For most of the 20^th century there were two principal streams of apprentices:

• Trade or Craft apprentices were recruited locally and their practical and academic training was directed principally towards becoming skilled craftsmen, but with the opportunity to progress to Foremen and technical management posts. They would typically be required to take City and Guilds courses at local colleges as part of their training.
• Engineering or Student apprentices whose training was more broadly based and directed towards qualifying them for membership of one of the learned Engineering Institutions, usually the Mechanicals, and careers as Professional Engineers. They were typically directed into college or university courses leading to Higher National Certificates/Diplomas or Degrees.

It was possible to move between the two streams and that did sometimes happen when appropriate.

Recruitment of Engineering apprentices was originally via the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich in a joint exercise for the three original Royal Ordnance Factories at Woolwich, Enfield and Waltham Abbey. In 1947, a national recruitment and apprentice training scheme was introduced covering all the greatly expanded chain of over 100 Royal Ordnance Factories and other Defence establishments and based largely on the scheme pioneered so successfully at Enfield and Woolwich.

RSAF's senior management had the great foresight to recognise the long-term importance of a scheme for training apprentices to the very highest standards to ensure that the next generation of craftsmen would be at least the equals of and surpass their talented forebears. So it was that in 1938 a full time Apprentice Supervisor was appointed to manage and develop the training scheme and to set up an Apprentice Training Centre. That enlightened attitude was to survive for the next 50 years until closure of the factory in 1988 and the individuals chosen to be the Apprentice Supervisor and Training Centre Instructors were selected from amongst the factorys most talented and dedicated staff.

Prior to World War II, new apprentices were placed directly with apprentice masters in the workshops, usually at first in the Toolroom, but one of the early tasks of the first Apprentice Supervisor, was to plan and create a Training Centre dedicated to initial training. Wartime priorities intervened and Bert Hart, the Apprentice Supervisor, had to double up as smithy and heat treatment Shop Manager. Nevertheless the new Training Centre did eventually open in 1942, and thereafter all new apprentices spent their initial period, usually their first year, learning the basics of engineering practice in the Centre. In subsequent years apprentices were accorded wide ranging experience in all the important engineering crafts and disciplines by placements in the various departments, eg tool and gauge rooms (for turning, milling, fitting etc), production workshops, heat treatment, inspection, development, laboratory, millwrights, electricians, tinsmiths, planning and drawing offices and a local foundry etc.

The success of the first Training Centre lead to the opening of a new, upgraded Centre in 1947, in a building repaired after being badly damaged by a wartime parachute mine. In 1967 the Training Centre moved again to its final location in a large building including a lecture room and gymnasium as well as comprehensive workshops. In the early 1980s, the Centre was re-vamped to keep pace with the latest thinking and practice in apprentice training and to enable apprentices to return to the Centre for more advanced training in their third years. 

The advent of the national recruitment scheme in 1947 brought with it the opening of an apprentices hostel in Ordnance Road, near the factory, which had many of the attributes of university halls of residence. Taken together with the high standards of both practical and academic training of RSAF apprentices, the training scheme at RSAF could ,with some justification, have been described as a university of industry.

RSAF apprentices were given some challenging projects as training exercises. For many years all apprentices had to complete the notorious cube and plate exercise as an initiation to benchwork. It entails creating a perfect cube from a lump of rough steel bar by hand filing and then making a plate with a square hole into which the cube will fit perfectly in any direction. It is not easy, but if it was not completed to the Foreman Instructors exacting standards and any significant amount of light was visible between the cube and plate, one would have to start again! On completion one certainly knew how to use a file and the basics of metrology (the science of precise engineering measurement)! It was with some quiet pride and satisfaction that we learned in recent years that the exercise used as the starting point of an RSAF apprenticeship was also used as a passing out test by another major international engineering company (a household name).

One of the most notable exercises was the construction in the years after World War II up to the middle 1950s of four ¼ scale, fully working model machine tools:

• an 8½ Butler shaper
• a John Hand 8 ton press
• Two 2/24, hydraulically controlled Cincinnati production millers, one with many parts made in 'perspex' to reveal the inner workings

They were taken to many exhibitions where they were demonstrated by apprentices and created great interest. They were a spectacular advert for the quality of RSAF training. After being lost for some years following RSAF's closure they have now all been traced and displayed at apprentice reunions. The press and the perspex miller are now displayed in the RSA Interpretation Centre.

Other projects, amongst many others, included the construction of a Gas Engine in 1967 and in the 1980s during the refurbishment of HMS Victory, a set of fully working replica flintlocks for firing her 32pounder cannon.

It was not only RSAF's own apprentices who were trained in the Training Centre. A number of other establishments without equivalent facilities sent apprentices to RSAF to do their basic training, including those from the adjoining Royal Gunpowder Mills at Waltham Abbey who regularly undertook their first year in the RSAF Training Centre.

RSAF managements committed support for apprentice training and the supreme talents, enthusiasm and dedication of the staff they appointed to deliver it lead to the RSAF apprentice training scheme earning a well deserved reputation as one of the finest in British Industry and second to none. RSAF apprentices went on to hold positions at all levels throughout the Royal Ordnance Factory organisation right up to Director General and also in industry at large, both in the UK and worldwide. Some became captains of British industry and many formed their own companies. An RSAF apprenticeship was virtually a passport to a job anywhere!

The story of apprentice training at RSAF including the recollections of former apprentices is told in a book "The Lads of Enfield Lock" compiled by former apprentices Graham Birchmore and Roy Burges on behalf of the RSAF Apprentices Association and published in April 2005.