What You See is What You Get Page 7

  News of my failure at both IBM and ICL filtered back to the school and I was summoned to Mr Harris’s office. Again he told me that I should stay and pursue my A Levels in subjects more suitable to me, such as economics. I reminded him again that I was not in the economics division but in science and engineering, but he simply could not accept it. There was no moving him. I was equally adamant that I was going to leave school.

  I didn’t tell my mother and father about the IBM and ICL episodes, but intent on finding a job, I started to look in the vacancies columns of the national newspapers. I spotted an advert from the Ministry of Education and Science who required applicants with GCE passes to join their statistics division. Naïvely, the word ‘science’ attracted me. I had visions of being involved in scientific experiments – missiles, rockets and the like.

  I went to the Ministry’s Curzon Street building and was interviewed by a very high-ranking civil servant, Miss Mayer, HEO (Higher Executive Officer), a middle-aged lady with silver hair and a very posh accent. I’ll never forget that interview because while we were talking she was fiddling around with a large pearl necklace. It broke, and suddenly all the pearls fell to the floor. She was terribly embarrassed, as was I. We scrambled around picking up pearls all over the place.

  During the interview I’d thrown in a few buzzwords like ‘digits’ and ‘data, which made me look like I knew what I was talking about, and I got the job. And because I had six GCE passes, I was given the level of CO (Clerical Officer) – one up on the pecking order from the ordinary plebs in the department.

  The job paid £32 per month – £8 a week in East End terms – and they wanted to pay it directly into my bank account. We’d never had bank accounts in my family, but my sister Shirley explained to me what I needed to do. So, shortly after joining the Ministry, I walked out of Curzon Street into Berkeley Square and looked for a bank. There was one on the right-hand side – Lloyds. In I walked, armed with a letter confirming my employment at the Ministry, and asked to open a bank account. I’ve been with Lloyds ever since that day in 1963.

  Remember the famous advert with Maureen Lipman as a Jewish grandmother on the phone to her grandson, telling him how clever he was with his ‘ology’? Well, having reported to my mother and father that I was now working at the Ministry of Education and Science as a clerical officer, I was hailed as the first person in the family to have what was deemed a professional job. ‘My son, the clerical officer in the Ministry.’

  If they only knew!

  3

  The Man at The Ministry

  And Leaving To Be ‘A Bloody Salesman’

  1963–6

  Even though I was only sixteen, I wasn’t at all nervous turning up on the first day. I was all suited and booted and raring to go. The Curzon Street office was in the heart of Mayfair. It was a very large and ugly block of grey concrete – exactly what you’d expect a government building to look like. I entered the building, stepped into the lift and the operator greeted me with ‘Good morning, sir,’ and took me up to my floor. I reported to an EO (Executive Officer), a woman in her thirties who showed me to my desk in a large open-plan office while the other people glanced up for a moment to suss out the new boy.

  In a weak moment, I reported the lift operator calling me ‘sir’ to my family one Friday night. They were so proud. ‘Sir, they call him! Can you believe that?’

  Anyway, this job turned out to be double brain damage. On the first day, a pile of papers was plonked in front of me and I was informed by my EO that I was working on something called the Plowden Report on Junior Education.

  In case you care, Lord Plowden had promised to come up with a report on primary school education and the pile of papers was the result of manual surveys on individual pupils across a whole section of the country. My job was to go through each form and code the answers to enable the data to be entered into an IBM punch-card computer system. This would result in a print-out telling you how many little Johnnies drank their quarter-pints of milk every day at school. If that wasn’t bad enough, many of the people surrounding me were a breed of robot, the likes of which I’d never come across before. To say they were boring would be too kind. The highlight of their day came during the tea break, when they’d debate the virtues of using Marvel powdered milk as opposed to conventional milk that might go off if you kept it for two or three days. Scintillating stuff, as you can imagine.

