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Transport manager Mark I
Page 87
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Janus comments
"ELSIE at the bar would make a good transport manageress," said Maggie's brother Cromwell. "She takes so long to serve you that you can hardly get above an idling speed; the merest suspicion of overloading and you are out on your ear; and the beer curdles in your glass when she shouts Time!"
"A female transport manager would be something of a novelty," I said. "Since the Minister who introduced the Transport Bill was a woman it is surprising that she did not make more provision in it for her own sex. Equal pay hardly applies when there is no opportunity for earning it."
"It is an old problem not peculiar to road transport," said Cromwell, "according to some authorities even the first woman was a side issue and in a man's world woman has stayed on the edge of things ever since."
"Of course," I continued, "there is nothing to stop an operator from n.ominating a transport manageress and from trying to persuade the Licensing Authority to agree. You may have opened up a whole new territory."
"Credit is really due to Cloggs," said Cromwell. "He had the point in mind when he started the Cloggs Academy for transport managers which has already made him a lot of money even if it has so far failed to make any transport managers.
"He argues that it is just as likely or unlikely for a woman as for a man to become a licensed manager and in this way he has doubled his possible intake."
"Cloggs seems to have been keeping rather quiet lately," I said.
"Haven't you noticed that anybody who has anything to do with transport managers' licences has been keeping rather quiet?" asked Cromwell.
"Not the Pundits and the academics," objected. "They seem to talk about transport managers and their, licences all the time although they do not give much information that is new. Perhaps Cloggs is the exception. I had thought he was still biding his time in road haulage."
"He is on the way out," said Cromwell. "Or rather he is expanding the lorry-hire side of his business. He considers it will suit his requirements admirably under the system of quality licensing. He will merely supply the vehicles. The poor operator who hires them will have to get the licence and appoint the transport manager and live in constant fear of the midnight knock on the door."
"That happy state of affairs cannot continue indefinitely," I said, "although it may seem to be sanctioned by the law as it now stands. I am afraid the Ministry of Transport will find some way soon of making Cloggs the hirer take more responsibility."
"When that happens," said Cromwell, "he will change course again and set up an agency for supplying transport managers made to his own specification."
"And that is why he is running his academy," I said.
"Merely an experiment," said Cromwell. "Cloggs regards it as a chance to put his theories about human nature into practice. He knows how much innocent pleasure people take in listening to something which
sounds edifying and is also slightly flattering:,
"Are you suggesting," I asked, "that the people who take a course think themselves clever because they are in the van of progress and so meet the lecturer more than halfway?"
"I would not put it as harshly as that," said Cromwell. "Let us say instead that their reasonably intellectual entertainment becomes that much more enjoyable when they can get the money back from the Training Board."
"That sounds even more cynical," I said. "If Cloggs is only at the experimental stage where does he hope to get in the end?"
"Everybody," Cromwell explained, "seems to have accepted Parliament's idea of the transport manager at its face value. This is so in spite of the fact that he would appear to be on a hiding to nothing and must steer what may sometimes be an impossible middle course between pleasing his employer and satisfying the Ministry."
"Presumably," I said, "Cloggs thinks the transport manager is destined for a more sinister role rather like that of a commissar put into a firm to report on deviations from right thinking and right practice. The spy-inthe-office is to be a companion piece to the spy-in-the-cab. Cloggs aims to give lessons in espionage, unarmed combat and the proper use of codes."
"You are on the right lines but not completely right," said Cromwell. "Cloggs has studied the subject in greater depth. He has gone behind the words of the Act and even of the original Bill to discover what it really was that the Minister and her advisers had in mind originally and what they first put to paper."
"And what form did the transport manager take in this early draft?" I asked.
"It was all in the black box," said Cromwell obscurely. "Most people thought there was only the tachograph. Nobody realized that there was also the transport manager in embryo. He was intended to be another piece of mechanism, a robot if you like. Cloggs swears he got the confession out of an ex-civil servant in his cups—there would have been no chance of that in this pub! Perhaps Cloggs was joking. The odd thing is that he was able to point out certain parts of the Act where the original wording still showed through in spite of all the subsequent deletions, scratchings out and amendments."
"Schedule 9 deals with transport managers' licences," I said. "It certainly does have some dark passages."
"There is one at the very beginning," said Cromwell. "It describes where the applicant should go for his licence if he does not reside in any area for which there is a Licensing Authority. Where is there such a non-place and why is this proviso thought necessary? It makes good sense if you believe the candidate has come in a little black box from Germany."
"I have been struck myself," I said, "by the reference to the 'test' which the prospective transport manager will have to take. I had always supposed that tests were for machines and for the people who directly operate them such as drivers and typists. For transport managers one would have thought it more appropriate to speak of an 'examination'," "What I found conclusive in Clogg's argument," said Cromwell, "is that the transport manager's licence has to be renewed every five years. Is he expected to have forgotten what he knew five years previously? Suppose, however, that he were a robot. It would be natural for the Ministry to want it back at the end of five years in order to service it."
"A fascinating piece of research," I admitted. "I like the idea of the electronic transport manager. The idea must have been to feed it with a tachograph chart through a hole in the head and out would come the driver's weekly wage and a flood of abuse if there was anything on the chart at all indigestible. Cloggs has earned himself a footnote in the history books. But of what use is the knowledge to him now?"
"Think about it a bit more," advised Cromwell. "Why should you think the Ministry ever abandoned its first idea? If a transport manager can be a woman it can also be a robot."
"Perhaps Cloggs has some evidence on this point also," I said.
"Here is one of those cases where lack of evidence is itself evidence," said Cromwell. "You have heard there is a Transport Manager's Licence Committee. That is probably the sum total of your knowledge on the subject. Many people are coming round to the theory that the committee does not exist but is a fiction invented by the road transport associations to show how busy they are."
"Remember also," I said, "that knowledge is potent only as long as it remains esoteric."
"Apart from that," said Cromwell, "what reason can there be for keeping secret what ought to be perfectly straightforward discussions on the kind of requirements that should be included in regulations on the transport manager? But if the committee is busy producing a mechanical transport manager in a Ministerial hideout, naturally it would be sworn to secrecy."