by Gordon Gray
The images I had of New York as a small boy were still clear in my mind and undimmed by the real thing. There were no jumbo jets or cheap air tickets back then. The only way to get to New York was by sea, preferably First Class on Cunard. For me as a ten year old, New York may as well have been on the dark side of the moon, it was so inaccessible. I remember hearing the voices of Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee on the radio with the magic Big Band sounds of the day. I used to try and imagine the skyscrapers, the big cars and the ‘fancy apartments’. I remember seeing newspaper photos of glamorous film stars setting out for New York on one of the Cunard Queens. All this built a fantasy city in my child’s mind and I was delighted to find that when I finally got there: It was exactly as I imagined it would be.
Once I had unpacked and showered, I went down to find a beer. Downstairs at the front of the hotel was a lobby bar with dimmed lighting and a fairly comfortable sitting area. I decided to sit at the bar for a while and take in the scenes of New York passing by on ‘Lex’. The barmaid was a tall brunette. She was an attractive, well proportioned lady of about thirty, wearing a smart and bright, colourful cocktail dress and obviously not a shrinking violet. I ordered a ‘Bud’, being into the American lingo already. Too late, as I was spotted as being a Brit even before she had poured the beer! I confessed. I learnt she was called Brenda and was a native New Yorker. She was straight out of a TV show. She had a thick nasal NY accent and took no prisoners. More than one late-night drinker felt the rough side of her tongue and her highly developed sense of sarcasm. I was sitting having a last beer one night and the bar was quiet. Brenda was looking forward to closing up and going home to her flat down on the East Side (wherever that is). A guy came in off the street, wandered slowly in and sat up at the bar. He was fat and a bit dishevelled and had obviously been out drinking and was looking for a night cap. He leaned on his elbows and called for a beer without waiting for Brenda to come over and serve him. This got him a look. His accent told me instantly that he was from the UK. She served him a beer without a word, but she looked at me and inclined her head at the drunk as if to say “Is this one of yours?” I just shrugged. Then a couple of minutes later, he called out at her, “Say, is Washington North or South from here?” She looked at him hard, then said, “South”. He grunted. A minute or so later, he called down the bar again, “Is Boston North or South from here?” She stopped what she was doing, turned and looked him in the eye. “If you go South round the bottom of the world up the other side, over the top and back, then it is South, but to us clever folk that live here, it’s North.”
The guy looked at her as he tried to work out what he had been told. Was she taking the mickey? “OK,” he said, (obviously a glutton for punishment, this guy) “if I wanted to go to Chicago from here, which way would I go?” Without drawing breath, she turned on him, “Look, arse’ole, you come in here a huffin’ an’ a puffin’ an’ a chugging, an’ asking dumb arse questions. You go whichever way you like, but just go!” She then turned and carried on polishing the glasses. The drunk downed his beer, sighed heavily, paid and left. I knew I was definitely in New York.
I spent the next day, a Saturday, exploring the ‘Big Apple’. New York was exactly as I had imagined it would be with the traffic, the sirens and the skyscrapers. What I was not prepared for was the physical size of Manhattan, nor the size of the skyscrapers. It was all on a vast scale, whereas in my head I thought that it would all be much smaller. It was all the TV ‘American Cop’ shows rolled into one. New York is unique, a one-off place. The contrasts here are more of the rich and famous alongside the historical crime rates in the city. The all out aggressive ‘Go! Go! Go!’ of the New Yorkers and the mad noise of police sirens. They have no time to slow down, they just go. The big yellow taxis are big, until you get in and find that the security screen round the driver cuts the available space in the back down by half.
On the Sunday night, one or two Racal Decca sales guys from out of town arrived at the hotel for the presentations. We met up and sat in the lobby for a beer. Brenda was on form as usual and took their orders. Then, she just turned to me with a smile, “Your usual, Gordon, I guess?” The newcomers looked at me! “How long have you been here?” “Just since Friday night, honestly!”
