Finding Feet in the Smoke| At the Tax Office
Extended diary entry
1st February, 1958, the first day of my first real job: Tax Officer (Higher Grade) – in training for three years – starting salary about £370 a year. ‘Report to reception and ask for Mr Tapper, the Clerical Inspector.’ I wear my one dark suit, a white shirt and a tie, not very shiny black shoes and a raincoat. This is the end of the Fifties and this is what we all wear in this strange, uncertain period, in many ways still coming round after the War. Waiting, without knowing exactly what was coming, for ‘The Sixties’ to arrive, still several years in the future.
Central Line from Holland Park to Marble Arch. Walk along Oxford Street to the western end of Selfridges. Cross the road to North Audley Street, W2. I locate my destination on the left-hand side at Number 17. But I’m early, and perhaps a little apprehensive about going in to start my first real job, so continue walking until I reach Grosvenor Square. Stop on the corner, look at this square on the very edge of Mayfair, and come back to the office of HM Inspector of Taxes (Paddington District).
‘Reception’ is staffed by a man who doubles as telephonist and clearly has something to do with the incoming mail. His voice is one of the nearest I’ve ever come across to Peter Cooke’s famous EL Whistey character. The same measured pace is there, and the strained monotone delivery from the back-of-the-throat. It’s slightly higher than the average voice, with the trace of bureaucratic formality appropriate to the job. He asks me ‘Erm, can I help you?’ and his face slides into a lop-sided half smile, as though he’s playing a part, saying what the script tells him rather than something else he’d prefer to say. It’s a friendly face, and the smile suggests that much of the world mildly amuses him, even including the line he’s just spoken. There’s the possibility of self-satire in it, the notion that ‘I do this crummy job but actually I don’t have to. I may worth more than this.’ This is Mr St John, first name Eric not generally used, but known all round the office as ‘Singe’. When I get to know him later, I find he’s a quiet, dry humourist, a jazz enthusiast and very moderate drinker of Guinness, who served during the war in the War Graves Commission because he had flat feet. He lives with his mother somewhere in the suburbs at Ilford. I tell him my mission and he half smiles again, as though saying ‘Ah, yes, the new boy. We’re expecting you. You’ll find this a rum place, all right’. He makes a call to announce my arrival and shows me where to go, along the lino-covered corridor.
My induction conversation with Mr Tapper tells me about the structure and duration of the various stages of my training programme. It tells me very little about the workings of the Tax District Office itself, and, as soon as he can, Tapper – who, in any case, retires at the end of my first month - hands me over to a section leader to give me some work to do. As far as I can discover during the coming days, the office here comprises three main divisions. Schedule A, a relatively small office, deals with property tax which the government is preparing to abolish. Schedule D assesses the income tax due from self-employed people. And Schedule E (the Pay as You Earn or PAYE) deals with the largest numbers of tax-payers, those who work for an employer. Schedules B and C, whatever they may once have been, no longer seem to exist. In addition, behind separate closed doors, there are Technical Inspectors in offices of their own, who handle very special and complicated tax matters indeed.
My section leader and mentor is to be a Mr Spence, a fussy, pernickety, twitchy old chap, also fairly close to retirement. He’s the type of man many then would have called ‘a bit of an old woman’. There’s nothing very typically male about him. You’d be surprised to hear him swear, even with the mildest of expletives. He looks as though a pint and a sandwich in the pub at lunchtime, accompanied by a cigarette, might be just on the edge of sinful behaviour. Schedule E has three sections: Railway, Mr Spence’s section, looking after all the thousands of employees at Paddington Station and its satellite depots; Lancaster Gate, focused on that rather more interesting stretch of the Bayswater Road and the streets immediately north of it, stretching westward towards Notting Hill Gate; and Church, much of the rest of the area in all directions around the station, bounded on the east by the Edgware Road. My section, Railway, is the largest, with about a dozen Tax Officers, the other two having six or eight each.
