7. Work – the early years

In 1985 when I was 26, I attended my first Open University summer school when computers were in their infancy.  It was here that I used a computer programme to obtain careers advice.  It was a novelty to answer a series of simple questions about my likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses and then have a machine tell me what career would best suit me.  I still have the list, and I remain impressed by its accuracy.

Ranked as a good match were the following occupations:

My parents were not very imaginative in helping me decide my future.  They saw me pass my 11-plus exam, and at that point, they decided that I was cleverer than they were, and therefore I wouldn’t need any assistance with my career.  I’m sure it didn’t happen quite like that, but that’s my perception.  My dad felt I needed to “get a trade behind me” and so obtaining an apprenticeship was the extent of his vision.  In October 1974 (I was 15 years old) Dad and I visited a local haulage firm called Birtles to see if they would take me on as a diesel mechanic.  There was no-one in the workshop when we visited, so my future career wasn’t agreed there and then, but they were willing to offer me a job when I left school in 8 months time.  Therefore, Dad had done his duty in getting me fixed up and no more was said.  My dad believed that if I became a good fuel pump mechanic, that would see me set up for life.  He was probably right in his assertion, but now I think about whether I’d have been happy working as a mechanic in my mid-fifties, the answer is, probably not.  Going to a grammar school, and afterwards, studying for a degree, opens your eyes to a world of new possibilities, which he’d never had.

The way I’ve written it, sounds like I am disappointed in the help I received from my parents: this is entirely untrue.  They did what they thought was the best for me at the time, and were fully supportive of anything I wanted to do.  The fault, if fault there was, lay in my lack of ambition.  I have little ambition, even now.  I am generally happy with my lot, and don’t strive to get a better job, bigger house, faster car.  I’m invariably very content with the status quo, just enjoying what I already have.

During my schooldays, I saw a careers officer just once, as I recall.  She talked about me becoming a quantity surveyor, which I did investigate, but not wholeheartedly.  I had an interest in cartography from the age of 13 or so (I loved maps, could read them like a book and was good at technical drawing) so that was a logical route to explore.  When I told the careers officer about this interest, her eyes lit up and she said that this would be ideal.  She talked about how Ordnance Survey (the premier map-producers) were based in Southampton, and therefore, this is where I would work.  To a 14-year-old who’d never been further than Blackpool, this was a daunting prospect, and I can still remember the sinking feeling when I realised that I’d have to leave home to follow my dream job.  If I’d talked to anyone after this meeting with the careers officer, I would have been advised that firstly I needed to complete my O-levels, then sit appropriate A-levels before even thinking about leaving home.  There would then be three years at university (where I could still conceivably live at home) before I could even consider applying for a job with Ordnance Survey, by which time, living 250 miles away would not have held the same fears. 

I recently saw a fascinating documentary about Ordnance Survey which clearly showed that such a role would have ideally suited my skill set and character.  The company was run along strict military lines, and even until 1974 it was a requirement for the head honcho to be ex-military.  In the early 1990s, I attended a ‘train the trainer’ course, and after one presentation, the course tutor asked whether I had a military background.  He said at the time, “You have the bearing and delivery style of a military man”.  Perhaps the armed forces, or indeed Ordnance Survey, was really my calling, but I never explored these options.  Missed opportunities, eh?

Soon after my visit to Birtles, I began applying for other apprenticeships with large companies, and I secured interviews with ROF Chorley, British Aerospace and Leyland Motors.  I obtained application forms for other companies, but since their recruitment process started later, many forms were never posted, since I quickly received offers from the ROF, British Aerospace (BAe) and Blackburn Youth Employment.  I also belatedly received an offer from Leyland Motors but since it arrived several weeks after the others, I had already made my decision.  I carefully weighed up the pros and cons between ROF and BAe and chose the ROF.  My reasons were clear, but possibly short-sighted.  The ROF was 2½ miles distant and BAe was eight miles away.  I could easily cycle to Chorley, whereas I’d need to catch a bus, or buy a moped to get to Preston.  To add further complexity, BAe even paid a bit more, so I was turning down cash for convenience.  The ROF offered £15.31 per week while the BAe staring salary was around £16. 

I clearly recall the British Aerospace interview.  Part of the task was to make a small two-dimensional figure out of pipe cleaners by following a drawing.  In later years, my role regularly took me back to Strand Road and on each visit, I would be transported back to being a scruffy, nervous 15-year-old turning up for his interview with sweaty palms. 

The thing I recall about the ROF interview was the formality, the security and the unexpected economy measures.  The first letter I received (dated 11^th February 1975) was hand-typed on A5 size paper, and arrived in a plain brown envelope.  Rather than providing a return envelope, applicants were advised to re-use the same envelope the letter had arrived in by opening it carefully, then re-sealing it with a pre-addressed gummed label.  I loved the whole ‘Blue Peter’ element of it.  After the selection tests (February) and a tour of the workshops (March), I was invited to attend a personal interview with the Apprenticeship Board.  The final hurdle was to pass a medical at the end of March and I received a formal offer on 4^th April.  By the time I started on 11^th August, the wage had risen 26% to £19.35.  Inflation was extremely high in the mid 1970s.

My craft apprenticeship at the ROF was a broad ranging one, where, after spending the first year in the apprentice training school completing basic skills training, I undertook ten short placements in a variety of roles over the next three years.  These included; machine shop, toolroom inspection, boiler house, maintenance on the Group 8 explosive production lines, pipe shop, toolroom, drawing office, vehicle repair workshop, factory quality control and finally the tackle shop before moving to a permanent job in the toolroom. 

I enjoyed all of the placements, except the one in quality control which I found really boring.  The task was to ensure that all the gauges and measuring devices used in the business were within tolerance.  I’m sure that it was an essential job, but I couldn’t get excited about it.  Luckily, I was only there for a few weeks, but those are weeks that I’ll never get back.  One day, the team in which I was working was undergoing a formal inspection, and I was quizzed by an auditor about a particular gauge which didn’t appear to display a quality control sticker.  Thinking on my feet, I managed to persuade the auditor that the gauge in question didn’t need a sticker.  Goodness knows what lies I told, but amazingly, I got away with it, and the man believed me.  When I was telling my boss about it later on, he was initially pleased that we had passed the inspection, but then, knowing the truth, he looked more carefully and found a detached sticker still in the gauge’s case. 

I also spent time in the boiler house maintaining the steam raising plant.  The huge boilers and turbines provided the 1600-acre site with both heating and electricity.  I worked there during the summer, and so there were many opportunities to see how everything worked whilst some of the turbines weren’t turning.  Everything there was on a larger scale to what I’d been used to.  Spanners were 18” long, hammers weighed several pounds and everything was hot.  The boilers took many hours to cool down, and maintenance started as soon as they were cool enough to work on, which was invariably hotter than you’d want them to be, especially in summer.

Unsurprisingly, in view of my interest in cars, I enjoyed spending time in the vehicle repair workshops.  The site was large enough for it to have its own fleet of buses, trucks, vans, cars, mopeds and push-bikes which were all maintained ‘in-house’.  I could be working on a Mini one day, a bus the next or even a locomotive.  There were a couple of Hunslett diesel shunters, which were still in use, and although I didn’t actually work on these, I did ride in one.  I also enjoyed driving the buses and once, even a 36 ton articulated lorry, although I only drove on site, and not very far.  There was one man who was dedicated almost full time to repairing the fleet of push bikes, and once, when he was off, I was asked to do his job, mending punctures and adjusting brakes, which was no fun at all.  I learned a lot about the A-series engine when I had to do considerable work on a MoD police Mini.  This was a useful experience, since the same engine was fitted in every car I owned between 1979 until 1994.  The experience in the vehicle workshops mainly taught me that I didn’t want to be a motor mechanic after all.  It was hard, dirty work, often working outside: I was there during February and March and it was cold.

The variety of placements was great, and provided a good overview of many aspects of engineering where I could elect to specialise.  The toolroom was where most apprentices aspired to work since it was considered the most skilled of jobs.  I was invited to complete my training in there along with a good friend, Neil Gregory.  I started in the toolroom October 1978 and primarily worked on a small lathe.  Toolmakers were the only tradesmen in the business who were still employed on piecework, so if someone worked quickly and accurately, he earned more money.  That was the theory, although in practice, no-one went daft and we all kept our earnings within a reasonable range so as not to upset the apple cart.

It was very varied work, but I was regularly asked to produce cap punches which were ordered in batches of 200.  These were small steel punches 42mm long with three reducing diameters, the largest being about 8mm, and the smallest between 3mm and 4mm depending on the size of cap they were to press.  Caps were found at the blunt end of any small rounds, and were the bits that, once struck, initiated the detonation of the propellant.  At ROF Chorley, caps were filled with explosive which was then pressed into place using these punches which had a small rounded section at the end to ensure even detonation.  There was a constant demand for the punches since they regularly wore out.  The clever trick I had developed was to mount two separate tools in the lathe so that I could cut two diameters simultaneously.  This took a while to set up, but saved considerable time overall and increased the consistency between the diameters.  An order of 200 cap punches would take me about 4 days to produce, and over the years, I must have produced thousands of units.

