by Alan Bristow
‘Freddie, I don’t need to sell the business, and I don’t think there is any purpose in pursuing this conversation. Let’s forget about it.’
Suddenly he reached in his pocket and brought out half a crown. ‘Come on Alan, I’ll toss you for the difference.’
Before you could say ‘Freddie Laker’ he had flicked the coin in the air and covered it with his hand on the table. ‘Call.’
There was a moment’s stunned silence, then George Fry let fly with his foot under the table and caught me a terrible wallop on the shin. His glance said ‘Don’t you dare!’ I cried out in pain, and the guests at the next table looked round to see what was going on.
‘Call then,’ urged Freddie.
‘Heads!’
Freddie slowly lifted his hand. George Fry had gone white. Heads it was.
I sat with the blood trickling down my shin while George finished his brandy in one gulp. Freddie’s voice sounded far away when he spoke up.
‘We’ll have to sort that one out with Myles,’ he said.
‘Don’t worry, Freddie,’ said George Fry. ‘I’ll have a word with him on your behalf, and I won’t mention anything about the tossing of a coin.’
We shook hands at the door and went our separate ways, I to Heathrow where I was just in time for my flight back to Bermuda, George Fry to his doctor complaining of heart palpitations, for which the doctor prescribed bed rest. A few days later George rang me to say that Sir Myles Wyatt had agreed to the price, and to my position on the BUA and Air Holdings Ltd Boards. I authorised George to enter into five-year service contracts with Air Holdings Ltd for me, George, Jack Woolley and Alan Green. George added that I was a free man once again and could return to the UK whenever I liked because the Surtax Direction Order had been lifted.
In order to continue enjoying the tax-free status of Helicopter Rentals Ltd it was of paramount importance that the ‘mind and management’ of the company was invested in a senior executive living in Bermuda. Several executives enjoyed this privelege over time, but the ultimate choice for the job was Bill Mayhew, the company secretary, who was Bermudian by birth and whose family still lived in the islands. Furthermore, his wife was suffering from multiple sclerosis – Bill’s dedication to her over the years was touching – and she would benefit from living in a warmer climate.
This seemed an opportune moment to move the company’s headquarters closer to London. Through George’s contacts at the Royal Aero Club he discovered that there were premises to rent at Redhill Aerodrome, and in the longer term it might be possible to buy the whole aerodrome. By the summer of 1960 we had started on the road to establishing Redhill as a comprehensive helicopter operating base with its own telephone switchboard and served by its own transport system. We were able to set aside half of one hangar to handle incoming and outgoing freight.
When I next met Freddie he was able to laugh his gamble off, but it can’t have endeared him to Myles Wyatt. ‘You’re a lucky bugger, aren’t you,’ he said. ‘Tell you what – there’s a racehorse I fancy, a little filly. Why don’t you share your good fortune and buy her for me?’
I agreed, not knowing what I was letting myself in for. To my surprise the filly only cost me £1,400. Freddie was an inveterate gambler who often persuaded me to join him at an evening race meeting. Usually he came out substantially lighter than he’d gone in. Once, at Lingfield, I estimated he’d lost about £5,000. Didn’t it hurt?
Freddie shrugged. ‘Alan, I bets in thousands and I loses in thousands.’
‘Freddie, I bets in tens, and I loses in tens,’ I said.
We climbed into his Rolls-Royce for the trip home. In those days, if you were a director of an independent airline you got a Rolls-Royce – and with my Rolls came Lionel, a chauffeur, who stayed with me for years.
The most difficult part of my job in the early days under Air Holdings was to absorb Fison Airwork into Bristow Helicopters Ltd. Fison Airwork was a specialist crop-spraying organisation based at a disused wartime airfield at Bourne, in Cambridge. Their main activities were the spraying of bananas, cotton and cocoa in Central America, as well as spraying potatoes and vegetables in the English spring and summer, then moving en masse to spray cotton in the Sudan in the winter months. The company operated almost sixty Hiller 360 helicopters. I found I had been landed with a hostile group of Fison Airwork pilots and engineers who believed that they should have taken over Bristows, rather than vice versa. It wasn’t my place to point out to them that most of the Fison Airwork contracts were barely profitable, while Bristows had solid gold contracts on which we flew more sophisticated and expensive machines. Fison Airwork’s only decent contract was with Shell in Nigeria, and I was very keen to expand their work there. I was soon to discover that, were it not for the Shell contract in Nigeria, Fison Airwork would have been bankrupt.