Mr Spence installs me at a very temporary desk and takes me round the office, introducing me to all the hardened taxation cases who work there. Then to Lancaster Gate section to shake the hand of its leader, Mr Marshall, a man with an eye defect that requires the wearing of blue-tinted glasses, and finally to Church to meet Mr Palmer, an apparently younger type, certainly in personal style, who may be no more than about forty-five to fifty. At this stage of my life, and for many years later, I seem to think that practically everyone I meet is bound to be older than me. I think this perception stayed with me into my fifties. Spence makes it clear to people that I won’t be here for very long because I’m waiting for my National Service call-up instructions which should come through within a few months. This generates in everyone I’m introduced to a feeble witticism about the Army, at which I smile politely. Then it’s down to the Schedule D office to meet their chief, Mr Press. He’s probably under forty, clearly a bachelor pipe-smoking type, has an evident sense of humour and wears the classic handlebar moustache of one who did wartime service in the RAF. He hopes I’ll be going into the RAF and I’m able to tell him that that’s precisely what they seem to have in mind for me. The atmosphere in his section feels immediately as though it would be rather more fun working there than in either of the others I’ve seen.
Odd job man
As I’m an extremely temporary person, they’re not launching me onto my official training programme but, instead, will give me various relatively menial tasks, making myself useful until I have to join up. My first job is to sit with, and help, an elderly, kindly man named Bert who also works in the kitchens at the Park Lane Hotel on evening shifts. As I discover then, and in later years, the lower reaches of the Civil Service are packed with people whose job isn’t a major part of their whole life. They take on quite trivial, undemanding tasks at moderate pay, seeing them, not as a stage in a career, but simply as the means of funding other, more fulfilling activities. They don’t seem to mind not being stretched for hours on end during the working day as long as they can afford to do the things they want to do outside work. They indulge in a huge variety of hobbies; they become classical music specialists, attending concerts frequently; they make things; they collect things; they sing in a choir or walk the South Downs at weekends.
Bert looks after ‘Movements’ for the Railway section and he introduces me to its relatively few mysteries. When an employee changes jobs and goes to work for someone outside a Tax District’s boundaries, that’s called a Movement, and their file must follow them to their new District. So Bert’s job fundamentally boils down to sending files to other Districts, and receiving files from them. One of the thousands of special forms spawned by a bureaucracy like this goes with the file. The main Movement form, whose number I can’t recall, is yellow. During the course of the working day, all this stuff passes beneath Mr Spence’s sharp eye to check the details before the whole thing is despatched. During my first week, he gently chastises me for showing one form’s destination as ‘Marylebone’ District – which is what everyone, including him, calls it – when its proper official title is ‘St Marylebone’.
I’m given to Bert to help him clear his backlog. Once he’s more or less up-to-date again, I have a new job, arguably not as interesting as Movements. We’re approaching the end of the tax year, the magic date of 5th April, when the Tax Deduction Cards (TDCs) must be written out and sent to the employers for every single employee we know about. There are two types of TDC: the smaller, square one, numbered P9, and the larger rectangular P11. Each Tax Officer in the section has a large drawer in their desk, specially designed for the job, containing hundreds of Control Cards, called their Allocation. These ‘concards’ hold all the important information about each individual employee’s tax liability, allowances and assessments of recent years. I have to write a TDC for every single one. As Railway section only deals with a single employer, British Railways at Paddington Station, only one type of TDC is used, so I move from desk to desk, filling them in at high speed.
One morning, Mr Marshall of Lancaster Gate section negotiates with Mr Spence for some of my time because he’s short-staffed and wants the TDCs done without distracting his people from other, more important work. In this section, each person’s allocation contains dozens or hundreds of different employers. Experienced hands know that certain employers traditionally prefer, for whatever reasons, the P9 and others the P11. I am not aware of this, and am not told about it. Because they’ve been around for years, most of the concards show one or other of the form numbers on the front but have never been changed as the cards have moved from one employer to another. The result is that many employers’ concards show a mixture of the two. Unaware, I follow what’s written on each card, producing batches of mixed TDCs. But it’s a couple of days before anyone looks at what I’m doing and realises that a good deal of my time has been wasted. There’s one of those whispered conversations between Mr Marshall and the Tax Officer who spotted it, eyes looking over in my direction, the questioning of assumptions about what I might or couldn’t possibly have known, and the conclusion finally drawn in my favour, that I was given the task without being told this rather obvious and important procedural point. The wrong ones are ditched and I write out the correct cards to replace them.
