Which left just one item to be settled – the hard one, the contentious one. The plan was that when all the new contracts had been signed BA would be left with clear title of ownership to its Concorde fleet and also to the backlog of spares that had built up over the years as Rolls-Royce and BAe produced more parts than the airline’s anaemic Concorde ops required. We are not just talking here about rivets or fuel gauges or catches for luggage lockers. The spares included the dismantled equivalent of several complete Olympus engines: BA’s hope of managing technical support economically in the future depended on access to them. For handing over the planes themselves and the reserve of assets built up during Britain’s long involvement with supersonic flight, the men on the government side of the table were looking for a single, comprehensive payment. Make us an offer, they said. So the men from BA did.
Perhaps you think this is starting to sound like a thriller for accountants only, but consider this: upon this single figure now rested a drastically straightforward calculation of the sort Mr Micawber would have recognised. BA would add it to the £19 million they had already committed, and then they would see. Total cost to BA of taking over Concorde, x; income from Concorde, x + 1. Result: Concorde survives. Total cost to BA of taking over Concorde, x; income from Concorde, x – 1. Result: no Concorde. There was no time left to renegotiate in. The subsidies would terminate, whatever happened, at the end of the financial year. If the Review Group failed to reach an agreement at their conference table, that would be the end of Concorde. The whole history of Concorde over twenty-two years had funneled down to that room in Victoria Street (whichever one it was today). It was the bottleneck that had to be passed. Or, better, it had become the needle’s eye, which Jesus said it was easier to get a camel through than for a rich person to go to heaven.
Unfortunately, the amount BA offered is not on record. Both sides had a motive for discretion: BA regarded that sort of information as commercially sensitive, while the civil servants who later drafted the Report of the Review Group followed their traditional practice of de-emphasizing conflict and making it seem that conclusions followed with smooth inevitability from starting premises. It seems reasonable to assume, though, that with £4 million left of the £23 million pot of profits, the number they came up with will have been somewhere around, or a little under, the £4 million mark. They certainly imagined that it was going to be accepted. After all, the negotiators had made their way successfully through all the other points. And they felt sure that what the government was asking for here was essentially a symbolic sum, related to BA’s ability to pay, and not to the theoretical worth of ironmongery for which no other market existed.
But the civil servants said no. Gravely, politely, but emphatically: no. They could not possibly part with equipment in which so much public money had been invested for that kind of price. They were looking, they said, for a much larger figure. Would they care to say how much? No, they would not. It was up to BA to come up with an acceptable offer. Or if not, not. The BA representatives were aghast. To be sure, the budget they had been working with was not completely set in stone. You could look again at the numbers and make some different assumptions. BA could always expand their pot of projected profits up to 1989 by beating their own estimates for the next five years’ income; and the profits after 1989 could theoretically be offset against expenditure now, if the airline was willing to take the extra risk on an uncertain future; and, of course, the £11.8 million they had promised to pay out on five years’ fatigue testing wouldn’t come due all at once. The figures could be stretched. But if BA had to pay an amount for this item that took their total costs a long way over what could be financed plausibly out of Concorde’s income in the near future, it would push BA’s Concorde operation out of the zone of unprincely but manageable returns on capital and into the zone of complete impossibility. The civil servants must know this, and yet they were pushing for it all the same, which implied a grim truth: that despite all the promising talk of the last two years, the British government was fundamentally resigned to Concorde going out of service. Sombrely, the BA team gathered up their papers and went back to BA headquarters, whose new name, Speedbird House, was now looking more than a little ironic. It seemed that all along they had misjudged the government’s commitment to the negotiations. ‘Never was Concorde closer to being stopped’, Brian Walpole told the witness seminar in 2001, ‘than in the negotiations between British Airways and government in 1982–4, when we were invited as an airline to pick up the support costs and to pay for the spares … there was an impasse on the price that we would have to pay … I am told reliably by a source within government that the government view was that we were unlikely to agree to pick up the costs … And that would have been the end of supersonic civil aviation for a mighty long time.’ Brian Trubshaw, who handled British Aerospace’s talks with the Review Group, was blunter. ‘Dealing with civil servants’, he told me, ‘nearly drove me mad.’ The plane appeared to be done for. It had tried to pass through the needle’s eye and bounced back, thwarted.