Shortly after the announcement of the Fison Airwork buy-out, the previous Managing Director Jimmy Harper resigned. From my point of view I was keen to have continuity and I persuaded Sir Myles Wyatt to let me re-instate him as the Operations Manager because I knew that the merger was such a sensitive issue with the Fison Airwork personnel. I made a point of ensuring that everyone in Bristows and in Fison Airwork understood I would tolerate no favouritism – promotion would come solely on merit, and anyone who expected preferential treatment because they’d been long-serving hands with either company would be disappointed. You can’t solve these people generated problems in an instant, and a them-and-us attitude persisted for several months before it faded away. At every opportunity I stressed that we were one company now, and that everyone worked for me, and eventually it died out. In the event, some of my most effective managers in the sixties, seventies and eighties were men I’d inherited from Fison Airwork.
It was not long before I realised that Jimmy Harper had little talent for contract management, a fact that was forcibly brought home to me when we lost an early contract in East Anglia through his failure to arrange the supply of DDT powder. I let him off with a warning, but I realised from that moment that he never accepted my authority. Jimmy Harper bore an everlasting grudge against Bristow Helicopters, as was to become apparent a few years later.
Looking at Fison Airwork’s books I could see that a great commitment of capital and effort was producing a return of 3.5 per cent. I made a point early in the merger of visiting Fison Airwork’s operations in Trinidad, Panama, the Dominican Republic and Honduras. Their largest single contract was with United Fruit, where Fison Airwork had twenty-five helicopters spraying bananas around Waltero in Honduras. The Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, was a frontier town where most of the male population walked around with guns at their belts and rifles slung over their shoulders. It wasn’t uncommon to hear gunfire from people shooting at the sky day and night. I was met at the airport by Fison Airwork’s chief pilot Peter Gray and ushered into a single-engined Cessna 172 aeroplane. For nearly two hours we flew until we came to a towering range of mountains, and I thought it was like going into heaven. A gateway appeared ahead of us, a great V-shaped cleft in the mountains, which opened into a wide fertile valley, and as far as the eye could see there were banana trees, endless rows of banana trees. At the end of the journey we landed on a road close to a railway line in the middle of nowhere. This was the local headquarters of United Fruit, where Fison Airwork occupied a corrugated iron shed and a hangar a hundred yards from the head of this railway. All around were sidings where trains up to half a mile long came to be loaded with ‘hands’ of green bananas to be hauled down to refrigerated ships for shipment to the USA. The Fison Airwork men were living in run-down accommodation with native boys cooking for them. Everyone seemed to me to be grimy, their clothing wasn’t clean, their uniforms had been thrown away – they looked like a rag, tag and bobtail outfit.
The engineers and pilots slouched up in a dishevelled group as I got out of the Cessna. I reflected later that this group had turned out to contain some of my best men, men who would rise to senior positions
in Bristow Helicopters Ltd – John Odlin was there, Bob Brewster, Peter Gray, John Waddington, and John Priddy, whom I called ‘Banana Fingers’ because when he offered you an enormous hand, it felt just like you were grasping ripe bananas.
‘Now listen,’ I said, ‘this is an absolute shambles. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. I want you all to wear clean white shirts and blue shorts tomorrow morning, and anyone who doesn’t come up to scratch will be going home.’
That didn’t go down well, and they shuffled off. I buttonholed Peter Gray and asked him how much these men were earning. It turned out they got paid a low basic wage of £800 per annum plus a flying hour premium. This meant the pilots needed to fly between 100 and 120 hours a month to make a reasonable wage. This kind of penny-pinching annoyed me intensely, and went some way to explaining why they were having so many accidents – I’d worked out that crop spraying was killing 1.6 pilots a year, and there were dozens of non-fatal accidents of varying degrees of severity, when the Hillers rolled over in the bananas with only minor injuries to the pilots. Crop spraying was dangerous enough without flying when you were exhausted and fit to drop, as these pilots were doing. By the time the damaged helicopters had been repaired, the margin on the United Fruit contract was not much above three per cent.