In the process, I’m learning some of the terminology that all institutions generate and take for granted that everyone knows and understands. I hear ‘Where’s that DTR case I was looking for?’ ‘This one can go on BF for three weeks.’ ‘PA that one when you’ve finished with it.’ ‘When’s the 5CI?’ ‘I’m not supposed to deal with that. It’s H-work. Pass it up to Spence.’ ‘Have you given them their EIR?’ And, so often heard at the enquiry counter: ‘Have you brought your P45?’ It doesn’t matter now what those things stand for. They soon become part of the currency of interpersonal communication. At the beginning, however, very few colleagues seem to appreciate that you’ve never heard of the wretched things before in your entire life.
To help people unravel and solve arcane taxation issues, there are shelves of heavy, doom-laden bound volumes containing the Finance Acts and the detailed interpretations and irrevocable procedures derived from them. The language of the Acts is impenetrable and that of the procedural instructions only slightly less so. It begins to strike me, quite early on, that this may not be the job for me. It’s a case of understanding a lot of dull, dense principles and, more often than otherwise, translating them into mathematical results, to determine people’s tax liabilities. I’m not at all sure that I have the kind of mind for this, and, as I remind myself, it isn’t what I chose for myself. I’m consoled by the notion that, after two years of mind widening experiences during National Service, I probably won’t come back into the Inland Revenue.
Colleagues and characters
Wherever you are, some individuals always stand out, not necessarily for the best reasons. On the very first day, Mr Spence warns me about a bloke in the office called Edmonds. This rather slimy character was to be strictly avoided because he would try and cadge cigarettes and, before long, would ask you to lend him money. Last Christmas Eve, apparently, he touted himself in the appropriate Oxford Street shops, telling them that his wife had just had twins – true - and that this would be good seasonal publicity for them in the evening papers, whom he’d contacted, if they gave him suitable goods, such as a new pram, baby clothes and so on. Later, when cadging a cigarette from me, he shows me the newspaper cutting, complete with photograph of him, his wife, the twins and an enormous pram donated by Selfridges or someone similar. True to form, he later asks me for some money and I have to decline.
Spence also warns me not to lend money to Hilda, a clerical officer who smokes continuously, or to Jock Campbell, who drinks continuously. Hilda is a bright and breezy cheerfully naïve woman from the East End, whom everybody likes, except for Mr Spence. She works alongside the admin clerk, an Irishman called Dennis McCarthy who gives the Guinness a good bashing in the pub opposite the office every lunchtime. I upset him seriously one afternoon when he’s talking proudly about George Bernard Shaw. I’m currently being delighted by the early Harold Pinter, whose work couldn’t be more different, and have little time for his man’s long and unnatural speeches. I express my view rather stridently and probably with some of the arrogance of youth, and McCarthy blows his top about this unformed, wet-behind-the-ears person with no life experience whatsoever daring to criticise his idol. It soon transpires that he’d never heard of Pinter, so I feel vindicated.
Jock is a very friendly clerical officer who gravitates towards me and other younger staff because we’re more likely to speak his language than what he calls the ‘stuffed shirts’ in the office. Jock is another of those quite intelligent people who chose to do a relatively basic task without very little responsibility attached – and he is extremely efficient - because they prefer other ways of using their personal talents. His talent is drinking and I later discover that he shares a flat with Bert, for whom I’ve done some Movements work earlier on. Bert had told me that Jock wasn’t an alcoholic. He just liked to drink a great deal, all the time. Every Christmas he takes the long train journey home to Scotland, drinking all the way. He has a week’s leave and is always scheduled to travel back on New Year’s Day. It seems he very rarely gets back to the office on time, and people often wonder if he will ever be seen again, Spence probably hoping that he won’t. He drinks all the way back as well, but, despite the doom-mongers, always turns up in the end, sacrificing an extra day or two’s annual leave in the process.
