THE story of an engineer, company owner, and family man, is told in a new autobiography by Blackburn pensioner Alan Duffy.

My Ladder of Life charts his younger days, his work, the decision to create Alan Duffy Engineering, his lifetime experiences and travels, up to the present day.

Alan was born in 1937, the only child of Jack and Edith Duffy, of Bicknell Street, Blackburn, at a time when milk and coal were both delivered by horse and cart.

He began at St John’s CE school during the war which had air raid shelters in the playground, and fire and gas mask drills.

Corporation Park became a favourite place to play; he was in the church choir; and also a cub – and once went on jamboree to Huntroyde, near Burnley.

In the winter of ’47 the kids made hand-warmers out of tin boxes, with smouldering cotton waste inside and sledged down Oswald Street.

Alan moved on to Blakey Moor Secondary School, where some teachers went to great lengths to perfect new methods of corporal punishment, such as the woodwork master, nicknamed ‘Owd Howarth’, who made himself a cane with a loop for linking it to his braces.

It was assumed that boys would join the trades after school, so they went on career visits, including one to Bank Hall pit, in Burnley, where they were given a free fall drop in the cage to the shaft bottom.

As a young teenager he loved jazz and visited Pickering’s record store, in Blackburn, where there were soundproof booths in the cellar.

Alan left school in 1952 and became an apprentice at Foster Yates and Thom, earning 18s a week, studying hard to become a qualifed engineer.

Other people there included Burnley Bill, Bolton George, Mr Dowell and boiler designer Mr Fellows, who had sailed the seas as a ship’s chief engineer.

Then there was Ivor Drewitt, Mr Moore and the typist Dorothy Whittan.

In the fifties, the dances at King George’s Hall, where Jock Caton and his band were resident, was the place to go, while Sunday afternoons were spent walking in Corporation Park – and it was here he met his wife-to-be Hilary Smith.

Her parents used to have a confectioner’s shop in the town centre.

The same year he moved to Mullards and when the drawing office was used as a set for the film A Kind of Loving, starring Alan Bates, June Ritchie, and James Bolam, he got a small walk-on part.

His next job took him to Crompton and Knowles, in Nelson, to develop packaging machines and new methods of wallpaper wrapping.

Some machines put things in cartons, such as bottles of tablets, other packed food such as pies, or sausages.

The man in charge of research and development there was Bill Hill, who had cycled for England in the 1928 Olympics and designed and patented a multi-change gear for bikes and invented a light-weight cycle frame tube.

Other workers were Bill Stone, Eddie Lawless, and Jack Goldie.

Later in his career, he became chief engineer at Pioneer Oil Seals, in Barrowford, and through his expertise the factory kept running during the miners’ strike and three-day working week.

My Ladder of Life can be ordered online from marketing@troubador.co.uk and is priced at £16.