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A DANCE THROUGH THE FIRES OF TIME

9502 - 1940-2000 - and from the 19th to the 20th century - LIVING ON THE PRECARIOUS EDGE OF TOMORROW

I came into this world, in 1940, with German bombs raining down all around me. A few miles away, across the River Mersey, Liverpool blazed from end to end. In this way, from its very start, my life - along with contemporary civilization as a whole – was created in the fires started by a fascist government’s imperial ambitions.

Sixty years later, as the new millennium dawned, my productive life came to an end – and the promise of that new millennium was dimmed – as yet another imperialist government rained down its more sophisticated bombs on a different set of innocent citizens. This time the perpetrators, hiding their fascist tendencies under the term neo-con, were the Americans determined to use their new hegemony to enforce their own self-interested demands.

So what had changed?

Some pessimists would argue that little had in fact changed. All that had been proved was that conflict, in support of greed, was the natural vocation of man! The spoils belonged to the most powerful, the victors and typically the least principled.

I would beg to differ. The reality is that these six decades covered the period when the world as a whole changed at a rate which was an order of magnitude faster than ever before. Moreover, this change impacted almost all aspects of our existence; from the richest western aristocrat to the poorest third world subsistence farmer. Whatever name you choose to give them, revolutionary forces had been let loose.

As just one personal example, as one of the millions working on the land, at the beginning of the period I helped hill farmers bring in their harvest of hay on horse drawn wagons. At the end of it, though, I advised the President of the European Commission on how the emerging global networks would reshape the future of the world.

Accordingly, this autobiography charts my part in the events which shaped the world over the last half of the 20th  century. The autobiographical elements mostly illustrate my life as a fairly typical middle-class individual of my times, buffeted by the forces of change which we barely understood and swept to the future through the fires of time which scorched all our lives. In part, though, it also describes some of the key events where – largely by chance – I became one of those making my own contribution to the winds of change which fanned those fires.

Even so, this has to be seen as a semi-fictional autobiography, not least because I have never kept a detailed diary. To be honest I have never, until now, considered that the trivia of my life would be of interest to anyone – not even to myself in my dotage! The events I describe are, therefore, my present memories of what happened in the past; distorted by the passage of the years. On the other hand, such distance has helped me put the importance of these events better into perspective. In retrospect, some – especially the events which had a negative impact on my life – now seem much less important; though, at the time, they dominated my thoughts. On the other hand, some – which I would have almost overlooked at the time – now seem to hold much greater significance in the wider scheme of things.

In any case, it is not as if I have made no effort at all to record events. Thus, I have regularly documented the most important events of my life in one form or another, even if not as a detailed day-to-day diary of the ins and outs and weather reports. The records I actually made were, however, very informal until the first collection of this material started in the late 1970s; but, even then, more than three decades ago. To cap it all, much of the last decade of this compilation – including almost all of the supporting material - was already present as the dozens of books, along with almost a hundred articles and news stories, I published at this time.  

I have included this published material in the overall collection – though not in this ‘book’. Indeed it accounts for something like two thirds of the overall content. The value of this supporting material comes about partly because it offers an insight into my thought processes and how these developed. Mainly, though, it is because the subjects of these publications are close to the lines of reasoning which shaped the overall compilation. These thoughts focus not just on my travels through the fires of time but on the issues shaping society as a whole. As such they powerfully sum up my own ideas, from the viewpoint of the end of the first millennium, as to where the second millennium will lead us.

I am not putting everything into the mix however. One absence, which might be crucial in some other autobiographies, is a warts and all record of the mishaps in my private life and especially of discord within the family. My wife has – understandably – asked that anything of this kind should be excluded. So for her sake, and that of my children, the worst excesses have been censored. Equally, some of the more salacious comments I might have made about my friends and acquaintances, and even enemies, have similarly been excised; for they would be out of place in this collection of material. I positively choose not to  revenge myself even on those who have most severely harmed me.

In any case, this compilation does not need to draw on such very personal anecdotes. These would throw little light on the issues to which I want to draw attention. There are plenty of other autobiographies whose main selling point is the revelation of such intimacies. The only exceptions here are contained in the mass of legal material covering the end of the period, which – as a matter of public record - must necessarily be reported in its entirety. The courts have always provided the most salacious stories for the News of the World!

Having said all that, this censorship has had a negligible effect upon the ‘story’ I wish to tell; since this concerns the very shape of the times I have lived through, of the fires I have danced through. Purely domestic considerations were never more than peripheral to the main story, though that  in turn may be why they became so personally explosive at times! Anyway, let the story now begin.

