Albert L. ‘Alb’ Smith

I graduated from Black Forest Primary School in 1936. I had come top in sixth grade, a class of 69 and I had been used as a monitor of goodness-knows-what in seventh grade with the result that my education was somewhat lacking and I didn’t do as well in the Qualifying Certificate as I had expected.

Although I could have gone to Adelaide High School, it was decided that I would go to Goodwood Central School for the art and woodwork. My parents thought this was a good idea. It was near the end of the Great Depression of the 1930s and my father’s business had suffered. He was a baker and had a baking round which went from Forestville by the Goodwood Station to Colonel Light Gardens down Marion Road on the western side and right across that area. If he could have held on he would have become a rich man but he went broke and I was sent to the central school with the idea of getting a job as soon as possible.

The central school was a boys’ and girls’ school in those days but there was definitely a physical fence dividing the girls from the boys. Alan Glover was the art teacher, Mr Henderson was the woodwork teacher and Scotty McLean taught general science. They are the only names of the staff that I remember. I don’t even remember the name of the headmaster. Alan Glover in those days taught pretty much the same as I taught when I first joined the teaching ranks later in the 1940s; that is geometrical drawing, some technical and dimensioned sketching. He also did a bit of design. No art as such, that is drawing and painting were not done at all. It was a very strict and regimented type of course. The main emphasis was on geometrical and technical drawing.

In 1938 my birthday was on January 10th and I left school and didn’t in fact go back that year. I had turned 14 and my father obtained for me a job with A. Pengilly & Co, the biggest furniture manufacturer in the southern hemisphere – or it had been. At this stage the depression had taken its toll and only about a quarter of the works was being used. In 1940 I left Pengilly’s and went to the Commonwealth Aircraft Production Commission at Islington to build Beaufort Bombers and Beaufighters for the RAAF.

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