Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  My work consisted of going to a number of places in the Bordeaux and Landes districts, where piles of sawn railway sleepers had been laid out for my inspection, and selecting those that came up to British Rail’s minimum specification. I had to look at the quality and condition of the wood and measure the wane on the top, where the iron shoes that hold the rails would be fitted. But a commercially significant fact was that anything I had to reject for British Rail could be bought by a private firm, and the rejects were usually between five and ten per cent. There was competition for these rejects, which could be negotiated for private purchase at a variety of prices, but usually considerably higher than those which British Rail had fixed. There were attempts to influence my inspections, bribes hinted at, but I did only what I was there to do. There were several commercial British timber merchants going around, most of them not working for British Rail, and they were my competition, because Calders Ltd were interested in buying as many rejects as possible. Those who were showing me sleepers were not necessarily interested in letting me know of others that were sub-standard, precisely because someone else was interested and a price was being negotiated. Two middlemen coming from somewhere in Eastern Europe took me around for several days, and their private conversation was in German, which of course I understood. They were always puzzled by the way I would insist on looking in corners they did not want me to see, where there would be piles of sleepers exactly right for the needs of customers who had their own sidings other than British Rail. I would count them, confirm their ownership, and then send a series of telegrams to London so that Rann could buy them for the firm. Towards the end of my period I negotiated for several thousand sleepers to be sent directly to Birkenhead, but not to be shipped until my arrival there. I did not tell London, and as prompt payment was coming through for those going to other timber yards, I was never questioned by the exporters. I suspected that Rann would starve Birkenhead, having no reason to be helpful to me there. Payment for those ordered on my own account I would worry about later.

  Christya came to visit on two occasions for about a week and considerably complicated my life during those visits. She was interested in the clothes and jewellery shops and wasn’t slow in extracting expensive presents from those trying to impress or please me. I did what I could to arrest her progress. On a few occasions I found myself staying at some country inn where Harold Wilson was also staying, and we played chess and discussed politics.

  In the autumn of 1952 I went to Birkenhead. I had been found a comfortable hotel in the Wirral, but Christya made herself so objectionable and demanding there that I was soon asked to move and found a house in Heswall on the Mersey with a floor to let. My landlady was Dolores Allen, and she was married to a travelling salesman who was seldom at home. From here I had a half-hour drive every day to the timber yard on the docks at Birkenhead, and I set about making the yard a success.

  First I had to deal with some technical problems. It was often wet, and the procedure was that the men, all working out of doors (except for the small office staff), would go on working for two hours in the rain and then could go home. As the rain would constantly start and stop, this meant that we were often paying for two hours’ work or less on a bad day. I altered this so that the men could take shelter until the rain stopped. When we were working at full stretch, I negotiated reasonable overtime payments with the union representatives on the workforce. By talking to the men, which my predecessor had never done, I gradually untangled all the logistical problems. There was a machine that made incisions with small blades piercing the sleepers before creosoting which was constantly breaking down. We were paying an outside firm of engineers a considerable amount to keep one or two men constantly doing repairs on that or on other machines. I employed one of them directly to join the staff at less than half the previous cost, but at a considerable salary increase for the man concerned. The machine stopped breaking down.

  One reason for the low output was that the cranes all had to cross a rail junction in the yard, and there was always one, sometimes as many as three cranes waiting to get by, often for more than an hour. I asked permission to put in a loop to stop the congestion, but this was refused by the head office, partly because the board did not want to spend money on a yard with a bad profit record, but also probably because the directors didn’t want to give me any opportunity to show that I brought about an improvement. I summed up the cost, had the work done and described the expenditure as general repairs without specification. When my uncle paid a visit, he looked at the new loop, scratched his moustache, hesitated, then said nothing.

  Two or three days a week, I would leave the yard early on and go out to sell, calling on old and new customers all over Lancashire, the Midlands and as far away as Leeds, which really was the territory of another yard. My sleepers arrived from Bordeaux, and I had to hire extra space to store them, while selling as many as I could as fast as I could. It was not difficult, because there was a shortage and much demand, but it needed time and energy that no one had been willing to put in before. I was not only selling my own products, but taking orders for other yards: these still boosted my sales, as I was entitled to a commission on them.

  Calders Ltd owned a flooring company which it had bought from a very sleepy old Lancastrian called Brookes, who still ran it. I took orders for him, and he had to start working harder to fill them. I made friends with another flooring manufacturer called Douglas Mitchell, a man who read and had intellectual tastes, and spent many evenings with him and his wife Chris; they were keen golfers, but I had no time for golf, although I went out on the course with them once or twice. What I didn’t know about flooring I learnt from him, not Brookes, and we cooperated in various ways. He even read some proofs for me.