The radar and demonstration equipment had been flown across to the Racal Decca Office in Battery Place in lower Manhattan. I was due to set up the equipment on the Monday and start four days of demonstrations to the New York shipowners on the Tuesday.
On the Monday morning, we waited for the radar equipment to arrive from the customs warehouse. It finally arrived at about 4pm and we manhandled the 5 foot by 3 foot by 3 foot crate into the cargo lift and up to the offices. I set to work to unpack it and set it all up. As soon as I opened the case, I could see something was wrong. The console was tipped to one side and jammed against the side of the crate and the wooden pallet under it was broken. We finished unpacking it and I gingerly opened the front panel. Gloom fell on me like a cold shower. It seemed to me that the whole packing case had been dropped and this had shattered the wooden pallet and some of the electronics in the radar. I could immediately see that pieces of the electronics were broken and some of the printed circuit boards badly twisted. Heaven knows how many of the solder joints had been broken or cracked. Some items at the base of the cathode ray tube had clearly been snapped off. Oh hell! There was no point or sense in trying to switch it on. It needed a careful dismantle to see the full extent of the damage and then a rebuild with new boards where necessary. The NY guys were eager to help and to let their engineers “Have a go at fixing this limey thing”. Fortunately, I was resolute in forbidding anyone to touch it as I knew no one there had even seen the electronics of this radar and the last thing I needed was for them to make things worse out of goodwill and ignorance.
Until I had spoken to the engineers back in the UK, there was nothing we could do so I went back to the hotel feeling decidedly dejected. I tried to think of a way we could save the week’s presentations that the local guys had set up. By now, it was early evening in New York and even later in the UK. There was nothing that anyone there could do tonight so I would be better to wait until the morning and call them then. NY was five hours behind the UK so 7 o’clock in morning in the UK would be 2 o’clock in the morning in NY. I went to bed and set my alarm. At 2 o’clock I called Louis, my boss, at home.
“Louis, I am sorry to disturb you at home at breakfast but,” I began and then explained what I had found.
Louis interrupted me, “Gordon, what time is it there?”
“What, oh it’s 2.15 in the morning, but we need to act fast if we are to save this week. The New York guys have over 80 shipowners and superintendents all due to come this week.”
“What do you suggest?” asked Louis,
“Well, we need Mike Pope over here. Mike was one of the chief design engineers and knew the radar inside out. If we can get Mike onto this morning’s Concorde flight from London with some spare boards, that arrives in NY at about 1100 NY time this morning. We can then work on the radar all day today and into tonight if necessary and we may be OK for Wednesday’s demos. But if we let him come on the normal flight, he won’t get here until late tonight and then we can’t start work until Wednesday. The system MUST leave here on Saturday for the next demos back in London and while we can hopefully delay Tuesday’s guests until later in the week, we cannot cancel Tuesday and Wednesday and get everyone in by Friday. Also, everyone will realise that we have had a problem with it. We are looking at a lot of potential orders here Louis. If we cannot get it up and running, then we will blow our start on the US market.”
Louis was silent. Oh Lord I thought. He thinks I have totally lost it! “Yes, I agree,” he finally said. “Leave it with me, but first tell me exactly what you have found inside the radar.”
Finally, about four hours later, after Louis had had chats with Mike’s boss, Tony, the R & D director who had come to China, and a long chat with Mike trying to
describe to him what I had found, I got a call back from Louis.
“Mike is on his way to Heathrow to catch Concorde now, but the managing director is not at all happy and the finance guys are going ballistic.”
“Why?”
“Well, under Racal rules only managing directors can fly on Concorde and it is unprecedented for an engineer to go on Concorde.”
“You are joking Louis?”
“No I’m not, that’s how they looked at it. It was more important to retain the perk for directors only than save the week of ARPA demos! However, they finally saw our logic. It actually took longer to get the finance director to sign off the travel chitty than the flight itself will take. Mike will be with you at 1100. Good luck!”
“Thanks Louis, I will be at the airport to collect him.”
