Engine Trouble

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 420, 11 July 1947, Page 9

Engine Trouble

T is not often that a story laden with technical details and entirely dependent on them for its plot is a popular success, so I was a little surprised at the choice of George Mulgrue’s "Watch Below," read over the air recently by Dermot Cathie. This story is distinctly technical (although easily enough followed), and is that rather rare thing, a play specially for engineers. If you know all about bearings and pyrometers, and can tell a big end from a little end (or was it a bottom end?), then this play is for you, sir. And if you didn’t, it was still very pleasant to sit back and let the terms flow over your head, to listen to the (imaginary) throbbings of the ship’s engines, and to,picture the little greaser running round dosing all the bearings (or the big ends) with castor-oil to keep their temperatures down. Moreover, it really was castor-oil, he specifically said so; apparently it’s good for big ends (or bearings), The play was inconclusive enough, being the story of a young engineer who experiences all the tertors of being alone in charge of the, engine-room when things begin to go wrong. He finally saves the situation but not the plot by reducing the fuel supply to the dangerously overheated engine. And I have :it on excellent juvenile authority that he went quite the wrong way about this-I forget now, but I rather think he attacked it from the bottom end instead of the top énd. Or maybe he just lost his bearings,