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Board appointments at Vacu‐Blast Surface engineering specialists, Vacu‐Blast Ltd., have appointed Mr. Roger Brickwood as sales director. This position was formerly held by Mr. F. H. ‘Bill’ Chaffer, who has relinquished the post in order to concentrate full‐time on developing the interests of BTR sister company, Impact Finishers Ltd., of which he is managing director. Mr. Brickwood was previously sales manager of Vacu‐Blast Ltd.

The preparation and cleaning of surfaces using abrasive blasting still suffers from the old ‘muck and bullets’ image of traditional sand blasting. But, as Roger Brickwood of Vacu‐Blast describes in this article, things have changed.

Controlled shot peening is widely accepted in the aerospace industry for fatigue life enhancement of critical aeroengine and airframe components. Less well known and little understood by many production engineers is the associated process of “peen forming”. This uses the basic principle of shot peening to form or shape curved sheet metal geometries which would be difficult to create with conventional methods such as die bending, stretch‐forming or rolling. It is particularly cost effective where the number of components involved is too small to justify expensive mass production processes.

British Airways' announcement of a further 24 firm orders and options for Rolls‐Royce powered Boeing 747–400 airliners could be worth £500 million to the aero‐engine company.

Croda appointment. Robert (Bob Wilson has joined Croda Paints Ltd as technical sales manager for the Tractol Division. He will be based at the Company's Birmingham laboratories.

Earliest localism was sited on a tree or hill or ford, crossroads or whenceways, where people assembled to talk, (Sax. witan), or trade, (Sax. staple), in eggs, fowl, fish or faggots. From such primitive beginnings many a great city has grown. Settlements and society brought changes; appointed headmen and officials, a cloak of legality, uplifted hands holding “men to witness”. Institutions tend to decay and many of these early forms passed away, but not the principle vital to the system. The parish an ecclesiastical institution, had no place until Saxons, originally heathens, became Christians and time came when Church, cottage and inn filled the lives of men, a state of localism in affairs which endured for centuries. The feudal system decayed and the vestry became the seat of local government. The novels of Thomas Hardy—and English literature boasts of no finer descriptions of life as it once was—depict this authority and the awe in which his smocked countrymen stood of “the vicar in his vestry”. The plague freed serfs and bondsmen, but events, such as the Poor Law of 1601, if anything, revived the parish as the organ of local government, but gradually secular and ecclesiastical aspects were divided and the great population explosion of the eighteenth century created necessity for subdivision of areas, which continued to serve the principle of localism however. The ballot box completed the eclipse of Church; it changed concepts of localism but not its importance in government.