LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER THREE A is for Advertising

      It was the summer of 1947 and I found myself back home again, aged 23, at ‘Byland’, Private Road, Enfield, Middlesex with my mother and father after over four years in the army. A very pleasant place to be, too. I had made another sparkling appearance at Fort Dunlop and, on the back of my Dunlop scholarship, had landed the job of Assistant to C L Smith, the Advertising Manager of the Company’s major division, the Tyre Group at Fort Dunlop – starting immediately. So my stay in Enfield was short-lived, and it was off to Birmingham and my digs with the Bellamys in Holly Lane, Erdington.

      I didn’t find it difficult being a civilian again because I guess I had always been one at heart, much as I had enjoyed my time in the army. But this was certainly different. Every morning I set off to ‘The Fort’, walking the mile or so to the factory, and spent the day ministering to CL’s needs. He was a kind, if rather pompous, man who dressed immaculately and spoke with a plum in his mouth. He was easy to work for, but I cannot say that the job was overly demanding. For doing it I was paid the princely sum of £350 a year (roughly the equivalent of £11,000 today), so I wasn’t heading for an early or wealthy retirement, but I enjoyed myself.

      I often socialized with Dunlop’s charismatic Competitions Manager, Dickie Davis – a great character, manager and salesman and also an accomplished pianist, who loved to entertain his mates by playing the joanna in the bar, surrounded by happy people and with a row of gin and tonics on the upright. I once arrived in the Isle of Man for the TT races and, straight off the boat, went to the Hotel Sefton where he was staying. ‘Get up, Dickie,’ I said to the recumbent form in his bed, ‘it’s 6:30. Time to go to the paddock.’

      ‘Get up?’ he groaned, ‘I’ve only just got into bed!’

      I was happy enough at ‘The Dunlop’ and used to go home every weekend on my beloved Triumph Tiger 100 motor cycle. Seeing myself as next year’s Isle of Man TT winner, I used to do the 110-mile journey in two hours, which wasn’t bad going in those days of no motorways. Correct bike wear was a massive, ankle-length army despatch rider’s raincoat (featuring press studs to enclose the legs), a pair of clumpy rubber waders, sheepskin-lined, heavy leather gloves, a pair of ex-RAF Mark VII goggles and a tweed cap with the peak twisted round to the back. I was regarded as a bit of a cissy because I wore one of my father’s crash helmets, painted white. ‘If we both fall off,’ I used to say to my friends who mocked my headgear, ‘I’ll be the one who gets up.’

      My mother had always hated Birmingham but I thought it was great. It was the first time I had been on my own, free from school or army discipline and completely my own master. I had a girlfriend who worked for ‘The Lucas’ and I used to go by tram from Erdington to Snow Hill to see her. The route took in Aston Cross, where there was Mitchell and Butler’s brewery, the HP sauce factory and a tannery. On a hot summer’s evening the smell was indescribable.

      Nearly every morning at The Fort I had to go down the central staircase when the staff started their day’s work. On the Sections Accounts floor – about an acre of tables in rows, wall-to-wall – I would see the clerks pushing big trolleys down to the strongroom to collect their vast ledgers. When they got them back to their workstations they would spend the whole day methodically moving dockets from in-tray to out-tray, entering their contents into the ledgers. Mind-numbing work. You’d have been trampled to death if you stood in the doorway at knocking-off time. For them life began when work finished.

      Frankly, my job wasn’t onerous and, like the Section Clerks, I had most of my fun outside office hours. Renewing my love of shooting, I joined the Dunlop Rifle Club to compete with my 0.22 BSA-Martini. I often visited the Birmingham Motor Cycle Club, to meet people like the famous BSA competitions boss Bert Perrigo, a chirpy Brummie, one of the all-time greats of motor-cycle trials riding; Jeff Smith and Brian Martin, trials and scramble stars of the day; and the amazing Olga Kevelos, who ran a café near Snow Hill station with her Greek father but was far more interested in being Britain’s leading female trials rider. At this time the legendary Geoff Duke, one of the greatest motor-cycle racers of all time, was making a name for himself – firstly as a works trials rider and then, in 1949, by winning the Senior Manx Grand Prix on his first appearance. We used to meet and gossip in the Norton Competitions Department in Bracebridge Street where Geoff worked – like my father so many years before.

      Another of my Birmingham friends was the Ulsterman Rex McCandless, who had designed a spring frame for his grass-tracking brother, Cromie, which was blowing the socks off everything in Irish racing. Rex joined Norton as a consultant and the all-conquering Norton ‘Featherbed’ racing frame came into being. He was an excitable, fun chap but understandably used to suffer fits of depression. We’d get together in the evenings and he’d sound off at me; ‘I’ve redesigned the whole road bike range to use the Featherbed frame and now they’ve told me that they’ve got a five-year supply of frame lugs that have got to be used first,’ he once told me in despair.

      If you were a motor-cycle nut in those days, as I was and still am, the Midlands was the place to be. Norton were based at Aston, BSA at Small Heath, Ariel at Selly Oak, Velocette at Hall Green, Royal Enfield at Redditch, Villiers engines at Wolverhampton and Triumph at Meriden. Now, with the glorious exception of Triumph, they are sadly all names of the past because of management complacency, union intransigence and the enterprise and competence of the Japanese.

      It was while I was in Birmingham that my own short-lived motor-cycle competition career began. Fired up by all the glamour and excitement of my surroundings, I got myself a 500T trials Norton and, with some advice from Geoff Duke about how to prepare it, set out to show my father how a motor cycle should really be ridden, and amaze one and all with my uncanny natural skill. Except that it didn’t quite work out like that: despite my father’s genes I was no more than a fairly competent club-standard rider and I singularly failed to hit the big time.

      At Brands Hatch, then an anti-clockwise grass track, I raced a 250cc dope-engined AJS, which belonged to the famous Arter Brothers, Tom and Edge. Among my fellow competitors were the great Eric Oliver, later to become a quadruple sidecar World Champion, and John Surtees, who went on to win seven motor-cycle World Championships and become the only person in history also to win the Formula 1 World Drivers’ Championship.

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