As much of this compilation is in praise of the middle classes, my antecedents were, I suppose, mostly located in the lower middle class of their times. Those on my father’s side had been immersed in the industrial revolution, in relatively high status jobs; for example as station-masters or building supervisors - where my great grandfather, for example, was in charge of the bricklayers building Lime Street Station in Liverpool. But, even then, their daughters were typically destined to go into service with the ‘gentry’, where the service demanded by these gentlemen was often of a very personal kind. Those on my mother’s side had been involved in the comparable social revolution. In particular, my grandfather was a teacher who – in his earlier years – had been the secretary of a friendly society; one of the precursors of the modern trade unions. All who were closest to me, in the generation ahead of me, had come together as managers of high-tech chemical production for a major multinational – Unilever – which was much more typical of the situation in mid 20th century. Indeed, most of the first two decades of my life was lived on one of Unilever’s factory villages – built house its workers – albeit we lived in a Georgian mansion built for its management.

I was not an especially precocious child. The teachers at my first school thought I was not that bright; indeed they were convinced I was rather dim! It was only when I started at the prep school of one of the top dozen or so public schools – which my parents could barely afford, even with me as a day boy – that I started to shine. From there I steadily progressed until, with a coveted state scholarship under my belt, I entered on the most elite academic course in the country; Physics at Imperial College. Actually, until just a few months before, my career was seemingly destined to be as an astrophysicist.

Interest in the first two decades of my life will, therefore, be in terms of its example of middle-class childhood and youth at the time. In reality, for most of this time society expected us to behave in the same way as our predecessors had done for the previous half century or so. Locked into the rigid class framework of the time, my place in the middle-class society of the future was already booked. In fact, thanks to my academic progress, it was to be in the upper middle class. I, and everyone else, knew exactly where I stood.

Although revolutionary forces had already been set in motion by the second world war, which had ended ten years previously, it was only  in my late teens that things started to change for my generation. The pattern was set when we became the first teenagers. Before our time the concept hadn’t even existed. You went straight from childhood into work. Now we became a new force to be reckoned with. We discovered rock & roll, or perhaps it is fairer to say they discovered us. Even then I wasn’t directly involved in the scene. I was a modern jazz aficionado. But the new pop scene infected the whole of my age group and, above all, empowered us to become the new kids on the block. Above all, for the first time it gave us the god-given right to challenge our elders!

I was more much directly affected by these new forces when I went up to university. Not least, by default, I effectively abandoned my pursuit of academic standing in favour of exploring the new revolution. Over the next three years I barely scraped a third and, by choice, headed off to become one of the new breed of managers rather than an astrophysicist. In particular, though, I found myself at the heart of the revolutionary forces which were to explode on the scene later in the 1960s.

At that time the leading edge of revolution in the UK was  represented by the anti-apartheid movement. Accordingly, I – with some friends – set up the student anti-apartheid movement. This effort introduced me to the world of mass demonstrations, at one extreme, and to that of national politics, at the other. At the age of twenty I regularly met with Nobel prize winners and ambassadors. Not least, to my surprise and that of everyone else, I started the successful move to get South Africa expelled from the Commonwealth.

When most people nostalgically recall the 1960s they think of the revolutions of that time as encompassing all the young. That is, I suspect, a quite false picture. Although the pop bandwagon was well and truly rolling, the real sexual revolution didn’t arrive until the 1970s, and most of the young were passed by in terms of the political revolutions.  They only woke up to it in the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher perverted their newly found revolutionary ambitions to her own right-wing ends. However, for those few of us who were later to become the leaders of society it really was a wonderful time! You could almost ‘smell’ the outstanding future which awaited us. It was to be a much better, social democratic if not Marxist, future. It was a golden age, promising ever more exceptional benefits to come. Of course, that future never came! The establishment fought back and – with typical efficiency – captured the new society and bent it to its own ends.

I didn’t go into politics or the media, as did my peers in these revolutions and as did my best man Jon. Instead I went into management, specifically into marketing management. This was where – in practice - the leading-edge action really was; rather than the civil service which was then the usual choice of the high flyers.

Initially I went into an advertising agency which – as promoted by Hollywood – then represented the most glamorous profession. Through it I found myself close to those in high society involved in the Profumo affair. Then I became a brand manager, which was the job which – over the next decade – developed into the most powerful junior management role of all. At the heart of the new  consumerist society, we felt we were the rulers of society; and we were. Finally, before the age of thirty, I became a general manager in a multinational conglomerate; promised a seat on the board. This career progress was quite dramatic, indeed meteoric, in an age when the old order still largely held; where CEOs below the age of 60 were almost unheard of, and almost all board members were over the age of fifty. I was indeed a very high flyer!.

It was during this decade of my career that I gained my widest experience of the ‘old’ industries; from those in FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods), then at the pinnacle of the emerging consumerist society, to the very different problems of the dying rubber industry. For benefit of future generations, who will no doubt think of a rubber moulding job shop as something that Dickens wrote about, this compilation describes the quite different circumstances which pertained to each of these old industries. At the same time it reflects my experiences across a wide range of roles within them, from researcher to marketer to production manager. In particular, it records my experiences of various aspects of general management – from brand manager to divisional manager. Again, these experiences - which were typically at the leading edge of the new ‘profession’ of general management later formalized in the MBA – were definitive of the situation at the time. These experiences were encapsulated later in my best-selling management text book.

