Finding Feet in the Smoke| Office Types

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The new job

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I’d written to my Old Man about intending to leave the Inland Revenue. While profoundly disappointed over my earlier failure to get a University place, he’d put immense time and effort into looking for alternative directions for me. His own employment history during the 1920s and 30s, through the General Strike and the Depression, had shown him the value of a Civil Service career. It was a totally secure job for life, even if promotion might be slow and salary only very moderate. I imagined he might think I was taking an unnecessary risk in abandoning that safety net and jumping into the possibly less certain world of commerce. What I told him impressed him, and he replied warmly and positively, philosophising a bit about the way good decisions are made.

He reassured me – and himself, no doubt - that something the size of Unilever couldn’t be much less safe than the Civil Service. Following his death in 1990, I discovered the carbon copy of this key father-to-son letter among his papers in the folder marked ‘G. M. Brown’, kept in his old desk in the flat in Cambridge. I hadn’t kept the original but recognised it immediately. I didn’t read it closely on this occasion, intending to do so again in the future. Ten or more years after he’d died, I discovered that, without a word and for undisclosed reasons, my mother had thrown out almost all the contents of that desk. The folder labelled with my name was still there, but now completely empty. Its contents had been papers unique to me but of low importance otherwise, even, as I recall, including the invoice for the purchase of my first school cap

Unilever House EC4 (once the De Kuyzer’s Hotel) is the imposing curved stone-faced building on the northwest corner of Blackfriars Bridge, right at the southern edge of the City of London. With Blackfriars Station opposite, it commands the junction of New Bridge Street, on the line of the old Fleet River, with the Victoria Embankment running west along the Thames to Charing Cross and Westminster. Queen Victoria Street runs east beneath the railway bridge into the very heart of the City. Unilever House, dominating the bridge and facing down-river to confront continental attackers (London could have done with it during the 17th century Dutch Wars) speaks of the power of industry, commerce and international trade, and of the might of money, a grand building with a grand entrance in the old style. The double swing doors at the front entrance were huge and heavy when I walked so deliberately through them on my first day, wanting all of London who may be watching to see me going in at 8.30 am on 1st July 1959. After a week or two, the doors had lost their magic and I used the side entrance every day as a matter of course, like everyone else, to show that I belonged, one of the seasoned thousands of employees working there and in the several connected buildings behind.

The open plan office I’d been shown was much more old-fashioned than the description suggests. Contemporary open offices are designed on ergonomic and acoustic principles, with sensitive attention to lighting, potted plants, and other visual elements, the positioning of computer screens and awareness of personal space issues. This office was simply a vast rectangular hall with two rows of square section pillars running down it, an open corridor on one side and a row of windows on the other. It was three floors up on the front curve of the building, so the lucky few with a window desk could relieve the tedium of their repetitive clerical procedures by gazing over to the south side of the river, where Southwark began and Blackfriars Road, SE1 led eventually to St George’s Circus and the Elephant and Castle beyond. Groups of desks in rows, each with a section leader behind a slightly larger desk, ran the length of this paper-processing emporium. Men and women of every age from sixteen to sixty-plus sat behind them, like so many examination candidates, bent over heaps of paper, scrutinising them and making marks on them, moving them eventually from one wire basket to another. Overalled women moved through the office periodically, bringing in more papers and taking others away, for filing or movement to sections or departments elsewhere.

The descriptive cliché ‘Kafkaesque’ is inescapable. So is ‘Dickensian’. And so is ‘Orwellian’, as the wage slaves in the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four re-process the latest editions of the newspapers, dropping fragments of the Truth down the memory hole.  And, though a much more humane expression of the crushing and pointless processing of dull data (which, as later years showed, was not really required by anyone, and was eventually abolished), it has its very direct parallels with Kafka’s two great novels of, among other things, the life-numbing power of mindless bureaucracy. It didn’t take long for worrying questions to flit through my mind. Had I made the awful mistake of moving from one set of uninteresting, meaningless operations to another? Worse, were the demands on my intellect and interest here rather less than those recently made by the Inland Revenue? Too late now, but the answers were probably rather close to ‘Yes’. At the same time I was also sufficiently convinced that I could never have applied myself properly to the demands of the tax office, and had been right to leave it. Plus, a worldwide concern as large as Unilever should offer me a range of opportunities for advancement in due course.

