Dancing with a Stranger

The speech of his life

Chik Collins
on the greatest oratory of Jimmy Reid: not the rectorial address

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The Cafe

Stewart Hendry and Mike Bailey

A juicy story

David Harvie
How it was discovered that lemons are good for you

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The Cafe
David Mackenzie and
Miller Caldwell

Transferable skulls

Robin Downie
Can we all be managed in the great cause of efficiency?

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Rear Window
Ian Mackenzie on a man who
broke all the rules

Rear Window

Ian Mackenzie

In the last days of steam on British Rail, I caught the morning Talisman train from Kings Cross to Waverley. It left Kings Cross one dreich January morning half an hour late. It had lost its slot, its path through signals, so at first we were constantly stopped. The acceleration after each stop was phenomenal, and the speeds extraordinary.
      Gradually it became obvious that the signals were beginning to go with us. We arrived at Newcastle half an hour early. We hadn’t just made up the late half hour. We had made up an hour. My friend Tom Scott and I raced up the Newcastle platform to congratulate the driver.      He was portly and his face was full of years. But age had not wearied him. He smiled beautifically.      ‘Do you know who I am?’
     ‘Who?’
     ‘Almost right, I’m Driver Hoole.’
     We were baffled. Only years later, did I discover he was the most famous engine-driver in Britain. He was notorious for breaking every record – and every rule in the book. He, the fireman, and the engine always became a team of stars who made every journey an Odyssey. And they turned railwaymen along the route into subversives who broke the rules for them.
     There was one rule with Driver Hoole. Forget the rules. I recommend that rule to you. On this day, the engine was Gresley’s streamlined local Mallard, which still holds, I think, the world steam speed record. The signalmen, realising on that grey January morning that Hoole was on the case, began to halt other trains to let our chariot of fire through.
     What was this all about? Efficient management? No, a celebratory stewardship of poetic freedom. The train is late. Wring your hands over a crisis? Or seize the moment to recreate? If you say it was irresponsibly bad management, I have nothing to say to you. You are in the same category as the Scottish driver who took over the train at Newcastle. He obeyed every rule. We arrived at Edinburgh Waverley five minutes late.

SR March 2003

Ian Mackenzie died on 31 October 2006. He was a former head of religious broadcasting at BBC Scotland

Islay McLeod’s Scotland

Industrial Dundee viewed at dusk from Broughty Ferry

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Transferable skulls

Robin Downie

We all know that significant meaning can be lost in translation and no doubt we all have our anecdotes to illustrate this. Here is mine. I have a daughter, Barbara, who is a professional violinist, and on a grand occasion in Houston, Texas, had to play Vaughan Williams’ iconic piece ‘The Lark Ascending’. She was accompanied on the piano by a Hungarian pianist who had minimal English. He asked what the title meant. Barbara explained that a lark was a bird and ‘ascending’ meant ‘going up’. ‘Okay’, he said, ‘so a bird goes up. What’s the big deal?’ Well, ‘the lark ascending’ distils the essence of the English countryside in early morning, whereas ‘a bird goes up’ hardly does justice to a pigeon in George Square.
     People can be translated as well as words. ‘Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee, thou art translated’. Bottom’s translation involved the acquisition of an ass’s head. Such translations occur not infrequently in political circles, from politician to chairman of a board, and from chief executive of a supermarket to chief executive of a hospital trust, or indeed from prominent businessman to non-elected politician with the job of making us all redundant.
     What is behind such translations is the idea of transferable skills, and of managerial skills as the supreme skills which are universally transferable. But what are these skills? They are skills in making money, and in ‘efficiency’ ie making workers redundant. They are skills so prized that their possessors will immediately go abroad unless they are rewarded with huge bonuses. But are these really ‘skills’ in any sense or at all?
     We have been encouraged so often since the days of Mrs Thatcher to admire the men/women of finance that it is easy to be misled into thinking that really there are skills there. A surgeon has skills, a joiner has skills, a musician has skills, a cook has skills, a mountaineer…but a banker? When you consider the billions lost by many major banks, presumably with boards filled with these highly skilled people, then you might well wonder whether anyone in any high street might have done better. We are told frequently that the present government has inherited our huge deficit and it is all the fault of the outgoing government. A lot of it may be, but a great deal of the deficit has been caused by the banks ie the skilled private sector we must all look up to.
     Turn now from the idea of skills to that of transferability. I gave a talk once on a Friday evening at a Macmillan Cancer weekend for doctors and nurses. On the Saturday there were workshops on special topics, one of which was ethics. I assumed in my arrogant way that I would be chairing it. But not a bit of it. It was chaired by a man who introduced himself (in a heart-sink way) by saying he would tell us ‘where he was coming from’. He had been trained as a civil engineer and could manage materials but he had gone on a course and could now manage personnel, and would ‘flag up’ what we wanted to discuss.
     Two points are clear here. First, the belief that skills in managing materials can be transferred via a management course to managing ‘personnel’, and second, since we are all ‘personnel’, it does not really matter whether we work in a supermarket or in a cancer ward; we can all similarly be ‘managed’ in the name of ‘efficiency’. For example, there might be a team of hospital cleaners who have worked in a given hospital for years, know the nurses and doctors and chat to the patients. But of course they are part of the public sector so sack them and bring in a private firm of cleaners. After all they are all equally personnel and can be substituted for the existing cleaners with a gain in ‘efficiency’ (if not hospital cleanliness).
     Or take hospital switchboards. The women answering hospital phones often knew the coming and goings of ward sisters and consultants and were usually very helpful. But, since we are all personnel, the switchboard (in Glasgow at least) is now centralised. Local knowledge and helpful advice are not relevant. A student of mine, writing an essay on ‘transferable skills’, referred at one crucial point to ‘transferable skulls’. A misprint with insight!

Robin Downie is emeritus professor of moral philosophy at
Glasgow University