Then it all fell apart. I discovered that a corporate board – then and now best seen as a cockpit of political infighting – was not where I wanted to be. So, spurred on my way by an assortment of daggers in my back, I headed for a company which was then just about the best managed in the world, IBM. For the next decade and a half I was part of the IBM team which almost took over the world, and certainly led us all into the IT Revolution which reshaped society. Albeit at a more junior level, though with an ambivalent role in IBM’s development, I found myself once more part of that revolution. I do seem to find myself regularly storming the barricades of whatever establishment I come up against. At the time the London Business School categorized me, I suspect correctly, as a dedicated – almost obsessive - change agent! Even though my formal status was at best that of a middle manager, my peculiar position in IBM allowed me to observe the actions of its board level management; and occasionally to influence these.

It was at the time when IBM was at the peak of its power. It has, of course, since atrophied to become just another multinational; and the lessons it once demonstrated to the world have long since been dismissed as mere illusions. Yet I continue to believe that, as recorded in my best-selling book about the corporation, IBM – or at least the confident IBM of that time a quarter of a century ago – held many of the secrets of management still to come.

The IBM years were also the time when my ‘private’ life most closely paralleled that of the newly emerging middle-class of managers and professionals. Living on one of the new housing estates which catered to this new market, our friends typically were middle managers, IT professionals, architects and senior civil servants. The life we led was stimulating, yet typical of the confident new lifestyles being adopted by these emerging mass leaders of society. At the same time my return to politics, as a borough councilor, was – as might by now be expected – ahead of its time; in that I represented the first of the ambitious new residents associations.

The final stage of my working life took me into the world of academia – where perhaps I should have taken myself in earlier times. Even here, though, I was never much like the average academic. Not least, I once more refused to play the vicious political games necessary for career progress. Much to my surprise, I still made the grade of Senior Lecturer, though not that of Professor; which might have been expected in view of my position as one of the few internationally recognized figures within the Open University Business School. Worse still, my dedication to personal integrity once more eventually destroyed me. In the meantime, though, I directly taught tens of thousands of managers what marketing and corporate strategy really should be about; and indirectly, through the books I was now writing, influenced hundreds of thousands of others!

Above all, though, I managed two especially important projects which were quite different to anything I had previously undertaken, and very different to the work of other academics. The first of these, which came about almost accidentally, was helping the new government of Ethiopia move that nation – with a population of 60 million - from Marxism to social democracy. This started as an educational project, teaching – on behalf of the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) – the three man junta (President, Prime Minister and Minister of Defence) who, following their military success in the civil war, ran the country. I, and my team of senior OU academics, taught them and their colleagues the management skills needed for their new roles in peace-time government. For me it grew into an even more important role when, almost as a double agent, I became the main link between the three man junta and the western governments. In a space of two years this saw me setting up their top level new diplomatic structures, linking the government to the outside world, negotiating a $1 billion loan from the World Bank, which the IMF considered to be the most successful ever, and successfully negotiating a resolution of the renewed civil war, which had seen more than 100,00 soldiers deployed in the field.

To say it was an exciting time would be to grossly underestimate the stresses of working, as some would see, as a double agent. I reported to the SIS (Secret Intelligence Services) in the UK, but I am still not certain whether this was to the FCO’s own SIS or MI6; since my handlers in Ethiopia were the FCO but those in the UK were MI6! On the other side of the double agent equation, my main contact was the Ethiopian Minister of Defence, the outstanding – but largely unknown - general who had brilliantly led the rebel army to it’s the greatest military successes in the 1980s.

Although I was the teacher, I learnt as much from the experience as my students. Moreover, these lessons were not just about Ethiopia, or even about the dilemmas facing third world nations, but just as much about the cultural blind spots to be found in our own western ‘democracies’. Bringing a new nation across from Marxism to social democracy clearly exposed the anomalies inherent in the market economies which we take for granted.  It also highlighted how narrow was the western, US, vision of what democracy should be about.

In the process I made some very good friends, amongst the senior members of government, though, with several thousand miles between us, I have once more not been able to maintain these friendships! Such is the price I, and my peers, have paid for our roving careers!

My final act was, for once, planned. It was to indulge in the research I had long promised myself. This, though, represented the culmination of the several decades of work I had expended on long range planning, now crystallized as an academic form of futurology. The research itself was truly leading-edge, requiring the development of a whole raft of new techniques. However, I regret to say that, as is too often the case, my fellow academics failed to recognize its importance. Even my PhD did not materialize until two weeks after I had retired! Worse, OUBS management thought my work was some form of joke; though I am still grateful to the OU’s Vice Chancellor who – alone - always was supportive.