Eighteen months later, on the afternoon when I’m leaving the Tax Office forever, Jock comes up to me and suggests that we go for a drink at about three in the afternoon to a place he knows where you can drink all afternoon. This is Judy’s Club, a large room somewhere off Baker Street, not far away. In these days, a place like this is an oasis in a desert of closed pubs which had shut their doors at 3.00 pm at the latest and wouldn’t be opening again until five thirty. I say goodbye to everyone and leave. The proprietor of Judy’s is a brassy, dyed-blonde, leathery complexioned woman falling out of the front of her dress, who calls everyone ‘Darling’, and wants us all to know that she’s just back from watching tennis at Wimbledon. Jock decides we will drink bottled White Shield Worthington with a whisky chaser. This is a dangerous combination for the uninitiated and we stick to it for what seems like, and probably is, hours. I think Jock must be drinking two of each to my one. At a late stage, Jock asks me to lend him a fiver. It’s a significant sum to me at this time, but, as he has bought far more drinks than I have, I can’t refuse. I hand it over, expecting that this is the last I will ever see of it, or of him. ‘Gie me yer address, an’ I’ll send it registered’. I do, and he did. The fiver comes back a couple of days later in a registered envelope. I never see or hear of Jock again.
A few of the people working in the Railway section still linger in my mind. Mr Bond, sitting one desk away from Spence, wears a dark suit, is said to be extremely good at the job and should be doing Spence’s, comes from the north of England somewhere and has a dry wit. It’s said that he’d been in a Japanese POW camp during the war but would never say anything about it. David Musgrave is gay (so is Bert, as it transpires) though the term itself doesn’t yet exist. He talks endlessly to a woman called Dorothy about recipes, the price of foodstuffs and interior decorating colour schemes. Dorothy needs no encouragement and would talk incessantly on any subject to anyone, most of it complete rubbish. Musgrave is the first homosexual I’ve come across at close quarters and it’s a long time before it even registers with me.
The real character on the section is Bill Neate, an old man who moves rather like a robot, giving out signals that whatever is involved, he is not to be hurried and certainly not flustered by anything or anyone. He wears a long black overcoat and a sort of stove-pipe hat - in all respects, thoroughly Dickensian. He’s funny in the office but his best performance is when he goes to the enquiries counter to see a tax-payer. The office goes quiet to listen to the exchanges between an often angry, perhaps far from sober, Irish employee of Paddington Station. They usually turn up in the afternoon, often with a mate, having fortified themselves with the dark fluid at lunchtime. Bill Neate has answered every conceivable query and jumped every hurdle during his long career. He is absolutely unflappable, the coolest man in the Inland Revenue, and leads his clients surely and steadily down the most complicated logical pathways imaginable. Of course, they get lost on the way, disagree with his conclusion that the office is correct and they are wrong, and it all begins again.
One favourite expression he inserts at a critical stage of the discussion is ‘All right, I’ll agree that . . .’ This makes them think they’ve gained a point or two but, no sooner has he said it, than he’s bamboozling them again with tax terminology of the most esoteric nature. Bill’s voice is strong, deep, gritty, clear and measured. He knows everyone is listening in and being highly entertained, and, when it’s all over, he walks slowly back to his desk, the file tucked firmly under his arm, saying nothing but wearing a satisfied smile, indicating that he’s achieved yet another complete and unconditional victory. No one ever applauds but just gets on with their work, perhaps exchanging a smile with him. Not everyone relishes an encounter at the counter as much as he does, and he’ll volunteer to deal with your awkward customer if you feel unconfident, or even sidle up and take over the case when he thinks you might be losing control of it.
Two blokes are more or less my own age. One is Maurice Taylor from Lowestoft: ‘Call me Mo’, something I find myself always reluctant to do when invited. He’s a year or two older than me at the most and has a fiancée back home on the east coast about whom he talks a great deal. He reads the Daily Telegraph on his tube journey every morning and yet, when questioned about something in the news, always seems to know nothing about it. He’s a harmless character but gradually becomes increasingly annoying because he’s always blurting things out before thinking them through. The office has an arrangement with the nearby British Council for our staff to use their canteen for lunch. Spence, Mo and I walk round there pretty well every day, and pretty well every day Spence has to pick Mo up over some inaccuracy that I usually can’t be bothered to deal with. This rather ill-assorted trio is soon augmented and enlivened by the arrival from the north-west of Graham Blackett, about 24 or 25, with a fiancée called Erica back home, about whom he talks a great deal. Paddington Office is his first posting after National Service so he’s much more of a man of the world than we are. His is a much more robust take on life than poor old Mo’s. He attacks the blurtings for all he is worth, tests Mo daily on his knowledge of current affairs and thinks having lunch with Mr Spence is a pretty limp and feeble way of going on. One day, en route for the BC canteen, Spence stops to pick up a useful pin that he’s spotted on the pavement. Blackett says nothing at the time but tells me later that is the end of it. He’ll have to make different arrangements for lunch. Somehow, he and I contrive an alternative system and, with hardly a word being said, Mr Spence is left with Mo.
