LITMIR.BIZ

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the Deeths’ superb apartment for dinner. We were having an aperitif on the verandah, with the drinks trolley between me and Dickie’s wife Betty, when she asked whether I’d like another drink. When I said I would, she clapped her hands and shouted ‘RAJI!’. About 30 seconds later a servant appeared, having padded his way from some remote part of the apartment, and Betty said, ‘A gin and tonic for Mr Walker, Raji’ – which he served from the drinks trolley between us.

      Crumbs, I thought. Someone else washes them here and they don’t serve their own drinks. I’ve got a lot to learn.

      On 2 November 1954 my magical mystery tour began at Bombay Central Station, starting with the long haul to Delhi in a twin-berth compartment with shower, basin, loo and our own food in vast tuck boxes which would be prepared and served by the resourceful John. It wasn’t long after Partition, when the old India had been split into Hindu India and Muslim East and West Pakistan: thousands of Hindus in Pakistan had tried to get to India by rail, while similar numbers of Muslims in India had tried to get to Pakistan the same way, only for the trains to be stopped on the way and everyone on them massacred for being of the wrong faith. Just another example of man’s inhumanity to man. But my journey was fascinating and the trips to the villages even more so.

      Communication was the problem when it came to promoting Aspro. Newspapers were limited, there were no cinemas in the villages and no television, while commercial radio was booked solid. So we had Aspro Information Units – loudspeaker vans that toured the villages literally broadcasting the advantages and benefits of Aspro and distributing samples. We even contemplated reviving the Aspro Pipers. Bagpipes are popular in India and Aspro had used them to great effect on a pilot scheme which involved Indians in pink and purple Aspro uniforms going to the villages and playing their bagpipes whilst a merchandiser chatted up the bazaar merchants: ‘There’s going to be a big demand for Aspro here. Not next week, not tomorrow but today. So stock up!’ Now if you, in your sophisticated way of life, looked out of your living room window and saw pink-and-purple-uniformed, bagpipe-playing Indians marching about I dare say you’d go outside to see what the hell was going on. In an Indian village where not much happens from one century to the next it was very big time and when everyone had assembled to see the fun a seventh man carrying a folding stand, who had been marching with his chums, climbed on to it and said, Indian huckster-style, ‘I’m not here today and gone tomorrow. I’m here to tell you about Aspro the wonder cure!’ It worked very well, but it was mighty expensive.

      Visiting India is an assault on the senses: the heat, wall-to-wall people thrusting, jostling and shouting, vibrant colours, bright sunshine, non-stop deafening music, sacred cows wandering along in the streets, horns blowing, spice-laden smells and a terrific sense of vitality and overcrowding. Hot, noisy, smelly and congested chaos. And then there was the curry: real curry, and very different from that I’d had at school. Our first stop was at Jaipur, a place that impressed me. The pièce de resistance was the Maharajah’s personal white temple to the god Vishnu, with its solid silver doors and panels of awe-inspiring mythological scenes. Then to Delhi, and on to Cawnpore on the holy River Ganges and an incredible religious festival, with thousands of people completely immersing themselves in the holy waters of the river, drinking them, washing in them and bottling them to take away; fakirs lying on barbed wire or with pins through their noses and flesh; dying and horribly diseased people: all human life was there to pay homage. It may seem hard to believe but I was actually working whilst all this spellbinding tourism was going on, finding out what people thought about Aspro, talking to the merchants, evolving media schedules, booking radio time and newspaper space, writing advertisement copy and radio commercials, getting layouts done, commissioning artwork, producing brochures and touring local shops and bazaars.

      Constantly on the move as we were, it was a very tiring trip and by the time we got to Calcutta I was ready for a bit of a rest, but it was not to be. On to Nagpur, nearly slap bang in the middle of India, to Bangalore, an ex-British Army military centre, and then to Mysore. Its Durbar Halls were staggering, with a solid gold ceremonial elephant that weighed 3200lb and was more valuable than the economies of many of the countries around it, no doubt. But although I was seeing sights I had never seen before and enjoying every second of it, I was now learning nothing new. From my round-India trip I had found what I needed to know. The reactions I was getting were exactly the same wherever I was. So on to Ceylon.

      The reactions weren’t any different there, but it was a fabulous experience. Now alone, I landed in Colombo five days before Christmas 1954 where I spent the holiday at the Galle Face Hotel prior to a road trip to Kandy, high up in the centre of the island. It was quite a small place surrounded by beautiful wooded hills and mountains and on the edge of an artificial lake swarming with fish and tortoises, but my objective was Nuwara Eliya, almost the highest point of the island at some 6200 ft. I reached it by way of the stunning Peradinya Gardens, where Lord Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command HQ was located during the war. The views were superb and so was the timbered Grand Hotel where I was to stay. I saw virtually the whole of Ceylon because this was long before the current internal conflict began, and I thought it was delightful. Which is more than I can say for Chittagong in East Pakistan. Getting there was a bit of a shaker. I was driven out to the plane at Dum Dum airport and found, to my amazement, that my transport for the day was a World War Two Douglas Dakota which the American forces had left behind them. Worse, instead of the usual seats it had a continuous stretch of canvas running down each side of the plane, above which was the bar to which the airborne troops had clipped their parachute release gear before they jumped! When the distinctly scruffy pilot arrived I became quite queasy: he didn’t have a copy of How to Fly under his arm, but he looked as though he should have. If you’d any guts you’d get off this plane now, I said to myself, but I guess it was like being a conscientious objector during the war – you needed more guts to be one and take the resultant flak than to actually go to war. So I stayed on the plane and of course it was perfectly all right. But Chittagong was awful – with the possible exception of Mexico City, quite the worst place I’d ever visited – dirty, smelly, chaotic and generally repulsive. The Hotel Miksha was all right though and I had a thoroughly redeeming time in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, which included meeting the local head man’s wife, who not only wore the trousers but controlled 40,000 members of her tribe – a sort of native Margaret Thatcher, if you can imagine such a thing! Soon though it was time for another flight, but this time in an up-to-the-minute Lockheed Constellation, over the top of India to Karachi.

      While I had been away from Slough I had been continually sending cables back to HQ asking for money to be sent to the local Barclays Bank. But when I got to Karachi I found instead a cable that read, ‘Enough is enough. Come home.’ After 14 weeks away I’d been rumbled. I got back to Slough at the end of January 1955, wrote a massive report on everything that had happened to me, made sweeping recommendations on how to improve things in the various places I had been and sat back to await developments. But to my extreme frustration there weren’t any. No one asked to hear my pearls of wisdom until about two weeks after I had got back. But then it was an invitation from the Chairman, John Jamieson himself.

      ‘Have a good trip, Murray?’

      ‘Yes indeed, Sir!’

      ‘Think you know all about India now?’

      ‘Well no, but I know a lot more than I did before I went.’

      ‘Enough to do the advertising?’

      ‘Oh yes, definitely.’

      ‘Well that’s too bad because now we are going to put you in charge of Home Market Media.’

      All that work, all that travelling and now it was going totally to waste. But at least I was getting promoted, and after a wonderful trip which I would never have been able to make any other way. In fact that job didn’t last very long either, as I was soon promoted to Advertising Manager of the Aspro Home Products Division, responsible to the Marketing Director, Tom Peters, a tough and confident Australian who was great fun to work for. Aspro had bought several companies to diversify from the analgesic business, which coined money but was vulnerable to attack from rivals like Anadin. What a rag bag they were: Lifeguard Disinfectant (‘Kills all known household germs!’); DIP plastic starch, an easy-to-use stiffener for the voluminous

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