When the powers that be decided that anyone doing gas fitting needed to be Corgi registered I had been fitting kitchens with my partner for about 5 years, he was a qualified electrician and I was a mechanical engineer but we could and did turn our hands to anything but mostly I attended to the plumbing and gas fitting so I put in my application for registration, got a call from the inspector saying that as there had been an unexpected amount of applicants that I should carry on gas fitting until they could get round to inspecting my work.

One day out of the blue a corgi registration certificate came through my door, only trouble was it was made out in the name of my wife!

I called the corgi office and explained the situation to them and was asked if my wife works for our company, well being self employed in those days you could claim for you wife doing secretarial work so technically she did and I told them so, “that’s ok then as you only need one person in the company registered then your covered”!

Funny thing is I never had any of my work inspected and we carried on fitting kitchens for another 8 years until we both went back into engineering.