Learning a trade

Text 1: At the Case, by William Tasker

An original autobiography written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

I was apprenticed to a printer at thirteen, and for the first year I was the devil of the office, which is to say that I swept the floor, ground the ink, carried the formes, fetched the journeymen’s beer and was cuffed by every man in the place for doing all of these too slowly. My hands were black to the wrist from Monday to Saturday, and my mother scrubbed them with sand on Sunday morning so that I might hold a hymn book without disgrace.

In the second year I was put to the case. A compositor stands before a sloping tray of small boxes, each holding one letter of the alphabet in lead, and picks them out one by one, backwards and upside down, to build a line of words in his stick. At first I could set perhaps two lines in an hour, and every one was wrong. Old Gunter, the overseer, would hold my stick up to the window and read my errors aloud to the room. By my seventh year I could set a column of close type faster than any man in the shop, without looking at the case at all, and I believe I have never been prouder of anything in my life.

I tell this with some bitterness, for the skill that cost me seven years was worth very little in the end. Within a decade of my coming out of my time, the great newspapers had begun to use machines that did the work of six compositors, and men of my trade were walking the streets with their sticks in their pockets. I do not regret what I learned. But I could wish that someone had told the boy with the black hands that the world does not always keep its bargains.

Text 2: The Long Stand, by Jade Pemberton

An original contemporary blog.

Four years ago I turned up to my first day as an apprentice electrician in steel toecaps two sizes too big, because they did not make them small enough in the site shop. The foreman looked at me, then at my boots, and said, ‘Are you lost, love?’ I was the only woman on a site of about two hundred people. By lunchtime I had been sent to the stores for a tin of tartan paint and a long stand, and I had waited twenty minutes for the long stand before I realised what was going on.

The first year was cold, filthy and mostly boring. I carried cable drums, swept up, drilled holes in concrete until my arms buzzed, and earned less than my friends who worked in coffee shops. Some of the men refused to explain anything to me. One of them told me, quite kindly, that I would be married with a baby before I finished. College on Thursdays was the only day anyone seemed to think I had a brain.

But slowly the work stopped being a mystery. There is a moment, when you have wired a whole floor of a building and you throw the switch at the board and every light comes on at once, that is better than anything I have ever felt in a classroom. Last month I qualified. The foreman who asked if I was lost now sends me the new apprentices to train, and the first thing I tell them is about the long stand. I am twenty-two and I own my own van. Every cold morning was worth it. I would do all four years again tomorrow.

‘Both writers suggest that learning a trade is worth the hardship it involves.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what we learn about the hardships of each writer’s apprenticeship
• explain how far you agree that both writers think learning a trade was worth it
• compare the ways the writers present learning a trade.

Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.