I reported to Mr Sommerville, a short, rounded Liverpudlian and supreme manager of the several sections that worked in this hall as well as others elsewhere on this same floor. In the hierarchy, he was the next stop before Mr Gilder. He’d already arranged where I was to work and there were only two things he wanted to tell me. One: I was on Clerical Grade L, a form of life below which nothing very much existed. In fact, people who did filing and carried folders of papers from one place to another were on Grade M, even Grade N. During my entire career there, I was told my current salary each Christmas but never given any indication of where that figure might be on a scale. They knew, but thought it unnecessary for us to know. The second thing was that my leave entitlement was two weeks per annum plus public holidays. By starting work on July 1st, he told me, I’d passed the halfway mark in the year, by one day, and so wasn’t allowed any leave for the remainder of the year. This contradicted the arrangement I’d struck earlier during my interview with the Unilever personnel manager, who said I would have one week’s leave regardless. Sommerville rejected this pompously from behind his enormous desk, so there I was, on the first day in my new job with one of the biggest multinational companies in the entire world, gravely hungover as it happened, telephoning for an urgent appointment with Mr Easton of Personnel to confirm what we’d agreed. He saw me immediately and validated my understanding. Thus Sommerville, already informed by telephone before I’d returned, was squashed and had received a measure of the sort of person he was dealing with. Doubtless marking me down as a troublemaker, he retired soon afterwards, and, not ever needing to, we probably never exchanged another word.

I’d joined the United Africa Company (UAC) in its Statistics Department. Goods were ordered on suppliers theoretically anywhere in the world, invoiced to us and shipped through us or our agents to all the different company outlets in Africa. Most of them were in what they then called British East and West Africa; in other parts of the rapidly declining Empire; in former French territories and in a few places in the Near and Middle East. The huge majority of the clerks in the department had nothing whatsoever to do with ‘statistics’ as we might imagine them, except that the values of the goods they were processing through their paperwork were collated monthly and sent around the company for budgetary control purposes. All the commodities possible to export to Africa were grouped in different divisions, such as Mechanical and Electrical, Motors, Drugs (meaning medical supplies as well as soap and lipstick), Hardware, Provisions and so on. I was allocated to a section in the Technical division, where the goods being shipped included Caterpillar Tractors, Electrolux fridges and Vono beds, things made in Britain, Japan, America, Germany and elsewhere - and all the spare parts for them.

Now secure in my holiday entitlement, I sat beside the section leader, Harry Cornwell – to me, Mr Cornwell, then the standard title of anyone senior to yourself – one of Sommerville’s immediate subordinates. He was one of several in these offices, men a bit too old or possibly not fit enough to have been in the war. They’d risen by default to positions of modest seniority while the men who should have been in those positions were in the Forces and, for various reasons, hadn’t returned to the jobs they’d left. Cornwell’s introduction to the work I was to do was a model of concision that left me as uninformed at the end as I was at the beginning. He’d assembled a few different bits of paper on his desk and told me what they were. Holding a sheet of flimsy paper, he said ‘That’s an indent. They come in from the Coast. This is an urgent one, on airmail paper.’ (Immediate questions that I didn’t ask: What is an indent for? What do we do with it? What exactly do you mean by ‘the Coast’?) Pointing at a sheet of coloured paper, he said ‘That’s an order. It’s a different colour for each month.’ It was rather like hearing the esoteric terms like TDC, P1 and CI5 at the Tax Office for the first time. Then ‘This is a supplier’s invoice. We check them here.’ Looking over his shoulder to one of the other sections, ‘They do the Coast invoicing over there.’ Coast invoicing? Whatever does all this mean? Then, at last, my job: ‘You’ll be doing the Figures, (What are the Figures?) but you may have to do some invoice checking too. So you’ll need this black biro.’ I looked round at the other clerks, all checking invoices, and shuddered. He reached inside his desk drawer, withdrew a packet of ballpoint pen refills and handed me one. ‘Bring it back to me when you think it’s finished, I’ll check it and issue a new one.’ Finally, he leant across his desk to the young bloke sitting opposite. ‘Richardson, this is Mr Brown. Teach him all you know.’ That was it, my induction training. In the event, and immensely to my relief, I never did have to check any invoices but in that bleary moment I seriously began to wonder how smart a move I’d made. Do any of you people realise, I thought, that only yesterday, with three A-levels under my belt, I was an Executive Officer in our world-renowned Civil Service, training to become a Tax Officer (Higher Grade) for the Board of Inland Revenue?

 The sweater wars

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Derek Richardson, a very pleasant character of my age though already married, had such a virulent crop of acne all over his lower jaw that shaving must have been seriously difficult, if not, at times, out of the question. His initials were ‘C.D.’ and, because of the acne, several in the office predictably referred to him as ‘Seedy’. He could handle this sort of thing. His sense of humour was sound and he gave as good as he got, often better. I was to work with him and gradually take over his job so that he could be moved to a slightly different one. Derek was something of a maverick and had no time for the old-fashioned conventions of office life laid down over the decades by people now at least in their late fifties. His most notable expression of this attitude was to wear, beneath his jacket, woollen sweaters, probably knitted by a loving family member in extremely bright, primary colours, instead of the almost universal white shirt and tie.