Learning some of the ropes
Following a farcically superficial eye test at Paddington General, I’m given Medical Grade 4 and told that HM Forces will manage without me. This means the office now has to treat me as a permanent staff, give me an allocation of taxpayers to work on, and begin my training programme to become a fully-fledged Tax Officer (Higher Grade). A young bloke in Church section is going to be leaving soon so I’m put there with the five others to start learning the job for real. Olly Palmer the section leader soon moves on somewhere else himself and is replaced by Mr Press, the man from the RAF, from Schedule D. The others are John McQuaid, the filing clerk and general duties person, Vic Nice, an old war veteran on Movements, Jock Campbell and Tax Officers Mr Fenwick, Jack Sykes and Dorothy Elston.
Old Vic is hard of hearing, very hard of seeing and writes with something of a tremble. He knows what he’s doing but has some difficulty doing it because of these physical limitations. They say it’s all the result of being in the war, and doubtless is. At least he’s sufficiently able and competent enough to do the job, which must be gratifying, to say the least. Dorothy is a big young woman, probably in her very late twenties or very early thirties, not unattractive, with the largest bosom I’ve ever been that close to in my life. It is truly remarkable and attracts my gaze frequently, most especially when she wears a dress or blouse with a slightly lower than usual front. It takes very little to reveal the top of her cleavage, which appears not far below her Adam’s apple. McCarthy refers to her physique as ‘formidable’, partly because of this marvellous frontage and partly because it’s so well balanced by an equally substantial arrangement at the rear. Mac himself, short and stocky, would have provided a convenient shelf for her breasts if she had chosen to rest them on his head.
Everyone always addresses Mr Fenwick as Mr Fenwick. He’s an old hand of tremendous tax experience, probably in his very late fifties, strict, stern and very buttoned up. While he never says anything about it directly to me, and generally gets on with me well enough, he thoroughly resents inexperienced whipper-snappers like me coming in with our A-levels and being put on the Executive Officer level, a position he has doubtless aspired to during his long career but will probably never reach now before retirement. I hear him on this subject periodically, talking across the top of his desk to Jack Sykes. Jack sits back-to-back with me, says very little during these conversations but probably responds more with suitable facial expressions and quiet grunts. Fenwick strikes me now, in many ways, as a disappointed man, and the Civil Service has always been full of such people. He takes very little stick from the taxpayers, and certainly doesn’t play with them in the way that Bill Neate so enjoys. Fenwick gives them the straight, no nonsense treatment and never cracks a smile. The office telephone, for which we have to ask authorisation to use for outgoing calls, stands on a small table beside his desk. He’s quite prepared to answer it as he is the nearest - except at lunchtime. He never goes out for lunch but sits at his desk, reading the daily paper and eating his sandwiches. If the phone rings during his lunch break, he simply ignores it, even if everyone else in the room is busy on something else. If anyone dares to ask him to take the call, he’ll reply ‘I’m at lunch’. He won’t budge. His other annoying behaviour is that, despite Dorothy’s recent marriage, he insists on always addressing her as ‘Miss – ‘, using her maiden name.
