Johnson might have fared better with a chair from the English designer Ernest Race’s now much rarer “Sheppey” range of 1962: a simpler thing without moving parts but unmistakeably modern with its enamelled and exposed steel bar at the front of the seat, its hardwood side frames and upholstery that could be supplied in PVC, leather or the customer’s own choice of fabric. To find the manufacturer of this award-winning work of mid-century English modernism, he only had to leave the ghosts of Mecklenburg in his office for a while, follow his usual route to the railway station, and then walk on past the large brick warehouse of the Sheerness Economical Society until he came to a semi-industrial street named New Road.
Anyone seeking a respectful perspective on the dreams of recovery once invested along this unprepossessing street could certainly have done worse than listen to the words spoken by the Chairman of Sheerness Urban District Council as he reviewed the condition of the town the end of April 1960. Repudiating the unhelpful judgement of Alan Whicker, who had recently come to Sheerness for the BBC’s Tonight programme and blithely dismissed the place as effectively “dead”, Councillor Jim Ward admitted that the announcement of the combined closure of the garrison, the naval dockyard and the Nore naval command had produced a “year almost of despair and certainly of very high hopes”.2 As he explained to the meeting, the thought of Sheerness and, indeed, the entire island, losing its livelihood had led the council to establish the “Development Committee” that was going into battle against apathy, demoralisation and the all too easy assumption that Sheerness might as well now be allowed to sink back into the sea from which its limited prosperity had come.
1960 was a dreadful year for the town — appropriately opened with the words of a visiting American sailor who, when asked what he made of Sheerness, had declared “It’s as big as New York cemetery and just about as dead”.3 On 12 February 1960, the Sheerness Times Guardian reported that Industrial Aid had again been pledged for the island. Some of the planned new development would spread south along the Medway to Queenborough where the Pilkington Glass factory was to be found. In Sheerness, however, two sites were dedicated to the recovery of the island economy. The primary one was the former dockyard itself, sold in 1959 to a private company named “Building Developments Ltd”.4 Balfour Beatty had an interest in this acquisition but the primary mover was the country’s leading post-war property developer Jack Cotton, whose company City Centre Properties had acquired the naval dockyard with the aim of creating a new “harbour estate” in which it would lease out buildings, old or new, as demand suggested, for engineering use. Reviewing his company’s recent work in October 1960, Cotton announced of Sheerness: “I am confident that the Group’s participation in the enterprise will be lucrative”.5 By the following summer, Cotton, who that year merged City Centre Properties with two other companies to create the largest property company in the world, was no longer talking only of leasing out properties to industries in the “trading estate” he was establishing in the dockyard. He was also planning to establish a new deep-sea port at Sheerness, a “gateway from Kent to the Continent” that could, thanks to planned road developments (including the Dartford Tunnel and the M2), provide Midland industries with “a new fast road-sea link with Continental markets”.6
The Kent Development Plan had also been modified to include the conversion of a second area of some 47.5 acres of land at the eastern edge of Mile Town, previously owned by the War Department but now surplus to its requirements. Sheerness Council had bought the land, rashly as pessimistic local critics moaned,7 and the county’s planning committee had agreed that it should be used for “light industrial development”, a designation that would preserve the possibility of building housing on any unused areas.8
Within a short time, companies were beginning to declare their interest in “New Road”. Among the first was the stationery manufacturing firm Twinlock, whose cast concrete factory was already being rushed into existence by a company named Atcost Ltd from Tunbridge Wells. Twinlock staff were informed that Sheerness “seems to have everything we have been looking for; plenty of land and people; and the most helpful municipal folk we have ever met”.9 Increasingly cramped at its Beckenham factory and apparently also used to poor local politics, the management declared itself pleasantly surprised by the reception its representatives had received in the town: “to be welcomed as manufacturers and employers is a strange experience for us”, and one that encouraged the firm to defend Sheerness against detractors who saw it only as a marshy dump: “Scenically, it is nothing spectacular”, the company’s spokesman admitted, but when the sun was out and the tide high the town was “a very pleasant place”.
