1960s WORK
0135 Jobhunting in 1966 & Westons Biscuits
After being fired by PST, with three months notice (which helped), I was desperate to get a job. With a daughter, and a son on the way, I needed to get a job as soon as possible. So I fired off literally hundreds of applications and replied to job ads for almost as many. As the weeks dragged on nothing happened. Then I gradually got through to a few interviews, though these were unsuccessful. It's my experience that, in job hunting, it takes time to get into the right frame of mind, and to develop the right experiences from which you can learn -- so that you become a good interviewee!
Thus it was, after three months, all of a sudden half a dozen job offers rolled in!
I can only remember two of them in detail. One was as a brand manager for Gallahers and the other was marketing manager at Westons Biscuits. That at Westons Biscuits was a leap to the next level of management, marketing manager instead of brand manager, so I took it.
Westons Biscuits in those days was part of Garfield Weston's empire, which also included a whole range of bread companies and the supermarket chain Finefare. For some reason he owned two biscuits companies; Westons Biscuits in Slough and Burtons Biscuits in Lancashire. He also owned the Ryvita brand, of slimming biscuits, which was handled by Burtons Biscuits.
Westons Biscuits, where I was offered the position of marketing manager, had been around for some time. In the 1950s its main brand had been 'Wagon Wheels' -- which some see as a cultural icon of that period; as was another of its brands, Jammy Dodgers! They had a range of other products and together these added up to a reasonable turnover. The managing director was Malcolm Denwood; and he was a nice guy. But he knew nothing of marketing, hence the reason he wanted a marketing expert -- which was to be me.
It was a pleasant environment and well-paid. I took my car, in the morning, for the company chauffeur to wash it and fill it up with free petrol. Then, during the morning, the chef brought round a range of meats, usually steaks, so I could choose which one I wanted for lunch -- which I had with Denwood in the directors’ dining room!
I quickly worked myself in, going round with the reps who sold the biscuits into grocery shops. Like most similar fast-moving consumer goods (fmcg) companies in those days, we supplied a range of shop types from supermarkets down to very small corner shops. I fondly remember one corner shop proprietor who, when the salesman pointed out that the pack of biscuits on the shelf was rather old -- it was actually five years old when they shouldn't have been held for more than three months -- said that she realised this and was thinking of reducing the price to get rid of it!
Every morning I used to sit down with Denwood and go through the sales returns. This was one part of the job I found depressing, since – like many managers at a time when the stick was used much more frequently than the carrot - he was very critical of the salesman who didn't achieve target. He also had very short memory, which I suspect is not unusual in such circumstances, since – even if a salesman had been making excellent sales for five days on the trot but then fell below average for two days - Denwood was already thinking about firing him! Selling is a very insecure occupation.
I also spent some time going round the factories, the one in Slough where I was based and the one in South Wales which was almost the same. In both massive road ‘tankers’ carrying flour came into the yard and blew their tons of contents into our silos. From there the flour, and the other ingredients, were pumped into massive mixers before being rolled into sheet pastry and then stamped out. The stamped biscuits then slowly passed through the long ovens, to tumble out at the end; where they were wrapped into the familiar packets. I enjoy immersing myself in production technologies - it is the last element of the scientist left in me - and there is something very basic about the whole idea of producing food products.
I had been there for three months when I began to wonder about the future. Garfield Weston was then getting on, and it was fairly obvious that he would soon be handing over to one of his sons -- most likely Galen (as did indeed happen). When this happened, I reasoned, Galen would look at the various components of the empire and would see that it was totally illogical to have two biscuits companies doing virtually the same job. Due to the lack of sophistication of senior group management, I also reasoned that, when that happened, Galen would pick whatever management team was doing best at that time – in terms of short-term profit - and fire the other one.
I went to my managing director, Denwood, with these thoughts. In fact with much more than that, for I had already decided that I had to get out before the cataclysm. So I prepared a complete marketing plan for him. This, in essence, said that -- in order to be the best performing board at the time of that the decision -- we had to milk the company and its products. Thus everything had to be run down. Our stocks had to be minimised, and our sales maximised by promotion, in order to generate the largest short-term profit -- which was all Galen would notice. In this scenario marketing was a luxury, and certainly a marketing manager was a luxury too far. On the other hand, I gave him some new products so that he could launch these; and sell them, in a stock loading operation, into the pipeline -- since even if they failed to sell they would make a profit in the short-term.
Having read this Denwood turned round to me and said in amazement “...I can't see you in this, you're writing itself out of the story”. I said “...yes indeed, the last thing you need is me!”
Thus did I persuade him to let me go, but he gave me three months salary as a leaving present. It was worthwhile from his point of view, since a year later Garfield Weston did hand over to Galen, and Galen immediately fired the management of Burtons Biscuits. Denwood and his team were put in charge of the merged venture!
In reality it wasn't such a life-threatening decision for me, since I had already signed up for Gallahers and was sitting at my desk there the following Monday. The three months salary paid for the deposit on my first house.
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