Jack Sykes becomes something of a friend for a while, and I keep in touch with him on and off for a few years after I’ve left the office. He’s in his forties, from the north, unmarried, has a war service past that he never speaks of, and lives off Queensway, Bayswater with his younger sister. He always has a wallet full of tickets for forthcoming musical shows in the West End, and has a network of similarly inclined friends. He’s helpful, friendly, witty, and strict with awkward taxpayers. His close buddy in the office is Les Fisher in Lancaster Gate section, a chubby, jokey character with whom Jack goes to lunch at the BC, and has a couple of pints on Friday lunchtimes. I’m very pleased to join them and follow their regime, along with Graham Blackett. We use the Barley Mow in Duke Street, at the time, like so many central London pubs, a Watneys house. It’s a welcoming place to be in and it occasionally happens that, having gone out for a 12 to 1 pm lunch break, you can find yourself on the Friday in the Barley Mow, very much wanting to carry on after 1 pm. You are perfectly entitled, without having given any prior notice, to telephone Mac, who looks after the annual leave records, and ask him to book you down for a half-day’s leave, there and then. This means you continue in the pub until 3 pm and then go wherever your instincts take you. We don’t do this very often, but it is entirely permissible and within your employment terms and conditions.
A notable example is the day of Mr Tapper’s retirement with almost the whole office crammed into the Barley Mow. Jack, Les, Blackett and I – and a few others – have already booked a half day’s leave this morning so are determined to enjoy every moment, and every pint of beer we can get down. We all get there early, have a good allocation, go unsteadily back for the farewell speeches and finally disperse in our different directions. I return to Holland Park for a much-needed lie down, flaked out, flat out on my bed. The serious complication is that the retirement party is on the March payday, meaning that the usual monthly binge is due: mixed grill at the Ritz, Shepherds Bush and the rest of the evening in The Mitre. I’ve already had enough beer for one day but, thinking that a good sleep will sober me up, am mistakenly all ready to get going again. We follow the established routine, though don’t manage to see it through to closing time. John Thompson rightly thinks I need to be got home. More or less supported on either side on the walk home, I apparently break free and stumble, raving, into the main hostel where people are watching TV. I spot our room-mate Trevor among them – he never goes to the pub, mainly because he’s still under 18 (it matters much more in these days) - and shout greetings to him in a confused and appallingly loud way, again and again. All eyes are on me, someone says ‘Get him out of here’ and John and another grab me by each arm and march me out and up the road. Next morning, they think it would be a good idea for me to apologise to a few of the more ‘senior’ hostel residents. I go round and do so, with exceeding sheepishness. They’re all very understanding, recognising the taxing situation I’d got myself into, many knowing they might easily have done exactly the same themselves, and probably had done. Their real fear is that my yelling could have attracted Miss Thornborough’s attention and brought down upon us all untold miseries and new, more demanding regulations about general behaviour in the hostel.
Les Fisher is arguably the only real human being with a sense of humour on the Lancaster Gate section. The only other two people I can recall are Marshall, the section head and his number two, Miss Lansdell. These two are constantly in dispute with one another over finer points of the mysteries of income tax and, as part of their working relationship, on most other topics as well. In line with the prevailing protocol, the head of section and his or her subordinates address one another formally, never using first names, even if they have known one another and worked together for decades. So these arguments go back and forth, with Marshall saying ‘But, listen, Miss Landsdell . . .’ to which she might reply ‘What I mean, Mr Marshall, is this.’ Les listens in and interpolates witty asides which they ignore. One of his favourite little gags is telephoning one of his employers, the Independent Order of Foresters, of whom he always asks when the switchboard girl answers: ‘Order of Foresters? Got any spare trees?’ He has something similar for other employers and reckons, probably with justification, that you’d lose your marbles in this job if you failed to see the funny side, or failed to create a funny side where none was immediately apparent. Men like Marshall and Spence noticeably feel that his approach is too flippant, but he’s extremely good at his job and that, in the end, is always what matters. It is certainly true of many of the older and case-wearied colleagues that, while they may still be hanging onto their marbles, their general outlook on life does tend to be more sombre than necessary.
