Alan Bristow

by Alan Bristow

  ‘I assure you I can, and I will,’ I said. For the avoidance of doubt, I showed him the document spelling out my terms of engagement, and in particular the clause dealing with my authority to close the company.

  ‘What’s more, I’ll do it overnight,’ I said. ‘Think about the aircraft that will be overseas before you force me to do it. Think of what the stranded passengers would say about you. I’m well aware of the consequences – I only hope you are, too.’

  ‘You’re bluffing,’ said Tebbit.

  ‘I don’t play games,’ I said. ‘If you’re persisting with this claim, put it in writing and I’ll take the appropriate action.’

  Tebbit packed up his papers in a huff and walked out, with the others trailing in his wake. I turned to my team. ‘How do you think I did?’

  ‘Bloody well,’ said Nick Nickalls. ‘It’s about time they were told some home truths.’

  ‘I’m not bluffing, either,’ I warned them. ‘I’ve been given the task of either rescuing BUA or shutting it down. I want to salvage it, but the shareholders are not prepared to put up any more money. I don’t have much scope to negotiate with Tebbit, even if I wanted to.’

  Over the next few days I established a series of ‘teach-in’ meetings at a hotel at Gatwick where heads of department told me exactly what they did, in front of the other senior employees. The primary purpose was for me to learn about the business, but everyone ended up with a clearer grasp of the overall picture as a result, and it helped to refresh their memories about exactly what their responsibilities were. People can go to offices every day and lose sight of the objective, which is to make money. But mostly, the teach-ins were for my benefit. I needed to understand the routes, the fleet, the ticketing systems, the engineering workshops, the operations and the planning so that I could have a real ‘feel’ for BUA. It was very enlightening. Some people took it very seriously, preparing charts to show what they’d been doing and what they thought they could do if they were given their heads. They offered new ideas, and I pinched them wholesale. They didn’t mind – nobody had ever asked their opinions before! They came out feeling like they were included in a great enterprise. The other side of the coin was, of course, that I could tell them all just how far down in the mire we were. I don’t think they fully understood how bad things were until I painted a picture for them. I also made sure that everybody knew I was the boss. Many of BUA’s problems under Stuart-Shaw stemmed from a lack of direction, and that awful feeling that nobody was in charge. I assembled the employees in the hangars for a talking-to, and I stressed that I had a plan to make the company grow and I intended to do it. ‘Expand into profitability’ was my slogan. I also demanded respect – I didn’t want to be loved or kissed on both cheeks, but I did let them know that I could do any job in the company and fly any aircraft on the fleet. I flew as co-pilot on the Viscount, the VC-10 and the BAC 1-11, which wasn’t always a thrill for the captain, but I knew a special effort was made to sharpen up the aircraft cabin and the crew performance whenever I was on a flight, whether it was to Glasgow or Belfast or Santiago. Ultimately, that level of service became the norm.

  Three days after Tebbit’s abrupt walk-out, Mick Sidebottom again came to me. ‘Sir, I’ve had a phone call from Air Commodore Warcup. He says that you’re absolutely right, he’s on the wrong side of the fence and he’d like to join the company.’

  ‘Let’s have him in,’ I said.

  Surprisingly, Warcup and I got along well enough. It turned out he’d been a helicopter pilot in the Malayan emergency and was altogether a pretty level-headed chap. He believed what I’d said about shutting the company down, and he didn’t want to have any part in it. I really didn’t have a job that suited his talents, but we needed an in-house advertising and PR man, so that became his role. BALPA was furious. Within 24 hours I received a letter, under the hand of Captain Tebbit, saying that BALPA no longer recognised their agreement with BUA and wished to terminate it on a unilateral basis. I asked Mick Sidebottom what this meant in trade union terms.

  ‘It means BALPA no longer has to negotiate with BUA as there is no longer a trade union agreement between us,’ he said.

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ I said. ‘They’ve walked away.’

  ‘That’s not what they mean,’ Sidebottom said quickly. ‘They’re giving us notice that they’re going to strike for a new agreement.’

  ‘That’s not what it says here,’ I said, pointing to the letter. ‘Please draft a reply, thanking them very much, noting that we no longer have an agreement, and saying that it is very understanding of them.’

