The wanderers

Stephanie Boucher on the revival of a European tradition: travelling journeymen who offer their skills in return for hospitality




Fortunately for them both, Coode had trained in German-speaking Europe and was familiar with some of the region's more bizarre customs. He was looking at a travelling journeyman, a craftsman who had served his apprenticeship and was now following tradition by arriving unannounced, to learn from an acknowledged master and to share his hospitality.

Coode, who has four children, says: "I had to phone my wife and ask her to make up a bed in our living room."

Reichlin, 25, is the inheritor of a centuries-old tradition that once encompassed Britain, but appears to have survived only in parts of Europe such as Germany and France. Young tradesmen and, increasingly, tradeswomen, are reviving the custom of journeying to far-flung masters of their trade to build on their skills.

Travel for young Britons is mostly confined to gap-year kids indulging their wanderlust in exotic places. But for newly qualified workers, a formalised apprenticeship system that integrates travel and learning can be a mind-broadening experience.

The practice is thought to have become prevalent during the construction of the great medieval cathedrals, when skilled workers covered vast distances between sites including the UK.

The English word journeyman still describes a stage in training between apprentice and master and is used as such by some British companies, but their journeymen are not required to travel any more. Older definitions may point to someone who was paid by the day (from the French journée), but nowhere, ironically, is the notion of a journey even hinted at.

Modern Germany boasts six societies fielding some 900 travelling journeymen and women from dozens of different trades in a single year. In France, three organisations claiming medieval descent run residential centres throughout the country, where skills are taught to young crafts and tradesmen who live communally and spend part of their time as travelling journeymen.

In 2004, the largest of these, l'Association Ouvrière des Compagnons du Devoir, put 8,000 young people though the various levels including the travelling phase, which sends trainees between the residential centres and is evocatively known as the Tour de France.

The outstanding abilities of the workers emerging from these societies have been noted by the UK companies to whom foreign journeymen are increasingly turning for work experience.

It was for their remarkable training that the French compagnons came to the notice of Ron Stroud, managing director of Total Maintenance and Engineering (TME), a firm of engineering contractors based near Newcastle upon Tyne.

Eight years ago, a compagnon-trained journeyman turned up at TME requesting a job in broken English. The firm's marketing manager Eric Goodfellow says: "We accepted him, in our broken French, because we needed workers. Then we discovered that his skills, at 21 years of age, were far superior to our own workers."

TME was soon enjoying a range of benefits supplied by two compagnon-trained Frenchmen, compared with their homegrown apprentices. They were more versatile, had a positive attitude to work and seemed at home in any social situation.

When his clients began requesting "the French kids", Stroud decided to act. In 1997 he launched the International Journeyman Programme with the aim of sending apprentices recruited into the MKW engineering group, to which his firm belongs, to France to complete their training.

Trainees sign up for an induction programme, including language training, followed by a three-week sample of life in a residential centre. They can then choose to join the compagnons for a minimum two-year period before returning to MKW.

Apprentices who have taken up the challenge found themselves on a steep learning curve in language and culture, not to mention their chosen skill.

But for those who persevered, like Steven McCarthy, a 22-year-old sheet metal worker who spent three years in France, the initial hardship and disorientation were worth it. He says: "The training is a lot better than in the UK, and they teach values. There's an older-brother system so you're looked after."

Funding constraints mean that the journeyman programme, whose work was recognised with a European Award for Languages in 2004, has not sent anyone to France recently.

But Stroud remains hopeful that the programme will expand again. It addresses the problem, as he perceives it, that his UK-trained apprentices leave much to be desired when compared with the compagnon journeymen he has met. He and others, such as human resources expert Hedley Malloch, who studied the journeyman programme, have lambasted UK vocational training for being too rigid and low on skills.

Stroud's real gripe, however, is with attitude. He says: "Kids here expect everything on a plate. With the compagnons, they have learned to do things for themselves. They can only survive by helping each other out."

Malloch has also questioned whether the French system is, well, just too French to work here. Indeed, the cultural eccentricity of these continental societies might be enough to deter all but the most determined enthusiasts.

Last March, Mike Williams, a 25-year-old furniture maker from Cambridge, became one of the first Englishmen to join the German travelling scheme under Sebastian Reichlin's wing.

It's a kind of brotherhood, reckoned Williams as he set off on his two-year stint, the distinctive uniform opening doors as he hit the open road in time-honoured German fashion: on foot, and with no phone to warn potential masters of his arrival.

The road to cultural exchange is not always smooth, as Julian Coode, who admitted to shock and dismay at the sight of Reichlin, found out. "Sebastian tended to charge around and take over, but he was also highly skilled. Travelling makes you very focused, so you can feel wasted if you're not being put to work all the time."

Travel is the common thread that links these ancient and diverse societies. For many journeymen, it will become the defining experience to which they keep referring in later life.

Observing it through the lens of the compagnons, Malloch sums it up: "Travel not only broadens the mind, it expands the skills base, humanity and cultural awareness. It is travel, rather than manners, that makes the man."