by Len Goodman
After spending the rest of the summer at home messing around, it came time for me to face up to the reality of the rest of my life. Those six weeks actually felt very little different from being on school holidays, except that I knew I wasn't going back to classes. My life was now mapped out for me. It's true that while there would still be plenty of opportunity for football, nights out and having a laugh, there was now the little matter of earning a living. During my last year at school, whenever the subject of me getting a job came up, I'd say to my mum, 'I'd like to work in the shop.'
'Len, don't be daft,' she'd reply. 'It's far too much like hard work. Up at the crack of dawn and even earlier sometimes. What you need to do is to get yourself a trade.' Getting a trade was all the rage in the post-war years, a time when Britain had 'never had it so good'. Especially if, like me, you left school with no O-levels or qualifications of any kind. 'You need to get an apprenticeship,' said Mum. And like many thousands of other school leavers in 1959 that's exactly what I did, although it took a little help from my dad.
Dad worked for a firm called ICT – International Computers and Tabulators – who made the 1950s version of computers; later they became ICL – International Computers Ltd. These computers were as big as houses, so big that if you'd described a laptop or even a PC to anyone working in the factory when I joined the firm they'd have thought it was the stuff of science fiction. Their computers worked off cards with holes in them that all flew out of machines, along with big things that went whizzing round; it was like something out of Dr. Strangelove. From my description you can see the technicalities of it all somewhat passed me by. With my in-depth knowledge of the computing and tabulating business, I was clearly going to be a major asset to this rapidly expanding industry.
Mum, having decided that a trade was what I needed, spoke to my dad. He was a manager at ICT so he was able to put in a good word for me and I was taken into the firm's apprentice scheme. I was to be an apprentice engineer fitter and turner; at least that's what it said on the forms I signed on my first day at work. While this sounds all well and good it takes no account of the fact that I am someone who is just not cut out for a job in a factory. They had no idea what they were letting themselves in for – and neither did I.
I brought a similar level of talent to being an engineering apprentice as Peter Schmeichel brought to ballroom dancing; I was just not cut out for it. For me the best thing about the job was my new dark blue boiler suit that looked really smart; all it needed was a hankie in the left-hand top pocket and it would have finished it off lovely.
I was still living at home in Marina Drive with my mum and my stepdad so I would take the train from Welling station to Dartford every workday; from there it was just a short walk to the factory.
Ironically there was no escaping the classroom because for the first six months we spent our time in the apprentice school, plus one day each week we went to college to complete a City and Guilds course. In the ICT classrooms we learned practical skills that included operating lathes and capstans. Our primary task was to make our very own tool kit, one that had four different screwdrivers – I've still got one of them – a shaver thing, a scribe and a number of different 'g' clamps. We were required to make everything to very tight tolerances: no shoddy work was acceptable, so naturally I came unstuck.
It wasn't that I didn't try, it was just I had no aptitude for tool making. I, like probably many others, both before me and since, found that as I showed less and less grasp of what needed to be done, and the more the others forged ahead of me, I seemed to go further backwards. From being Speedy Gonzales I'd turned into the real slowcoach of the apprentice intake. Those doing the teaching got fed up with me being a poor learner and tended to concentrate their efforts on those who showed more promise; I can hardly blame them. If I'm honest I was more interested in being the all-round class joker; although my fellow apprentices found it funny, those doing the teaching did not. And while I did try and get to grips with things I usually made a complete hash of everything.
Despite my being absolutely useless there were a few little things that did occur that were of a more positive nature, that have stuck with me ever since. Dad said something to me when I first started that did me a lot of good.
'If somebody asks you if you know something and you do, then say you don't, because maybe they'll teach you how to do it in a better way than you've been taught before.' One day exactly that happened. The regular teacher had taught us how to grind a drill that had become blunt so that it was resharpened. It was something I just couldn't seem to get to grips with until on one occasion a man came in to teach us who was a specialist in grinding drills. He asked, 'Are there any of you who don't know how to grind a drill?'
No one said a word except me. 'I'm not really too sure.'
'Okay, son, you stay behind and I'll show you.'
All the others went off but his method was miles better than the way we'd been shown. Since then I've never said I can do something unless I'm absolutely certain that I can, because there's always the chance you might find there's a better way.
When I first went to the BBC to work on Strictly Come Dancing I said to the director, 'This isn't my job so please never feel that I'll be annoyed or upset if you tell me how I can do it better. I want to know what I do wrong; I want to learn and improve.' Whenever I start working with a new director I say the same thing. In 2007 I did a new show that was related to Strictly, a kind of Eurovision Strictly Come Dancing. Before we started filming I said, 'I want guidance because this is not my job, I'm just a dance teacher from Dartford who got lucky.'
This has meant that I've had loads of good advice during my television career that has helped me immeasurably. It's all thanks to a few words of advice from my old dad.