I had a meeting with the overseer of the fruit company. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m here to close down this operation and we’re moving out. I’m giving you thirty days’ notice right now.’
He was open-mouthed. ‘Whoa, feller – what’s wrong?’
‘I’ve been looking through the accounts of this operation for the last year, and there’s no way the company can make a profit for such a high-risk operation. In fact we’re running at a loss, and the damage is appalling.’
‘Well, whaddaya need to keep flying?’ Pest control was vital to the banana producers, and helicopters were the only way to administer the chemicals effectively.
‘I don’t know yet. I’ll have to speak to my crews and re-examine Airwork’s costings for the job. I’ll let you know tomorrow.’
Next day I mustered the pilots and engineers, and noted that as requested, they were wearing clean white shirts and blue shorts.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to negotiate a decent rate for the work from the fruit company, and if I succeed I’m going to double your basic wage, and there will be no more flying pay.’
They looked at each other as if to say, where did this bloke come from and what does he know about crop spraying? In fact I knew quite a lot about crop spraying, and I did not like it one bit. It was exhausting work for pilots, and where helicopters had to compete with fixed-wing aircraft and even ground vehicles you would never get a decent return on investment. But I was able to convince United Fruit’s local manager that we should replace the previous, complicated agreement with a guaranteed monthly establishment charge, plus an hourly flying charge based on a monthly minimum of fifty hours per helicopter. This allowed me to follow through on my promise by almost doubling the basic wages of the pilots. I put all pilots on a basic minimum of £1,400 per annum, linked to annual increments. I never believed in holding down wages for its own sake. My prime motive was a return of at least ten per cent on capital employed. I thought Fison Airwork treated their pilots meanly, and the conditions in which they were living in Waltero and the Dominican Republic were intolerable. Pilots and engineers worked long hours, but the helicopters always looked well maintained. Fison Airwork had some good engineers, too – men like Jim Macaskill who became great Bristows stalwarts.
I flew home to London more than ever convinced that we should get out of the crop spraying business. Back at BUA’s headquarters in Portland House I went to see Sir Myles Wyatt. Myles was a good businessman who understood aviation, but he didn’t want to have to bother about helicopters and was satisfied as long as the business was making a decent profit. He looked at the bottom line and little else. He had enough on his plate with the rest of Air Holdings Ltd. Bristow Helicopters was to become, as he said later, the ‘jewel in the crown’, a company that consistently made strong profits without throwing up problems. Myles worked incredibly hard – his sole relaxation was his racing yacht Bloodhound, which he later sold to Prince Philip. In fact, he was working himself into an early grave, and he died in 1968 without having reached his sixty-fifth birthday.
I knocked on his office door. ‘Myles, this fruit spraying is a business we want out of. Let’s sell it. It’ll never make a worthwhile return.’
‘What do you call a worthwhile return?’ Sir Myles asked.
‘Fifteen per cent,’ I said. ‘We’re barely breaking even after we’ve repaired the damaged helicopters.’
‘Well, you’d better get on with it, then.’ I rarely got more guidance than that from Myles.
I started casting around for a buyer for the spraying business and got an expression of interest from Desmond Norman, son of Sir Nigel Norman, ironically the founder of Airwork. Desmond had founded Britten-Norman with John Britten in 1954 to exploit a number of inventions, one of which was a rotary atomiser for chemical sprays, which cut down on the amount of spray needed per acre. As an added benefit, Desmond’s system didn’t poison the crew. He’d started a company called Crop Culture with a third partner, an Australian pilot called Jim McMahon, and Airwork’s fleet of Hiller 360s was just what they needed to progress their plans. I sold them thirty-five Hillers, all those I didn’t think we needed to service our own plans, and they made a good go of it for a while – the profits went to develop the Britten-Norman Islander aircraft – but despite Desmond’s undoubted genius they too got out of crop spraying just a few years later.
