John Hudson talks to John Skene about his life as a quality inspector.

John Skene was an ambitious 20-year-old when he went to the inaugural meeting of the Bristol branch of his professional organisation, back in 1939.

He remembers it was in a city centre pub, possibly the Crown and Dove, and a lot of the formal business of setting up the organisation went over his head.

He's learned a thing or two since then, though – and now, at the age of 90, he is busy helping to organise the 70th anniversary get-together, which is scheduled for the BAWA club in Southmead Road on October 1.

The organisation is the Chartered Quality Institute, though it was the Institute of Engineering Inspection when John was first involved, and was the Institute of Quality Assurance before it was granted its royal charter in 2006.

"I've been on the committee since 1951, never been off it," says John, who was awarded the MBE in 2002 for services to industry through quality management.

"We now have about 200 members in the Bristol area, but I wish a few more of them would get involved!"

For a man whose working life has been dedicated to excellence and safety, he has seen some hair-raising moments.

"I've not driven since last year, when a truck came through a red light at me," he says.

"Mind you, by then I had been driving for about 75 years, so I hadn't done too badly.

"I first drove when I was 14.

We lived in the suburbs of Cardiff, and my father had a cycle shop in the middle of town.

I'd not long left school to work with him, and one evening when we were going home, he told me to get into the driver's seat of our 1934 Morris Cowley.

"He handed me the keys and said 'Now drive me home'.

"And I did.

"It had no synchromesh gears, of course, so it was a case of double de-clutching, but I'd watched him doing it often enough – and I'd been riding a motorbike since I was 11!"

John, born in Cock Road, Kingswood, spent his childhood between Bristol and Cardiff, and when we was 16 came back to Kingswood to live with his grandparents.

His first job here was on his doorstep, with Douglas Motors – working not on motorbikes, but an odd little roadster with a two-stroke engine which was aimed at owners of country estates.

There was also a version that could serve as a little delivery truck in those in-between days when town-centres were crowded with all manner of vehicles – hand pushed, horse drawn or motorised.

From Douglas John moved on to the Bristol Aeroplane Company at Patchway to make nine-cylinder radial engines – Mercurys for Bristol Blenheims and Gloster Gladiators and Jupiters for Bristol Bulldogs and Gloster Gamecocks.

His stay there was not long, and before World War II he had joined the engineering company H O Strong of Brunswick Square, which was doing subcontract work for BAC.

And it was from Strong's, as a young inspector, that he went along to that first quality institute meeting in 1939. Wasn't he young to be an inspector?

"It wasn't unusual," he replies.

"Inspection in those days was not so technical, and we used basic fixed-gauge measuring equipment for a lot of the work.

"It got a lot more complicated later on, mind you!"

A month after that inaugural meeting, John was called up to the Glosters and did not return until 1946.

If he'd been three month older, at 21, his post might well have qualified as a reserved occupation, but that was not open to a 20-year-old.

As it happens, it was a far from easy war for him, from the evacuation from France to tough times in Burma, where the premature detonation of 600lb of high explosives left him partially deaf.

He also remembers the adjustments he faced on his return – like meeting his little school-age elder daughter, whom he had last seen when she was two weeks old.

He had gone to that first meeting of the quality institute as a visitor, but after the war, back at H O Strong, he joined it formally in 1951.

He was secretary for 18 years, aided greatly by his much-missed wife Muriel, who died 20 years ago.

John had a varied working life in the years after the war, going on from Strong's to the Government's electrical and mechanical inspectorate, and after that to Parnall and Sons of Lodge Causeway, who made office furniture.

Finally he was at the engineers G V Linham of Fishponds, and after he retired at the age of 65 he did consultancy work for several more years.

"Quality control took in some funny jobs," he reflects.

"I once had to go down to Cornwall to take samples out of 25 bags of china clay.

"Another time I had to test rubber bands from a container full of them."

After a lifetime in the business, he insists that safety and reliability really are of paramount importance.

But then again... "I have two great-grandchildren, and they can't have sports days at school in case they fall down," he says.

"I got involved in the Territorial Army after the war, and I think of all the exercises I used to take the men on.

"It would be a nightmare trying to organise that kind of thing now."

As for life in post-industrial Bristol, he says that among all the reasons for the decline in manufacturing, you can't rule out sheer bad management.

"When I was at Parnall's, some people at BAC told me 'Your company doesn't want to work for us any more.'

"To work for BAC meant having a couple of independent inspectors in, and the MD said 'I'm not going to have them telling me what to do'.

"Later, when I was testing at Bath University, I learned it was looking for 50 sets of furniture for student accommodation – in chipboard with a beech finish.

When I told the supplier he said, 'We do teak and oak. We don't do beech'."