The Bristol Owners Heritage trust has recently received a fascinating piece of 1950s ephemera from the family of Peter Riley who started his apprenticeship with Bristol in December 1950. His nephew Michael sent this, kindly forwarded by Dennis Leigh. Michael has fond memories of riding in the back of the untrimmed experimental type 404 “Bomb”, going round London sitting on the petrol tank.
Apprenticeship is coming back into fashion as a powerful learning tool for many trades, crafts and skills-based jobs. We certainly use it extensively in medical training.
The enclosed 5 year schedule is impressively rigorous and leads to 13 possible career outcomes, with a selection board after the third year for the designers and plant engineers.
But I suspect that not many of today’s apprenticeship schemes – some of which are only a few months long – contain more than a fraction of this much training and experience.
Stefan Cembrowicz
Bristol June 2019
Some extracts below from the BAC Apprenticeship brochure from 1956 (supplied by Richard Sanderson)
Bristol Owners Heritage Trust 