Men Who Make Transport-6
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ON and off, this American citizen has worked in Europe for 40 years. "So you are an internationalist," I said. " Put it that way if you wish," he answered. "I would rather say that I have learnt to like people from many nations, and my conviction that that is the way of progress grows stronger and stronger."
It was in 1919 that Philip Wilson Copelin arrived in Europe for the first tithe. He had come, with his father, on a family pilgrimage, his elder brother having been killed during World War I. Out of the blue his father asked him whether he would like to stay in Europe for a while. It thus came about that the youth from Illinois found himself in a _Swiss school; a mid-western American rubbed shoulders with French, Swiss, Italians—even one or two youngsters from the East—and, without losing his American accent, became a citizen of the world.
The Arts studies he subsequently followed at Brown University, U.S.A., must, of course, have influenced his future. No doubt the Humanities did much to deepen and strengthen what I had rather pompously described as his "internationalism." But it was his vacation activities that determined the first steps in a career which has taken him to a top place in the British motor industry.
American students, often through sheer financial necessity, work in non-academic fields during their vacations. I remember a head waiter in a Bahamas hotel telling me that he was in fact a dentistry student from California (he was a very bad waiter, incidentally). The young Copelin worked in a foundry. I think he must have been a very good foundry worker, however, for the jobs he did awakened such a lively interest in metals that, graduating from Brown, he entered Grenoble University, France, then (and probably now) a celebrated centre of