  At first, I would sit quietly on my own. Like all new people joining an organisation, I had to go through that period when people stare at you and try to get the measure of what you’re like. The employees around me weren’t my cup of tea, so there wasn’t much dialogue when I first started. Thankfully, after a few weeks, I found that some of the younger staff, particularly the girls doing the typing and clerical tasks, were more my kind of people. I struck up a working relationship with them, and a couple of the fellows, and we secretly laughed and joked about some of the weirdoes working in the organisation, as you do.

  At the age of sixteen, I was eligible to pass a motorbike driving test and I decided to get a Lambretta scooter, a rather fashionable machine at that time of mods and rockers. It cost me fifty quid from some bloke in Edgware. I justified it to my mother and father by saying it would save me a lot of money on the bus fare to Curzon Street. Well, at least I had some wheels.

  I did what everybody else did with their bikes: stripped it down and had the side panels chromium-plated and the main body sprayed – in my case, a luminescent mauve. I would proudly park this motorbike outside the offices in Curzon Street where its gleaming side panels were much admired by the younger members of staff in the department.

  The bike was very useful for running me and my pal Geoff Salt around. I’d often drop him off at his various girlfriends’ houses, including one adventure into the depths of South London, to Dulwich, when I got a flat tyre for my troubles.

  As a learner driver, you had to display L-plates, which wasn’t very cool. I decided it would look better if I cut out the letter L from the white background and stuck it on the front and rear of the bike, only to be stopped one day by a copper who pulled me over and asked, ‘What’s that L for? L for love? L for luck? Get off that bike and go and buy yourself some proper L-plates.’

  This was all rather embarrassing, considering I was in Oxford Street, suited and booted, on a Saturday night. I was in somewhat of a fix with the copper standing next to me. Where was I supposed to go at eight o’clock at night to get L-plates? I asked for dispensation so that I could at least drive the bike to another location where I could park it. After a bit of negotiation, the copper reluctantly agreed, but told me I wasn’t allowed to ride it back home until I had proper L-plates. Fortunately, he didn’t hang around and after that evening’s ventures I naughtily broke the law and drove the bike back to Clapton. I replaced the L-plates the following Monday. I passed my motorbike driving test in Walthamstow My current licence still says I can ride a motorbike, although I haven’t been on one since.

  Back at the Ministry, for once there was a bit of excitement. Miss Mayer came storming into the department and asked me to step into her office. She was having a high-level meeting with a load of top-ranking officials. From what I could glean, the Plowden Report had gone tits-up and they wanted me to explain a few things. That’s how bad it was there – they had to get a sixteen-year-old kid to explain to them what was going wrong.

  It transpired that a bunch of punch-card operators had entered the data incorrectly, so they asked me to review the print-out and compare it with some of the forms that I had coded. There were thousands of these forms. I said if they gave me a couple of these clerks to sit with, I’d help them read the data, so they could input the whole lot again.

  They agreed and, believe it or not, they put me in charge of five or six people, some of them my seniors by ten years or more. They’d be asking me, ‘What’s this, Alan? What’s wrong with that? What shall I do with this? What does that mean?’

  I got on real
ly well with them and they soon started taking the mickey out of me. ‘You’re Miss Mayer’s favourite,’ they’d say. ‘Miss Mayer’s son.’ But they respected the fact that I was one of them. I hadn’t snitched or dropped them in it for the big cock-up first time around. Within a couple of days, I had them sorted out, and I was sitting at my desk with my feet up.

  After about two weeks, we’d done the whole lot again. I guess the printouts must have made some sense this time because Miss Mayer told me that I’d done a good job – I suppose the data suited what they wanted to see. However, there were no tips or bonuses going – let’s face it, this was the government.

  *

  Eight quid a week was all well and good, but it wasn’t enough for me to keep up with my mates. I saw the job at the Ministry as something of an investment, so that one day I would end up not having to worry about income. In the meantime, I needed to supplement my earnings. I’d kept my job at the chemist’s shop plus a few other ventures, and it was a rather weird situation – I was earning less from my career than I was from my sidelines!

