by Alan Bristow
We were selling three Cs – convenience, comfort and cost. First and foremost the system had to be convenient – if it was not, there would be little point to it. Secondly, it must be comfortable, and it must be comfortable for everyone, including disabled people. Very few transport systems were at that time, but we incorporated ramps from the street to make access simple for people with wheelchairs. Finally, it must be cost-effective in comparison with other means of transport. The difficulty is that you can’t beat your own car for convenience; rapid transit systems only really come into their own in areas where the convenience of the car is minimised by heavy congestion.
I was ploughing millions of pounds into developing this system, and it came to my attention that the Department of Transport had allocated money for experiment and development of British transport systems. I went to them to enquire about financial assistance, but they refused on the peculiar grounds that we had already started work – this money, they said, was to get companies up and running in the field, and as Briway had already started testing a prototype we were not eligible. I think Cecil Parkinson was ready to give us something, but his civil servants intervened: ‘Minister, you can’t do that – they’ve already started.’ Government support was thus limited to encouragement; Parkinson came down to see the car running, as did two of his Transport Ministers, Michael Portillo and Patrick McLoughlin, and the Department of Transport sent down an endless stream of interested visitors from cities across the country and as far afield as Hong Kong and Korea. My son Laurence was in charge of marketing, and it was his job to guide these delegations around the system and gauge their reactions.
Ernest Urquhart was someone I knew from my Bristow Helicopter days when he’d been Clerk at Works in Shetland. He now held a similar position in Southampton, and he made me aware that the city council was studying an elevated driverless automated transport system covering about 8.5 km. We went down to Southampton to meet with him and his colleagues, and over a period of time we worked out a route that met the Council’s requirements and which I considered to be practical. We could handle the gradients and the sharp turns, and attachment of the track to existing buildings was not a significant problem. Twelve stops were to be provided, including the Pirelli site, Ocean Village, and on several acres of development land owned by Associated British Ports. With some city-centre shops like Debenhams, passengers would be able to walk straight out of the transit system onto the second floor of the shop. The scheme was one facet of a city centre regeneration plan that was urgently needed as Southampton moved away from relying on a port-based economy to become a major south coast regional centre. In 1988 Southampton Council had employed Dr George Gaskell of the London School of Economics to conduct a public consultation exercise, which found that an overwhelming majority of people in Southampton were in favour – seventy-six per cent of all householders and seventy-five per cent of individuals in a street survey wanted it.
We encountered the first of our political problems here; the original track was to have traced a circle around the centre of Southampton, but because of political objections from different quarters – supposedly to protect a park here, or to take the track into some councillor’s ward, but largely to cause political trouble for the ruling group on the council – we ended up having to agree a horseshoe-shaped 4.4 km track along which the cars would run out and back. Southampton’s Chief Executive and his team were enormously practical and experienced in dealing with such issues, but it was a foretaste of the frustrating political battles that would come to overshadow and ultimately kill off the Southampton scheme, and many others.
We made a lot of concessions at Southampton because we knew it was to be our ‘shop window’ – we needed an operating Briway system to show the world what we could do. There were seventeen consortia from all over the world bidding for the contract, and Briway – the only British contender – won hands down. Not only were we two thirds of the price of anybody else at £36.5 million but our performance was vastly superior to any other driverless transit system.
Once the plans were finalised they had to be submitted to the government. In those days a special Bill was required for all such transport systems, and the Bill had to go through both Houses of Parliament. Southampton had engaged the services of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, then chairman of English Heritage, to propose the Bill in the Lords and find a seconder. At the hearing in April 1989 the Bill was passed to a sub-committee who considered an objection to part of the route, which apparently involved pulling down someone’s house. I thought it was a very reasonable objection, and negotiations between Southampton Council and the owner of the property resulted in a slight deviation of the route. After that, the Bill was passed by the Lords without amendment. The next step was to take it through the House of Commons.
Bills like this normally pass through the Commons without debate, but there is an automatic right of any MP to stand up and say ‘I object’ when the Bill is mentioned, and that means that the Bill has to be debated in full instead of passing on the nod. The MP for Southampton Test, a gentleman called Mr James Hill, stood up and said ‘I object’, so Parliamentary time had to be found for the debate. For reasons connected with the labyrinthine workings of Westminster, which nobody has been able to explain satisfactorily to me, the sequence in which the Bills appeared on the Order Paper on the day of the debate was changed at a late stage. There was a three-line whip on an amendment to a Paymaster’s Bill that the Conservatives wanted to ensure was not adopted, and they even suspended a sitting of the first Gulf War committee to ensure everyone would vote. Because of the change to the Order Paper, a lot of MPs trooped back from the bars on hearing the Division Bell thinking they were voting against the finance bill amendment, when in fact they were voting down the Southampton Rapid Transit Bill. Lord Howe, Michael Heseltine and Norman Tebbit made enquiries on my behalf to find out how this had happened, but they could not establish why the secretariat that deals with these things had changed the order. Whatever the reason, the Southampton Bill was thrown out, and Parliamentary rules dictated that a failed Bill could not be reintroduced within a twelvemonth, which would effectively prohibit us from fulfilling our tender arrangement with Southampton.
