On Being A Driving Instructor

Pimme’s recent blog entry about learning to drive triggered a few memories for me. I used to be a driving instructor before joining the UK Rail industry in 1992. I taught both cars and motorcycles and, like Pimme, I have a few tales to tell.

Perhaps one of the most frustrating things for the professional driving instructor is that everyone is a self elected expert in driving. Ever come across someone who admitted to being an awful driver? A rare breed indeed. So who are all these folk who have all these accidents? Rhetorical question and straying from the point.

Many of my clients were women in their thirties and forties who decided to take up driving. Their husbands were either hostile to the whole idea and constantly put them down, or supportive, but misguided, giving them advice that would inevitably lead to a test failure. Parents who paid for junior’s driving lessons when they turned seventeen were also a nightmare – they assumed that a block of five or ten lessons would do the trick and assumed too, that I was trying to string things out to make more money when I insisted that junior was not yet ready.

“Ah,” they would say, “Let him/her take the test and they just might pass.”

“The examiner isn’t stupid.”

“But they might get lucky.”

“They won’t, they are not ready.”

“We’ll go to another instructor.”

“Good luck.”

You see, I used to get phone calls (as did my colleagues) from such disgruntled parents asking for a lesson and test booking. To which the answer was always a firm negative. Driving instructors talk to each other and we knew full well that a last minute booking of this nature was from someone who was not yet ready for their test and had decided to take their custom elsewhere. What these folk forgot – or did not consider – was that driving instructors have a reputation to maintain and examiners expect them to present candidates who are properly prepared for their test. They might still fail, but they were at least ready. Woe betide the instructor who gets a reputation for presenting candidates who are not ready.

Bikes were another matter. At that time, instructors were not regulated in the way they are today and were mostly enthusiastic amateurs. I recall watching my sister struggling with a figure of eight manoeuvre in preparation for her off-road test. She couldn’t understand why she constantly hit the cones marking the outside of the exercise area.

“Try looking where you are going,” I said. Funny, a simple solution to a simple problem, but no one had picked it up at her training school.

Then there was the old gent (I’ll call him Bert) who decided to return to riding after a prolonged period of illness had caused him to lose his license. He was on a borrowed Yamaha and was unfamiliar with it. So I briefed him on the controls before explaining to him and the other client I had for the day where we were to go.

“I want you to follow Andy (not his real name) out of the training centre, where we will turn right onto the dual carriageway. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay”

So we set out, Andy turned right onto the dual carriageway and Bert turned left, while signalling right. I decided that Andy would realise what had happened and wait for us to catch up while I followed Bert. A couple of miles later I pulled him into a safe place and asked him why he had turned left instead of right. Apparently, he was confused by modern bikes with indicators “on my old Francis Barnett, we used hand signals.” I could think of a hand signal or two I could use, but kept my trap shut.

We rejoined Andy and set off through an old village. The road was narrow and rose up a steep hill. As we progressed, Bert’s progress became progressively less the further we climbed the hill. Eventually the Yamaha stalled and Bert toppled into the grass verge. I stopped and lifted the bike off him.

“Why didn’t you select a lower gear?” I asked.

“Never needed to on my old Francis Barnett. That’s the trouble with these newfangled modern bikes – no power.”

I could go on, but you get the drift

Happy New Year to you all.