History buff hits town to celebrate apprentices - both present and past
TV star and history buff Tony Robinson paid a visit to Portsmouth to teach young apprentices how their ancestors used to live.
The Time Team presenter spoke at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard about some of the gruesome tasks apprentices of the past were forced to perform.
Around 50 apprentices and employers from across the south east gathered at the meeting, which was organised by the National Apprenticeship Service to promote its National Apprenticeships Week.
Mr Robinson said: 'The ancient Greeks, the Romans, Babylonians even the ancient Egyptians had apprentices, How do we know this?
'Mummies used to be wrapped in the Egyptian equivalent of paper, called papyrus.
'But they didn't use new paper. They recycled old stuff and when archeologists discovered them, they had all this administrative writing to work out that there were even apprenticeship schemes then.
'There probably wouldn't even be any pyramids if it wasn't for the Egyptian equivalent of the NAS.'
Mr Robinson, who also played Baldrick in the TV series Blackadder, said you only had to look at English names to discover how deep the tradition runs.
'The kind of work apprentices used to do are still buried away in people's surnames.
'In the Middle Ages everybody was cold and rich people started making clothes out of wool.
'But a big problem with wool is if you cut it it falls apart. You needed to make it stiff first.'
'In order to do this, the wool was dipped in a solution made up of three-week old urine.
'To stir the solution, the apprentice would be made to walk through it for eight hours a day - giving him the job title of "walkers", from which the present-day surname comes.
'They don't tell you that on the crisp packets, do they?' said Mr Robinson.
He said they were holding the talk in Portsmouth because 'the navy has always been choc full of skills, and it's really pertinent we should celebrate apprenticeships in the dockyard.
Cara Gunther, 18, from Hastings Avenue, Gosport, works for apprenticeship training firm Fareport.
She said afterwards: 'It was fantastic. I'm a big fan of Tony Robinson. I was just waiting for him to say 'I've got a cunning plan'. I was thinking the whole time: 'It's Baldrick!' He put a lot of enthusiasm into explaining about something people don't really understand any more.'
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Saturday 04 February 2012
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