Hopes were also rising and falling again over at the harbour estate. At the beginning of 1960, i.e. three months before the Admiralty finally vacated the dockyard, it looked as if the Cambridge electronics company Pye Ltd would be acquiring more than fifty thousand square feet of factory buildings, where they hoped soon to be producing electro-medical and naval communications equipment, as well as “high-fidelity sound reproducers”. This expansion, which seemed likely to produce hundreds of jobs, was hailed as “wonderful news for Sheppey”.10 It didn’t happen — for reasons that may have been connected to Pye’s decision to merge with its competitor EKCO, across the estuary in Southend-on-Sea.
Next up was Associated Motor Cycles. This was going to be a huge amalgamated concern, reminiscent of a present-day army regiment into which many predecessors have been sent to die during a long history of cuts and mergers. AMS, as it was called, was actually an amalgamation of five different motorcycle companies — Matchless, AJS, Norton, Francis-Barnett and James — and it was already struggling against competition, from BSA at home, but also from BMW in West Germany and a far more effectively managed Honda in Japan. Its offer to make a government-assisted move to the harbour estate from Woolwich seemed to answer many problems in Sheerness, not least by creating one thousand jobs at a stroke. Everyone geared up for the opening, and the Board of Trade was so encouraged that it once again struck Sheerness off its list of scheduled development areas in which government loans could be used to encourage investment. There was some alarm in Sheerness in July 1961, when it was announced that AMS would not be making any profit that year, on account of a “steep downward curve in sales in Britain and the United States”.11 The share price fell sharply, but the Chairman still insisted that the move to Sheerness would help the company recover, since the low cost of the state-subsidised factory would surely ease its pressing financial difficulties. By 3 November 1961, however, it was apparent that AMS would not be coming to Sheerness after all, and the Sheerness Times Guardian was devoting its front page to the fact that the busy Labour MP Percy Wells was pounding the streets of Westminster and Whitehall, demanding that Sheerness be restored to the list of development areas under the Local Employment Act.
The coming and going of the public subsidy was bad news for smaller companies too. Paul Lassen, the managing director of a kitchen cabinet producer named Rossland Ltd, had moved his company to the harbour under the expectation of receiving loans from the Board of Trade: “We knew we would have to paddle our own canoe until such time as a loan was forthcoming from the Board”.12 The company had turned down other work, devoting all its resources to getting its new plant up and functioning, only to discover that the loan it had been encouraged to expect was not forthcoming now that “development area” status was to be removed. Lassen went down with his canoe, last seen railing against a government that had brought him to Sheppey “on false pretences”.
Wadia Halim Murad kept up his fight with the government for a great deal longer, although it would almost certainly have been better for him had he not done so. Born in Jamaica as the son of a Lebanese Arab millionaire, Murad had come to England in 1921 to study at Manchester University, where he played a lot of cricket and left without a degree. By the early Thirties, he had become interested in wireless technology, producing a new kind of coil-former that help
ed to bring short-wave onto the mass wireless sets made by Pye, Plessey and Ultra. By 1939, he had returned to his primary interest in engineering, and was producing an improved capstan lathe through his Murad Machine Tool Company. His inventions had been widely used in the manufacture of munitions during the Second World War — Murad claimed to have both speeded up and significantly lowered the cost of manufacturing twenty-millimetre shells for Spitfires and Hurricanes. A self-declared admirer of the British Empire, he had helped to produce carbide armour-piercing shells used by British tanks in the north African desert, and also “spot-locating fixtures” for cylinder blocks and heads of the Rolls-Royce Merlin engines fitted in British tanks.
Wadia Murad’s car, 2016.