Fortunately the national and international governments I dealt with did recognize the value of my work. Thus, with the help of the VC, I became one of the great and good working on a key DTI task force which examined how the growing problem of aging might be overcome. In Europe I became an advisor to the then President of the European Commission, Jacques Santerre, indirectly through its think-tank in Seville and more directly through that in his personal cabinet. On the global stage I was accredited by UNESCO as an NGO, not least for its crucial inter-governmental meeting to agree its statement of cultural rights my contribution may eventually – I hope – ease the passage of the remaining third world nations to something approaching parity with the West.

Expanding my sphere of influence, I backed up these high level contacts with a PR campaign which saw me regularly featuring in the broadsheets and on television and radio. Most impactful of all, at the Millennium I promoted the concept of the woman’s century to come; which, for a while at least, was quite influential.

I had always expected to reach ‘burn out’ at the Millennium; and was, in a sense on target in that respect. What I had not expected was, though, that this last fatal fire was applied by my management at the OUBS. The last evil force in my life, the then Dean, took great satisfaction in destroying not just my career but my whole life at the time. Such was the fitting end to my meteoric career.

Returning to the beginning, though, I was born in 1940; as my parents’ first and only child, as was then the fashion brought on by the uncertainty of war.

 

But, of course, the trajectory of my life had been determined earlier, in the sense that we are all  - to some extent at least – determined by the lives of our antecedents. Indeed, one most important influences in my young life was my grandfather. 

 

He was born, in the late 19th century, to a very different style of life; as the son of a tenant farmer near Swaffham in Norfolk.  One of half a dozen or so brothers, his middle-class family was relatively privileged for the time. Even so, in his teens he ran away from home. As a result, he lost track of almost all his brothers in later life.

 

My grandfather was, however, intelligent. So, when he ended up in Leeds where his children were born, he eventually became the General Secretary of what was then called a friendly society.  This was in the late 1800s, when ‘friendly societies’ were becoming the precursors of modern unions.  Accordingly he was something of a radical, indeed an activist, and told me in his old age about the union demonstrations he had been involved with and the police actions against them -- again, I guess, influencing or at least colouring my future views of life.

 

At the turn of the century, though, he moved on to become a teacher. He met my grandmother when he was studying at the equivalent of teacher training college (perhaps more the equivalent of university these days) in Leeds. He was then in lodgings with her cousins, Herbert and Lily, and that's how he came to meet her.

 

After teaching short term at various sites in Yorkshire, he moved to Liverpool to a young offenders institution, called in those days a reformatory.  This was where my mother spent her childhood. Her early memories are of their house, built into the corner of the institution, with the inmates acting as houseboys.  It was I guess a very Victorian institution, and certainly was a very Victorian house.  My mother in particular described one room off the main staircase which was furnished with very heavy furniture and heavy drapes which she crept past at night because, to her, it had ghostly properties. 

 

My grandfather was, in effect, both teacher and warder; and often had to travel round the country to recover the boys who had escaped and had been detained by police forces in remote places. My mother heard all the stories of these escapades. She, though, had a even more direct experience. One of the boys, Charlie, was brought into the family to be fostered.  So, along with her own brother and sister, she gained this boy as another brother.  His own mother was a prostitute who couldn't look after him but my grandfather, helped by my grandmother, brought him into the family and he grew up effectively as part of that family.  Unfortunately, as a teenager he left to join his mother in London. He eventually died on the Burma Railway, having joined the RAF and been shipped out to Singapore just before it fell. 

 

My maternal grandmother's background was rather different to the rural origins of my grandfather. She was brought up in the city of Leeds, and her father was a boilermaker. That didn’t, though, mean he was one of the brawny men who hammered steel in someone else's factory. Instead, it meant that he owned a factory which made boilers, one of the high-tech pieces of equipment in the 19th century.  So why wasn't the family fortune passed down, in part of least, to me? The answer was that my great-grandfather was a man of very particular judgment. He drank himself to death at almost exactly the same time as he drank away the profits of company and it went bankrupt!

 

My grandmother was in fact older than my grandfather, perhaps a trait which carried on to my generation and beyond. To me she always seemed very old, though her generation always dressed old. But as with most women in the those days she had relatively little to say about her background, though we knew more about her relatives - who still lived on in Leeds - than we did about my grandfather's family.  We used, in particular, to go across and stay with them. It was a family whose husband had suffered greatly from being unemployed for most of the Depression. He eventually got a poorly paid job as a school caretaker -- but with the advantage that it came with a house.  I remember that house well; it was a tall, very tall, house on the edge of the school playground. The kitchen was in the basement, which is where we all used to congregate. My bedroom, on the other hand, was right up on the top floor - next to the loosely boxed in bathroom; to which I remember people coming and going as I tried to sleep. 

