltham Abbey. It blew out all the windows in Waltham Cross including our showroom window, the biggest in the town. We had the window replaced, but the following Saturday there was another explosion and out came the window again. This time Ted and I were actually entering the gates of the Gunpowder Factory on business and the explosion blew his Austin Ruby Saloon across the road and nearly into the River Lee. It was the I.R.A., and everybody in the Factory with Irish connections or accents was immediately sacked. I can't remember if there were any casualties.

When I was with the gas fitters at Enfield, we used to push a handcart loaded with gas fittings, tools, pipe, gas meters, spare parts and our bicycles up the hills from the Town Centre every day. The trucks weighed about half a ton, had iron wheels and no brakes. Those hills are about 1 in 10 and the only way of stopping the truck was to run the wheel into the kerb at an angle. You had to be pretty fit - nowadays they all have vans.

I was usually with a Fitter called Harold Steele and we got on very well with each other. Often at lunchtimes we ate our sandwiches in a Blacksmith's Forge and watched him shoeing horses or making cartwheels about 4 ft diameter. He would forge an iron rim, heat it up on a charcoal firebed and then shrink it onto the wooden wheel. He made all the spokes by hand and sometimes the complete cart. They are made still in exactly the same way in the more backward villages in Spain and Italy.

Harold went into the Army in W.W.2 and rose to the rank of Captain. When he was demobbed the Company offered him his old job back, as they were legally bound to do, but refused to give him any promotion saying he wasn't promotional material so he took umbrage, started out on his own and built up a very successful business, which he still has. I often see his wife Betty, whom I knew before the War when she worked in one of the Company's offices, and again after the War when she had a senior job at H.Q.

Sometimes, instead of being with Harold I was likely to be with Bill Jordan on his 'Rest period' after four weeks Night Emergency Duty. Bill was a good sort, but a bit rough and ready, and likely to speak his mind.

One day we were in one of the big houses on Enfield Ridgeway - Nob Hill - on a big job lasting several days. The maids would bring us tea and toast for elevenses and the Cook would give us lunch in the kitchen. The Lady of the House was very pleasant but kept asking questions, although quite nicely. After about four days of this Bill was getting a bit uptight, and when she asked "What are all these M & F things you keep telling the boy (me) to get?" Bill replied "They are gas fittings, madam. M stands for Male Thread, and F means Female, or inside thread. M goes into F, just like you and me, madam." That was the end of that job. Our Company Chairman, Colonel H.C. Smith, lived just round the corner and his wife got a telephone call about 'a disgusting workman'.

Colonel Smith later became Chairman of British Gas and received a knighthood. During the War he commanded a Territorial Unit, and although he never left these shores or got into action, he was awarded the T.D. decoration. After the War he had a dust-up with one of the Showroom Managers who signed all his documents as 'Major ......... R.A.' "You can't do this" he stormed. "Oh, yes I can. The King gave me my Commission as a Regular Soldier, not a b.... Territorial. Only the King can take it away." Another chap who didn't last long in the Gas Industry.

There was another fitter called Charles Coward I sometimes worked with, a rather self-assured man with a thin pencil moustache, a la Clark Gable. He was in the Territorials and was captured at Dunkirk. As senior Sergeant Major he was in charge of a P.O.W. Camp in Poland, and the Germans put him in charge of working parties at the Concentration Camps. After the War he was a principal witness at the War Crimes Tribunals and wrote a book and several articles about what he saw. He appeared on 'This is your Life' with Eammon Andrews several years later. He never came back to the Gas Company.

Two of the labourers at Enfield had been regular soldiers in the East Surrey Regiment - 'The Buffs' - and when they had been in Egypt their battalion had been used as 'extras' in the film 'The Four Feathers', starring Ralph Richardson and John Clements, one of the best films I ever saw. The action scenes had real British soldiers fighting against the 'Fuzzy Wuzzies' (they don't like it up 'em - as Corporal Jones of Dad's Army used to say). They told us some side splitting stories of what went on - not fit for print. I saw that film every night for a whole week. In those days it was only 9d (4p) for which you got a main film, a 'B' film, three live stage acts, an organ recital, a cartoon and a newsreel. Programmes were continuous from midday to midnight, so you could see everything three times. No wonder cinemas were so popular with the courting couples.

