Peter Moore: The vital skills they don't teach you at university

We have a crisis.

The heritage crafts charity has warned that many of our historic crafts are dying out. They have a red list of crafts as the numbers of craftsmen and women diminish without the skills being passed on to the next generation. There is only one workshop left in the UK making rattan furniture. Over 70 other skills could be lost forever. We have already lost gold beating and lacrosse stick making. In a subject close to our editor Jim Parker’s heart, we have also lost hand-stitching cricket balls.

Today it is difficult to find someone to carve a new figurehead for your ship, which may explain why none of the cruise liners in our bay during the pandemic had dramatic figureheads.

In our part of the world there is a concern that we have a shortage of thatchers, by which I mean people who thatch rooves not cider. We also lack silversmiths and cut crystal glassmakers, although on one programme they suggested a shortage of glass blowers. I nearly shouted at the radio, “Go to Cockington.”

Skills have changed over the years. We don’t see many lamplighters or snuff box makers anymore. It made me wonder what other skills are disappearing.

Today we rely on supplies of drugs from the pharmacy, but two hundred years ago my predecessors must have relied on supplies from the leech farm. Breeding leeches must be a dying trade, which seems unfair on the leeches.

Is there still a role for an all-round car mechanic now that most cars are bristling with microchips and just need to be plugged into a computer? And will the skill of changing gears disappear with automatic and electric cars? With self-drive cars, the whole idea of a human driving might become redundant.

Driving around South Devon I sometimes wonder whether fixing potholes is also a lost skill.

I can even boast the ancient skill of being able to use an old Nokia brick phone. Can anyone still remember how to dial a phone number on a landline?

I have some other redundant skills. I can still check a blood pressure using a mercury blood pressure machine and a stethoscope. I can even call it by the old name, a sphygmomanometer. Without bragging, I’m also pretty skilled at taking a blood sample, as nurses could not take blood and there were fewer phlebotomists in my junior doctor days. It was almost a compliment when a heroin addict asked whether I could go pop round that night and help him as he could never find a vein. That is a request I refused.

Some of the tests we used back in the 1970s are now redundant. This is often an improvement. Rather than the modern colonoscopy, we had to rely on a barium enema, squirting a radio-opaque dye up people’s backside before taking an x-ray. It may be less romantic than carving a ship’s figurehead, but is this skill a thing of the past?

In Star Trek the doctor, Leonard “Bones” McCoy, seems to be able to diagnose anything by plugging the patients into a machine. Will my skills of examining a patient, percussing the chest and listening with a stethoscope become a lost skill?

As more and more young people go to university and end up with a massive debt, should we encourage them to take up an apprenticeship, learning these skills before they are lost? I would not suggest that all new doctors and nurses should be able to use an old-fashioned blood pressure machine with a stethoscope or carry out a barium enema. No one needs to know how to use an old Nokia brick phone or dial a phone number on a landline. Some skills are better forgotten.

We probably only need a few carpenters with the skill to make a figurehead, although there will be work in nautical museums. What we must not do is to believe the myth that somehow a university degree is worth more than an incredible hands-on skill. I look forward to watching cricket when the bowler uses a ball which has been stitched by hand.