 

For me it was a wonderful opportunity, seeing we visited in the school holidays, to raid the classrooms and play with the children's toys; which my own school would never have deigned to possess – such trivia were only for those lowly mortals who didn’t have the intellect for proper learning! I have this memory of wandering around the school playground defiantly hammering away at a toy drum which I'd taken from one of the classrooms. But, above all, I remember the smell of the very necessary disinfectant  which had been sprinkled around and which used to permeate the classrooms.

 

I don't know what it was about the place, but it just had the feel of industrial Britain. Where I normally lived in one or other form of suburbia, this was clearly located in the inner-city. The playground was built up above the surrounding area, so that from the edge of it you looked down onto the streets of back-to-back housing; which we saw as the deprived slums of the time, though they must have been in fact the home of strong communities.

 

As I say though, I knew relatively little about the background of my grandmother on that side. To me she was a small plump figure who rarely said much.  I appreciated, though her Yorkshire cooking.  It was wonderful to eat her Yorkshire pudding with gravy, eaten before the main course as it should be.  In particular I loved her new cake, bread baked without yeast and eaten deliciously warm straight out of the oven. And there was always parkin, a ginger tasting cake, at Christmas. It was still a time when cookery was based on local specialties. Thus, for example, Merseyside’s specialty was ‘scouse’ - a form of stew – or quite frequently ‘blind scouse’ where the meat was missing because the family couldn’t afford to buy it! Indeed the main food of the masses was the ‘jam buttie’; a piece of bread smeared on one side with butter – or more usually margarine – and jam, which was the staple diet of Liverpool children. The bread though was delicious, before sliced steamed bread replaced taste with convenience. I used to cut the cobs we bought, a hemi-spherical bread almost the size of a football, into half inch thick slices. Even we in the middle-class used to have sandwiches for tea, with our only hot meal at lunch; or dinner as we northerners called it. Mind you, as we were better off, we used to sometimes replace the jam with meat or fish paste. And we often finished tea with cake. We did always drank tea. We simply didn’t think of drinking coffee. That only became fashionable, even amongst the avant garde, until the late 1950s.

 

When my mother’s relatives came across from Leeds, they brought baloney, a local form of liver pate; as if – stranded in some foreign land - we neededsuch food parcels.

 

Despite her silences, my grandmother did have a significant impact on my grandfather, not least because - in the early part of the 20th century - he was considering emigrating to Canada.  At that time, and for much of the first part of century right up to the 1960s, I guess most people did seriously consider emigrating to get away from the deprivations at home.  My own family seriously considered emigrating to New Zealand, and have from time to time to time regretted not doing so ever since. Equally my grandfather didn't go to Canada.  This is partly because his teaching qualification wouldn't have been recognised in Canada, and he would have had to start all over again.  My mother, though, believed a far more important reason was that my grandmother wouldn't have trusted him alone in Canada for the several months before she could join him. She knew a side of him of which I was not aware until much later. He was seemingly very much the ladies man and sowed some wild oats from time to time.  It is not something you even consider when your elders seem so much older - so close to death -- when in reality they're probably in midlife crisis instead.

 

My mother was born during the First World War which so changed the landscape of British lives.  We now remember the deprivation of the Second World War, with its rationing etc, but the First World War was even worse for many people. For my mother it was nearly disastrous, in as much as her brother, slightly older than she, developed an illness which required him to have various operations and to be looked after very carefully. This meant that all the decent food which was available was given to him, and my mother was deprived of it.  As a result, again in common with many other children at the time, she lacked the calcium needed for a balanced diet and developed rickets. This left her bow-legged, and probably contributed to her arthritis later in life.  Her brother Sid, though, survived to a ripe old age despite having been given a few weeks to live when he was young. Her sister was significantly older; eight years older actually.  As such she was not seen by my mother as being part of her immediate family.

 

When my mother first went to school she made friends with the one girl in the class who had no other friends.  She was called Mi Li and, unfortunately, in those days mixing with people of other races was not encouraged.  Accordingly, despite the socialism of my grandfather, my mother was removed from the school the next day and sent to another one.   But she always remembered Mi Li fondly; and I guess inculcated that in my own education, so that later I came to be one of the founders of the student anti-apartheid movement.  Other memories she talked about were doing her homework in the cloisters of Liverpool Cathedral. In those days the area around the Cathedral wasn't the slum it has since become but was full of quite upmarket housing, indicating just how much the suburbs of cities change over time.

 

The Grafton Street School, the reformatory for boys where my grandfather taught and they also lived, was just a couple of streets away from the docks. In later life she would look back across the Mersey, from the shore at Eastham Woods, to see the 'Cast Iron Shore' near where she had lived. Again her memories were fragmentary, and the earliest one of Liverpool occurred just after they moved there. She got lost and was taken to the police station where they asked “Where do you come from?” She said Leeds, where her earliest years had been spent, and that confused everybody; not least herself!

