About

Ralph Windle’s Blog on Science & The Arts

is about some big, interconnected issues:-

The long-running Arts / Science / Two cultures Debate. Why the old clichés have to STOP...

How Creative Synthesis - the bringing together of separated (Arts/Science?) modes of thought is now top-priority for Innovation...

About Ralph Windle

ENGINEERS’ CORNER

                                  “ We make more fuss of ballads than of blue-prints –
                             That’s why so many poets end up rich,
                             While engineers scrape by in cheerless garrets.
                             Who needs a bridge or dam? Who needs a ditch? ”

                                            Wendy Cope (from ‘Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis’)

CVN and this website have always been much blessed by our many, witty and creative engineer friends.( One of them, the distinguished Dr Robert Hawley, honoured us by becoming CVN’s first Chairman.) They were always conspicuously ready to laugh-along with Wendy Cope’s caricature ( above); but, even more, at their own ( ‘Engineering Council’s) absurd press advertisement which had provoked it:-

         “ Why isn’t there an Engineers’ Corner in Westminster Abbey? In Britain we’ve always made more fuss of a ballad than a blueprint .. How many school-children dream of becoming great engineers ? “


                   ( Advertisement placed in The Times by the Engineering Council)

Sadly, the accumulating evidence ( over at least the past ten years ) suggests that the absence of that necessary dream owes more to the unimaginative confusions of engineering’s own collective bureaucracies, and its over-numerous ‘professional bodies’, than to the unfair competition of pampered poets.

For here we go again ( The Engineering and Technology Board’s UK Engineering Report 2009) : -
   “ the UK needs an extra 587,000 engineers between now and 2017, all with advanced   skills, so that the country can compete with other developed economies … there is concern at the 30% decline in the number of lecturers teaching engineering … and at the 17% drop in the number of HE students going into production and manufacturing degrees in 2009”.

Where are all these missing, brighter talents and  supposedly reluctant women?

Paul Jackson, the ETB’S Chief Executive (three CEOs, four Chairmen and a name change in its mini-history so far )  offered (to ‘Personnel Today’)  the shattering revelation that  …      “ engineering has an image problem and needs to tackle the gender divide .”

Now these were some of the very issues already on The Engineering and Technology Board’s first (2002) agenda when Dr Hawley ( whose ‘Making the Best of Valuable Talent’ had reached Lord Sainsbury in 2000); myself for CVN, (after wide consultations with Ove Arup and other industry leaders); and a trail-blazing team of cross-disciplinary collaborators including  the Deans of the arts/science/engineering faculties of Oxford Brookes University ( led by their brilliantly committed Professor of Engineering, Dr Denise Morrey) presented to ETB ’s first Chairman, Sir Peter Williams, the detailed proposals for the ‘Janus Arts/ Engineering’ project, initiated by CVN and aimed specifically at upgrading the creative content and appeal of UK engineering programmes.

Sir Peter much welcomed the plan, (which went public in Dr Hawley’s Mountbatten Lecture in November 2002); and in March 2003, the ETB chairman hosted the ‘Engineering and Creative Arts’ dinner symposium at the Howard Hotel, London, involving Sir Peter, Dr Hawley, Geoffrey Crossick, then Chairman of the AHRB; Lindsay Sharp ( then Director, Museum of Science and Technology); myself and six other CVN activists, including Professor Denise Morrey and Professor John Perkins from Oxford Brookes, BBC Producer Alec Reid, Bristol Theatre Director, Andrew Hilton, and painter, Peter Welton.

By now, Lord David Puttnam , first Chairman of the National Endowment for Science ,Technology and the Arts, was also personally involved and very supportive. He sent his personal assistant to the ‘Janus’ planning symposium. And, with Sir Peter also doubling as President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, it would have been difficult to envisage a more prestigious endorsement for this necessary and overdue innovation. (See the website archive for a fuller list of CVN’s Consultative Network.) Note that ETB’s current Chairman, Sir Anthony Cleaver, was also involved (twice) in the briefings by myself and Dr Hawley -during his earlier incarnation as Chairman of the ( later aborted) UK e Universities Worldwide Limited .

Perhaps it is an attribute of such institutional and top- people gyrations that a clear and honest collective ‘memory’ seems rarely to develop and survive, whether by choice or neglect; but it explains much of the too-slow learning and endless iterations which seem to  characterise them. In this case, the sad politics of unwieldy ‘Councils’, and confused and warring personalities clicked in to delay, and then de-rail, this essential project. And, were it not for the angry articulations of Lord David Puttnam towards this professional  engineering disarray, no one but he and CVN would ever have known. So here, just for the record, are some of the truths he felt obliged to express to Sir Peter and others of this important profession:-

“ CVN has succeeded in convincing us that there is indeed a massive challenge and equally massive opportunity in this ( Engineering and the Creative Arts) field .I will be writing shortly ( to the ETB ) about my concerns in respect of the gap that CVN has identified ..”
                                                       ( to Dr Hawley, September 2003).

“ One great benefit of the CVN proposal is that it has alerted us to the urgent need for action and serious progress in this field. Indeed, it seems to us that the future of the UK Engineering Industry clearly depends on such progress.”


                                                       ( to Sir Peter Williams, September 2003)

“ We were astounded that the failure to address the need for greater investment in creativity and innovation did not appear to be a matter of urgent concern to the Engineering industry”.
                                                           ( to Sir Peter Williams, ibid 2003)

There is much more …..

                                           ________________________________________

                                     “ No wonder small boys dream of writing couplets
                                And spurn the bike, the lorry and the train.
                               There’s far too much encouragement for poets –
                               That’s why this country’s going down the drain.”

                                                                                         (Wendy Cope: ibid)

Oh for a refreshing whiff of Wendy’s wit ….!

Plus ca change !…A longer, more detailed, account of  these events remains in the CVN archive, always in the hope of better things to come for our engineering friends. It was, and remains, a tragedy that their ‘leaders’ lacked the vision and energy to act.

 ( RW June 2010. )