The House of Commons then had to debate whether it would allow the Southampton Bill to be reintroduced. John Garrett, the MP for Norwich South, agreed to propose that the Bill be heard again, and in January 1991 an attempt was made to revive it. Despite the fact that this should only have been a procedural debate on whether to reintroduce the Bill – the substance of the Bill would have been debated later – James Hill MP once again made a lengthy submission, almost all of it unsound, dealing with the detail of the proposal and urging that the Bill be rejected before it could be debated fully. He claimed that it would be impossible to build the system with private money, as had been promised, but Garrett was able to counter by naming a dozen major companies that had agreed to back the scheme financially. Despite the fact that the Southampton Rapid Transit System would have benefited his constituency, Hill was determined to kill it because of his personal animosity to Dr Alan Whitehead, the leader of Southampton Council, whom he had discovered was planning to stand against him at the next election. Dr Whitehead was a very progressive young leader, and in fact the voters in Southampton Test later threw out Hill and voted in Whitehead, but it was too late to save the Southampton Rapid Transit System. Despite the fact that Hill had broken virtually every rule of the House in the procedural debate, the Commons refused permission for the Bill to be reintroduced, killing the system stone dead.
During the debate, Hill said he wanted to stress that he was not suggesting the system was not capable of doing the job. ‘I am going to see the chairman of Briway in about two weeks time to reassure him that his train was not criticised, and that if there is a sensible transport scheme for the city of Southampton his company could be one of the forerunners,’ he told the House. In the event, he did not come to see me. At that point Briway had reach
ed a technical stage in development testing that would have enabled us to go into production with a very good looking, streamlined car that was more capable than anything else available at the time. I had invested a great deal in Southampton, and Hill’s destructive antics came as a bitter blow. We had at the same time been short-listed for the rapid transit system at the proposed new Hong Kong Airport, in partnership with Lord Weinstock’s GEC, we were in talks with Bristol, Stoke on Trent and Cardiff, and we were in negotiation with the City of Leeds Corporation, who wanted to lay out a more ambitious 12.8 km system, so we persevered with development.
After the Southampton fiasco, Leeds looked like our economic salvation. We spent months, and a lot of money, drawing up the routes, establishing the type of construction on the elevated sections, working on public relations and perfecting the prototype. Leeds Council announced officially that it had decided to go ahead with the transit system provided by Briway, and our drawings and models appeared in the local newspapers under headlines describing a ‘futuristic’ transport system that would solve the city centre’s traffic gridlock. Unlike the Southampton system, large sections of the Leeds scheme would run at street level. I was particularly well-informed on the Leeds situation because my son Laurence had had a school friend who was the son of a Leeds businessman who sat on the council as a Conservative. He very kindly kept Laurence informed. A general agreement had been arrived at between the political parties that would enable an all-party vote to be taken to allow work to start. On the night that this vote was to be taken, Mr Jon Trickett, the leader of the council, opened the meeting by saying that his colleagues had been studying the layout and decided that it would be prudent to start on a smaller scale with about 5 km of track, all of which would serve Labour wards. Liberal, Independent and Conservative council wards would not in any way benefit from the transit system, at least to begin with. This unexpected announcement caused uproar in the chamber, to the point where people were on the verge of exchanging blows. The vote was never taken and to this day the system has not been started, although they’re still talking about it. The only real change is that the estimated cost has risen above £1 billion.
Perhaps it was foolhardy of me to continue to pour more money into the project, given that decisions could never be made on a predictable business basis; political interference was a factor that could not be calculated. Personal animosities, squabbling over whose ward or constituency should benefit, axe-grinding and sheer bloody-mindedness characterised the decision-making process. I stayed in too long, and by the time I made the decision to close down the business I had spent £14 million. Southampton and Leeds might today have rapid transit systems and Briway might be the major British player in a competitive world market, but as is the way of things when politics and bureaucracy rule, there is great expenditure of private capital and council taxpayers’ money, and nothing to show for it. Over the years I have managed to recoup most of my investment in Briway in tax entitlements, so ultimately it is the taxpayer who foots most of the bill for the petty foolishness of politicians. City-centre rapid transport systems have never been more sorely needed than they are now, but in modern times they can only be built at extraordinary cost, and by foreign companies.
The Southampton scheme seemed to have everything going for it. It received all-party support in the House of Lords, English Heritage was resoundingly in favour, the vast majority of people in Southampton wanted it, the local Chamber of Commerce and the County Council supported it, and the Council voted twice in favour of it. The Briway system was tailor-made for it by a talented and dedicated team of engineers backed by serious private investment money. Yet it was killed by small-minded backbiting among MPs. Today Southampton’s city centre traffic congestion is worse than ever and the Council is desperately seeking ways to reduce air pollution from vehicles. Good luck to them.
