A steel factory desk like Bryan's (photo courtesy eBay - £822.70 ONO if you want one)

Bryan used to have a routine which involved mimicking a Boys Brigade Band coming over the hill. This was something we were familiar with in those days – the Boys Brigade would march around on a Sunday morning, cruelly persecuting wastrels like me and Bryan who would be nursing hangovers and thumping headaches. For those fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the sound of a Boys Brigade band, here’s a link to a video of one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIz7zqMsgwQ

YouTube won't let me share the actual video.

Bryan would start off by gently drumming on his steel desk and making the muffled sound of trumpets in the distance, very gradually increasing the volume until he would be kicking his metal desk and making full-on band sounds as the band emerged over the crest of the hill. It was very realistic and truly a joy to experience. Once.

One day, Bryan decided he wanted to buy a second-hand Ford Capri. It had to be red with a black vinyl roof and he meticulously scoured the classified ads in the Birmingham Evening Mail, highlighting any that seemed to fit the bill in terms of price, specification and most importantly within distance of him and me being able to go and view it either at lunchtime or immediately after work. He searched for months; we must have seen about twenty of the damned things until he finally found one that met his high standards. He was like a dog with two tails.

He picked up the car on a Friday evening. On Sunday morning, having carefully and lovingly washed and waxed it, he took it out for a spin from his council house in Erdington. He lived quite close to Marsh Lane which, at the time, was being upgraded to a dual carriageway, but not yet open. There was a learner driver having a first lesson on the as-yet unopened carriageway. Bryan crossed the carriageway and waited to pull out, the learner approached, turned out to be totally unfamiliar with the mechanics of braking and slammed into the side of the Capri, writing it off. Bryan had done about 15 miles in it. He was devastated, but I couldn’t help laughing, unsympathetic sod that I am.

Another time, Bryan’s granny was over from Australia. She’d emigrated there as one of the ‘Ten Pound Poms’ sometime in the 1950s or early 1960s. I went to meet her at the council house. She engaged us in conversation. Try and read this in an Australian accent:

“You boys ever thought o’ movin’ to Awstralia?”

Bryan and I glanced at each other. We each knew what the other was thinking – this was to be the dreaded Land of Opportunity speech.

“Erm, no, we haven’t, not really”

“Good! ‘Cos’ I’ll tell yer this fer nuthin’. Awstralia is the arsehole of the Universe. The place is a proper shithole. If I had any sense I’d have got out of the friggin’ dump twenty years ago but I’m too old now. Take moy advoice, do the roight thing and stay well away”

That little chat hadn’t quite taken the direction we’d been anticipating.

Pooh Sticks

Another buddy of mine was Kevin. We used to socialise outside of work quite a lot, go drinking together in Town, although Kev had a bit of a drug problem which would often lead to my having to shepherd him home when he got the cocktail of booze and drugs wrong. He was bisexual and confided to my girlfriend Janice that he fancied me. I was totally oblivious to any of this until Jan told me much later.

Kev and I used to sometime go to the Tyburn House pub at lunchtime for a pint of Ansells Mild and a crusty cheese and onion cob – food of the Gods. On the way back to work we’d stop for a game of Pooh Sticks on one of the little foot bridges over the Fazeley Canal.

A Fazeley Canal Bridge © Wikipedia

I can’t find a photograph of Pooh Stick Bridge, but this is a similar one further up the canal, by the Saltley Gasometers. Anyway, Kev and I would drop our pooh sticks into the motionless water, rush frantically to the other parapet of the bridge and wait. And wait. And wait. The canal moved at glacial speed, only showing the vaguest sign of life when someone opened a lock about half a mile downstream. Sometimes we’d be there for half an hour before a stick emerged, by which time we’d have inevitably forgotten whose stick it was.

There was once a very well-thought-out robbery involving Pooh Stick Bridge – some thieves attacked a security van at a local business, stole all the wage packets and shot off in a stolen getaway car. The police were in hot pursuit, but a couple of minutes behind. The thieves drove up the dead-end lane to the bridge, jumped out, ran across the footbridge and got into a second stolen getaway car that was waiting on the other side. The only way the police could catch them was to reverse back up the dead-end lane, drive about a mile up Kingsbury Road to the Chester Road bridge, go along Chester Road, turn into Tyburn Road and drive another mile to the other side of Pooh Stick Bridge, by which time, of course, the thieves were well away. I don’t think they were ever caught.