*
At least that’s how the company side remembered it. Things looked very different from the government side of the table, as I discovered when I talked to Bruce MacTavish, who is now retired and lives in Surrey. ‘Defeat never entered my mind!’ he said, chuckling a little at the mock-heroic ring of the sentence. He is terribly discreet, but as I went over the ground with the DTI’s former chief negotiator, a picture gradually emerged. The pilots and the engineers may sometimes have thought of MacTavish and his colleagues as dry souls, who knew the price of Concorde rather than its value, but as far as they were concerned, that label described the Treasury. The pinstripe types at the Treasury were the ones who reduced the world to a balance sheet. They were makers and doers. MacTavish had been working on the administrative end of Concorde for almost a decade. He had been responsible for coming up with the formula, back in 1979, that let BA stop amortising its Concordes. ‘In words of which I’m inordinately proud, we resolved “to enter Concorde into BA’s books as a fully depreciated asset”. In other words, we wrote it off without saying we were writing it off.’ He too looked at the sky with pride when the unmistakable silhouette went by. Now that the fate of the plane was going to be decided on his own territory of well-draughted agreements and ingenious compromises, he and his colleagues surveyed the situation to see what they had to work with; for Concorde, as he put it to me, had ‘as many angles as a dog has fleas’. And they saw, far more clearly than the company negotiators did, that an agreement was politically almost inevitable. Sir John King had Mrs Thatcher’s ear, and the political clout that gave him had been invested in his claim to the plane. ‘He had put his dhobi-mark on it,’ Bruce MacTavish said, using the old slang word for the symbol that identifies your stuff when you send it to the laundry – as if Concorde were a bundle of clothes that King fully expected to get back from the negotiating process ironed, pressed and folded. But, given that very sharp limitation on their bargaining position, it was still the DTI team’s duty to get the best possible deal for the taxpayer. ‘It was bad enough having to part with the original aircraft for nothing, but to part with the spares at a derisory sum! – well, the Treasury wouldn’t have let us.’ So the DTI team decided that their best strategy for getting anywhere near the target figure for the spares that the Treasury had given them, lay in playing down the inevitability of success. The grimmer the outlook seemed to be, the better. It was not, in fact, that the civil servants in the Review Group were fatalistic about Concorde; it was that they were much, much better poker players than BA gave them credit for. There was indeed a minimum price that the airline had to meet, and to that extent ‘BA saw with justification that if they couldn’t satisfy us, the deal was off’. But beyond that, there was only a deliberately infuriating bureaucratic silence designed to force up BA’s offer to the maximum the company could truly manage, before the civil servants (of course) accepted it. ‘We sat on our hands and waited for them …
’ Was it acrimonious? I asked. ‘I don’t think so. There was just a lot of “After you, Claude!” “No, no, after you, Cecil!” type of stand-off.’
Finally, after the BA finance department at Speedbird House had squeezed and massaged and squeezed again the Concorde profit projections, and redefined the acceptable level of risk, and made the maximum allowance possible for the effects of the deferred fatigue-test payments on cashflow, the offer on the table over at Victoria Street crept up to £9.3 million; and the civil servants smiled and minuted as paragraph 47 of the report that they recommended that amount ‘for acceptance by HMG’. Three pages later paragraph 54 quietly acknowledged that the deal would be the conclusive end of an era. ‘The current programme of disposal by HMG of redundant items includes the means of producing further Concorde aircraft.’ It really was goodbye. But at least the planes themselves were saved, to fly until the end of the century and beyond. On 31 December 1983, the day of the deadline, BA ceremoniously handed over a cheque for the £7.2 million plus £9.3 million which they owed the government. £16.5 million to privatise a project on which nearly £900 million had been spent, and Concorde, which had seemed all but dead two years before, jinked, sideslipped and flew triumphantly through the eye of the needle.
