by Sugar, Alan
It was around Christmas of 1968, after a visit to the doctor, that Ann announced she was pregnant. We were both happy at the news that we were going to have a baby. Ann was only twenty then and I was twenty-one, so we were very young to start a family, but that’s how it was in those days.
When the news was announced to Ann’s family, it was greeted with delight – immediately followed by questions about our preparations. ‘What are you going to do? Where’s the baby’s room going to be? How are you going to manage?’
I told my mum and dad the news and got the usual responses. My mum’s was, ‘Oh, very nice – you are young.’ And from Dad: ‘Oh good,’ a sort of congratulatory grunt. I got a bit more enthusiasm from Daphne, Derek and Shirley.
Ann carried on working right up to when she was seven months pregnant. Not because I asked her to; it was what she wanted. In those later months, Ann spent most of her time round at Rita’s with a couple of relatives, Edna and Fanny. Fanny was one of Ann’s aunts and Edna was her daughter-in-law. They lived next door to Rita and Johnnie.
The cackle that went on between Rita, Edna and Fanny – fussing about all the things Ann had to do to prepare for the baby – was a typical Jewish outing. How this must have confused (or bored) Ann!
Rita would often ask me, ‘Aren’t you excited, Alan? You don’t seem to show your excitement. How do your mum and dad feel?’
‘Well, my family are, of course, very happy. And as for me, it’s not a case of not being excited; I’m just a bit apprehensive about the birth, you know, too many cooks spoiling the broth. It’d be nice if we were just able to sit down and think about this ourselves.’
Believe me, Ann was under heavy pressure, albeit well meaning, with everyone telling her what she should and shouldn’t do. It was winding me up. My reply didn’t go down too well and I got the ‘We’re only trying to do our best’ type of response. And, of course, they were only trying to do their best, but it was hard going.
On 7 June, a Saturday morning, when I was about to leave for work, Ann told me she was feeling a bit peculiar. She thought it might be the start of some contractions. Obviously, this being our first child, she had no idea what to expect. She phoned Daphne who advised her to call an ambulance.
When the ambulance arrived, the friendly neighbours gathered outside to wave her goodbye and wish us good luck, and off she went in the ambulance. By now, Daphne had turned up and she came with me as we followed the ambulance in my car.
Rita and Johnnie were unaware of the goings-on. They were at a synagogue in north London, attending a blessing of a friend. Had they known what was happening, they’d have been down there like a shot.
At Wanstead Hospital, Ann checked in and settled into her bed, by which time the contractions had died down. She looked at me as if to say, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here – nothing’s happening.’ But when I popped back later that night, she was definitely in labour. There was a possibility that the baby was in the breech position and they may have to perform a Caesarean section. I was asked to sign a consent form, as Ann was only twenty years old – in those days you weren’t considered an adult until you were twenty-one.
Now here’s the bizarre thing – something you wouldn’t see these days – instead of staying with Ann until the baby was born, helping her through the trauma and pain, I went home again. Hospitals wouldn’t let fathers hang around or be present for the birth of their children, so I didn’t have any choice (not that I’d have relished the thought). Anyway, instead of sitting by the phone, the following morning I went to play tennis with my mates! Some of them were jibing, ‘You’re going to be a father soon.’ Meanwhile, unbeknown to me, the real action had started. And while I was playing tennis – on Sunday, 8 June 1969 – baby Simon was born. As they’d suspected, Simon had been in the breech position, but thankfully the doctors were able to manoeuvre him and Ann had a natural birth after all.
I went straight round to the hospital. The nurse brought in a trolley with a plastic cot in it, and there I saw young Simon for the very first time. I wheeled him into the ward and Ann and I were together with our son. I have to say, he didn’t look like either of us at the time. Apart from the delight that we had a son, the reality really hit home that we were now responsible for another human being.