Being good at the job is not the forte of the other member of Church section, a strange character called Cooke. He’s around forty, tall, spindly and gangly, who seems to spend the absolute minimum of his working day actually at his desk in the office. No one ever knows where he is. He’ll get up from his chair, announce to the room in general that he’s going down to the filing room, and then not be seen for an hour or more. I come across him several times when I go out to the lavatory, washing his hair at one of the hand basins. In fact, his hair washing may be some kind of compulsive behaviour. ‘Where’s Cooke?’ someone says. Spence comes into our office, asking this question. Mr Press looks up from his work and asks it. Mr Fenwick asks it when taking a call from one of Cooke’s taxpayers. He isn’t having a crafty drink somewhere, and he probably hasn’t left the building. Hair washing in working time has become something of a frequent habit and he’s eventually tracked down one day and disciplined. He once claims to me that he’s devised an entirely alternative method of dealing with income tax matters, which he thinks is so good that he’ll put it into practice on his own allocation. Presumably he was disciplined over this as well. I do recall the climactic afternoon when Cooke is told sotto voce, with everyone trying to hear what’s being said, that the disciplinary procedures have been fully exhausted and that he’ll be receiving his notice in writing. He walks out, smarting and chuntering, never to be seen again. He may well be one of the people Les Fisher has in mind, who have lost their marbles through an inadequate sense of humour.
Seasonal memory
My first Christmas while working in central London has stayed with me. By now, John and I have moved to Finsbury Park. The office dinner dance, my first such event, is to be held, of all places, in the Long Room at Lords Cricket Ground. For those who worship the game, this is the holy of holies, and there are those who’d give their eye teeth to have a look inside it. In later years, I’ve mentioned my visit there to such people, several of whom considered my presence there to be an utter blasphemy or, at least, a complete waste of the occasion. All I recall of the room is famous old cricket bats hanging on the walls along with photographs of famous old cricketers and cricket teams. We have a good evening there, and I win a bottle of Scotch in the raffle, much to McCarthy’s disgust: ‘He wouldn’t know what to do with it’.
It’s the earlier part of the evening before the event that I enjoy most. Jack Sykes and I have arranged to meet at Marble Arch to walk up to one of the great mansion blocks in Maida Vale to rendezvous with Musgrave before going on to the party. I’ve never seen the Christmas lights in the West End before so come in early to walk around the Piccadilly area and soak up the romance of it all. The main lights up Regent Street are large lanterns in different colours, the shop window displays sparkle and shimmer, people jostle around on the pavements while the double-deckers inch their way up and down the jammed street. The dry crispness of the evening adds to the atmosphere, and I love it. I walk slowly up to Oxford Circus, then along Oxford Street where the lighting theme is different and the pavements even more crowded. I remember Jack Sykes saying to me ‘Oh, Oxford Street, what a dump. It’s becoming more like a market every day.’ That’s in 1958: people had been saying it long before then and have been saying it ever since. They say it because it’s true, and it’s probably never been more like a market than it is today. I’m not bothered by that. The lights and the people and the season absorb me. In my complete anonymity, I just gaze at everything and soak it up. I feel comfortable and happy.
Musgrave lives in a sumptuous flat belonging to an impeccable gay character called Bernard who clearly had an eye, and the necessary supplies of money, for an array of serious objets d’art, all set in rooms of exquisite decoration and furnishing. There are signs of wealth around the place that I could never have imagined. Bernard, dressed in the smoothest of light grey three-piece suits, flamboyant silk tie, long cigarette holder held between delicate, immaculate fingers, offers us drinks in glittering cut glass, possibly one of my first ever gin and tonics. The quality of everything, the exaggerated campness of Bernard’s style of behaviour and standard of living – Musgrave wasn’t a man for style at all – astound me. I feel clumsy, awkward and completely out of place. I keep sneaking a look to see how Jack’s doing, but he can handle it. He has rather more years of experience to draw on. While these surroundings in no way resemble his own, he is worldly enough to know what to do and what to say. There’s still a tremendous lot for me to learn.
Apart from the social sphere, much of my learning time is spent trying to master the intricacies of the income tax system. I’ve embarked on a three-year training programme, involving periodic courses at the Stanmore training centre and working through piles of complicated exercises which are marked and discussed by our new Clerical Inspector, a very bright young bloke called Bachelor. As time passes, I become increasingly worried about the progress I believe I’m not making. It isn’t just the working with figures all the time. It’s the crushingly unstimulating details of the principles involved, which don’t, and can’t, allow for any imagination, deviation or lack of precision. All must be done strictly ‘by the book’ and my understanding of the book is frequently revealed to be inadequate. There is nothing in it that I could enjoy. And so, after a year or so, I realise I have to look into jobs elsewhere.
