[BITList] Ginger beers and leckies, etc

[HUGH]

John, Colin, 

After some research, I find videos (some quite short) of motors, pumps, etc, in Bougaineville, are in the column of suggestions at the right hand side.

On the Cs, the batti walla (acc to The Malim Sahib's, etc, an ER lampman) was mainly famous for wiping the Allan gennies' commutators with a rag, while they were running.  I observed this, but didn't follow his lead.  What other electrical work he did escaped my notice, or has been forgotten by me.  I know the 3rd did electrical work up top on the Cs when I was fiver and 4th, but when I was 3rd I was never asked to do any. And the day and nightwork fivers did routine electrical maintenance for the dockers in London, mostly fuses, and bulbs in cargo clusters, often in the rain. I first heard the term "leckie" long after I left the MN, mostly in shipyards, but it never supplanted "electrician".

I was happy to be a "ginger beer" until I became aware the term had been hijacked for use by some as rhyming slang for "queer", as in homosexual.  I don't think it is universally used that way, and I don't carry banners about it.

I was once told by a prat that I wasn't "a real engineer", he having heard that (a) I got my hands dirty as a fitter at one time, and (b) I wasn't a member of an Institute or Institution.  One day I looked at the great pile of Transactions I had accumulated from the Inst Mar Eng and asked myself if I had ever got any benefit from it all.  I couldn't identify a benefit - nothing of it was useful to me.  So I let my membership lapse and threw out the books, all bar a few that were of interest.  The prat's attitude had more to do with his ignorance of how marine engineering and shipbuilding worked than anything else.

Hugh.


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