*
When the witness seminar on Concorde convened at the Institute for Contemporary British History in the spring of 2000, the old Concorde hands turned out to reflect on the history of the plane, the technology of the plane, the politics of the plane. But they also gathered to tell Concorde stories. One of the best was told by Captain Jock Lowe, who had once met (he said) the American pilot of an SR-71 Blackbird spy plane. This pilot had been on station in the stratosphere over Cuba one day, when he and his co-pilot got a crackly request from air traffic control to move a couple of miles off course. ‘Eh?’ they thought, for not much moves in the thin air up at 60,000 feet which a spy plane can get in the way of. But as they sat there swaddled up like astronauts and plugged into their craft’s systems by a tangle of umbilicals, an Air France Concorde out of Caracas sailed by, ‘with a hundred passengers sitting in their shirtsleeves, eating canapés’. Another planeload of rich people had entered the kingdom of heaven.
Three
The Universe in a Bottle
For Christmas 1981, an eighteen-year-old boy in Epping was given a computer by his parents. MPs, pilots and government ministers were wrestling over the millions that Concorde required, but David Braben’s Acorn Atom cost £120. He knew this because he had requested it. In the way of parents with technically minded offspring everywhere, his mum and dad had asked for guidance about what he wanted, and he’d picked the machine that seemed to cost a plausible Christmas-sized amount. For the £120, he got a kit of parts. There was a motherboard with a Mostek 6502 processor chip on it, there were some cables, and there was a skeletal keyboard. £170 would have bought the Atom ready-assembled. For that matter, if money had been no object and his parents had had £335 to hand, he could have jumped up a technological step, for Acorn had already just introduced the Atom’s successor machine, the famous beige BBC Microcomputer, which would eventually sell a million units in Britain. The Atom was a soon-to-be-deleted bargain. But it used the same processor as the BBC Micro, albeit in a slower version, and it had fundamentally the same internal architecture; and Braben was good with a soldering iron, as computer hobbyists on a budget then needed to be. He spent a few more quid of his own pocket money on working memory, to bump up the meagre 2K that came in the kit, and put the Atom together in a home-built case. When he plugged it into the family TV set, he had a functional machine that could be coaxed into doing most of the things that the BBC Micro did.
Which was not much at all, by present-day standards. In 1982, home computers were only a few years out of the archetypal garage from which the very first tiny devices for home users had emerged. There was no such thing yet as a mouse. There was no such thing yet as the ‘desktop’, with its little pictures of files which you opened by clicking on them with the mouse. Graphical user interfaces only existed, that year, as a promising project in a research lab. It would be 1984 before Apple built a GUI into the Lisa, and then into the Macintosh, and made the mouse and the icons ordinary. Windows was even further away: Microsoft was still just an obscure company in Seattle. Nor was there such a thing, in 1982, as a cheap hard disk, on which users could store their documents and their software between sessions. Programs had to be loaded into the Atom from an audio cassette in a tape recorder, and you had to do it anew every time, because every time the computer was turned off, its memory was wiped clean. The only place that anything was stored permanently in the Atom was in its ROM chip. The small block of read-only-memory contained two things. First was Acorn’s operating system for the machine, which stopped it from being just dead silicon by telling the different components how to talk to each other. It managed the flow of information through the processor; it interpreted the key-presses you made on the keyboard; it took charge of the cathode-ray tube in your TV so that the screen displayed lines of text and primitive graphics rather than broadcast pictures. You could use the operating system to arrange your files in directories, and you could list the contents of the files and the directories. It was a little environment, controlled by typed commands. The other thing in the Atom’s ROM was a compact copy of the programming language BASIC. BASIC had been devised in the 1960s as a tool for non-scientists, and ever since then it had represented computing’s most user-friendly face. Versions of it were a stand-by of every home computer.
