Railworld Wildlife Haven – Brian Pearce MBE

The signs of an extraordinary ‘life well lived’ were there when, as a teenager Brian Pearce – with no money and not wanting to let his lifelong London friend down – rode to London on a homemade bike with only one gear, saving the five shillings for an overnight stay in a hostel to ride the 186 miles back to his family home in Grimsby without a stopover.

He attributes a successful interview to become an apprentice at Perkins Engines to his father, Ron, who told him he had to visit the local library to read ‘everything he could on diesel engines’. Achieving an incredible 98% on the technical test paper the second was less successful with an 11% score. ‘Which paper was that?’ asked the keen candidate. ‘Intelligence’ came the reply! Fortunately, this was overlooked by the Apprentice Manager and Brian was taken on to fulfil an illustrious career at Perkins Engines which took him all over the world. In order to facilitate the testing of the engines in countries where the grasp of English was sometimes limited, Brian worked with many interpreters, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian to help get the message over. They say ‘Necessity is the Mother of Invention’ – he saw a need, so he created a ‘suitcase’ with which he could demonstrate the versatility of electronic controlled engines and also create faults to help them understand and diagnose problems in the engine control system. Years after Brian’s design was accepted, Perkins are still using the design and over 250 of the suitcases have been built.