  Within hours, Tebbit was on the phone. ‘You’ve misunderstood,’ he told me. ‘This is not what we intended. We want the letter to form a negotiating basis for a new deal.’

  ‘Too late,’ I told him cheerfully. ‘Don’t trouble to call again.’ And I put down the phone.

  My relief, astonishment and delight at having BALPA off my back knew no bounds. I informed all the pilots that BALPA had unilaterally terminated their contracts, and I wanted to offer them employment on individual terms. I proceeded to draft Bristow Helicopters-type contracts for all aircrew. Even though only the pilots were threatening action, I included flight engineers, stewards and stewardesses and offered them improved terms in return for productivity gains. I asked them to come to see me, or to telephone me so that I could determine how many wanted to stay with the company. About twenty-four pilots declined the invitation, one on religious grounds, although I never did find out what those grounds were. Another who left must subsequently have had words with his wife, because he came in to see me and signed on again. For the three years I was at the helm of BUA we had no further pilot disputes. Complaints were dealt with at the level that they should have been dealt with – in the personnel department – and all was sweetness and light.

  It is difficult in modern times to remember how much power the unions used to have. Some managers were unable to do any productive work because their sole task was to deal with union bosses. There were thirteen unions at BUA, and I got on very well with twelve of them after the story went around that I had threatened to kill Clive Jenkins. It wasn’t entirely accurate, but they disliked Jenkins as much as I did, so I made no move to correct it.

  Jenkins was in charge of one of the main unions at BUA, the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs. He was a dreadful man with a grating Welsh accent. ‘I don’t think yew understand trade yewnions, Mistah Bristow,’ he would say. ‘Yew need an education in the facts of life.’ I bent over backwards to accommodate him, but he was one of the most bloody-minded and frustrating men I have ever met, and we should all be thankful that his ilk have vanished from the British industrial scene. He had announced that his union had ‘declared war’ on BUA, and on the advice of Mick Sidebottom, I agreed to go with him to Jenkins’ house in Islington to see if we could find some common ground.

  It so happened that my old commando knife from Indo-China was looking a little tarnished and careworn, and I’d taken it to work intending to have my secretary Pauline send it out to a cutler for some minor refurbishment work. It chanced to be in my briefcase when I visited Jenkins, and I took it out in order to put away some papers. It’s a fairly impressive weapon. Jenkins got altogether the wrong idea, and stepped back from the table, knocking over his chair.

  ‘What are you doing with that?’ he asked.

  I wasn’t in the mood to humour him. ‘Well, you’ve declared war on my company, Mr Jenkins. Where I come from, war means killing. In the Foreign Legion, they’d have cut out your liver for breakfast.’

  I put the knife away and took my leave, but ever-more entertaining versions of this story circulated at BUA, including one in which I had stuck the knife in Jenkins’ kitchen table and another in which I’d chased him around the table while he shouted: ‘You’ll hang for this!’ More damaging to Jenkins, I thought, was the fact that I was able to describe the opulence of his home, which was far more expensive than anything
his members could hope to afford, and was stocked with fine furniture and well-chosen art. His championing of the working class ensured that he never had to belong to it. He was a true ‘champagne socialist’ and died a millionaire.

  Jenkins had the gall to call a meeting in the BUA hangar without so much as a by your leave from me. Sidebottom came up to tell me about it.

  ‘Jenkins has got a bunch of people in the hangar for a meeting,’ he said. ‘He’s got a set of steps up and he’s going to talk to them. What should I do about it?’

  ‘Tell him I’m coming down,’ I said. ‘If we’re having a meeting, I’ll address it, too.’

  I walked in and asked him what he was doing, calling a meeting in working hours? With a hundred or so people watching him, he said he wanted to talk about work practices and rate changes, and he wanted to stop people from being forced to do two jobs.

  ‘Who’s got two jobs?’ I asked.

  ‘You have unskilled men who are sweeping up in the hangars, but they also have to man the emergency fire vehicles,’ he said.