After the war, Murad became determined to create “the best car in Britain”. By 1948 he had produced a single working prototype of a 1.5 litre “Murad” saloon car. In 1982, he would tell the Sheerness journalist John Nurden that his car was “decades ahead of its time”,13 with its aerodynamic design, fitted radio and integral oil cooler. It had rear rubber-bonded springs and independent front suspension, leather seats and noiseless door locks that were said to have been the envy of the engineers at Rolls-Royce. The “Murad” was, he remembered, “a beautiful thing to drive, and so quiet. Wherever I went crowds would gather round”. It was enthusiastically received at the Earl’s Court Motor Show in 1947, and the ensuing positive trade press coverage of the car — which was “fully tooled and ready for production” — brought Murad advance orders from around the world worth an alleged £5.5 million. The “dream car” is also said to have drawn admiring crowds at every stop during a two-thousand-mile test drive around Britain in 1948. Unfortunately, however, the post-war Labour government was far from helpful when it came to initiating production. Murad had gained a government permit to develop an engineering factory on the Watford bypass, but this was suddenly withdrawn and he was ordered to move to south Wales. He refused and, after further argument, consented instead to open a foundry and factory in Aylesbury. More government wavering followed, costs rocketed unexpectedly during the ferocious winter of 1947, and the receiver was called in shortly after Murad had supplied a “Murad Bomilathe” for Sir Vivien Fuch’s Trans-Antarctic expedition (the company’s equipment is also said to have been used by the Royal Navy and in the laboratories of the Atomic Energy Authority).14
On 5 May 1960, Murad received a call from the Board of Trade, urging him to establish an engineering works in a government-designated Development Area. Declining a site in Scotland, he opted for Sheerness, where he was assured eight hundred skilled men awaited new employment. So, Murad and his prototype car moved to Sheppey, encouraged by the additional understanding that the Board of Trade would provide £50,000 to cover his removal costs. Unfortunately, by the time he started building his Whiteway factory and foundry at Queenborough, Sheppey was no longer on the list of potential recipients for state aid. Farewell, then, to the £50,000 and also to other anticipated subsidies. As for the eight hundred skilled workers who had lost their jobs in the Sheerness dockyard, Murad discovered that they had mostly been absorbed by the naval establishment at Chatham. “The labour was useless”, he would tell Bel Austin of the Sheerness Times Guardian, so he had no choice but to spend £200,000 in wages to “indenture” forty apprentices and train them himself.
The new firm, Murad International Ltd, did not flourish. Production of the car was never a possibility, but demand for lathes of the kind for which Murad had become well-known during the Second World War was also declining, and the engineer was forced to diversify again. A former apprentice remembers that the wooden patterns Murad had once used to create machine tools lay rotting in the yard,15 while the company tried to scrape along with simpler products: small, hand-operated paper guillotines, adjustable “Techni-Tables” designed for home use, a “NoTREST” desk stand designed to display an A4 sheet of paper at a convenient height for people using electric typewriters. Murad sold everything he could to stay afloat on Sheppey, mortgaging his five-bedroom house in Hertfordshire and surrendering his life insurance policies too. Try as he might, however, the enterprise just devoured what remained of his wealth and then failed. By 1982, when John Nurden caught up with the man he described as Sheppey’s answer to John DeLorean, the bank had already obliged Wadia Murad to put his Queenborough factory up for sale for £90,000 (it went to a company named Wasos). He had nothing left but the increasingly vandalised and derelict machine shop he had later established on Montague Road, in the industrially obliterated settlement known as West Minster, on the island’s Medway shore between Queenborough and Sheerness.
Having arranged to meet him there on one of his weekly visits, Nurden found an eighty-one-year-old widower shivering in an old overcoat, while the precision machinery that had been evicted from his lost Whiteway factory lay rusting in the “ramshackle junk yard” behind the machine shop — no longer fit for anything but scrap.16 The precious prototype of the “Murad” car was stored inside the increasingly vandalised building, but it too was going nowhere, and not just because the engine had been stolen. During his decline, so Nurden reported, Murad had ended up sleeping across two chairs at his works, before being rescued by a former employee, Mrs Doris Palmer, who had taken pity on the old man and invited him to stay with her. By the time Nurden interviewed him, Murad had nothing to keep him going except the state pension of £30 per week. The phone at his machine shop had recently been disconnected and he’d just received a final ultimatum from Swale Borough Council (“pay your £2,000 rate arrears or go to jail”). A fighter to the last, he was preparing to sue the Department of Trade for the £50,000 removal costs he had been promised in 1960. “I shall fight them to the very end”.
