The aim of encouraging ‘arts, manufactures, and commerce’ in Britain through drawing education was the focus for disagreement throughout the long nineteenth century and beyond (Bird 1992; Brett 1987; Romans 1998 and 2005; Denis 1995). The production of technical representations (in print, exhibitions and the factory) by jobbing designers and factory draughtsmen presents one under-researched area where these cultural conflicts can be addressed in more detail. My approach, neither a celebration of the ‘art of the engineer’ (Baynes and Pugh 1981; Booker 1979; Fox 2009) nor an attack on the ‘coercive’ nature of worker education in drawing (Denis 1995; Purbrick 1998), seeks to describe the strategies of workers who aimed to exploit the ‘machine dreams’ (Sussman 2000) of this period and claim professional and cultural status by acquiring and demonstrating drawing skills.

In comparison to the situation in Britain’s industrial rival France (Day 1987; Edmonson 1987; Alexander 1999), technical draughtsmen and engineers in Britain largely trained themselves through copying from a wide range of examples and conventions; their drawing strategies were ambiguous and multivalent and must be addressed in a cross-disciplinary way. As ‘visual technicians’ engineers inhabited and reproduced the motifs and manner of artistic, ornamental and practical styles of drawing, in competition with other groups also fighting for status, such as men of science (Morrell 1990: 980-989), or with a developing art and design establishment (Hoock 2003; Duncan 1995; Trodd 1994; Denis 1995).

Within engineering, draughtsmen were a further sub-group of even more compromised status. My paper will consider first, the ways in which drawings produced for the elite shipbuilding company of Robert Napier and Sons, Glasgow orchestrated different visual languages from art, industry, and practical science in order to make a persuasive effect, and second, how the process of making these drawings either aided or frustrated the working ambitions of the draughtsmen who produced them.