  By the end of December I found that we had done more business in four months than in the previous two years – and that was only the beginning. By the end of the financial year I had turned the previous year’s loss of £20,000 into a profit of over £230,000, and in addition had taken orders from other yards of about £200,000. Having the extra sleepers was the biggest single factor, but listening to those who knew about the technical problems that were holding back the yard (they had never been asked before) enabled me to find the answers and triple production. The rest of it was finding new customers and just hard-selling. I had been promised a commission on sales over a certain target and on increased profits. When Battson showed the figures to my uncle, he had trouble in believing them. Then he told me that he would not give me the £80,000 or more that was due to me. I said I would take half if I received a directorship, and after some argument he agreed to the directorship, but only gave me a quarter of what was owed.

  I saw little intellectual life outside of my work during that year from 1952 to 1953. I went occasionally to the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool and to some other theatres, and occasionally took British Rail sleeper inspectors out to the local music hall and to dinner. I was lunched two or three times by Harry Watson at the Adelphi Hotel’s prestigious French restaurant, but that was a waste of time. His cronies were all old Lancastrian Tories, some of whom had had their coal mines nationalized and been given jobs with the National Coal Board, which they constantly derided. The good food and wine in no way compensated for the perpetual dismal flow of reactionary conversation, and I pleaded pressure of work in response to further invitations. I did go, with Christya, to the Grand National at Harry Watson’s invitation, but all I can remember of it was a long car jam in the Mersey Tunnel and on the road to Aintree, and drizzle and much drink in another private dining room overlooking the race course. Just like Ascot!

  During that year I saw little of Christya except when I drove to London on weekends, usually leaving after work on Friday and travelling back from London early on Monday morning so that I would arrive by ten o’clock. It took five hours by car on the A5, most of it the old Watling Street Roman road that went from the Edgware Road northward, over the top of Bir
mingham and then north-west to Chester and the Wirral: I knew it by heart.

  During the week Dolores Allen, my landlady – a plump, attractive forty-year-old housewife, who was usually on her own – often came up to talk to me in the evenings. I would bring sacks of firewood from the yard, usually the cut-off tops of telegraph poles, for both her fires and my own. On the very last night of my stay we had a bit too much to drink and ended up in bed together. It was my first sexual infidelity since marrying Christya, and although I experienced some guilt, I enjoyed it immensely. After returning to London, I made opportunities to see Dolores again, and I also visited her when in the area.

  I was now back in London and at head office, but there was no real job for me there. I was made a sales manager, but was not the sales manager, and it was not clear what I was selling. I made my own job, but was hampered at every turn by the other directors (now I was one myself), anxious to deny me the opportunity to shine as I had at Birkenhead. Kirkup and Billington, both coveting the chairmanship, saw me as a bigger threat than each other, while the working managing directors, Rann and Vogel, were both fearful of my potential rivalry: they could see the day coming when my uncle might give me a position senior to theirs, given that I had proved I knew the business and could run things successfully. They jealously guarded their fiefdoms, excluding me from everything. There was a special dinner to celebrate a birthday of my great-uncle’s (it may have been his eighty-fifth), at which I was asked to make a little speech. I hired a professional to help me, prepared it carefully and gave a highly charged oration that brought tears to the eyes of some of the older employees, and my uncle was, I could see, moved himself by it. That was viewed by the ambitious directors as a challenge and a declaration that I had my eye on the top of the tree.

  I was now intent on acquiring shares in the company. I spent all my commission on ordinary shares, and my uncle, who had put 20,000 shares aside for me if I proved worthy, now passed these on to me. I made an agreement with the two Robertson sisters, whose brother had been a managing director before the war, to acquire their shares at some future date, and they gave me an option on them at a fixed price. The ladies were elderly, lived in Polmont, and I paid them several visits to explain how their shares could help to keep the company in the family, an aim of which their dead brother would certainly approve. Calders Ltd, which seldom raised its dividend in line with increased profits, was run on old-fashioned lines, putting money into reserves against future hard times every year – and the reserves were now considerable. It was exactly the kind of company that the new breed of speculative accountants, typified by Charles Clore, were eyeing as targets for takeovers, where the reserves would more than repay the cost of the bid. If I could persuade my grandfather to free the trust that he had previously been willing to let me have on the birth of my infant son, I would be in a position to buy a considerable further block and own more of the company than all the other directors, apart from my uncle, put together.

  Christya had become pregnant again, and in April 1954 she produced a baby girl. I had been pacing up and down in the waiting room, and was asked to go to see her immediately after the birth, which was again by Caesarean section. She then said, “Listen. No one must know this is a girl. Send your grandfather a telegram right away saying it’s a boy, and you’ll get your money.” I was very uneasy about this and thought it over. But Christya had a hypnotic influence over me in many ways, and in the end I did what she said. She may even have sent a telegram herself to force my hand. I cannot exactly remember the circumstances.

  The baby was called James again, which later became Jamie. The pretence was kept up for some months, and then, inevitably, the deception was found out. But in the meantime everything went well, although I was now more involved in the politics of Calders Ltd than in the work I was actually doing for the company. I certainly had more time for holidays, and I remember a month at Cap Ferrat that summer, when I took the villa next door to Jacques Chaix, where I became a part of his large house party, but with my own quarters. I drove down to the south of France with everything needed for the villa, while Christya, a nanny and the baby flew down to meet me. I had several bottles of whisky in the car, and was told by French customs I could only bring in one bottle duty-free. “But I’m meeting my wife and baby in France,” I protested. “They’re going by plane.”