Taken together, the operating system and BASIC gave you everything you needed to write and run your own little programs. The manual that came with Acorn’s machines provided a quick tutorial in the language and included a few programs to get you started. But the computer contained no word processor, no bells and whistles, no array of applications waiting for you to play with them, no instant pleasurable pay-off for buying a new computer. When you turned on the Atom or the BBC Micro, the ROM chip booted up its two pieces of cargo and on your television screen appeared this:
BASIC
>
– and nothing else. The machine did nothing else, unless you made it.
Nevertheless, as 1982 wore on, and the BBC series that the BBC Micro had been commissioned to accompany proved to be a hit, thousands of people, and then tens of thousands, busily set to work writing programs which balanced their chequebooks, or administered French vocabulary quizzes to school children, or identified the leaves of common trees. DOES THE LEAF HAVE SERRATED EDGES? PRESS Y/N. There were other machines than Acorn’s on the market, of course. The BBC Micro was a rather earnest, high-fibre computer, a sort of computational Volvo, designed to appeal to households which believed in effort and educational value. It was expensive too. If you were willing to sacrifice durability and build quality, you could spend about a third as much money and buy a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, also launched that year. When you took the Spectrum out of the packaging, you knew it was supposed to be fun, not good for you. It had a dandy rainbow on its fascia, rather than the BBC Micro’s studious picture of an owl. Radio Shack marketed a micro called the TRS-80; Apple’s pre-Macintosh flagship, the Apple II, was a hobbyist staple. But all of these machines, at least to begin with, shared in the same DIY ethic, the same assumption that computers were principally objects you did things with and to, not objects that did things with and to you. It was a sort of false start in the history of computing. The audience who eagerly watched The Computer Programme once a week on BBC2 knew that something revolutionary was happening. A great change was coming, as promised in books like Christopher Evans’ The Mighty Micro (1979). Though some of the specific prophecies about the future were duds – Evans said that by 1990 the printed book would be extinct and lawyers would be replaced by expert systems – most of them turned out to be spot on. There would be a transformation in the way people worked. Millions of homes would contain a computer more powerful than the biggest mainframes of the 1970s. E-mail wo
uld provide the biggest leap forward in communication since the invention of the postage stamp. Where the expectations of 1982 went wrong was in supposing that this bright new world would still be a world of home-grown software. Every moment in history unconsciously projects its assumptions forward: just as the aerospace designers of 1962 thought that the future of jet travel would be Noel Coward zinging to Barbados at Mach 2, people tinkering with their BBC Micros in 1982 thought that the future held a myriad of other, better chequebook programs written by people like themselves, when in fact it was going to draw in the public not as millions of producers, but millions of consumers. It was going to be a future of shrink-wrapped software products far too complex to be written at home by amateurs: a world of mass marketing, not mass participation. The BBC Micro thrived in an in-between time, a fertile interim lasting only briefly as the home computer expanded its reach. Software, for that historical moment, existed in a simple ecosystem in which most was written at home, some could be bought on audio cassettes, and some could be captured off the television, when The Computer Programme broadcast a piece of BASIC to the nation’s tape recorders in the form of an agonising audio howl. The moment didn’t last long, but because it was simple, because it was so open to whatever enthusiasts could come up with, it was rich in opportunities. It didn’t produce the future people were expecting, but out of it, instead, came a whole new British industry that would achieve levels of success in the global market not seen since the 1870s, when British manufacturers produced 40 per cent of the world’s mechanical goods. This industry didn’t require huge capital investment; it didn’t need steel foundries, or wind tunnels, or giant fatigue-testing apparatus, which made it ideal for the shattered landscape of the British economy in the early 1980s. It didn’t need much at all, in terms of tangible assets. You could start off with a £120 Acorn Atom.
Backroom Boys Page 9