  ‘They get extra money for doing that,’ I said. ‘I’ll stop it if you want. I’ll hire men to man the fire vehicles and stop paying the sweepers the extra money. Is that what you want?’ There was a murmur of dissent from the sweepers. Before he could reply, I carried on.

  ‘Anyway, this meeting has been called without permission on company premises in working hours and I’m declaring it closed. Good day!’

  ‘All right,’ said Jenkins. ‘We’ll have it on the football ground over the road. Come on, everybody.’

  He strode out of the hangar doors. About two people followed him, and the rest drifted back to work.

  ‘You won’t be needing the steps,’ I shouted after him.

  I had a run-in with union bosses in the Channel Islands when I changed the staffing arrangements for BUA (Channel Islands). We had a surfeit of engineers in Jersey, and I negotiated an agreement with their union for a reduction of nineteen staff. Later, the union reneged on the agreement and said we could only have nine. I told them that made the operation unviable, and I would have no alternative but to close it down by midnight unless they stuck to the deal they’d signed. They didn’t believe me. Midnight came and went, and I told them that the company was suspended forthwith. They were aghast; they couldn’t believe I’d gone through with it. In fact, I simply reversed the company, operating from Gatwick to the Channel Isles with all maintenance work done on the mainland, so they sacrificed the workforce for nothing.

  BUA couldn’t afford to do it any other way. These were critical times and the airline could have collapsed at any time. I formed a group I called ‘the Commandos’, because we had some desperate matters to deal with and business orthodoxy was not going to get us out of the hole we were in. Most of them were Laker men; some were in the wrong jobs, so I switched them around. Ted Bates, Alastair Pugh, Nick Nickalls, and Bill Richardson, who ran the engineering, were given director responsibilities. Freddie had a chief pilot called Captain Jennings who was a good man but who wasn’t very well, and couldn’t have fought the battles we had to fight to return to profitability, so I retired him with a generous settlement and promoted Mac MacKenzie in his place. I instituted Bristow-style working lunches for executives every day, catered by the BUA catering department and served by the stewardesses on a rota basis so their performance could be critiqued. Some of them didn’t like it, but it certainly sharpened them up.

  Freddie had been brilliant at the charter side of the business, but some of the scheduled services were a disaster. The service through Spain to the Canaries was too seasonal and had to become a charter operation, and as soon as it did, we started to make some money on it. The scheduled routes Freddie had opened up to South America were very good. He had shown tremendous foresight by taking on the licences when BOAC dropped them because they were unprofitable. The whole operation, however, was compromised by endemic fiddles and poor financial arrangements. I sat late into the night with Nick Nickalls going through the accounts, and I discovered that astoundingly, Stuart-Shaw had given the agents in South America the right to sell tickets on credit. They would pay a small deposit on a London to Buenos Aires ticket, with the rest payable over three years. So while BUA was extremely short of cash, there were big numbers in the debt column – something approaching £6 million. I flew to São Paulo in Brazil, where we had a very active agent who had sold a serious proportion of this credit. His name, oddly enough, was Gonzales, and he talked quickly, moved quickly and spent money quickly.

  ‘Look, Speedy,’ I said to him, rather unoriginally, ‘you’re going to be fired. You’ve got all this money outstanding, and I want to see it.’

  ‘Oh, I can get it back, Mr Bristow. All of it.’

  ‘You’ve entered into contracts where people pay a token twenty per cent of a fare down and the balance over a period of years. I want this money in a twelvemonth.’

  I knew I wasn’t going to get it all, but I had to make the point. BUA was desperately short of money and couldn’t afford long-term payment deals that played havoc with cash flow. Speedy Gonzales got a letter saying if he didn’t achieve the goal I’d set him he’d be fired, and within a year he’d performed a remarkable turnaround. We ended up with a small bad debt, but in cash terms we were a lot healthier at the end of it. What surprised me most was that Myles Wyatt knew all about the deal. I told him we didn’t need to be so generous – thanks to the International Air Transport Association BUA had a monopoly on the route through South America to Chile, and income on it could be robust without resorting to giveaways.