Hospitals were very strict in those days and would only allow visiting at certain times, so when Rita and Johnnie turned up that afternoon – in evening wear because they were on their way to a wedding – they wouldn’t let them in initially, but after a bit of argy-bargy, they managed to see their first grandson.
Simon was named after my father’s father, Simon Sugar. Unfortunately, he was never given a middle name – something he took slight exception to when he was growing up. This was down to the Johnnie influence again – he insisted that Jewish people do not have middle names. Frankly, when I look back now, I cannot believe I accepted such bloody nonsense. I have a middle name, my brother has a middle name and my sisters have middle names. But this very domineering man imposed his wishes on me and, because of that, Simon never had a middle name.
Just before Simon was born, my mum and dad went on holiday to Jesolo in Italy. It was the first time they’d ever been abroad. They could afford it now my father was working for me, but, if I remember rightly, I treated them to their trip. However, the timing of their holiday would give rise to another row between Johnnie and me.
In the days after we brought Simon home from the hospital, Rita was by Ann’s side quite a lot, as one would expect when a newborn baby comes home with a very young mother. I went to work as usual and called in from time to time to find out how things were. Ann spent a lot of time at her mother’s, with everyone flapping around the baby. I joined them all one day after work and sat on the couch next to Ann. The family was banging on: ‘You should do this, you should do that, you should make sure the baby’s warm. Has he been fed? Has he been winded?’ And so on and so on.
At that moment, Ann burst out crying from all this pressure being put on her, not to mention the customary post-natal depression. I put my arms around her and said, ‘Right, we’re out of here right now. Get up, we’re going.’
‘No, no, no,’ they protested. ‘Don’t go yet. The baby hasn’t had his milk, he hasn’t had this, he hasn’t had that . . .’
I said, ‘We’re going. We’re going home. Please, leave us alone for a little while. I know you mean well, but look what you’re doing. We have to go.’
For the first time, Johnnie saw the anger in my eyes. Even he slid back in his chair, knowing that this would turn into a flaming row. ‘Let them go, let them go then,’ he said.
When we got home there was a look of relief on Ann’s face. She was more than capable of dealing with the baby – it was just a case of letting her get on with it. Looking back, one can’t be angry with the care and attention shown by Ann’s family – they just didn’t understand how heavy it was. In fact, there were numerous occasions when I had to rescue the situation, when the overpowering Simons family tried to control Ann’s or the baby’s life.
One such occasion was when the trio on Eastern Avenue – Rita, Edna and Fanny – thought they’d detected that Simon had something wrong with his neck, that his head always tended to lean to one side. This latest fuss eventually led to us taking him to the doctor.
Of course, there was nothing wrong with his neck at all. They were driving Ann bloody mad. Again, all well meaning, but as before, I explained to Ann that we had to keep away and get on with our lives – an idea to which, I think, she was warming. The difficulty was that she’d spent nineteen years living in that household and just over a year with me. She was very conscious of not hurting her family’s feelings.
A couple of weeks after we brought Simon home, I realised something was burning up inside Johnnie – he was plutzing again. This time it was about my parents. Eventually, he couldn’t keep it in any more. Johnnie and Rita invited themselves to our house for tea, or rather, to come and have a word wi
th me.
Johnnie sat down in front of Ann and me and then, presiding like a judge, he said to me, ‘Do you think the treatment your mother and father gave Ann by going on holiday was the right thing to do, when they knew she was just about to have a baby?’
I couldn’t see what was wrong with it, but I carried on listening to Johnnie, who was explaining how wrong and heartless it was, how they should have been there in case something went wrong. He ended up saying, ‘How could they do that? What kind of people are they?’
I was being pressurised by Johnnie to agree with him. He wouldn’t let it go. He kept banging on and on, saying, ‘You must agree with me. Your mother and father are heartless. They’ve done wrong.’
Eventually, I said to him, ‘If my mother and father have done anything wrong, you’d be the last person I’d admit that to, okay? So you are wasting your time.’