  It was working with Mr Allen that once again prompted a new business venture. I’d become something of an expert in cosmetics and toiletries, as a result of selling them. Some of the girls at the youth club I went to in Stamford Hill were very impressed at my knowledge of Rimmel Coty, Yardley, Lancôme, Helena Rubinstein and Chanel, not to mention the full colour range of L’Oréal hair dyes. Yes, it was Walthamstow, but believe it or not they had the clientele for that stuff.

  Thinking about the Cream of Cactus advertising campaign at school had sparked my interest in the cosmetics industry. I must have driven Mr Allen nuts, I was so inquisitive. At that time, a ‘Flaming Red’ Rimmel lipstick would sell for 1s 6d, but the Lancôme equivalent was 4s 6d – three times the price!

  ‘Tell me, Mr Allen, these look the same to me – why is one 1s 6d and the other 4s 6d?’

  Advertising,’ he said. ‘They’re both made of the same stuff. There is no technical justification, apart from a flasher wind-up case.’

  As well as absorbing how people would buy stuff based on the prestige of the brand and the advertising, I was fascinated by what the cosmetic products were actually made of. Take hair lacquer, for example. It was effectively industrial alcohol with something called shellac dissolved into it, the theory being that as soon as it was sprayed onto a warmish surface, the alcohol would evaporate, leaving the shellac to hold the hair in place – quite simple, when you think about it.

  A bit of trivia. Ladies may sometimes wonder why they get that cold sensation when the hair lacquer touches their neck. This is because the heat from the body evaporates the alcohol, giving the cooling effect. The same principle applies in an old army trick I once heard about: apparently, in Africa during the war, soldiers put their bottles of beer in a bowl of petrol and left it exposed in the baking sun. As the petrol evaporated, the effect was to take the heat out of the beer. Earth-shattering stuff, right?

  I called a meeting with my friends Steve Pomeroy and Geoff Salt and told them that cosmetics was a bit of a mug’s game, and that perhaps we should start a little business making shampoo and hair lacquer. Steve’s family’s business was lemonade, so they knew where to buy bottles and labels. I could source the ingredients to make the hair lacquer and the shampoo – a soap detergent with a little bit of perfume in it.

  Having convinced the two lads we should enter into business, we slung fifty quid each into the pot and formed a brand name – Galsté – made up of our three names: Geoff, Alan and Steve.

  I found a fellow by the name of Sidney Summers in Tottenham who was a wholesale supplier to hairdressing salons. From him, we bought gallon drums of shampoo, hair lacquer and some green, gooey setting lotion. Then we designed a small label that Steve had printed and we set up a bottling plant in the basement of Steve’s house in Clapton.

  Unfortunately, the bottle openings were rather small, so I had to make a sort of pipette to fill them up. On top of that, the setting lotion was so thick and gooey that we had a lot of trouble getting it into the bottles. I got lumbered with sorting out the technical problems, but after hours of sweating and cursing, I eventually succeeded.

  Armed with three products in our range, the next task was to go off and sell them. Geoff, who claimed to be a good salesman, had the task of calling on chemist’s shops and other general stores to see if he could get any orders. Steve was considered the expert on supplies and manufacture, but I was the one who had to sort out the filling of the bottles, so come to think of it, he wasn’t really tasked with anything!

  I asked Mr Allen to stock some of the bottles on a sale-or-return basis. He always chuckled when he heard about my ventures and was happy to agree. Naturally, when people came into the shop, I would recommend my shampoo and hair lacquer, and managed to persuade a few punters to part with their cash. Unfortunately, Geoff and Steve weren’t as enterprising as I was, and after a couple of weeks or so they had zero sales.