  “We’ll allow you a bottle for your wife,” the man said, “but not for the baby.”

  “But it’s a Scottish baby,” I exclaimed, whereupon the man laughed and waved me on. Christya and the baby stayed a month at Cap Ferrat, while I had to make two trips back to Britain on business and to show my face.

  During my year in Birkenhead I was also publishing books and running Skyline Press, the printing company in Islington, one of the trading companies that came under Calder and Co. (Printers) Ltd, which enabled me to cover many of my expenses and do odd deals that came my way. I often drove down to London on Friday night, spent all Saturday and Sunday morning doing publishing work at Wilton Terrace and printing at Cross Street, and then driving back, either late Sunday or early Monday. As I think back and try to remember those years, I marvel. I certainly never stopped, and was working twelve hours a day or more, every day of the week, and that does not include travelling time.

  Back in London I was giving more time to publishing and was now building a list without the help of anyone else. I made a few trips to New York to visit publishers there and picked up several books. Senator Joe McCarthy was now becoming active in the wake of some sensational spy trials, especially after the Alger Hiss case. This had interested me since my university days, and I was still in touch with the Washington lawyer Jim Mann, who had known Hiss well. Lord Jowitt wrote a book about the case,4 which I bought and read, and it reawakened my interest. Jowitt, who had been Lord Chancellor in the first post-war Labour government, had come to the conclusion that a British court would never have convicted Hiss on the circumstantial and highly dubious evidence that had led to his conviction and imprisonment for perjury after a second trial; the first had been dismissed by a judge whom Richard Nixon then tried to impeach. Nixon’s controversial career had started with the Hiss case.

  I decided to get in touch with Hiss and to commission a book from him if possible. I did so immediately after he was released from prison. He was a very sad man, broken in spirit, but courteous and dignified. He said that he did not really think he could write a book about his own case. He had been framed on false evidence, and he didn’t see how he could ever prove his innocence, although he certainly wanted to try. It was still too recent and too painful. He was a proud man, and just meeting him convinced me that he was also an honourable one. His time in prison must have been not only supremely humiliating (in the way other proud men like Dreyfus and Oscar Wilde had found it humiliating), but also an experience that would depress and humble him for the rest of his life. He told me that he might be willing to write a historical book about other miscarriages of justice that were similar to his, and mentioned Dreyfus. We kept up a correspondence, and finally he wrote to me, saying that he had decided: yes, after all, he would write a book about himself. One big incentive of course was that he needed money. I offered him £2,000, a large sum then, and he signed a contract and started on the book. But he was in poor health, and it was nearly two years before he finished it.

  In New York I came across several radical publishers as well as the conventional ones around Madison Avenue. Everyone in New York was welcoming then to a young British publisher looking for books, and I made many contracts to publish American books in Britain, in some cases importing part of the American edition, either a small number of copies or a thousand or two in sheet form for binding under my imprint in Britain. This considerably cut down the risk, and I sold my own books to American publishers as well. I met Paul Sweezy, a philosopher who had lost his teaching job at Harvard because of his left-wing views and writings. In 1949 he had founded the radical mag
azine Monthly Review together with Leo Huberman, which by now was also publishing books. I became particularly friendly with the latter, who was having, like everyone known to be on the left at that time, considerable trouble with the various right-wing pressure groups and Congressional committees who were persecuting him. On one occasion, probably in 1954, I telephoned him on arrival at La Guardia airport. He answered, and then said quickly, “Don’t give your name. I recognize your voice. My telephone is tapped and I don’t want you to get into any trouble. How long will it take you to get to New York?” He then suggested that I should meet him some two hours later at Liggett’s Drug Store at Grand Central Station. I was to catch his eye and follow him out and not speak to him until he was sure we were not being followed. This cloak-and-dagger routine soon became familiar to me as I met more Americans who were being persecuted because of their past or present political allegiances. Huberman guided me on to Angus Cameron, previously senior editor at Little, Brown in Boston. Angus had been fired when the company was attacked, in keeping with the McCarthyite siege on publishers, following on from the persecution of Hollywood and New York writers, actors and directors. Angus had set up Cameron and Kahn as an imprint for books that frightened the more conventional publishers, all terrified of McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, cynical politicians who had found an easy way of acquiring electability by recourse to a phoney patriotism, proving that Dr Johnson’s old adage was still true.5

  Angus Cameron and I became good friends, and I acquired several books from him. One in particular brought me into conflict with the American Embassy in London. I had contracted to publish The Judgment of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg by John Wexley, a dispassionately written but quite terrifying description of a spy trial carried out in an atmosphere of hysteria. Much significant evidence that might have saved the Rosenbergs, an idealistic but misguided couple, was suppressed. Convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Russians, they were electrocuted in June 1953. The book gave a quite different description of the circumstances of the case and of the trial to the account which had been reported in the newspapers. When I announced publication (this was in 1956), I received a telephone call from an official at the American Embassy. The conversation went as follows: