Unsung engineers
Sir: Priscilla Metcalf (Letters, 30 March) obviously did not have the advantage of the composer of your amusing ballad on an Engineers' Corner in Westminster Abbey, that of seeing the original advertisement published by the Engineering Council. We were well aware of individual commemora- tions of the engineers Priscilla Metcalf mentions, as we spent some time in the Abbey doing our research.
All those engineers honoured died more than 50 years ago. By comparison we have, in the last 50 years, commemorated among the poets, John Masefield, W. H. Auden, Rudyard Kipling, T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas; among the musicians, Sir Adrian Boult, William Walton, Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten. Dame Sybil Thorn- dike and Noel Coward are there, too. We do not argue with that.
Our advertisement was about today's attitudes and how today's society fails to honour engineers.
Finally, had we not run the Westminster Abbey advertisement the prestigious Spec- tator would not be writting ballads about engineers.
Kenneth Miller
Director-General, The Engineering Council, Canberra House, Maltravers Street, London WC2
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