 

From her later time in Liverpool, she especially remembered the overhead railway which ran nearby, along the docks and then out to Southport. This was one of the features fondly remembered by most Liverpudlians, until it was wantonly pulled down in the 'modernisation' of the 1960s which cut the heart out of the city. In her memory it used to make a thundering noise in the distance as she was going to sleep.

 

At the bottom Grafton Street, on the boundary of the docks, was a big brewery. From there she had to walk along the road to St. Margaret's, which was a relatively up-market school. A ‘nice school’ was how my mother described it, where her fellow pupils were the daughters of people such as city councillors.

 

By the brewery there was also a big yard where they stacked timber. In later years there was also a transport contractor, Booles, whose owners lived in the street and were very elite, with a sumptuous house. They gave dinner parties at their house. Also nearby was a factory which made jam, and as she lay in bed she would get the lovely smell of the jam being made. Although it would not happen now, this interspersing of industry with high class housing was typical of this area of Liverpool at the time.

 

The people she remembered included Mrs. White. She was the storyteller who fostered my mother’s love of reading. She told all the classical stories and took in the children who lived in the elite houses in street. Indeed, all the children used to go and listen to her. 

 

My mother’s closest friend, Audrey  (Maisie) Smith, lived in a house - also in Grafton Street - that was in part a dairy. Her family had their own cows in the yard behind the house, where there was a cowshed, or shippam as they called it. My mother used to go and get the milk straight from the cows and thought it was marvelous to have cows in the centre of a city; though this was quite usual in that period.

 

After the My Lai incident, my mother’s new school was three miles away and she had to walk there each day.

 

Her brother, Sidney, was sent to the Oulton Grammar School - since he was two and a half years older. Her memories of St. Margarets, at that age, are sketchy; though she could remember the priest taking his hat off and folding it to put in the sash at his waist.

 

As a teenager she seems to have behaved much like the rest of us have done since that time. For fun, she and the other girls would regularly catch the ferry across the Mersey to Birkenhead, and then hide in the toilets before they made their way back again. In this way they didn't have to pay, since the pay kiosks were on the Birkenhead side. One of them, Eva Rimmer, continued to visit my mother - eventually attending the local dances with her - when my mother moved to the Wirral. Of course, Ma also remembered the first Mersey Tunnel being built, and the stories about how they had to pump in so much concrete grout to seal the cracks that it eventually seeped out at the Cast Iron Shore miles away!

 

Life was not all that bleak. At home, in the reformatory school, when she used to have a party her older sister Ethel, along with her friends from the houses around, used to dress up as 'Nippys' - the waitresses who then served in the Lyons Corner Houses. The children, of my mother's age, attending the parties were most impressed with this. Normally, though, they had house-boys to do any rough work that her mother wanted.

 

There were, of course, emotional entanglements. The boy who was stationed on the door of the schoolhouse, Carter, was the object of a bit of a crush by my mother; and, when her father discovered this, poor Carter was never allowed on the door again.

 

It clearly was a large building, which offered many opportunities for play. She well remembered running up the fire escapes outside of the house 'like a monkey'. She was the pet of the matron in the school and the women staff. They used to make her dolls and she was always included in the parties they had at the school. Before these events they used to go in and look at the table where all the presents were but, despite trying to remember which was the one she wanted, she invariably got the wrong thing.

 

When she was twelve years old, she - along with the rest of the family - moved to Bromborough Pool on the Wirral. It was an event she remembered especially well, since she had to take care of the cat - Fluffy! The cat immediately jumped out of the upstairs window, since at Grafton Street the equivalent window led onto a fire escape which was the cat’s domain. Fortunately, despite the cat's shock at the resulting fall, it survived.

 

The main reason they moved to the Wirral was that the government was disbanding the home office schools. Equally, though, her sister who was seven and a half years older got entangled with one of the boys who had left but who (as a coach driver) regularly came down from Ripon  to meet her. My mother thought he was very nice, and covered for her sister's secret trysts by going round the shops when Ethel was supposed to be looking after her. But, when the family found out, there was a terrible row, since her parents wanted to break up this relationship with an unsuitable lower class boy.

 

My grandfather had moved to teach at a local school, at Bromborough Pool; which is also where I later lived.  This was the village owned by the Prices chemical factory, later taken over by Unilever.  I'll describe that in a later chapter, but it was a company village and in effect it was a company school.  My mother passed on few memories about the school itself, though she hated the fact that she had to attend it herself when her father was a teacher there -- since this marked her out from all the other children. She did though remember the house, where they lived; one of company houses, a terraced house in York Street. Again, my mother’s memories of that period were of sunny summers, in the 1920s, and of gardens laden with apple-blossom; and meeting my father.