For my own part, I shied away thereafter from anything with political overtones and concentrated on managing my estates – just as my mother had wanted. Coxland was by then a profitable dairy farm on which I had built up a pedigree herd, and I brought my own ideas and innovations to the business. My invention of water beds for cows was roundly laughed at by people who know nothing about the dairy industry, which is to say, almost everyone. But I was spending £57,000 a year on straw for bedding, which does the job badly. It provides poor cushioning when the cow goes down on its knees, it gets filthy quickly and harbours bacteria, and it’s labour-intensive to change. I designed a heavy-duty water bed that would address all these issues. They got fewer diseases, they didn’t damage their knees – and not only that, but the additional comfort factor for the animals during the fourteen hours a day they spend chewing the cud increased the milk yield by six per cent. I won the Duke of Edinburgh’s award for the innovation that made the biggest contribution to the dairy industry at the Royal Show in 1996. I had to go to Buckingham Palace to be presented with a plaque. I was waiting in an ante-room when Prince Philip came in.
‘Good god, Bristow, what are you doing here?’ he said.
‘I’ve come for my plaque, sir,’ I replied.
‘Ah yes, the water beds for cows. Damned good idea that,’ said Prince Philip. ‘Wish I’d thought of it myself.’
Dunlop bought a licence to manufacture my water beds in Holland and worldwide sales are very good, although the idea hasn’t taken off in Britain because milk prices are kept artificially low in the UK.
I invested a lot of time and money in building the quality of the herd. Indeed, I even fired my long-serving, trustworthy and otherwise reliable farm manager Fred Trinder for selling a beast I’d gone to great lengths to acquire in the days when one was only allowed to import bloodstock into Britain every fourth year. I’d hunted all over Holland for good Friesian cattle and eventually found a six-week-old bull with what I could see was an excellent pedigree book. I called it Jet Star, but Fred never took to it; he always said the bloodline was no good, and within a year he’d sold it without consulting me. I was absolutely furious and sacked him on the spot.
Fred had won the Military Medal at Arnhem, fighting his way to the bridge after his glider crashed almost ten miles from its target, and he was a man of courage and probity. The day after I’d sacked him, he came to work as usual.
‘What are you doing here?’ I said. ‘I thought I sacked you yesterday.’
‘Well, I thought we’d say no more about it,’ said Fred.
So we didn’t. I managed to buy Jet Star back and he turned into a prize stud bull. ‘It just goes to show, you never can tell, can you sir,’ said Fred one day when the stud fees were rolling in. I said nothing. Not only did Fred stay with me for forty years, but his son and grandson became my farm gamekeepers, too.
I had something of a reputation for sacking people, but it was overblown. At Bristow Helicopters it was George Fry or Alastair Gordon who did the firing, and often I wouldn’t find out about it until later. That said, there are a lot of pressures associated with running a company like BHL, and I did in fact fire people on the spot when they didn’t meet my standards. Almost always, like Fred Trinder, they would tacitly reinstate themselves by turning up the next day, by which time my frustration had worn off. It happened far less often than people liked to claim – it’s been grossly exaggerated because it was amusing, and it’s become company folklore. One of our best engineers, Jean Dennel, used to say ‘You don’t become a member of the Bristow family until you’ve been fired by Alan Bristow three times. I haven’t got the MBE, I haven’t got the OBE, but I’ve been sacked enough times to convince me that I must be a man of talent and ability.’
I fired Dennel once when he was in charge of a turbine conversion programme, putting the Gnome engine into what became known as the long-nosed Whirlwind. It was just before Christmas, there had been another delay to the first test flight and I was under enormous pressure to bring the helicopters into service.
‘You’re bloody useless, Dennel,’ I said. ‘You’re fired.’
‘If you fire me, I’m not going to the company Christmas party,’ Jean shouted. ‘Stuff it.’
‘I don’t care,’ I said.
But of course it soon became clear he was going to make good on his threat. George Fry, Jack Woolley and my son Laurence went down to his house and persuaded him to come to the party. ‘Oh well,’ Jean said, ‘it was just a family argument.’
I had time on my hands to undertake long voyages on my yacht. I’d been a keen sailor ever since my father bought me a dinghy before the war and had crewed for several highly competitive men – often for Sir Myles Wyatt, who owned the famous Bloodhound, and occasionally for Max Aitken on Drumbeat and Crusader. I bought a forty-four-foot Moody Carbineer, which had been Boat of the Year at the Olympia Boat Show and which I named Small Fortune. As my own fortunes improved I traded up through a series of boats, all called Twirlybird – the last, Twirlybird V, was a beautiful 133-foot Lü rssen ketch designed by Ron Holland in which I sailed across the world. But unfortunately sailing is beyond me now, and I’ve sold her. With advancing age I’ve found that my horizons, once limitless, are now very close around me, my circle of contemporaries small and precious, and my ambitions at rest.