Mike walked out of Concorde Arrivals at JFK with a big stupid grin on his face, his head full of Concorde stewardesses and champagne and a large, bulging grip bag. This was, thankfully, in the days before the endless security screening and searches of today’s airports and Mike was able to hand carry all the spares he thought he might need in the bag. On the way to the office, I sobered him up by telling him again what we had found in the console. It worked, as his expression had turned from happy to puzzled to worried. He had filled his hand baggage with as many spare printed boards and tools as he could and we hoped that somehow we could sort it all out. The main concern was that if the cathode ray tube itself was damaged or cracked, we were sunk, as it was a special one that we knew we could not get in the USA and we did not have a spare. Mike set to.
He decided fairly quickly that the whole packing case must have been dropped, possibly off a forklift truck. However, in spite of the Concorde champagne, he worked hard for the rest of the day, testing and changing boards, dismantling, examining, measuring voltages and things and then reassembling various modules. I could do nothing but get him lots of coffee or pass him a screwdriver now and again. Fortunately, most of the damage was in one area near the base of the CRT and he had the boards to fix that. It was, however, a key area that controlled the rest of the radar display. The display console design had ensured that most of the shock was absorbed by the console framework. By 7 o’clock that night, Mike had done it and we had the radar working again.
Meanwhile, the New York team were busy on the phones and all Tuesday’s guests were rescheduled to come for later in the week. So at 10.00 on Wednesday, the first of six half-day presentations and demonstrations was under way. None of the customers realised there had ever been a problem. Mike stayed until Friday morning ‘just in case’ then flew home on a normal economy class flight, much to his disappointment.
Mike’s Concorde trip saved the week. We did not let anyone down, all the invited guests arrived and in the weeks following the demonstrations, the American office took a number of large fleet orders for the radar. The Concorde flight for one engineer suddenly seemed very cheap.
Now, years later, I know that arriving by sea is still the best way to arrive in New York. We have been lucky enough to have done it a couple of times. There is nothing like arriving in New York in the early morning after passing under the Verrazano Bridge, passing into New York Harbour and seeing Manhattan emerge from its slumbers as the sunrise strikes the pink sides of the skyscrapers. A peaceful, distant grey silhouette that slowly grows as the ship approaches the city and the sun climbs higher until it becomes a solid tangible thing. The skyscrapers finally tower above the ship and cast their shadows over her as she slides up the Hudson River and into her berth, assisted by the ever busy Moran tugs. Only when finally alongside the wharf do the sounds of the city intrude onboard the ship and alert the traveller to the real New York waiting over the bow.
Washington. R&R Weekend
A few years later, I was back in the States. I was with Plessey by then and we were bidding to supply the US Navy with naval command and control systems for the new Avenger Class minehunters that they were having built. These ships were over 1000 tons each and all built of wood, including the funnel casing. We were invited to give presentations to the shipbuilder and visited the Peterson Shipyard up in Illinois. It was a family-run yard with heaps of character and we were welcomed personally by the owner and managing director and after the formal presentations, we were shown round the yard. It seemed to consist of lots of pale blue wooden buildings and did not immediately appear to be at the cutting-edge of technology. However, they certainly knew how to build wooden ships, and big ones too. The yard had a long and illustrious history of shipbuilding. The wooden hull frames for the minehunters were enormous and made up of laminated wood strips about 18 inches wide and all bent into shape in huge ‘steam boxes’. These were vast metal chests about 3 or 4 feet high, housed in one of the wooden buildings. The dark interior stretched away and steam hissed ominously at us as we peered into the gloom. The proof of the pudding lay tied up at the fitting out berth where the first hull was waiting to have her main equipments installed.
I was then sent across to Syracuse in Upper New York State where GE, our American partner on the project who made the minehunting sonar, had their facility. After a week working with them, writing the final proposals for the command and control system, I had to get down to Washington to meet my boss who was on his way out from the UK. It had been agreed that I was to be flown down to Washington on the Friday afternoon by one of Plessey’s US guys, called Ed, who had his own small single engine plane that he flew around the States whenever he could. He had flown it up to Syracuse during the week and was now going to fly back to Washington and take me too. We went out to the airfield and Ed pointed out his plane, his pride and joy. I was not happy. It seemed to be very small and although he told me what sort it was, I instantly forgot. Normally I am very happy to fly on comfortable big airliners with nice stewardesses, but with one guy and a single engine, I felt a little exposed. We took off.
