John Tysoe is a former British aerospace engineer and retired professor of thermodynamics at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. In addition to his previous book, Nuts and Bolts: Chronicles of a Wayward Engineer, he has written numerous magazine articles concerning his yachting adventures and hobbies (scale models of historic boats and airplanes) and several hundred highly informed, highly charged letters and articles waging war against the ills that beset man in the name of “progress”—from such things as “sanitary” landfill sites, wholesale sea pollution and big-money development in his beloved British Virgin Islands, to—most especially—the politically motivated lie of global warming. As a recent amputee, he has also become a force in encouraging others like himself not only to face the inevitable but to do so with courage, a sense of humour, and continued enthusiasm for embracing life. John can be contacted by email: [email protected] or by snail mail: 1260 Old School Road, Cheltenham ON L7C 3L7 ON THE FRONT COVER: Top: This orange Tiger Moth is the last one I flew, in New Zealand. (The one on the cover of my earlier book, Nuts and Bolts, was the first one I ever flew, in England in the early 1940s.) Bottom: de Loose Mongoose, our favourite beach bar in Trellis Bay, British Virgin Islands. Sweeping Up the Bits Further Chronicles of a Wayward Engineer John Tysoe Griffon Abbeye Press Toronto Canada By the same author: Nuts and Bolts: Chronicles of a Wayward Engineer Published in Canada by Touchnaught an imprint of Griffon Abbeye Press Toronto Canada Contact us at: [email protected] ISBN 978-0-9810781-1-3 © John Tysoe 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Printed and bound in Canada by Ball Media Corporation 422 Grey Street Brantford Ontario N3S 4X8 www.ballmedia.com I dedicate this book to the memory of my wife, Inge. I cannot imagine what my life would have been if I had never met her, but it would most certainly not have been as interesting; And to my daughter Margaret who, having seen me safely through one book, was actually prepared to undergo the same experience again, no doubt hoping that I had become more computer literate meanwhile; And to the memory of Marlene, a good friend of Inge and myself, whose first words upon scanning the draft of my first book were, “When are you going to start the next?” Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. Mark Twain Contents Introduction / 9 Chapter 1: New Zealand and Back / 11 Chapter 2: University Beginnings / 22 Chapter 3: Travels in Germany / 31 Chapter 4: Avro Revisited / 42 Chapter 5: England Reminiscences / 51 Chapter 6: Canadian Capers / 65 Chapter 7: Tales of the BVI / 74 Chapter 8: Slings and Arrows / 107 Chapter 9: Summing Up / 122 Introduction aving unloaded the responsibility for my first book onto the shoulders of others, I was enjoying a pint H of Boddington’s Pub Ale on the deck, watching the flowers blooming and the dandelions growing. The only thing disturbing the peace was the constant buzzing in my head of Marlene’s question, “When are you going to start the next one?” I was doing my best to ignore this, but then there occurred a local event which took me right back to 1973 and a month spent in New Zealand, which somehow I had neglected even to mention in Nuts and Bolts. Our local town council, admittedly not the brightest stars in the galaxy, had decided to fire three office cleaners in order to save money. The inevitable result, which could have been foreseen by the average ten-year-old, was that CUPE, the Canadian Union of Public Employees—one of the most powerful unions in Canada—went ape, stirring up enough trouble to make the French Revolution look like a tea party at the local vicarage. “And what,” I hear you cry, “has this to do with your engineering career?” If you really want to know, buy this book and find out. As Ruskin once said, “If a book is worth reading, it’s worth buying.” John Tysoe Cheltenham, Ontario June 2010 Chapter 1: New Zealand and Back ne day in the spring of 2009, having finished my first book of memoirs, Nuts and Bolts: Chronicles of a O Wayward Engineer, and seen it on its way into the uncharted territory of printing and publishing, I was stooging around giving the brain a rest when the local paper informed me that the Caledon council had fired three office cleaners “as an economy measure”. I don’t know about you, but this kind of thing makes me sick. I am as far removed from being a socialist as it is possible to get, but this business of picking on the most humble of your employees, to further your own agenda, sucks. Predictably, the cleaners’ union was immediately up in arms, staging a large rally outside the town hall, and making it clear that worse was to follow. As I write, the council has not yet had the sense to back down, but it cannot be too long. The whole business took me right back to 1973, when I spent a month in New Zealand, a fact which is not even mentioned in Nuts and Bolts. I remain totally mystified by this omission; it was not just a holiday jolly, but a significant part of my career. It happened this way: I had been an engineering instructor at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto for some five years when they took on a new president to replace Fred Jorgenson, who had retired. He was Don Mordell, from McGill, a prestigious university in Montreal. Don was formerly a chief engineer at Rolls-Royce, although it has to be said that there are a lot of chief engineers at R-R (all chiefs and no Indians, as someone 11 Sweeping Up the Bits Department naturally had high hopes for his administration. I had asked the chairman if I could meet with Mordell as a representative of the department to put some of our concerns to him. I attempted to put across the importance of the assessment of a student's lab report by the instructor, as a point of contact between someone with many years of experience and someone who was just starting out. He tossed this out as a side issue. “Oh, graduate students can do that sort of thing.” I knew then that I had lost. There were no graduate students! We did not have a post-diploma course! Our guys just grabbed their diplomas and shot out to try and get a job. I reported failure to the chairman, and after that things went bad very quickly. Mordell embarked upon an economy campaign, no doubt seeking to make a name for himself as an efficient administrator. Ha! He hired as consultants the firm of Price Waterhouse—may thistles grow on the graves of their ancestors—a name which will stink in my nostrils from here to eternity. Their first move was to lay off a number of cleaners and janitors. That, at least, was the plan, but it got nowhere because the entire cleaning and janitorial staff barricaded themselves in a whole floor of the newly constructed Jorgenson Hall. After a few days' standoff, the victims having the support of the entire Ryerson community, Mordell was forced to back down. His consultants then turned their attention to the teaching staff, proposing to get rid of the most expensive faculty members. This would have included me, not because of my superior qualifications (I was near the bottom of that ladder, with my humble pass degree), but because of my seniority in terms of experience. Plus, I would no doubt have been near the top of any such chop list, having upset quite a few of the brass already. At the time, I was working with Roy Anthony, a visiting technical college instructor from New Zealand, who was on a fact-finding tour of North American centres of learning, with a view to setting up his own lab back home. He was most interested in what I had to show him, and we became good friends, to the extent that I invited him home, and was 12 New Zealand and Back unwise enough to challenge him to a game of table tennis, at which I think I am pretty good. After he had turned me inside out and hung me out to dry, he said that perhaps he should have mentioned at the start that he was the current New Zealand champion. Oh well—win some, lose some. When Mordell’s hatchet-men started their pogrom, I asked Roy if he thought there would be a place for me at any of the New Zealand institutes that he knew of. Certainly, he said, they would jump at the chance—in fact, Hamilton Tech was looking for someone like me at the moment. He wrote me a letter of introduction, which I sent to Hamilton Tech together with a letter saying that I proposed to be in New Zealand in the next few weeks, and would appreciate the opportunity of meeting with them.