Midland Junction Technical School Scholarship Winner in Mechanical Drawing
This is a young Alfred Watson who won the first scholarship in Mechanical Drawing at Midland Junction Technical School in 1906. Scholarship winners were exempt from tuition fees the following year.
Alfred - standing third from left
Alfred’s career path, which began with a railways apprenticeship and ended in a senior position in mining took an opposite direction to his father’s, which began in mining and ended in the railways.
It was his father’s position in 1892 as the foreman of
Edward Keane’s Midland Railway Company Workshops that brought the family to
West Midland. Enos Watson had begun his career at the age of 12 in the coal
mines of the West Midlands of Britain. Through attending night school and work
experience he gained a thorough knowledge of mechanical engineering. These
skills were highly sought after when he migrated to Western Australia in 1886,
just after 
Alfred, his second of seven children was born. Initially Enos was
offered a position as the First Leading Hand at the Fremantle Government
Workshops. Then after six years with the Midland Railway Company Workshops, he
was offered the position of Foreman of the new Government Ways and Works
Workshops at West Midland. The family moved to a large house in Montreal Road
where Alfred spent his teenage years.
Alfred’s apprenticeship as a fitter with the Government Railways included studies at what was then a very new technical school in Midland Junction. When he married he also had seven children. Shortly after his second son was born in 1922, he moved to the goldfields with his young family where he began work on the Perseverance gold mine, firstly as Foreman Fitter, then as Assistant Engineer. His children, six of them boys, diversified into all sorts of careers including mining and science and continued to add to the huge Watson dynasty in this State.
Special thanks to Lindsay and Joe Watson for this information
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