Again, he must have seen the look in my eyes – up until then I had always spoken respectfully to him, but now he could see I was about to explode, so he backed down, saying, ‘Well, I suppose you’re showing loyalty to your mum and dad, and I guess that can’t be bad.’
When my parents arrived back from Italy I spoke to them about this incident and I think they felt a bit awkward about it and recognised that they had done the wrong thing.
*
When it comes to being a young father, I have to say that compared to those of today, I was rotten. When I saw how my two sons and son-in-law carried on when their babies arrived, it was quite an eye-opener. There they were changing nappies, taking their turn to bath the baby, being at the birth, taking time off to assist.
Me? I can honestly tell you that I never changed a nappy. Well, maybe I changed one or two, but I certainly never bathed a baby, although I might have watched a couple of times and taken some pictures. In fact, as Ann often reminds me, I never saw the kids when they were growing up, apart from at the weekends. I was out to work first thing in the morning and by the time I got back, they were already in bed. And even at the weekends, I have to admit that I was never one of those smarty-arty, happy-clappy fathers. Of course, we went on family holidays many times and played tennis and all that stuff, but I wasn’t one of those fathers who’s at the centre of their child’s activities. I’m not sure how they feel about it now. My absence during their early years is most often brought up when my children see me messing around with my grandchildren. They make wry remarks such as, ‘You were never like that with us.’
*
Back to business. With lessons learned from the plinth and cover exercise, when my suppliers ended up supplying everyone and his brother, I knew that this injection-moulded plinth and cover stuff wasn’t going to last for ever. It wasn’t going to take long for people to work out that by investing £3,000–4,000 in their own tools, they’d be able to do the same.
It seems I’d put K & K Electronics out of business. They moved on to open a small factory in Hackney Road, where they assembled amplifier modules. These amplifiers would be placed inside a plinth to make a kind of hi-fi record-player that would be sold with a pair of speakers. It seemed to be a good idea at the time and was a transition from the cheap Dansette record-player with its auto-changer to the more sophisticated hi-fi market. I suggested to Phil Kaplan that if he’d supply me with some of these amplifiers, I would free-issue them with my plinths for them to drill out and fit the amplifiers in. Then, all my dad and the kid next door would have to do was fit the record deck on top and we’d have a finished audio unit. We must have bought a few hundred of these lash-ups.
I sold them to a fellow in Plashet Grove, East Ham by the name of Bernard Allaghan who had quite a few hi-fi and photographic shops. There was hardly any money in this venture; the main profit was still on the dust cover, so after all the hassle of making plinths, making covers and fitting and wiring up amplifiers and record decks, the margin was pretty thin.
I was still selling transistor radios and other bits and pieces, but in truth, the plinth and cover business was making the radio side of things look stupid, so I decided to become more selective – I would just sell stuff that was being demanded by the customers.
One day, George Chenchen was at St John’s Street dropping off a batch of radios he had fixed for me and he spotted all this amplifier stuff going on. George was a cocky kind of fellow and used to talk in a way which implied that everyone else, from a technical point of view, was an idiot compared to him. He looked at the amplifier I was fitting and told me it was rubbish and that he could design a much better one. He asked how much I was paying for it. When I told him, he laughed and said it was a rip-off. To be perfectly honest, I had no idea of component costs and, as it turned out, neither did he. He just said it for the sake of saying it.
The market for this makeshift stereo record-player with a pair of speakers was not really deemed to be the next growth area in the hi-fi industry. Instead, people were warming to the idea of a separate record deck, separate amplifier and a pair of speakers. Crazy as it may sound, people wanted four lumps of equipment instead of three!
The separate stereo amplifier market was starting to boom. It was monopolised by companies such as Armstrong and Leak and Japanese imports were also starting to make inroads. Leak’s and Armstrong’s amplifiers were very expensive. Teleton, a Japanese model, was cheaper, but still relatively expensive. I reckoned that if I could make an amplifier much lower in price than the Teleton, I’d be able to take a share of the market.
