1960s WORK
0183 BTR New Products
As I have said elsewhere, at BTR I had a number of new products under my belt. One of these was that of magnetic rubber. We had only one customer for this, Edwards, which was a firm in Sheffield. They took the magnetic rubber we produced and bonded it with plastic. It was then used for signs, fridge magnets etc. In particular, though, the most prestigious use was for the weather charts which were shown on television. The presenters could move the clouds around on their magnetic boards as they wanted -- without fear of them falling off.
It should be explained that we produced the magnetic sheets on a calendar, but the strips which were used for magnetic door seals on refrigerators were extruded. Unfortunately, the material, which was heavily loaded with iron compounds in order to become magnetised, was very corrosive on the dies we used in our extruders. Accordingly, we spent much of our time replacing the dies. This was very expensive, and it took a long time to get replacements from outside suppliers. We eventually perfected a method making our own split dies with a surface grinder. Having said that the Edwards Company was a very demanding client. John Cahill liked them, though I found them something of a nightmare.
As part of the general moulding shop we also produced raw rubber, blending it but not vulcanising it, for a tyre valve manufacturer which was located in Northern Ireland. This company, Bridgestone Brass, was in fact handled through an agent -- who was the person we dealt with. I was always nervous about going to Northern Ireland to see him, since his method of steering his car was to position it with the white line in the middle of his bonnet as he roared at high-speed around blind corners! Equally, the business over there was rather more competitive than I was used to. His son, for example, was sent to prison for not just burning down the competitor's premises but emptying the safe while he was doing this.
I do, however, remember having lunch at Burton with them. There were two of them as well as my boss John Cahill. When there was a lull in the conversation John, who was Catholic, threw in the comment that he thought Bernadette Devlin (the leading Roman Catholic MP from Northern Ireland who had been speaking on television the night before) had been very impressive. There was noticeable silence and then the two of our clients (the agent and the manager from Bridgeport Brass) literally put their heads together and, after some muttering, the agent turned around to say cryptically “... well our orange order doesn't wholeheartedly support Bernadette”!
Also in the general shop we produced very hard rubber mouldings for Kent meters. They were difficult to produce and we got a high reject level. Kent themselves also found a high reject level. Accordingly they demanded compensation for this from us. This row had been going backwards and forwards for several months until we had a face-to-face meeting. The device I used, though I only told my brand manager about it after the event, was that I had agreed - in my mind - to give them the full £30,000 they wanted; but I'd also decided that I would hike the price by 1 percent for every minute they talked on. Accordingly, at the end of the meeting I gave them the money and told them that, because of the difficulty in producing the part, I had to increase the price by 50%. They were happy with that, and so were we; since we recovered the £30,000 in the first month.
We also were trying to get into printing suppliers. In particular we produced sheets of rubber for printing cardboard boxes. These were rubber layered onto a fabric backing and were produced by our Leyland company -- which made quality control much more difficult. In use the rubber was cut out - by hand - in the box printers, leaving just the printing they wanted proud of the backing. We also made stereo rubber for the printing industry, again as a blend of raw rubber which had not been vulcanised. This was used by some printers, again for crude printing on boxes and packaging material. Like most rubber blends it was rather unstable, and again we had problems with quality control.
Best of all, we though, we had the business from Otis Europe for producing escalator handrails. You have probably never thought about escalator handrails, you just think you brush your hand on these as you go up the escalator. But they are quite sophisticated items of equipment. They were built up in much the same as a rubber boot; built up, from long strips of rubber impregnated fabric with solid rubber over the top. These were then cured, in 24' long strips, on a special press. At the time we were in trouble, since we didn't have sufficient press capacity, even though we were running 24-hour shifts. Accordingly, and with a lot of effort having gone into persuading the board, I spent £25,000 on the new press so we could double of capacity. That, I suspect, was my eventual undoing.
We were also involved in some very leading edge developments with the main BTR lab, which was on-site. Thus we were developing positive drive escalator handrails, which had cogs, made out of plastic joined by steel ropes, inside the outer rubber sheath. This was needed because escalators -- or more important travelators which were in fact flat escalators - were getting longer and longer. This meant the normal drive couldn't handle the ordinary handrails since the drive tended to slip. We were also working on developing plastic steps for escalators. The London tube network, which was an especially important customer of Otis UK, were having problems with the aluminium treads they had started using; since the light shining of them was mesmerising passengers who then tended to fall down the escalators! Incidentally I went down underneath one of the LTE escalators to discover it was a much more massive operation than it appeared on the surface, with motors something like ten feet across in a large motor room beneath them. They needed this because they had to be capable of carrying a complete load of people on the escalator -- with a margin of safety.
We sold these handrails to Otis, who had a factory outside Liverpool. I had a special brand manager, who was more a salesman, to handle contact. I remember one meeting when they bitterly complained to us about the lifts (fortunately nothing to do with us!) they were installing at the new Roman Catholic cathedral in Liverpool. The authorities there were insisting that the warranty for the lifts covered the lifetime of the cathedral -- which was expected to be something like 1000 years!
Our biggest business though I came from FlohrOtis in Germany, who were then the major force behind escalators in the Otis European empire. AscintreOtis, the French sister company, also had to buy our handrails along with everyone else -- but were (as was often the case) quite anti British.
I and the brand manager used to go across to Berlin quite frequently, to meet with the manager from FlohrOtis who was responsible for buying in handrails. He was a nice guy and we used to go at dinner with him quite often. The only faux pas I made was when I asked him how he lost one of his fingers; only to receive the reply “I lost it in the British prisoner of war camp”! The war was not that long over at that time.
As I have said, this part of business was my actual come-uppance. I was aware that the brand manager was not very good salesman, though I compensated for this by closing the business myself. The lesson I should have learned was that I should have kept quiet and seen how the brand manager himself was getting on. That is the way that you manage salesmen. As his manager, it is much more important that you understand the salesman than you understand the customer. The problem was that, underneath the surface and unrecognised by my brand manager, changes were taking place in FlohrOtis. We were, thus, presented - out of the blue - with the news that control of the escalator business was moving from FlohrOtis to AscinterOtis in Paris. In this way our business disappeared almost overnight. It was very embarrassing since it was in the leading edge business being invested in. Accordingly, the board demanded that I fire the brand manager. I, though, thought he had done nothing other than be rather naive, so I refused. I hadn't realised that - in a company dedicated to finding scapegoats - there was another level of these. I was fired instead!
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