It was like a different world had opened up

About this recording

Bruce Tait left school at 15 and was taken on as a craft apprentice at Dounreay. He would go on to work at the site for 45 years, latterly as design office manager / senior design engineer on the mechanical side.

In this short recording, Bruce talks about the high quality of training provided at Dounreay. He says: “When I went there and saw some of the machinery, and saw some of the materials that they worked with, it was something else. It was like a different world had opened up, seeing all these things being made, put together, made operational… A lot of people are very critical about what went on up there, but from my point of view it was way ahead of its time."

He adds: ”It broadened the opportunities for so many people.”

In a separate recording in the Wick Voices collection, you can hear Bruce talking about his family’s involvement in the herring trade as well as his voluntary roles with Caithness and Sutherland Vintage and Classic Vehicle Club and Wick RNLI as lifeboat operations manager.

The accompanying photo shows the Dounreay dome (DFR) under construction in the 1950s. Image courtesy of Dounreay, a division of Magnox, and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.