Trustee from the Toolroom

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West Ealing is a suburb to the west of London, and Keith Stewart lives there in lower part of No. 56 Somerset Road. No. 56 is an unusual house and a peculiarly ugly one ..." Oh My, I must admit that sometimes I just want to hear a good story read by a great narrator. I've been listening to audio books on my daily walks for over 40 years and one of my all time favorite narrators is Frank Muller. His is a voice that can lend enchantment to almost any story. Unfortunately he is no longer alive and finding his books gets harder and harder but every once in awhile I long to hear him again. So I stumbled on this. I'm sure I probably read this long ago as it was published in 1960. I love Nevil Shute and at one time read many of his novels but it was great fun to hear this story read by Muller. Then, in the way of any good story, upheaval arrives when his sister and her fairly wealthy husband perish at sea, leaving Keith and his long suffering but supremely practical wife as guardians for their nine-year-old niece. Keith is also named trustee for the little girl's inheritance which turns out to include a valuable stash of diamonds lost on a corral island near Hawaii. inability to use this document or the information contained in it, even if you have been advised of Like most authors, Shute was at his best writing about what he knew, and what he knew more about than anything else were engineering (his career) and sailing (his passion). Both feature hugely in this highly unusual story about a humble, self-effacing but great-hearted little man who overcomes all obstacles to pursue his self-imposed duty across half the world. In the end, virtue gets its reward and we can all close the book with a warm inner glow.

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact. Two contrasts are regularly apparent throughout the book. The first is between the seriousness with which the craft of model engineering is treated by its practitioners, and the physical scale of operations (which in today's language might be dismissed as "boys' toys"). Naturally, only the non-technical characters find this contrast amusing, since to an engineer the ultimate seriousness is that what he designs works, and Shute was a professional engineer. The other contrast is between Keith Stewart's generally low estimation of his own abilities and the high esteem in which he is held by engineers worldwide. "Not the Keith Stewart?" is the amusing recurrent response when one engineer introduces him to another on his journey. "A very competent student of engineering matters" is how Shute the neutral narrator describes him, "though he would have been amazed to hear himself described in those terms". He had bought it when he married Katie in the middle of the Second War. That was soon after he moved down from Glasgow to the London area to work as a toolroom fitter with Stone and Collinson Ltd., who made subcontract parts for aeroplanes at Perivale. It was, of course, the first house that Katie or Keith had ever owned, and they were very proud of it. They contemplated quite a family so that they would need quite a house, the upper rooms for nurseries and children’s rooms and playrooms while the garden would be a nice place for the pram. When, after a few years, it became evident that that was not to be, they had separated the two top floors from the remainder of the house and let them off as what the agents called a maisonette, retaining the ground floor and the basement for themselves. On the ground floor they had a bedroom in the front, the living room and kitchen at the rear overlooking the garden, and a bathroom at the side. In the basement they had adapted what had once been the scullery as a small spare bedroom; the whole of the rest had been taken by Keith as his own domain. Reading a new (only for me as Nevil Shute has been dead since 1960) book by Shute is like putting on a cardigan, comfy pj's and slippers and cozying up on the couch. It's comforting, even though astounding things can happen. Trustee from the Toolroom was Shute's last book. As soon as I started reading it, I fell comfortably into the fantastic world that he created for my reading enjoyment.Keith Stewart is one of Nevil Shute’s wonderful, down-to-earth, smarter than they seem, characters. He invents miniature engineering marvels and writes articles and instructions for a magazine titled Miniature Mechanic. When, on the death of her parents, he is left as trustee to his niece, he finds himself faced with a tremendous task that he feels he must perform to fulfill the obligation. The novel is really the story of his fulfillment of that task and how it reveals who Keith Stewart is to himself and to the world at large.

neighbor should have a copy of Trustee wasn't, in retrospect, accidental at all. Our neighbor was an engineer (MIT, class of 1918), well read and well traveled. Trustee, a novel by a bestselling author/engineer about engineering, occupied a natural place in his library. is due to postwar currency restrictions caused not by any individual but rather by difficult times. Before reading this book, my only exposure to the works of Nevil Shute had been watching the delightful movie A Town Like Alice. I used to watch that movie over and over as a kid, especially whenever my father (who has a workaholics dream job) had a little time to spend with me. Nevil Shute has always been one of his favorite authors and as such, that movie has always been a source of fond feelings. This month, I have a rare opportunity to spend time with my dad, as he's taking a rare vacation to go to the Shute convention in Seattle and he wanted me to come along. So this week I started reading this book.Trustee from the Toolroom was voted #27 on the Modern Library Readers' list of the top100 novels. [2] The top ten in that poll included four works by Ayn Rand and three by L. Ron Hubbard and according to David Ebershoff, Modern Library's publishing director, "the voting population [was] skewed." [3]