Mr Moger, the Gas Manager at Enfield, was a Director of Enfield Town Football Club, well up in the Amateur Leagues. Anyone who could play football at all well could always get a job with Enfield Gas so long as he signed on for the Football Club. This was typical of all Gas Companies before the War. There were three Amateur Internationals in Tottenham Gas - Alt Boorer, Bill Greygoose and Bill Magner. The latter played in the winning Walthamstow Avenue team at Wembley. He worked in the Tottenham Repair Workshops doing up Gas Fitter's bicycles, heavy red things with a box on the back for tools. I've pedalled those things up and down High Streets, high hills and country roads, laden with tools, gas fittings, gas pipe strapped to the crossbar, and gas meters slung over my shoulder.

As part of my apprenticeship I had to do a stint in the Repair Workshops, where old cookers, geysers, gas fires, street- lamps etc., were brought in for complete overhaul. The geysers and wash-boilers had to be re-brazed and polished on buffing machines, and the street-lamps had to be repaired and new glass put in. The cookers, if cast iron and black, without any insulation, were given to poor customers free of charge. If they had enamel panels and insulation they were rented out at 5/- per quarter. Private appliances were renovated at a price. The cookers were tested practically by the men cooking their own lunches, so in the afternoons the workshop smelled like a cafe.

There were about fifty men in this workshop, paid between 1/- to 1/3d (5p to 6p) per hour, for a six day, 50 hour week, plus over- time. These were good wages in the 1930's.

One of the men was Con, an old bachelor with a big moustache. To impress us apprentices he would fill his mouth with paraffin, set light to it and blow a sheet of flame across the workshop. He was very hard up and always used tallow (a grease issued to lubicate taps) to do his cooking. He only had one pair of boots and every Friday afternoon he would spray them with black cooker paint so that he could go out courting over the weekend with his girl(?) friend. The paint didn't dry very quickly and would collect all manner of fluff and cotton wool etc., from the workshop before he went home, and it would still be stuck to his boots when he came back to work on Monday.

When I returned to Tottenham in the Industrial Department after the War there were sea floods on the East Coast and hundreds of gas cookers were brought down to Tottenham Repair Shops. They were full of mud, sand, seashells and dead crabs.

In Summer 1939 I was with the Mains Gangs laying gas mains in the roads and fields, and I usually had two breakfasts, one before leaving home and another on the job, cooked by the night-watchman before he went home. There was always a hut with a coke brazier in front to keep him warm at night and to heat up the jointing lead during the day-time. He had a highly polished shovel - you could see your face in it - to fry up our eggs and bacon and sausages which we brought along.

The Mains Gang Foreman - Sandy Tate - died recently at the great age of 92. When World War 2 broke out I was with his gang, laying pipes and digging pipe trenches. To break up roads about six of us would stand around a steel spike in the road hitting it in turn with our 14lb hammers. To keep a rhythm someone would sing or play a concertina.

Being the Heavy Mob we were taken off this and put to sandbagging the more important Company buildings. On the day War broke out - Sunday, 3rd September 1939 - I was cycling to Headquarters to do this when the Air Raid siren went and a policeman made me take cover in a ditch near Edmonton Cricket Club. I was the only person about - everybody else was listening to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, making the announcement on the wireless. It was a lovely sunny day, and a complete false alarm by some officious idiot.

As a Management Trainee in the Gas Industry I was in a reserved occupation and could not join up voluntarily so I had to wait until June 1940 before I could go in the Army with my official call-up group. I left the Mains Gang and went to Waltham Cross, which was why I was in Ted Cadwell's car at the time of the I.R.A. incidents.