 

When my mother arrived on the Pool, my father - who was seven and a half years older than her - was already one of the eligible bachelors; who, she pointed out later, would not then have even looked at her! Later on they all used to have wonderful times, after all it was the nineteen twenties (and then thirties) when life was lived to the full! For New Year they always had a big dance at Hulme Hall in Port Sunlight, but the same crowd moved around various dances throughout the year. The band, run by my uncle Bill, played for these dances. According to my mother he was a very talented musician, who could play any instrument - though, as was often the case with band leaders in those days, he mainly played the saxophone. My aunt, my father's sister – Phyllis - later Bill's wife, used have lots of partners; she was lively and everybody thought the world of her. They became a foursome and went around together, even on holiday.

 

Eventually my grandfather went to teach at the Higher Bebington Primary School. There he taught the remedial class. He was never happier than seeing these backward children grow in stature. Much in keeping with his social view of his role, he also coached its very successful football team. At the same time the family moved to a rented house, the typical three bedroom semi of the time, in Higher Bebington.

 

I cannot remember my grandfather on my father's side, since he died of blood poisoning when I was one -- literally just a few months before antibiotics were found which would have saved his life. He was in charge of building operations at Prices, and this was why he and Nana Mercer lived on the village. He had been a builder, or - rather more formally - in charge of the builders, much of his life. I remember being told many times about how he built the Gum Tragasoll, a large factory nearby in Hooton.

 

His father had also been a foreman builder, a bricklayer, and had been in charge of part of the building of Lime Street station in Liverpool. Other relatives, on my grandmother’s side going back several generations, had been on the railway; including being station masters, an important job in those days.  The women, though, typically went into service; again a typical job for unmarried women.  As a result, they had all the hangups, with few of the advantages, of being close to the upper-class.  Only one had escaped the mould, and had become a director of Brunner Mond -- which later became ICI -- though, even as his name was spoken in hushed tones, we never saw him.

 

My father had two brothers and sisters.  His older brother, Joe, had once played for the reserve team of the Liverpool Football Club.  Indeed, they had wanted him to join the first team, but in those days their wages were a pittance -- less than thirty shillings a week. Instead, he joined the Liverpool council water board, and became senior manager within that.  He had a pleasant house in Bebington, but was most notable for his wife -- Hilda -- who was rumoured to have 'entertained' a proportion of the American army during the Second World War.  I always disliked her.  She insisted on hugging me, the worst thing you can do to a small boy, showering me with the musky powder she wore. I hated it.  They had a son, my cousin Barry, of whom I saw little. Having fathered an illegitimate child, he had to run away to America where he stayed.

 

My father's sister, Phyllis, was apparently a very vivacious when young. She married Bill, who was a salesman -- or at least a traveller as it was called in those days.  I guess he was a very typical traveller, and was full of the sort of stories of salesman tell. He was also unreliable like many salesman. He and my father, of course, ran G & M chemicals – of which more in a later chapter -  but Bill was always changing to the products and never gave the existing ones much of a chance.  Ultimately he died relatively young and left massive debts. Fortunately Phyliis got good legal advice and was able to avoid the most of these. He was also very musical running a dance band, he played the saxophone, and his band was a standard fixture at Grosvenor hotel, the best in Chester.  He also used to regularly feature on radio -- especially on Workers Playtime - and we used to listen out avidly for this. 

 

My father's younger brother was the spoilt child of the family. Barry eventually went away to sea. This may have had some effect on his sexuality, for my mother was convinced that in later life he was a closet homosexual -- in fact she thought he was a fairly open homosexual, bringing his boyfriends home.  He was not very successful as a seaman, though he did bring back some souvenirs -- including  a marmoset monkey which was the family pet. He was later invalided out of the war, with a nervous breakdown; which was understandable since he was the pilot of a boat which was target for bombing by the RAF and lived on his nerves in case they actually hit his launch. After the war he eventually went to work for Billy Butlin at Pwllheli, where he was in charge of the shops and bars. This was a very responsible job, since - once he had got the campers locked away on site - Billy made most of his money from the shops and especially the bars. 

 

We used to occasionally visit Barry at Pwllheli, and he used to come home for Christmas. It was at Christmas that his job was particularly profitable.  He got vast amounts of gifts from his suppliers. In particular one supplier used to give him an envelope in which there was £500 in crisp fivers. It should be pointed out that, at that time in the 1950s, £500 was as much as a manager would earn in a year!  Ultimately he retired to open a CTN, a sweet shop.  Like most shops it was not particularly profitable, but with living accommodation attached he led a reasonable life. Once I left for university my mother went to work for him, serving behind the counter.  I think this was to get over the vacuum I left rather than for any money -- since Barry was stingy in the extreme.