The thing was so noisy so I could not hear a word he said and it was also cold and draughty. I had a fear that the little flappy door thing that I was wedged against would give way and I would plummet down into someone’s backyard. I kept my seat belt tightly fastened on the trip. To complete my enjoyment, the guy had a bad touch of B.O. as well. There we were crammed into this little thing that seemed to be made of perspex and tin, while he kept fiddling with switches and things and tapping gauges. The engine noise kept changing and the whole thing seemed to swing and shake about in the sky. I could not see out of the front at all as the instrument panel rose above my eye level. I asked him how he could see where he was going. “I can’t,” he shouted. “I look out of the side and work it out from that,” pointing sideways out of his window. Maybe that explained the feeling of flying sideways! Not exactly confidence building! We eventually landed on one of the main runways at Washington Dulles airport and taxied off to a private aircraft parking area. Boy was I glad to get out. Commercial flights for me from now on I vowed.
I was meant to meet my boss in Washington over the weekend and brief him on the trip etc before he flew on to Los Angeles, but when I got to the hotel and checked in, there was a message from him to say he had been held up in the UK over the weekend and would I wait in Washington until the Tuesday when he would now arrive. I should now plan to fly home on Wednesday night.
Great! I now had a whole weekend on my own in Washington. I had been booked into a super hotel, the JW Marriot, which was the boss’s favourite, so settled down to enjoy Washington as a tourist. Life sometimes throws you a double six. And enjoy Washington, I did. I went on a Grey Line tour, watched the American football on TV and walked all over the city. I ate well on burgers and steaks, drank American beer and popcorn and slept well in the king-sized bed and felt very relaxed. After that flight down from Syracuse, I felt I deserved it. However, the pleasure we all got some months later after winning the contract made me almost forget the flight.
I always found America refreshing, fast-moving, go-getting and the people all very friendly and helpfu
l. They always seemed to know which admiral or senator we had to get on our side and it would be done that day. I loved the soft music, easy listening and country music radio stations. I loved the automatic gears on their cars and I loved the supermarkets where you could buy anything. I loved the huge lean steaks in the butchers section and I loved American football, weak beer and popcorn. The Americans were a breath of fresh air with their ‘can do, will do’ approach.
CHAPTER 13
Some Final Thoughts
Head Hunters
“Mr Gray? My name is James, we have not met, but are you able to talk at the moment?” The voice on the end of the phone was cultured, calm and confident. I recognised the use of the words. That was always the code signal for ‘This is a headhunter calling’, or executive recruitment consultants as they were more properly known. They would continue something along the lines of “Our client company is a UK-based, blue-chip company, trading internationally in the electronics industry; they need to expand their markets and are looking to recruit an experienced international salesman.” After a few guarded questions and answers, with no company names ever mentioned, they would then say, “If you feel it would be of interest could you come in and see us to discuss it further?” The answer usually was “YES.”
Such calls, while rare, were always good to get. Even if I was happy in the job and had no intention of leaving, a head hunter’s call always made me feel good. Somebody loved me, or at least was prepared to see if they loved me! Maybe it was worth following up anyway, just out of interest. It was always good to go and meet these headhunters as firstly that was the only way to find out about the company who were looking for a salesperson, and secondly it revealed a lot about my value in the market place and what other companies were prepared to offer. If this job did not suit, then perhaps they had others on their books that did. So I would find myself visiting the headhunter. Their offices tended to be smart, comfortable and in the better parts of London’s West End, often looking out over the trees of quiet London squares and always with beautifully spoken, smartly dressed and attractive receptionists. It was a very different world from offices I had worked in, like those out in the suburbs by New Malden Station or the old concrete buildings off Feltham High Street.