Organisation & Methods

One day in 1978, I was quietly minding my own business in Quality Control, calculating a process capability or something, when I received a call from Les Bunce, the Training Manager. Les called me up to his office:

“You need to go and see Artur Haslimann”

Artur Haslimann was the Managing Director. He was Swiss and a very remote character, you’d hardly ever see him around the factory. I was concerned.

“Why? What have I done this time?”

“No, nothing. He wants to interview you for a special assignment. He asked me who were our best two graduates, so I said you and Simon. You’ll need to smarten up a bit – here, you can borrow my jacket and tie. Make sure you bring them back. Oh, and comb your hair”.

I entered the inner sanctum of Mr Haslimann’s office and found him waiting for me with a man called Peter Fearn. Mr H introduced Peter, who it transpired had just joined the company as Deputy Managing Director, having previously been Works Director of Turner Asbestos in Manchester. Artur (we were never on first name terms, but I shall pretend we were) said:

“You must never tell anyone about this, but there’s been a problem with our latest Audit and Stock Taking. The book valuation and the physical stock take don’t tally up, it seems we’re missing thousands of pounds worth of stock, and it’s completely wiped out our profits. Peter here has been brought in to troubleshoot the problem. Oh, and if you breathe a word about this to anyone, I will sack you on the spot for gross misconduct”

Peter took over the conversation. He came across as a bit of a hard case, but he was OK. Just a bit brusque and business-like:

“The stock control system in this factory is pathetic. There are absolutely no work-in-progress monitoring systems in place. I’m going to change that – no, WE are going to change that, you, me and Simon. The first thing we need to do, however, is to run another stock take. I need you to supervise that because you know your way around the factory and I don’t. We’ll do it over the last weekend of the month and then analyse the results against those of the previous, official, stock take”.

So, Simon and I were 22 years old, no experience and tasked with organising and supervising a stock taking which required hands-on management of about 2,000 people and costing just over a hundred thousand pounds in overtime payments but we weren’t allowed to tell anyone why we were doing it.

People were grateful for the overtime, but very suspicious as to what it was all about. It had only been a few months since the last stock take, so there must be trouble afoot. Simon and I were under intense pressure to spill the beans as the rumours spread around the shop floor and, over the weekend, a sizeable minority people were obstructive and apathetic about the process. By the time Sunday afternoon came around, we were running out of time and badly behind schedule. A lot of people had gone home, we were understaffed and many of those left behind were just lazing around, drinking tea and taking the piss. I was visibly cracking up until one of the blokes who’d been ringleading the piss-taking took pity on me, rolled up his sleeves and rallied a team to go out and count the stock on the sections that hadn’t been properly counted.

On the Monday morning after the count, I was summoned to the Financial Director's office. He was a snidey little bastard and was looking to find fault in what we’d done over the weekend, pointing out that the count on a couple of production lines hadn’t been double-checked. I was still very tired and stressed after the stocktake and, to put it mildly, exploded with indignation:

“Listen, you lazy fucker – on Sunday morning while you were out playing golf, we were up to our necks in oil and swarf, identifying and counting bits of metal. Where were you, eh? Doing nothing useful, that’s what, as per usual. If you were to get off your arse and actually work for a living, this company wouldn’t be in the mess that’s it’s in”.

He was visibly shocked and went pale. The last thing he’d been expected was for this little oik to bite back at him in such an aggressive manner. He later told someone, a mutual friend, that he thought I was going to chin him and I’m sure he would have done something about it disciplinary-wise were it not for the fact that I was reporting directly to Peter Fearn and Artur Haslimann, who were above his pay grade. I know Peter would have backed me up and, being a tough Northerner, he wasn’t the kind of man to take prisoners. I don’t think the Financial Director ever spoke to me again, he’d just blank me.

The results of the second stock take turned out to be very close to the results of the first, official, one within a small rounding error, so yes, it was true – a considerable amount of stock had gone missing, the company’s balance sheet had to reflect this, the Auditors were right and we’d gone from a position of making a slight profit to one of making a loss. This was serious stuff and Artur was put under immense pressure by GKN Head Office.

Peter set up a new department with the deliberately innocuous name of ‘Organisation and Methods’. It comprised him, me, Simon and a rotating staff of one or two student apprentices. We designed a work-in-progress tracking system based around a double entry bookkeeping methodology, divided the shop floor into four major sections – soft machining, heat treatment, hard machining and assembly, then designed a paper-based booking system whereby a running stock take would be performed 24x7, batches of components would be added to the stock on one section and simultaneously decremented from the stock of the previous section. Adjustments had to be made for scrappage, rework and sample inspection and a floating balance maintained of the stock levels in the factory on quite a granular basis.

The Computer Department

All the paper-based data would have to be transferred onto the company’s IBM System 34 computer for accounting purposes, so it made sense to base our little department within the computer department. They gave us desks in the open plan Systems Analysts section where we’d work with the Analysts, designing the way in which our paper system would be translated into a functional design specification, then onward to the Programmers and eventually to the Operators in the computer room itself.

It was fun in the computer department; there would usually be some kind of scam in operation. At one time, for some reason, we had a group of Polish systems analysts working alongside us, their English wasn’t too good, and they were unfamiliar with our ways and sense of humour. Naturally this offered great scope for a bunch of very intelligent and mischievous people and several stunts were developed. One stunt I remember was when someone brought in one of those little plastic dog turds you can buy from a joke shop and, unseen by the Poles, placed it in the middle of the floor. When the lady with the tea trolley came around (we called her the Soup Dragon), we would walk across from our desks, very carefully negotiate our way around the turd, making an elaborate fuss of theatrically stepping over it. The Poles were huddled in a corner, drinking tea and eating Eccles cakes, bewildered as to why no-one was cleaning the mess up.

On another occasion, one of the Analysts was sitting at his desk with a work experience Pole alongside him. I approached with a genuine question:

“Steve, have a got a scientific calculator I could borrow? One with Sines, Cosines and Tans?”

“Erm no, I’m afraid not, however (rummaging around in his draw). I’ve got this piece of string, if that’s any good?”

“Well, it’s not ideal, but I suppose that’ll do for now. Can I borrow it?”

“Sure. You can keep it. I’ve got a spare piece”

“Cheers, mate. I owe you one”.

The poor Polish chap was completely bewildered. These English people were incomprehensibly stupid and truly beyond redemption.

Ladbrokes Lucky Seven

Once the system was fully developed, we moved onto deployment. At this time, there was no computerisation on most factory floors, so we had to have little offices built to host the block mode green screen IBM terminals. We’d been given the budget to recruit and train Data Collection Staff, but while the new system was being debugged and settled in, Simon and I had to cover the shifts, acting as data entry clerks. Normally, Simon would work from six in the morning until five in the evening and I would work from eight in the morning until nine at night. The overtime was useful because I’d just bought a house in Hodge Hill for me and Janice.

There wasn’t a great amount to do in the evenings, the data entry work only took about an hour, so I’d go and fetch some fish and chips for my tea and then sit gormlessly in the office, waiting for the Progress Chasers to bring me the work in progress slips for me to type into the computer. I discovered that the IBM terminals had some kind of offline text mode, so, being me, I hatched a plot….

I’d buy a Birmingham Evening Mail and then copy a slightly modified version of the racing results into a dumb text screen I’d created with the heading ‘Ladbrokes Lucky Seven’ on it.

Ginger Bob came into my little enclave for a cup of tea one evening at about 7PM. He saw my screen:

“What’s that, Col?”

“Oh, oh, it’s nothing. Ignore it. I’m not supposed to be seeing that”

“No. Go on. What is it?”

“Well, you see, we’ve got access to the Ladbrokes computer. This is the predicted results for the races so that the bookies know where to set the odds. I like to check it against the actual results from the Evening Mail. It’s pretty close actually, if you look at, say, the 2:30 from Kempton, they’ve predicted the first and second places well, but got the third place wrong”

“Fuckin’ ‘ell, Col. So we can look at this, have a bet and stand a good chance of winning?”

“Well, yeah, but what I’m doing is illegal – we could get nicked for this”

Inevitably, word of this foolproof money-making opportunity spread like wildfire around the production lines and pretty soon I was being pressured into sharing Ladbrokes’ predictions. I’d really dug myself into a deep hole.

An IBM terminal of the era © Reddit

Peter Fearn soon got wind of this and went ballistic:

“Why can’t you take anything seriously and behave like an adult? Is it some kind of mental illness? You always have to have some kind of childish plot going on. It really is pathetic”

I backtracked, told Ginger Bob and the rest of the lads that it was just a wind-up. They took it well. Peter didn’t.

Corridor of Power

As mentioned earlier, the Organisations and Methods team was based in the open-plan computer department. Artur Haslimann was very worried about this because we often had a copy of the company’s highly sensitive, damning and confidential audit report and when we were out on the shopfloor setting up our systems, the report would be lying around. We’d always try to ensure that it was locked in a desk drawer. But nevertheless there would always be the chance of a cock-up and people would get to see it. Artur decided to move us, for security’s sake.

On the ground floor of the main office block there was an ‘executive corridor’ where most of the company directors and their secretaries were based. It was very exclusive, with wood panelled walls, thick lush carpets, subdued lighting and a waitress service. Artur had Simon and I moved into one of these suites, which comprised a small outer office and an adjoining meeting room which was only accessible via the outer office. Moving us there went down like a lead balloon with the Board of Directors, most of whom had spent years climbing the greasy pole of company politics to earn their place there, only to find that we two youngsters had been parachuted in! It went down particularly badly with my personal nemesis, the aforementioned Financial Director, who was singularly aggrieved and embittered. To placate his board, Artur compromised by decreeing that we were not allowed to use the directors’ silver service restaurant except when we had visitors. We’d use the staff canteen, which was no hardship.

A very old (1950s?) picture © Facebook of the main office block. The swanky directors’ offices were on the ground floor behind the line of cars you can see. Artur Haslimann’s office suite was the one on the right-hand side of the main entrance. Peter Fearn’s office was on the left-hand side of the entrance. The silver service restaurant was the little room on the roof, there were good views from up there.

Now that our W.I.P system was running smoothly and effectively, we didn’t have a lot of work to do, apart from the occasional small project, so the wood-panelled office became a centre of fun and games for Simon, me and whatever apprentice(s) we had seconded to us at that time. There was no furniture in our meeting room, so we elected to put this space to work for us. We collected some ball bearings from the assembly line, weighted them on one side with circular paper stickers to offer some kind of asymmetric weight bias and developed an indoor carpet bowls league. Most days we’d have a few ‘ends’ when there was no-one around.

Things soon came crashing down around our ears. Artur was replaced by a new Managing Director, a man called Dave Mackin. I don’t whether Artur jumped or was pushed as a consequence of the audit problem a couple of years previous, but Dave Mackin was a totally different character. He was much more ‘hands on’ than Artur, would spend a lot of time on the shopfloor and in general ran a much tighter ship. Dave saw Peter Fearn very much as Artur’s right-hand-man who had been widely regarded as the natural successor to Artur, so demoted this potential threat down to a pretty menial job. He also summarily closed the Organisation and Methods department and kicked Simon and I out of the ‘executive corridor’.

I was moved into Design, where I had established a reputation as a good draughtsman and engineer. I forget where Simon was moved to. In Design I was given another fairly interesting project – Hardy Spicer had a German partner company called Gellenkwellenbau (GWB). We were to make some prop shafts subcontracted from GWB but all the drawings and technical specification documents were in German. I was sent on a crash course at a Handsworth language lab to learn German, in order that I could produce English language versions of the drawings and specifications that could be understood by our Production Engineers. I used to go to Handsworth a couple of times a week, which was something I enjoyed because there were some really good West Indian takeaway restaurants and cafes where you could get jerk pork, saltfish, curried goat, rice and peas etc.

The Big Robbery

Our W.I.P tracking system worked very well and when the next ‘proper’ stock taking was done, we found that our online running count was very close the actual physical count, so the company was back in profit. We still didn’t know, however, what had caused the original massive discrepancies, and it was a couple of years before we found out…

An undercover police investigation revealed that one of the Birmingham crime families had been running a massive racket. They had people inside several of the local auto components factories – Hardy Spicer, Pressed Steel Fisher, Dunlop, Lucas etc. and were stealing from the factories on an industrial scale (no pun intended). The stolen goods were being trucked to East Midlands Airport where there were charter flights ready to ship all the contraband to Belgium from where it would be sold via a network of dodgy aftermarket dealers.

The breaking up of the racket and the subsequent court case implicated a few of my good friends from the shopfloor who received sentences of varying severity.

Moving On

And so, my time learning about the Commercial side of Manufacturing Industry came to a close. I went back into the Engineering side of things, but, having been thrown in at the deep end, had very quickly learned a hell of a lot about Management and Operations, which was to prove very useful to me in later jobs. I’ll discuss some of these in later articles.

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