 

I get the impression that my father was the neglected one of family.  He had a an Alsatian called Denny, on which he lavished all of the love which was  probably denied him by everyone else.  The family was peculiar in one respect. His father was Roman Catholic and his mother was Church of England.  This meant that my father was in theory brought up as Catholic, though he was actually Church of England – at one stage he was the only Roman Catholic in the Masons in his area!

 

He went to St Xaviers School, in Liverpool, run by the Jesuits. I never heard much about that, though I got the impression that the priests didn’t spare the rod. After leaving school, and joining Prices in the laboratory, he got some qualifications at night school. Ultimately, when the opportunity arose, he moved out of the laboratory into the factory where he became a foreman and then supervisor; running a section of the factory - the fatty alcohol department -- which essentially distilled fatty alcohol from whale oil. He also, took over some of the new plants being brought in. At Prices he was always independent and was chairman of the supervisor's association – at which time he worked with Clive Jenkins who was the local union representative.  Ultimately he was promoted to become a junior departmental manager, though he always felt that he was not fairly treated by the management.  He was a great worker, but was not always respected by everyone above him. From my own experience I sympathise with him. I also sympathize now with the problems I caused; where my mother wanted me to do better than him – a difficult challenge for any child and even more for his father.

 

My relationship with my relatives was asymmetric. That with my mother’s family was very tight knit, closely following the traditional extended family model even though they lived a number of miles away from us rather than in the same street.

 

That within my father’s family was much more distant, with the notable exception of my grandmother, Nana Mercer, who I saw several times a week. My father’s family had been, to a degree, dysfunctional. Not least, the relationship between the two parents was rather formal, as it often was in the earlier years of the century, and in later years she still referred to him as ‘Mr Mercer’.  Indeed, it was years before I knew that his name was Joseph, the same as his eldest son – my Uncle Joe - again another custom in those times. In any case, this grandfather died of blood poisoning when I was just one year old, so it became in certain respects – and in my eyes - a single parent family.

 

The children, three brothers – Joe, Horace (my father) and Barry, in descending order of age – and one sister – Phyllis – gradually left home and, apart from my father and myself, only visited it occasionally. This was more of a social gulf, since they had very different lives, rather than a geographical one – since they lived as close by as the members of my mother’s family.

 

On my mother’s side, however, there was a shared interest which held us all together. The husband’s all worked for the same company, Prices. Moreover, my formative years were spent on the factory village, Bromborough Pool. I lived there from the age of five until I was 20 years old.

 

This was not, though, the same as the traditional picture of mill-workers sharing a common culture. They were, instead, all managers; part of the first generation of such lower middle class managers. The company was itself one of the new ‘high-tech’ companies, producing chemicals for the Unilever (multinational) group. Nor, as I have intimated, did they live in the street next to the mill. All three families lived in middle class suburbs. Even though we, ourselves, lived on the factory village, it was in one of the Georgian villas built for the managers of the company – which were sited in a privileged position overlooking the cricket field and discretely separated from the rest of the village.

 

The intimacy of the family link to Prices was enhanced by our closeness to the factory, such that my father cycled home for lunch every day. Even my Uncle Sidney, who ate his lunch in the factory canteen, walked up to our house most days to have a cup of tea and a chat in the time remaining from his lunch break. Sidney was a bachelor all his life. In those days, even though it was unusual, his lack of a partner did not hold any special connotations; though my Uncle Barry, who was also single, certainly was gay – though, then being a criminal offence, he never came out of the closet. Sid, however, had plenty of girlfriends; and some of these were very good-looking. I suspect, though, he never enjoyed carnal relations even with these; since in those days such relationships were chaste until sex was sanctioned by marriage. In any case, if he did ever indulge, such were the taboos and the damage to the girl’s reputation, that he never would have spoken about such activities.

 

Whatever the state of play in the rest of his life, we effectively became his ‘atomic’ family, and I became his surrogate son.

 

My father was very practical, but somewhat taciturn. He spent much of his spare time working on the two loves of his life. One was his car, which in those days was necessarily second-hand, and sometimes temperamental. Above all, he spent his time in the garden; which probably ran to a quarter of an acre, mostly given over to vegetables. We were self-sufficient in all our vegetables. He stored the harvested potatoes in a clamp and the onions and apples in the various outhouses. The fruits were bottled and even the runner beans were salted down. All of this was a necessity where, in common with most workers, his income allowed for few luxuries. In the context of our lunch-time debates, however, he was usually a passive listener.

 

Although my father was bright, he passed his chemistry exams at night school at a time when any further education was very much the exception, my mother’s family was much more overtly ‘intellectual’. My grandfather had been a teacher and, especially, my Uncle Sid was a born – extrovert - debater. Thus, in the school holidays, he and I – along with my mother – debated all the issues of the day. These debates were, I suspect, an especially important formative influence for my later development.

 

In this way was my life shaped almost before it had begun!

 

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