On the plus side, positive portrayal of non-white characters and Jews. He was really making an effort on that front. Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. So do all the details bore you? No, because the message conveyed is about people. The message conveyed is so simple and so obvious, but one we often forget. The scenarios drawn are not believable, but they will make you smile. Shute describes Keith Stewart and his wife as living in the very house in South Ealing, London, where Shute himself was born and brought up. There is a faithful description of the property and of the modest way of life that went on there. I read this book simply because I love the audio books narrated by Frank Muller. I had never heard of Nevil Shute nor of this novel but I was willing to give it a go on the strength of Frank Muller’s reading. I love tearing through a book on audio on my two hour bike rides and walks around the city. When I return home I find the spot on my eBook and continue which allowed me to finish this in a couple days.I'm a Nevil Shute fan so my rating is really in relation to other Shute novels - I liked it but it really isn't one of my favorites. It's so methodical and detailed in it's slow progression of actions. Our hero Keith Stewart is a simple man and the book walks through every step he takes over the better part of year after his sister and brother in law are killed in a boat crash. (Actually that boat crash was a pretty good section and was a bit of a diversion from the rest of the book's tone.) Keith Stewart is a middle-aged Englishman living in London in the 1960's. Many years ago he gave up his wartime job as a rigger at an aircraft factory and now works from home, creating miniature engines and such and writing articles for a magazine called Miniature Mechanic. The magazine is shipped to people around the world who try to create Keith's designs and correspond with him. He makes little money and his wife makes a bit more so they can live a relatively comfortable life, nothing extravagant. They have never really traveled and live very insular lives. Shute lived a comfortable middle-class English life. His heroes tended to be middle class: solicitors, doctors, accountants, bank managers, engineers. Usually, like himself, they had enjoyed the privilege of university, not then within the purview of the lower classes. However (as in Trustee from the Toolroom), Shute valued the honest artisan and his social integrity and contributions to society more than the contributions of the upper classes. Such an uninviting title for a terrific novel. It does fit the story and perhaps when it was written it wouldn't have been a turn off. Anyway, Nevil Shute's name came up recently and I decided to read something by him which I hadn't read yet and I'm so glad that I found this book and looked beyond the title. Shute was a champion of the middle and lower classes. You can tell he despised the class system and I think he may have had some issues with the Royal Navy as well. He also loved telling the stories of self-made men. In this book two American multi-millionaires, industrial titans, who started from the ground up, play prominent roles in the story. One in particular helps Keith complete his adventure and fulfill his duty as trustee.

The plot of the novel hinges on the actions of a modest technical journalist, Keith Stewart, whose life has been focused on the design and engineering of scale-model machinery. Stewart writes serial articles about how to create scale models in a magazine called the Miniature Mechanic, which are extremely well regarded in the modelling community — as is he. Trustee from the Toolroom is a novel written by Nevil Shute. Shute died in January 1960; Trustee was published posthumously later that year. Trustee From the Toolroom was Nevil Shute's last book. It tells the tale of a mild mannered, unremarkable man who made a remarkable journey to fulfill his responsibility as trustee for his niece.And it has one of the most likeable protagonists I’ve ever encountered: “… an honest little man of lower-middle-class suburban type, content to go along upon a miserable salary for the sake of doing the work he loved…”. Keith Stewart is not handsome, or witty or heroic in the usual sense of the word. But he’s a wonderfully likeable man, the sort of character who does that little bit to help restore your faith in mankind. This book is much like him: gentle, likeable, warm and friendly. It could be argued that the book is thin on plot, and it is essentially little more than a travelogue, but the strength of having such a likeable main character means it is never a chore. I'd recommend it to anybody who wants refreshingly unpretentious story with very human characters. If I’ve made it sound like a period piece that isn’t my intention, but like I said, I find it hard to believe books like this will be written for a while. This is such an odd little story, a narrative of vast technical scope and a plot driven by a simple yet somewhat outlandish concept.