Whilst I enjoyed this work, after some time I realised that I wanted to get more out of the job, which meant seeking promotion to a staff position, and this is what I did after four years on the tools.  I moved to ROF Blackburn in January 1984 as an estimator in the maintenance department.  This work required me to decide the time each maintenance job ought to take using methods-time management (an estimating process).  The job required a fair amount of walking round site reviewing all manner of maintenance tasks, from replacing leaking steam valves, to repairing damaged doors or furniture, or even painting offices or workshops.  Many of the jobs were regularly repeated, so in these cases a previously estimated time could be re-used, and it simply required me to issue a new work card. 

One such repeat job was to paint white lines along the pathways to denote safe walking areas within the workshops.  I’d not been at the factory long when I was asked to raise a work card for the job, which I did without questioning it, even though I didn’t recognise the building concerned.  To satisfy myself that the work had been completed satisfactorily, I went to inspect it, and was very surprised to find that the building had been demolished several months earlier.  I was pleased to note, however, that the walkways had been carefully painted quite recently, across what was now a piece of derelict ground.  I really felt I had to pay the painter, since he had done as requested, and the fault lay with the foreman for raising the job in the first instance.  

Reading this now, you may understand how I quickly saw the writing on the wall for my job.  I spent 12 months in the maintenance team before moving to a similar role in the toolroom, but long before then I was on the lookout for a more secure occupation.  I saw an advertisement in the local paper for an Illustrated Parts Catalogue compilation engineer at British Aerospace, and so I applied for the job in July, just before going on two back-to-back Open University summer schools at Durham and Warwick.  I returned to hear that I had an interview at British Aerospace on Friday 8th August 1986. 

I was given the job, despite being late for the interview.  I set off in good time to drive to Samlesbury, but the road to the main gate was shut due to a motorcycle accident, and I had to find my way around the outside of the site to find another gate to enter.  The other gate was about a mile from where I needed to be, and I was allowed to make my way across site alone.  I remember innocently driving across the apron which was reserved for aircraft movements only.  I can only imagine the horror with which this manoeuvre was viewed by the employees.  No-one stopped me, but I was warned to drive back by a different route!  It took six weeks to be offered the job, and then six weeks more to clear security before I started on 3^rd November.  Whenever I visit Samlesbury site, I am reminded of the accident which caused the diversion.  Unfortunately, the motorcyclist involved lost his life near the main gate, and a small vase of flowers and a neatly mown section of verge now marks the location.

The Illustrated Parts Catalogue for a Tornado jet lists all the available spares along with exploded diagrams showing how they fit together.  It is a bit like a Haynes manual, but one that runs to 12 volumes of binders, each 3 inches thick.  There were several of us working on the team to modify the existing Royal Air Force catalogues so that they depicted the standard of aircraft recently sold to the Royal Saudi Air Force.  I really enjoyed the job, but performed it for less than two years before being selected to help develop the support processes in the early days of the European Fighter Aircraft programme (which subsequently became the Eurofighter Typhoon).

Just over a year later, I was moved once more, this time to manage a small team providing an interface between the users of the mainframe IT systems that generated the Illustrated Parts Catalogue and the team developing those systems.  At this time, I also became a member of an international working group developing procedures for use by the Panavia Partner Companies, Panavia being the three-nation consortium that built and sold the Tornado aircraft.  This role was thoroughly enjoyable since I was required to attend a three-day meeting in Munich roughly every four weeks.  It sounded very glamorous, flying out on the company jet from Warton on Monday evening, spending three nights in a Munich hotel before flying home on Thursday afternoon.  The only downside was three days of very slow negotiation with an international group of people each with their own agenda.  Attendees included representatives from the three aircraft manufacturers, the three engine manufacturers and representatives from the three government nations.  Thankfully, the language was English.  The main recollection I have of these meetings were the endless arguments which rolled round the room for what felt like days, debating the correct and appropriate use of words such as should, shall, will or must when writing procedures to be used across international boundaries.  My natural pedantry on the correct use of English served me well in these discussions.

The meetings were held at Panavia headquarters in Arabellastraße, and most attendees stayed in the Arabella Hotel which was just across the road.  I did this twice, before realising that I never saw anything of Munich unless I made a special trip into the city in the evening at my own expense.  I learned that a colleague, Pietro Venezia, representing the Italian manufacturer, stayed in the city centre and commuted out to Arabellastraße each day.  This sounded more interesting than what I was doing, and since the hotel he used was a lot cheaper than the Arabella, I could justify the additional travel expenses.  So I booked into the City Hotel for future trips and each evening, Pietro and I wandered round Munich visiting the various restaurants and bars.  Meanwhile, my British Aerospace colleagues, would be sat in an anonymous hotel eating corporate food and getting drunk on expenses.  Don’t misunderstand me, the Arabella was a lovely hotel, with a rooftop swimming pool and all the extras, but it was nearly 4 miles out of the city.  The City hotel, by contrast was in the thick of it, located in a busy street with plenty going on.  In 1989, the adjacent building was a strip club, and there was always plenty of nightlife very close to hand.  Not that such things influenced my decision to stay there in any way…

The small team that I’d joined evolved as the business re-organised, and before long I was in a group called Logistics Business Systems.  My team’s role was to analyse and improve existing IT systems by developing procedures, producing plans and programmes, and addressing quality and training aspects.  In addition, I was asked to help manage the effective use of resources.  It sounds boring when I write it down, but it suited me, and I worked there for five years until 1994.