I challenged Chenchen to come up with a circuit design for an amplifier. I said I would invest some of my money and set up a production line to make it. He told me he was okay on the electronics side of things, but had no idea about the mechanical stuff. This was not an issue for me – my Brooke House schooldays kicked in. I drew up a metal U-shaped chassis and designed a wooden cabinet for the chassis to slide into.
I could spend hours talking about every single amplifier and product we ever made, and it would be dead boring to everyone other than the old saddo hacks who used to work for me or buy from me. For the broader audience, I’m going to skip quite a few things and just cover the interesting points.
George Chenchen was fed up scratching around, making the odd few shillings per radio repair, so he asked whether he could come and work for me. I agreed and put him on the payroll. Between Chenchen and myself, we designed this amplifier.
It was impossible to start production at St John’s Street, so I acquired a factory floor in Great Sutton Street, just down the road from St John’s Street. The building was occupied by a garment manufacturer, but the first floor was vacant. It was approximately 1,000 sq ft, which looked massive when I saw it for the first time.
We moved everything out of St John’s Street into Great Sutton Street. George bought a load of wood and made some assembly line benches, I recruited about twenty employees and we geared up for the production of this amplifier – the Amstrad 8000. I called it the 8000 as it was supposed to be eight watts per channel.
Dad was starting to panic again. Until recently there had been just me and him plus a van driver, Harry Knight. Suddenly I had about twenty employees.
‘How are you going to pay for all this, Alan? What are you doing?’ said my dad.
‘Never mind, don’t you worry about it. Look over the road . . . You see there’s a bank?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, we’re going to rob it.’
These jokes went down like lead balloons with my father. He had no sense of humour and couldn’t grasp what I was up to.
I took the first production sample of the Amstrad 8000 to Premier Radio in Tottenham Court Road. The shop was owned by Ronnie Marks, my first supplier. He told me there was no point showing it to him, as he wasn’t technical and wouldn’t be able to evaluate it, but his manager, Nick, knew about these things.
I can’t recall the number of times I drove back and forth between Great Sutton Street and Tottenham Court Road with various samples of this amplifier, only for it to be repeate
dly rejected by Nick because of its poor sound. Each time I told Chenchen why it was rejected, he would change a few components in the circuitry, and back I’d go again. This trial-and-error method of product design proved that Chenchen had as much knowledge about electronic theory as I do about butterfly collecting.
Later, I would learn that producing the right sound from an amplifier is relatively easy if you follow basic electronic principles. The irony of it was that any amateur reading Practical Wireless could have worked out the problem – it was all about the frequency response. To put it simply, the human ear starts to conk out above 15,000 Hz for high-pitched tones (dogs have a greater sensitivity at these frequencies; that’s why they can hear high-pitched whistles which to us are silent). The deep bass sounds – which tend to blast your eardrums at discos – are at the other end of the frequency spectrum, at around 100 Hz or below.
Eventually, we got the amplifier to a state that Nick felt was reasonable, and at that point we started the production line. I think that Premier Radio bought the first six amplifiers off me.
With my plinth and cover business still subsidising the cash flow, I started to sell these amplifiers to all the electrical shops in Tottenham Court Road. At £17, the Amstrad 8000 was much cheaper than anything else on the market. And simply because of the price tag, they started to sell quite well.
A lot of snobbery existed in the hi-fi industry at the time. The way you drummed up business was to advertise in the hi-fi magazines and try to obtain some editorial endorsement by way of technical reviews by the magazines’ experts. I placed my first slice of advertising in one of these magazines. Unfortunately, their review of the amplifier wasn’t great, and I spoke to the reviewers to find out why. In the end, I suggested the review should not be printed, but that I would still continue to pay for advertising.
Talking to the reviewers was a learning curve. Never mind what the retailers said; it was the reviewers I needed to listen to. These guys dictated what was needed. I found out just what they did in their test procedures and what results they expected to see.