Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
‘Fantastic’ college inside old city hospital
Michael Baldwin failed his 11-plus but ended up with a PHD and a top job at Shell, all thanks to Canterbury Technical College...
The old Canterbury Technical College stood where the entrance to St Augustine’s Abbey is located in Longport Street. It was housed in the old Canterbury hospital building, vacated when the present hospital was opened, but long since demolished.
The technical college was a fantastic facility. In those days, if you failed the 11-plus, you had little chance of any route in life requiring academic achievement. There was the 13-plus exam, but by that time you were so far into the secondary modern system that chances of success were remote.
At the age of 14, I was advised that I was fit for nothing, and was advised to leave school at 15 and go to Canterbury Technical College to get some “O” level GCES. Such exams could not be taken at my secondary modern school in Whitstable. I joined the college in 1958 and the great thing about it was that it wasn’t a school. I couldn’t believe there was none of that stifling discipline
I had undergone at secondary modern. There was complete informality, but first class teaching.
The laboratories were the old hospital wards. Several classrooms still had labels on the doors such as X-RAY. There was the chute for dirty washing which went from top to bottom.
It was the sort of place where you could get a grammar school education after leaving school. In my case, I did evening classes too most days. I studied with apprentices from the Kent coalfield. When I moved to “A” levels my trigonometry was taken with apprentice surveyors. In all I spent four years there. After leaving the college and armed with “A” levels in physics, chemistry, pure maths and applied maths, I moved into industry. I spent three years with BP at their Isle of Grain oil refinery, long gone. I then moved to the Shell Research Ltd laboratories at Sittingbourne, where I worked for about 30 year, ending up as
a principal scientist. During my career I achieved Graduate membership of the Royal Institute of Chemistry, leading to Fellowship, and a PHD in biochemistry. Canterbury Technical College was a real lifeboat to victims of the secondary modern system. During my career I came across many people who had been failed by
that system, which was brutal. When I was in my early 50s I obtained a Postgraduate Certificate in Education. I did my main teaching practice at a Rochester grammar school. There have been great strides since the 1950s, when many of the teachers were ex-military with superficial training in teaching, but I wonder how good facilities are today for our 11-plus failures who are capable of something better. Education and employment tend to be very elitist. I have more qualifications than I know what to do with, so I bucked the trend. So many employers just look at paper qualifications and recruit on that basis.
When I first started out, many of the lab technicians were ex-forces from the Korean war. They were superb at their jobs. Today they wouldn’t get a look in; you need a degree!
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