  Generosity on the South American routes extended beyond the agents and the fare-paying public; the BUA stewards were feeding off it, too. Our Silver Service to Santiago was excellent, but I had inherited about a dozen male stewards who seemed to have cornered the route and they were on the biggest fiddles imaginable. I began to get letters from passengers asking: ‘Can you tell us why we don’t get our free champagne and caviar on your Silver Service any more?’ To begin with I had more pressing problems to deal with and didn’t take too much notice, but after I received several similar letters I started to investigate. Diana and some of the more experienced stewardesses – they were in their thirties and were generally known as the ‘Old Crows’ – were put on the route, and they reported that instead of being given to the passengers, the champagne and caviar supplies were being offloaded at the end of the flight and sold by the stewards around the restaurants and pubs of Surrey, Sussex and Kent. The most astounding fiddle was the ‘flying carpet’ racket. The stewards were running a carpet cleaning business, and they’d collect a carpet from a customer in London and fly it as clandestine cargo to Santiago in Chile where it could be cleaned for pennies. They’d bring it home on the next flight, then charge a small discount to the English carpet-cleaning rate. So I cleaned them out, and built up a very strong and effective team of air hostesses on the route.

  We faced one situation that could have turned to be very nasty had it not been for my personal relationship with Charles Forte, who was a regular shooting companion. Forte had a tour company, and BUA’s sales director Ted Bates had agreed to charter three BAC1-11-500s to them in the high season. A few weeks before the first flight, the company rang up Bates and said they couldn’t sell the seats, so they didn’t want the charter. BUA was faced with considerable loss of revenue, something in the order of three quarters of a million pounds, and Ted Bates came and asked me what he should do. I wrote Charles a letter saying look, we’re out several hundreds of thousands here and we’d better sort this out before the lawyers get involved. Charles called me as soon as he received it.

  ‘Gracious, Alan, it’s the first I’ve heard of this. Why don’t you come to lunch at the Café Royal and we can talk about it.’

  I went along there and showed him the correspondence, and he was visibly upset. ‘It’s clear we owe you compensation,’ he said, ‘and I will make arrangements to pay.’ I took a discount to help him a
nd the matter was settled there and then, without argument or legal bills.

  We were very good at selling BAC 1-11 capacity to places like Benidorm. In the 1960s, Spanish holidays were becoming fashionable. The shareholders had built a hotel, the Reine Isabel in Las Palmas, which was the biggest, the tallest, and the best in the Canary Islands, and is to this day is a four star hotel. They decided one wasn’t enough, so they put another one up on Tenerife – the San Felipe, a really charming, old fashioned hotel. Then they went back and bought the casino in Las Palmas. BUA had the capacity to help fill them, and our charter side was very strong indeed.

  BUA’s engineering operation was very well run by Bill Richardson, who was not only a good engineer but an immensely practical man who hadn’t been given the money or the ground equipment to do a proper job. Bill came to me and said: ‘Sir, we’re spending thousands of pounds sending our radio equipment away for overhaul and repair because I’m told we can’t afford to build an insulated radio room completely encapsulated in copper mesh. It’s a false economy – it would pay for itself in a year.’ I authorised the expenditure, and not only did we take our own avionics maintenance back but we started working for other airlines, and it became a profit centre in its own right.

  It was imperative that we rationalise the fleet, and to do that I had to get rid of the de Havilland Doves and Herons that Morton Air Services were operating. Sammy Morton’s company was part of the Air Holdings Group but operated in a semi-detached way from BUA. One of the jobs I disliked most was telling Sammy he was fired. I went to Cannes to meet him, and I think he knew it was coming. Even so, it took me two meetings to do the job – on the first evening we met at a restaurant where he was surrounded by his friends, and it was simply the wrong time. But his piston-engined airliners were costly and inefficient and were holding us back. There was little value in the fleet; the aircraft went for scrap and were replaced by BAC 1-11 jets. I’d arranged to buy sixteen of the 500 series BAC 1-11s through Geoffrey Knight at Vickers. Nick Cayzer blanched slightly when I told him about it, but we got a very good deal – a relatively small deposit and good terms over a long period, so the shareholders didn’t have to dig deep to fund it. Nick said: ‘Oh, well, I suppose at least we’ll get something back for them second-hand.’ That was typical of the negative attitude that prevailed on the Board at that time.