The most challenging part of my career occurred in 1994 / 95 when I was asked to manage a group responsible developing Logistic Support Analysis (LSA) capabilities within Military Aircraft.  If you thought the last job was a bit dry, it’s best not to ask what this role entailed!  Suffice to say I worked alongside an acknowledged expert in the field who was twenty years my senior and even more pedantic and stubborn than I.  Peter (the expert) could not be trusted in front of the customer, so my main task was to get him to tell me in simple English what needed to be done, so that I could meet with the UK Ministry of Defence and other defence companies to push through our proposals.  It was very stressful, and for much of the time, I only just had sufficient knowledge to scrape by without making a fool of myself.

Thankfully, I was also given a couple of interesting additional roles during this period, one being to work on the team bidding to sell the Eurocopter Tiger attack helicopter to the British Army.  I was acting as advisor on the LSA aspect of the bid submission.  This role involved a great deal of UK travel, but sadly, I never got chance to visit Marignane (near Marseille) where the machine was built.  The role only lasted six months since the Army subsequently bought the American Apache helicopter instead.  I live with the hope that it wasn’t entirely my fault we lost the bid.

The other secondary job at this time was to develop, organise and help to deliver a module of the post-graduate Operational Business Management Programme at Warwick University.  The 2½ day module taught delegates (British Aerospace managers) about the development of new maintenance processes and was part of a ten module training course attended by some 150 managers over 3 years.  Every few months I would spend a week at Warwick University helping to deliver this module to two cohorts of trainees.  One of the concepts introduced on that course was subsequently adopted in 2001 when the first ‘Availability Contract’ was awarded to support the Tornado aircraft fleet at RAF Marham.  This ground-breaking development saw BAE Systems staff working alongside RAF personnel maintaining and repairing RAF aircraft.  This concept was a world first, and the same idea was subsequently adopted by Typhoon when that aircraft went into service at RAF Coningsby later in the decade.

In early 1996, I joined a small resource management team at its formation to manage the 1500 staff employed by the customer support organisation.  During the same period, I also took over responsibility for the recruitment and management of Customer Support graduates.  The business was expanding, and we had too few skilled staff and so for much of the next three years, I recruited many graduates and attended recruitment events almost every month.  I would place advertisements in regional newspapers and then pitch up at a local hotel to persuade engineers to apply for the many roles available.  In addition, I frequently attended ‘resettlement events’ which were specific days organised by the MoD for people who were soon to leave the armed forces.  These events were generally in the UK, but on one very memorable occasion, after I had attended a recruitment event in Middlesbrough, I drove down to Hull to catch the overnight ferry to Rotterdam before driving over to Bad Lippspringe near Paderborn in Germany for the Rhine Army Summer Show.  I still don’t know how my boss at the time persuaded his manager to let me go (along with a chap from HR) but he did, and we had a great time.  At the last minute, my boss was told that he couldn’t attend himself, and since he left the team (and later the company) very soon after we returned, I concluded that sponsoring this trip wasn’t his best managerial decision. 

The Rhine Army Summer Show had developed over the years into the largest Anglo-German event and was organised by the British armed forces.  The show got better each year as the organisers found new and exciting attractions and entertainment.  We were amongst the trade stands, and although we collected many CVs to take back home, there was still ample time to enjoy the show, which was like a combination of the Royal Lancs show and a German beer festival.  Very few people were visiting our stand by lunchtime on the final day, and so we hit on the idea to finish early, drive across Germany in the afternoon and spend the night in Amsterdam rather than stay in Bad Lippspringe.  Our reasoning was that we could then catch an earlier ferry the following day and be home sooner.  That was our sole consideration, to get back home to our wives and families.  After an interesting night in Amsterdam, we caught the fast ferry to Harwich the next morning and drove across the country where I dropped off my colleague at his home near Preston. 

Following the merger of British Aerospace with Marconi Electronic Systems to form BAE Systems in November 1999, my role changed and I joined a much broader team who looked after the entire Customer Solutions and Support organisation, with approximately 10,000 staff across the UK and Saudi Arabia.  From knowing people by name and working with them to identify their ideal roles, the job suddenly became entirely focused on numbers and spreadsheets, and I felt removed from any personal touch.  So after 14 years at Samlesbury, I left this team in February 2001 and sought my fortune at Warton.