  One Saturday night when we were out, we discussed the project and decided we would try to sell the stuff in East Street market, off Walworth Road in south London. The next morning, Steve took his firm’s van and we drove to the market, laden with all this gear. We found the market inspector – affectionately known by market traders as ‘The Toby’ – and asked him if we could take a stall on a casual basis, as we weren’t licensed.

  Eventually he found us a spot at the end of the market strip, as one of the traders hadn’t bothered to turn up. I can picture it now: a large stall with just three products on it! It didn’t look very inviting and was made worse by the fact that all three of us were manning such a sparsely populated stall. We didn’t sell much that Sunday, and when the market closed just after lunchtime, we went home with our tails between our legs.

  I persevered for two or three more weeks with little success. I decided to spruce the stall up a bit by selling other products. We turned to Steve’s uncle, who used to make household cleaning materials such as bleach and pine disinfectant – similar to Dettol. We laid out the stall nicely, with all the products lined up beautifully, including the bottles of pine disinfectant, bleach and toilet cleaner. However, as these were not well-known brands, the move wasn’t that successful.

  One day, out of sheer frustration and laziness, I decided I wasn’t going to bother spending time setting the stall up neatly, so we just chucked the whole lot on in one big pile. This created some excitement amongst the shoppers, who thought that there were bargains to be had. People delved in looking for buried treasure and the stuff started to sell like wildfire.

  Messrs Salt and Pomeroy lost interest in getting up at six o’clock on Sunday mornings, so I ended up being the only one to go to the market. Having passed my car driving test by then, I’d borrow Malcolm Cross’s van and take his brother Ronald along with me as a stall boy.

  We’d chuck all the stuff on the stall and a crowd would gather round as usual. One lady stepped up and asked for six bottles of the shampoo. This was like manna from heaven to me.

  ‘There you go, ladies and gentlemen,’ I said. ‘There’s a lady who’s bought our shampoo and now she’s back. Look at that – you can’t get a better testimony than that. Good stuff, isn’t it, dear?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it’s not for me – I use it to wash my dog!’

  You’ve never seen so many people disperse so quickly. Ronald was in hysterics.

  In the end, we dissolved the business because of the lack of interest of my two partners. I was left with a pile of unsold stock, which I kept in the bicycle shed I had at the flats.

  Back at the Department of Science and Education, one of the topics of conversation was the impending death of Winston Churchill, who’d had a stroke. It had been dragging on for days, if not weeks, and we were hearing regular updates on the news. To liven up the office one day, I popped into the typing pool and, with a look of surprise on my face, said to the girls, ‘Have you heard the latest news about Churchill?’


  ‘No,’ they said. ‘What is it? Has he died?’

  ‘No,’ I said with a deadpan face. ‘He’s all right, but his doctor’s dead.’ I cracked up laughing at this and they all joined in. It was most likely the highlight of their week – that’s how boring it was there.

  Sadly, Winston Churchill did die a few days later. I believe his funeral was a national holiday – any excuse for a day off at the Civil Service, right?

  We also had a couple of days off when the department moved from Curzon Street to a new location at Richmond Terrace, roughly opposite Downing Street. While helping to settle in after the move, I decided to explore the new building. In certain areas, I found drawings pinned up on the wall which looked remarkably like aeroplanes or missiles. I’m not suggesting it was some Secret Service type of place, but it looked rather interesting to me. I asked Miss Mayer whether we were merging with the science part of the Department of Education and Science and, more to the point, whether I could get myself into a department where I could do something more interesting than compile educational statistics. ‘Mind your own business,’ was the reply. ‘And get on and do what you’re told to do.’

  That was the final straw. I realised this place really wasn’t for me. I looked around at some of the people there, particularly the older ones, and thought to myself that I didn’t want to end up like these robots, pushing a load of boring paper around.

  I started looking for another job and saw a promising newspaper advert for a trainee cost accountant with a statistics background. The firm was Richard Thomas & Baldwins, an iron and steel manufacturer located on the corner of Gower Street and Euston Road.