Despite the drill-grinding tips, I was still way off where I needed to be to complete my course; all the other apprentices got their toolkits made in six months, well before I was even close to finishing; they were immediately off and on to the next part of their training, while yours truly was left behind. The other apprentices went and did their three-month stints in all the various parts of the factory, doing such things as unit assembly, final assembly, the drilling section and the grinding section, all part of their apprenticeship to become fully fledged engineers of some description, but I was still in apprentice school trying desperately to get my tool kit finished. I was so useless that I never did get it quite right and eventually, after 14 months, the management took pity, or more likely just gave up on me, and let me loose on the shop floor. Working with the other men at the factory was okay, but it also introduced me for the first time to the world of unions and shop stewards. Ours was a man named Mick, who was a bit of a bully when it came to getting people to tow the union's line. Soon after I left the apprentice school, there was some dispute or another between the union and the management and we were ordered to walk out by Mick. One of the guys I worked with said he didn't want to and didn't agree with it. Mick took the cigarette he was smoking out of his mouth and stubbed the lighted end on the bloke's face. It made me question what the unions were trying to do.
Just before I Ieft the apprentice school, I got another one of those little life lessons that's held me in good stead ever since. It was abundantly clear to everyone that I was lousy at just about everything I attempted; I was the Quentin Wilson of the engineering trade. My ineptitude may or may not have been behind the fact that Bernie Vernon, the man in charge of the apprentices, went from being kind and helpful towards me to the point where he became so exasperated that he turned ultra-nasty. The upshot of all this meant that any filthy rotten chore that came along he gave to me; one in particular I hated. Next to the apprentice's building was the main toilet block for the whole factory; there must have been 30 or 40 traps in this large building.
'Goodman.'
'Yes, Mr Vernon.'
'Boggy, the toilet orderly, has not come in and so I need you to go and report to Jack Smith, the man in charge of
factory cleaning. He's got a very special job for you.'
So over I went to see the factory foreman.
'I want you to sweep out and clean all the toilets.' He then added something I've never forgotten, something that I've used throughout my career – both as a dancer and as a teacher. 'But I'd rather you swept out and cleaned one beautifully than swept out the whole lot in the hour and didn't do the job at all properly.'
Concentrate on getting things right one bit at a time so that it's perfect: don't try and rush it so it all just about looks passable.
Six months after I made my escape from the apprentice school ICT decided to close their Dartford factory – everyone was made redundant. The closure of the Dartford factory presented the company with a bit of a problem. We were indentured apprentices, which meant they had to find us new employment in order for us to continue our training and complete our apprenticeships. This was no problem as far as the smartest of the boys – the clever-dicks – were concerned; just about all of them were snapped up by another Dartford firm called Halls. Some of the others, who were also good, but not the best, went to Burroughs and Wellcome, the chemical company; they're now called GlaxoSmithKline. The handful that were still left were farmed out to Vickers in Crayford; everyone, that is, but Leonard Goodman. Given my apparent – make that total – lack of any suitable skills I was the last to get a placement. I ended up at Simms Motor Units in Finchley, a company making injectors for diesel engines. They couldn't have found a more difficult place for me to travel to from where I lived; I don't think it was a punishment but it certainly felt like one. I had to be in Finchley every morning at half past seven which meant getting the train from Welling to London Bridge and the Northern line to East Finchley from where it was a short walk to the Simms factory.
I'd probably been there no more than two days when they realised that they had got one of England's least talented apprentices. The truth was talent didn't come into it; I was total crap. However, whether it was someone at Simms recognising that I might have some useful part to play in their company's future or just out of sheer luck, I'm not sure, but I was put to work with a man named Ralph Phillips. I was lucky because he was not only a lovely man, he was also the Simms' odd-job man, although officially we were called the Maintenance Department. If things needed doing around the factory, like a leaking roof, something that had conked out, a drain pipe that had fallen down or a broken window needed mending, then Odd Job and me were called for – no job was too small for us.
Odd Job's real skill lay in welding and he would fix all sorts of things that came into our little area in the factory; pretty soon he was passing on his skills to me. For someone who had so far been useless at just about everything they had tried to teach me I found that I was a natural welder – well, possibly an exaggeration, but compared to everything else I'd attempted I was a natural. Having discovered I had a knack for it Simms decided I might be more use to them if I were properly trained so they sent me on a three-month welding course at BOC – the British Oxygen Corporation – in Cricklewood on the North Circular Road. Why couldn't it have been Hollywood? Not only had I found something I was reasonably good at, I also enjoyed it. I may not have been the world's greatest welder but following my course I was a match for most people.
After completing my welding course, travelling to and from work sometimes got a little easier, at least in one respect. A lad named Dave Hutton, who was also an apprentice at Simms, lived not far from me in Swanley. He and I were not really best mates, but he would sometimes offer me a lift home on his scooter. It was okay if the weather was reasonable but in winter, on a bad night, it was horrible. It was freezing bloody cold like you cannot believe, added to which, most often as not, I wasn't dressed for travelling on the back of a Lambretta. I'd usually gone to work on the train, dressed in my normal clobber. In those days you didn't have to wear crash helmets and you just hung on the back of the scooter as best you could. It was nothing like those scenes you see from 1960s movies where glamorous Italians ride their Vespas or Lambrettas in the sunshine of Rome; we just looked like a right couple of Herberts.