Situations vacant
John Thompson works on the other side of Oxford Street in the Wigmore Street post office. Walking over to meet him one evening, I notice a smallish new building has been completed on the corner with Portman Square, of very modern design, with whole floors of coloured plate glass, and several large rubber plants in the entrance hall. It’s an office block for the firm 3M, The Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. Looking at the block from the outside, I think I’d like to work in there, so write them a letter asking to be interviewed for a job in, perhaps, personnel or something similar. In today’s more robust commercial climate, that letter would go straight into the bin. In 1959 things are less ruthless. I’m invited for a conversation with a personnel manager where I explain my frustrations and wonder whether they might have something I would feel better suited to. It becomes clear that they don’t, that I have very little to offer them, and that is eventually the end of that. Nevertheless, the experience encourages me to pursue Situations Vacant more purposefully.
I recall that, after I’d failed to get into university, my father explored a number of alternatives, including the Junior Management Training Scheme at Unilever. I apply and am invited for an interview. A pretty highly placed personnel manager with an unmistakable public school accent and impeccable suit sits behind a gigantic desk in a large upholstered swivel chair. Had I known, the distinctive design of his tie is probably sending me serious signals which I am naturally unable to decode. We are in a huge dark wood-panelled room right on the upper front of Unilever House. They are mainly looking for recent graduates but are prepared to look at someone like me with three A-levels and some respectable work experience. The killer question is ‘Would you consider yourself to be an ambitious person?’ to which I, aged about 20, reply in all honesty ‘No, I don’t really think so.’ The preferred reply may well be on the lines of ‘Yes, very, and, if necessary, I’ll walk over anyone’s face who gets in my way to the top.’ Strictly speaking, this is probably the end of the interview proper.
However, my ex-public school/Oxbridge interlocutor says that there are always clerical vacancies somewhere in the massive Unilever empire in London, and, if I agree, he will certainly recommend me for one from where I can work my way up the company’s promotion hierarchy at a gentler pace than the three-year fast-track to the stars embodied in the Junior Management Scheme. (In the event, the pace certainly is gentler, and I reach the Assistant Manager level after some eight years). Taking up his suggestion will get me out of the Inland Revenue and I gratefully accept. He immediately makes a couple of phone calls, and produces another interview. With his lofty recommendation behind me, which I hear him giving during the second conversation, the next stage is not so much a selection procedure as a confirmation. I have only to walk over to another office at the back of the building to meet a unique character Frank Gilder, who is to become my new boss. He makes it quite clear, as soon as I walk in, that a job is mine if I want it. I do.
Gilder is a small man in a grey suit with a seriously and obviously painfully bent back, nearing retirement after a lifetime in the service, at home and abroad, of the United Africa Company (UAC), then the largest subsidiary company in the Unilever group worldwide. He is in charge of a very large clerical department and runs a tight ship. With frequent reference to a massive map of Africa on the wall behind his desk, he launches into a summarised history of the colonisation of the continent, details of the enormous distances involved there, and the company’s part in trade and development. Now this does sound interesting, exciting too, far from the dreariness of the procedural manuals of the Inland Revenue. Gilder has spent the larger part of his career working all over Africa and hints that he’d only come home because of concerns about his health (‘the bloody back, Brown, among other things’). His story is fascinating and I fall for him. Eventually we reach a point where the reminiscing had to stop. ‘I think it’s time you saw the buggers at work, Brown. I won’t come with you. I always seem to put the fear of God up them when I enter the office.’ He telephones one of the section leaders ‘Send Wheeler along, will you?’ He is there in a flash, almost saluting, and he shows me the vast open-plan offices and all the bits of paper they have to process. Gilder’s final words to me as I leave him: ‘One of these people will be leaving the office at the end of June. You can start on July the first. Let them know in Personnel after Wheeler’s finished with you.’
Thus, in the summer of 1959, I am able to resign from a job for the first time. Having been there merely eighteen months, I fortunately don’t qualify for any farewell ceremony. I have a pint or two at lunchtime with Jack, Les and Blackett in the Barley Mow, then go round the office saying Goodbye to various individuals who wish me, as people do in such circumstances, All the Best. Then I’m off with Jock to Judy’s Club. The following morning I begin my new job with the biggest hangover of my entire life to date.