Glad you are backing Wales Clive. My mother was born and bred in Amanford. I visit friends in Wales and it is still like that in the rural parts.
Margaret Thatcher started the someting for something more attitude. When I worked on my projects in 60's and even early 80's I often needed weird things making and if you went round the back of a factory the lads would make it for a round or two. The bosses knew but it was a perk for the lads. It was a well known and widely practised thing. When I needed bigger and more complicated stuff doing I was helped by the MD of a huge factory in West Brom. He was a stranger but I just knocked on his door. He welcomed me and we used to go through the drawings and he would say it will be good for the apprentices. He only charged a nominal sum. Unfortunately all that is gone. The days of the one off characters and unusual behaviour are over. We are all being shaped as in supermarket carrots.
Frank
One old fella in "my" village two doors from me didn't speak or understand any English at all, he was 90 years old. Through a neighbour, I used to chat with him because his walk to the only shop in the village passed my house and he used to stop for a breather against my garden wall. I asked him if he'd ever been to England and he said "NO!" very emphatically, " I went to Swansea once" he said! I was very surprised...
The concept of industry has changed dramatically since my schooldays. All trades then started with apprentiships, and the respective companies' appreciated the value of early training on the job. You'r very right that the local manager had the power to decide how those apprentiships were managed and your recallection of "side jobs" being good training and perks for the boys was commonplace. Trouble now is, those management decisions are now corporate, and in the deparate financial situation they are all facing, theres no room for apprentiships, perks or jobs on the side. There's little scope for any manufacuring in the UK now and soon it will all be gone, if there's any left at all.
I used to work at Landrover and you could always get something "knocked-up in the shop". That's all gone now, of course. On the other side of the coin, I know for a fact that milliond of pounds were lost in the British Leyland days due to petty and sometimes wholesale pilfering, outside work being done in the workshops and all sorts. Guys in the trim shop had "bedrooms" made up in the stores area, slept most of their shifts doing nothing at all, and sadly at the cost to the taxpayer, which had to be wrong...
Times have changed, some things for the better, but... the rest is history.
We're all carrots now? A good similie...
I think he just had a very good scriptwriter, but he got turfed out in the end too. I think she deserves one. 
so did valuation/surveying. I spent a long time in the Civil Service in the Valuation office where everybody was in the union but I refused to join and was blacklegged. Water off a ducks back. They used to have their silly little meetings every month whilst I kept on working. My dad was in a closed shop at GAC where he fitted out the Meteor jet planes. When he was forced to down tools he could not remember where some of his stuff was when he went back to work. So planes used to take off with some of his tools in the control wire tunnels. Some other people in the union couldn't care less so he left under the stress of it all.