He was also planning to go and live with his better-off brother in California — “as far as he can go” from a country that gave grants to DeLorean and Volkswagen but had encouraged him to move to the Isle of Sheppey and then abandoned him. He would, he volunteered, “be sad to leave Britain. I have been here since 1921 and it will be a terrific break for me but I just can’t take anymore”. Or again: “What I did during the war was superb. It was magnificent. Now I brood. I am a very bitter man”. Once resettled in California, he planned to restore his prototype car to working order and write a book about “how the British government hoodwinked him into moving to Sheppey”. Calculating that he had lost £1 million thanks to that betrayal, he confessed that, while he hated acknowledging failure, he now had to face the facts. He hoped the Kent Evening Post would put him in touch with some of the forty people he had trained as apprentices, so that he could gather their testimony in support of his claim: “I am going to fight this bloody thing to the end of my life”. Unfortunately he lost his case against the Department of Trade, and also, as may be presumed from the words Murad scribbled in the only surviving catalogue for his car, against the socialist “nit-wits” in Attlee’s post-war Labour government who shouted “We are the masters now” and sang “‘The Red Flag’ in the Mother of Parliaments”.17 His book never appeared, but his prototype car did recently turn up at auction. Allegedly found in an old farm building (some local opinion prefers the thought that it may never actually have left Murad’s old workshop in West Minster), it was still engineless and by now also much dented and showing a fair bit of rust too. In its issue of 5 October 2016, the magazine Practical Classics reported that the car went for $1,557 when it went under the hammer on 21 September 2016.
Ernest Race: A New Use for Kent’s Fruit Trees
By the beginning of 1961, doom-struck Sheppey was also being urged to reinvent itself as a “brand”. Mr A.W. Davies of K.S. Advertising in Canterbury even recommended a tagline — “I’ve discovered Sheerness and the Sunny Isle of Sheppey” — an implausible mouthful that was nevertheless briefly adopted as “Sheppey’s favourite holiday publicity slogan”.18 On Tuesday, 10 January 1961, which records suggest was actually “Dull AM, becoming overcast and rain by afternoon”,19 Mr Davies came to the island for a “l
uncheon meeting” at which he was happy to cast his own reassuring beams over members of the Sheppey Rotary Club. “Advertising”, he promised, “has a very full role to play in the future, both at home and in the field of international relations, for it is the support, and perhaps the very inspiration of free enterprise”. He knew about the doubts of those who might be tempted to associate his profession with mere hucksterism, or the big business art of planting artificial desires into the hearts of their children, while at the same time wiping the floor with the “little man” whose shops battled on along Sheerness High Street. If, however, the island was to find a future, its people really must face up to the fact that “consumers choose branded and advertised goods in preference to unknown and unidentified goods”.
Mr Davies had done his best but, in the year following the dockyard closure, Sheerness remained both unbranded and depressed, too sunken in spirit to be raised by a “sunny” slogan. Even the Royal College of Physicians’ report revealing the link between smoking and lung cancer, to which a special Panorama programme was devoted on Monday 12 March 1962, had impressed the folk interviewed by the Sheerness Times Guardian as another cruel conspiracy against the island economy. One horrified Sheerness tobacconist reported a loss of 75% of his cigarette sales, while others invested slender hopes in a perceptible switch to pipes and small cigars. Smokers were definitely scared, as the manageress of the Sheerness branch of Lewis of Westminster conceded: “I never thought the public would be so silly”.20
Thanks partly to the council’s Development Committee, however, there had been at least some concrete reasons to feel less awful as 1962 dawned. On 5 January, the paper reported that the new year had opened with an optimistic industrial start. A company named Harris Engineering proposing to move their factory from Croydon to Sheerness harbour estate, and Pilkington were hoping, if they could get planning permission, to extend their glass factory at Rushenden, Queenborough. Encouraging developments were also underway on New Road. The clerk for the Sheerness Council, Mr Jack Griffiths MBE, reported that, since Christmas, the council had received two new enquiries from companies considering creating factories in the town. Arrangements were now in hand with Perox Chemicals, which had already taken a six-acre site on New Road, “the sale is now in the contract stage. Nothing should now go wrong”.21 Meanwhile, the Sheppey Shirt Company hoped to forsake their current premises on Blue Town High Street for a modern factory built on a three-quarter-acre site on New Road — and Abbott pharmaceutical company would also begin its island operations there, before shifting production to Queenborough.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 29