There was another problem. Dave was not the most savoury looking character on account of his spot problem – not that I want anyone to think I have a phobia after what happened with Sally, but he was covered in blackheads, pimples and worse still. I was prepared to put up with my rather too close proximity to him on account of the fact that the journey took under an hour on the scooter, much less than the tube and train. One night we were haring down the Old Kent Road, getting closer to Welling by the minute, when Dave suddenly turned around.
'You okay, Len?'
As he said this, a load of unmentionable flew out of his nose and covered my face in snot and mucus. It was a bloody nightmare scenario, like a scene out of Ghostbusters. To this day it still haunts me. I've never really got over it.
The commute, even with the occasional lift home from Dave the Spot, was a grind. If I took the tube and train I arrived home at seven at night and on many occasions, after about an hour or so at home, I'd say to Mum, 'I've gotta go to bed because I'm getting up again at half past five.'
Finally, enough was enough. I told my mum I was leaving Simms. I'd done my best but this was no life; I had to find something different. Luckily I had one thing working in my favour. I'd come to realise that maybe my welding skills could be put to better use nearer to home. Most welders are not trained as welders: they are usually employed as something else and they just sort of pick it up as they go along. I, on the other hand, was highly trained! One day I was telling a mate of mine, who was also a West Ham supporter, who worked for Harland and Wolf at the Royal Docks in North Woolwich, how fed up I was with commuting to Finchley. He suggested getting in touch with his firm as they were always in need of trained welders. I did, had an interview and the next thing I knew I was working with a gang of East End blokes – much more my cuppa tea. I couldn't have landed a better little number if I'd have gone looking for it.
Initially I worked in the factory welding up the gantries – the kind that hold the overhead cables for electric trains; we did thousands of the things. When that job was all finished the work became much more varied and as often as not I'd be out welding in the docks themselves, working on a ship. In the days before I started working at the docks it was a very different process, one that was far more labour intensive. To rivet a ship it needed a gang of five men. One to heat up the rivet, another guy, called the catcher, who took the hot rivet and pushed it in the hole. Then you had a guy on the inside of the steel panel, who would bash the rivet into place. Then there was the 'fire guy'; he was needed because the rivets were red hot and therefore it was his responsibility to deal with any emergency. The fifth guy was the one in charge of the gang.
When welding came along the ship-building companies told the rivet gangs that they could get by with a two-man crew. Naturally the union would have none of it, insisting that there should be at least four men on every gang. This meant that for every single electric arc-welding gun there were two welders, so when one of you was welding the other one wouldn't be welding. To operate the machine that created the electricity to drive the welding gun, it needed a man to look after it; this was the plant minder. He sat on his bum all day long watching the machine go round and round. Naturally we still needed the fire guy and that's how I ended up on a crew with three great blokes.
The whole thing was like something out of I'm All Right Jack, the film in which Peter Sellers plays a union official who refuses to cooperate with the 'time and motion' people. Like those guys we were up to every trick in the book. On Monday I would clock myself in as well as clocking the other welder in. Next day he would go in and do the same for me; this meant we only worked half a week most of the time. There was another nice little earner that everyone was involved in and that was overtime. The company was keen to get ships in and out of the docks as quickly as possible, so there was never any question of leaving early. In reality, if a
job went on after 5 p.m., our normal knocking-off time, we were paid up until 7 p.m. It was amazing just how many jobs actually finished at 5.15 – an extra 15 minutes' work for which we were paid two hours. Similarly, on bigger projects, where we had to go past 7 p.m. meant that we were paid until 9 p.m.; once again a lot of jobs finished at a quarter past seven. The real big bonus was when things went on until after 9 p.m. That would mean you were paid right around until the next morning – no matter what time you clocked off. It's no wonder we don't build too many ships in Britain today.
Obviously working at the docks meant I was earning a packet, a far cry from apprentice wages, although staying at home, and Mum's natural inclination to spoil me, meant that I always had enough money to go out and enjoy myself. I was also getting more into clothes and with the changes in Britain that were taking place it was a great time to be a teenager. Music was changing too and I, like most kids of 16 and 17 in the early sixties, was excited by what I was hearing. It made me want to spend less time at places like the Court School of Dancing: I wanted to rock and roll. However, for whatever reason, Dad never gave up on me when it came to trying to get me into ballroom dancing.
Dad and my stepmum were regulars at the Erith Dance Studios, which I later learned was owned by Henry Kingston and Joy Tolhurst, a husband and wife who were former world champion dancers. Dad was always pestering the life out of me to go there with them.
'Len, you'll love it, I know you will, you should come.'
'Not on your life, I'm not doing all that old-fogey dancing. I like doing my jiving and there's only one Saturday night a week and I'm not wasting it on a load of old fuddy duddies doing ballroom dancing.'
Nevertheless Dad never stopped badgering me. One week he told me they were having what they called a party dance where a professional couple came along to demonstrate, which was followed by everyone having a bit of a dance. I was probably about 16 or so and thought this all sounded like a pretty daft idea.