Letters: June 2022

Reading the profile of Ashley Ogden brought memories from summer 1966 flooding back. I was 18 years old, with a place at New Hall, University of Cambridge, to read natural sciences. My school was Tiffin Girls School, Kingston on Thames. Hawker Sydney aeronautics was just up the Richmond Road and opposite that was the Pinchin Johnson paint factory, which supplied aeroplane standard paints and coatings.

I had secured a summer job in the quality control department, testing the incoming solvents, pigments and other chemicals. The ‘recipes’ were on cards and one simply followed instructions and made sure the specs were within the prescribed limits. I had almost no direction or supervision, and no chemistry above O level, but all went well, and I was asked to return the following summer to cover for the supervisor’s holiday. Perhaps the fact that, during quiet periods, I had cleaned and relabelled all the reagent shelves also helped!

So in summer 1967 I found myself in charge of outgoing quality control – once again with a set of recipe cards and specifications but this time for the finished product. Again all went well, apart from the time when I had to reject a whole batch of coating, to the disbelief of the foreman. It turned out that it was a ‘half batch’ but one component had not been halved. (We’ve all done it but probably just with cake mix!) What a difference 52 years makes, but I guess Line-X is a rather larger operation than a local paint factory.