With the crop spraying business disposed of, I concentrated on Bristow Helicopters Ltd. Apart from Nigeria, the only Fison Airwork contract I retained was in Trinidad and Tobago, where as well as a seasonal sugar spraying contract they were supporting Regent Petroleum out of Galeota Point. All these changes must have been disconcerting for the Fison Airwork people, but nobody was made redundant. We never seemed to find ourselves with surplus pilots and engineers – new contracts were generated to produce long-term growth, and this meant finding and training more pilots and engineers.
Every Fison Airwork helicopter was repainted with the words ‘Bristow Helicopters’. It was important to me that somewhere on a helicopter, the Bristow name was recognised. The client could paint the machine any colour he wanted, provided the name Bristow was printed in small letters above the doorway. The red, white and blue Bristow colours were taken from my family crest – and we were seen as British, no matter where the helicopters were flown in the world or what country’s registration they carried.
One of the immediate benefits of being part of Air Holdings Ltd was that it opened up new business opportunities for BHL. A major shareholder was British and Commonwealth Shipping, owned by the Cayzer family. Sir Nicholas Cayzer subsequently chaired Air Holdings, while his cousins Tony and Bunny – Lord Rotherwick – sat on the Board. The influence of British and Commonwealth in South Africa was considerable, and through Safmarine, a tanker company with close ties to British and Commonwealth, Bristows were invited without competitive tender to send down a more powerful Hiller 12E with a pilot and engineer to see if it would be practicable to lift the components of an HF radio relay network into some inaccessible sites in the mountains. I went down there to see how feasible it would be, and it was a borderline case with the Hiller, which was running out of steam at 6,000 feet. At the end of the first week I reported to their radio communications people that it could be done if the sites were no worse than those I had been shown. In the event, some of them were higher and more difficult to approach. The surveyors would get to a site and announce that they couldn’t get a line-of-sight to the next VHF installation, and ask to be taken another 150 feet up the mountain, then another 150 feet. The chief pilot, Tony English, was a genius at this kind of work. He was a mountaineer who was quite happy climbing above 14,000 feet in the Andes without oxygen.
Sometimes when the wind came off the mountain the turbulence became extreme, and the only thing to do was to pull the stick hard over and turn away down the mountain. English’s first job was to fly in men who could build a concrete platform, then timber and steel frames had to be underslung to each site. Initially it was a six-month contract but it eventually stretched to two years.
From a personal viewpoint, the Air Holdings deal transformed my life. With the proceeds I bought a lovely home on the outskirts of Cranleigh, Surrey, a farm near Reigate and in 1965 a nearby estate called Baynards Park. Later I also bought the farm next door, Coxland, and over the years turned it into a first-class pedigree dairy enterprise. I developed the woodlands to provide breeding grounds for pheasants, duck and partridge. George Fry, Jack Woolley and Alan Green also did well out of the sale of the company, and were able to set themselves up in the Home Counties. I had the means to indulge my passion for horses. Coxland boasted some beautiful woodlands through which I created carriage drives, and for a while I became horse-driving mad. I could no longer ride because I’d had three vertebrae fused together after a serious riding accident – if you could call it an accident. At Yeovil I used to ride to hounds with Sparkford Vale Harriers, and I had a pretty powerful jumping cob. I was out one day with a fellow called Bob Dyer, helping to build the local point-to-point course. Dyer was a local farmer and a well-respected Master of the local hunt. Hacking back to put the horses away after building the jumps, I rode past him, and at that moment he hit my horse on the hindquarters with his whip. I wasn’t expecting it. My horse went up in the air and threw me off. My right foot got stuck in the stirrup and I was dragged along the ground for a considerable distance, losing my hard hat as I went. I remembered nothing for two weeks after the incident, but my back was so badly damaged that I was told by the doctors never to ride again. I underwent back-stretching treatment and endless courses of injections, but nothing worked. Dyer could never explain why he did it – it was just one of those silly moments. I know he regretted it to his dying day. I didn’t hold it against him. It happened, and that was that. But carriage driving became a substitute for riding, and I became not only extremely enthusiastic, but competent enough to join the British Four-in-Hand team.