ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that a self-confident, technically sophisticated male workforce in a British Midlands town in the 1930s transferred many of its skills and capabilities into the domestic sphere and in particular to the processes and practices of shopping. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Coventry exhibited many features that were later to be associated with the affluence of the 1950s and 1960s. Individual judgement, facility with materials and techniques, and familiarity with technical terminology garnered during lengthy apprenticeships furnished the time-served engineer with a strong sense of self, which proved to have interesting reverberations in the domestic sphere. Aesthetic tutelage, the guardianship and promulgation of a national design standard by state functionaries, disenfranchised many from a wider debate about design. The British Council of Industrial Design's (CoID's) scourge John Gloag published a book called The Missing Technician in which he bemoaned the absence of the vital figure of the industrial designer in the production process.
