Articles
Engineering-related autobiographies don’t often trouble the non-fiction publishing best-seller lists. BP’s John Browne must have shifted a fair few copies of his memoirs, and Apple’s Steve Wozniak had some literary success too. But, in the main, written works about movers and shakers in Stem are hard to find.
It was a surprise, then, to come across No Country for Engineers, written by chartered engineer H G Evans, which is essentially a series of well-observed anecdotes of one man’s career path. Evans doesn’t pretend to be an inspirational high-flyer like Browne or Wozniak – rather, he’s a man from humble beginnings who went on to earn a decent living in a variety of roles in manufacturing companies, working in countries such as the UK, Italy, Germany and France.
While his observations from the coal face vary wildly from the mundane to the genuinely humorous, the stories he tells from the 1960s onwards are likely to resonate with many other engineers and actually end up combining to provide a valuable insight into the trials and tribulations of the wider industrial base.
Some of the funnier anecdotes sketch out memorable individuals that H G Evans met along the way, many of whom remain unnamed to preserve reputations. There’s the HR ‘expert’ who wasn’t interested in any new-fangled management development schemes, and had a simple and rather brutal approach to employee encouragement: “If someone is good at their job, we don’t see the point in moving them around. If they are bad, we fire them.” No wonder British manufacturing withered on the vine.
Then there are encounters with several visiting Japanese engineers, whose politeness in the face of British managerial incompetence also raises smiles.
The book will be of interest to other engineers who have enjoyed long and varied careers, and to younger members of the profession who are keen to learn how things used to be done. Either way, H G Evans has written an entertaining book and is to be applauded for putting his myriad experiences into words.
No Country for Engineers, from Olympia Publishers, is priced £7.99