Oily Times

I left school at the end of the Fifth Form without even a brief look at what might lay in store for me in the Sixth Form, so narrow was my academic horizon at that time. The only science subject I was allowed to take for the General Certificate of Education was chemistry and since I had enjoyed that more than any other subject I decided to seek a job in science. The opportunites in Grimsby were limited to the dominant fishing industry and eventually I was accepted as a laboratory assistant in C.T Bowring's cod liver oil factory on the Humber Bank. This was a subsidiary of the Bowring multinational company founded at St. John's New Foundland in the 1820s by Benjamin Bowring, a Cornishman, who was greatly involved in the Canadian sealing trade. By 1823 he owned a fleet of small sailing vessels to trade across the Atlantic. This fleet grew and by the end of century the family was associated with important maritime interests, being engaged as ship brokers, steamship agents, and exporters and importers of merchandise. By the 1840s, his son, Charles Tricks Bowring was the functional head of the company which had expanded to Liverpool dealing in cod liver oil and seal products. The Grimsby factory had been established before the Second World Wa as part of the Liverpool expansion.

My job in a two-person control laboratory was to carry out daily checks on the build up of salt in the factory boilers and do routine analysis of the composition and physical consistency of oil that was extracted from cod livers. Towards the end of my time there I was measuring the levels of vitamins A and D.

My mentor was a Mr Frankland, who had recently come from Hull to be in charge of the lab and it was he who urged me to enroll for an external London BSc degree through evening classes. Gradually, I began to see a wider view of a career in science and it was the outcome of further conversations that I walked up the grand staircase of Grimsby's education office for the second time. This time I had an appointment with the Director of Education to see if he could mediate with the new head of the grammar school to resume my school education as a Wintringham sixth former.

It was all agreed that I should take the 'golden road' and I resigned from Bowrings after a year's employment and for the next two years I crammed physics and biology together with chemistry for entry to university.