Vic Marsh, one of the stodgier, more unbending, of the old hands, was head of the Coast Invoicing section across the room. Based on the checked suppliers’ invoices, his clerks prepared final invoices for the goods being shipped to Africa. He dressed in a severe, black three-piece suit with a stiff detachable shirt collar, unmistakeably one of the Old School of office supervisors. While he didn’t write with a quill pen, Dickens could easily have placed him in one of his several business house scenarios. During the summer afternoon heat, some would remove their jackets. Seedy was usually among the first to do so. Marsh, like several others, was never known to take off his own jacket, no matter how high the temperature. It was ‘not done’, and, worse still, he didn’t approve of other people doing it. Most of all, he unreservedly disapproved of Seedy’s bright red, yellow, blue or green sweaters being even more on show than usual.

For Vic Marsh, this was strictly unacceptable behaviour. He complained to Cornwell about it, who passed it awkwardly on to the offender. Seedy ignored it and lit another cigarette. It became something of an issue particularly because, when the question was put, it turned out that quite a number, women as well as men, considered jacket removal to be less than dignified conduct in the well-run office of 1959. It smacked of disrespectful informality and made the place look untidy. Its singular lack of effect on the quality of your work was never mentioned. Was Sommerville brought into it? Should Mr Gilder be asked to give a ruling? Perhaps Seedy could be encouraged to wear a shirt and tie during the hot weather instead of his sweaters. At least, they thought, he should ask Cornwell’s permission before removing his jacket. All this just made Seedy more determined to follow his own instinct about his own clothes.

It seems unbelievable today to be writing about this, but it was a genuinely serious matter then, in a large pre-Sixties commercial institution in London, England. It became such an annoyance to Seedy that he eventually took the matter to his JCC representative who conducted an opinion survey throughout the building. This enabled some in the office, who would never say anything directly to Seedy about it, to voice their objections anonymously. The results were published in a substantial article in the Unilever house magazine, with people on both sides giving their opinions on this burning topic. The outcome was naturally inconclusive, like most issues referred to the JCC. It was left for each office to deal with such matters in its own way: Seedy continued exercising his right to wear his rebellious sweaters and Vic Marsh continued to exercise his right to glower silently at him across the room.

My early doubts about the job were justified. For most of each month it was dull, menial, repetitive work, bereft of any stimulation whatsoever. I recorded figures, caused pieces of paper to move from one place to another, and stapled some pieces of paper to other pieces. At the month end, I had to do The Figures, which did give me a sense of meaning and importance for a few days. It involved collating onto gigantic sheets of paper the values of orders and invoices from columns of figures that other people maintained day by day. When I’d got all my columns to balance, which sometimes required some fiddling to achieve, officially called ‘adjustments’ for which my forms had a special section, I passed the results to a mysterious figure called Alan who incorporated them into an even bigger table. All this was done manually, in our own handwriting, as was everything else in the office with the help of a few primitive mechanical adding machines. To operate these, you keyed in your figure, pushed a button across to plus or minus, keyed in another figure, pulled a handle and somehow the thing did the sum and printed it on a strip of paper.

Coast invoices were much more serious. They required complicated calculations, such as multiplying the cubic footage of a consignment by the freight rate charged by the shipping lines, or applying a rate for maritime insurance or buying commission according to the value of the goods. In these days, basic computers, such as made by NCR, which only the largest of firms could afford, worked on punched card or paper tape input and were big enough to fill half our office. It would be years before our ideally suited repetitive calculations could be processed electronically. But by then such petty procedures would have been abolished anyway.  Instead, the invoices were sent in folders to ‘Comps’, a department like a typing pool, where dozens of succulent girls sat working comptometers. This machine, electric but far from electronic, was a box the size of a large loaf of bread, with rows of numerical keys on top and a long narrow window for the answer. If the luscious girl needed to multiply £37,429 by 17, she put her fingers on the appropriate keys for that figure and then pressed them all down together seventeen times. If she didn’t have enough fingers for the sum involved, she would break the figure down into more manageable bits.

Among the archaic office equipment was the Dyeline process, used to make the necessary multiple copies of completed invoices. This very early precursor of the photocopier was a wet chemical process. An image of the document was transferred onto a heavy, coarse, purply coloured paper and passed through a mysterious, stinking fluid. Prolonged exposure to its fumes was not recommended and the job attracted rather less than succulent operatives. The copied papers were hung on lines over huge heaters to dry before they could be handled. You could see all this going on through a plate glass window, down in the depths of the building. It was like the reprographic department of Hell. Shorter-run copying employed hand operated spirit duplicators with Gestetner wax-coated stencils or ‘skins’. Presumably, at some distant time before any of these gadgets had been invented, when the British Empire and its works ruled much of the world, even larger armies of men and women simply copied out the invoices over and over again by hand, like monks copying their religious works. If you could stand the grinding tedium, and people did, there would always be work for you.

Sitting with Seedy while picking up my job, I would look across to Bill Winterburn, the old chap who sat next to Cornwell. Bill had been in India during the war and Seedy suggested one day that I should ask him what that experience had been like. ‘I will. It should be interesting.’ ‘It won’t be,’ said Seedy. ‘He’ll just tell you how hot it was. Nothing more. Try it.’ I leaned across to old Bill one morning at coffee time, asked him what it was like in India during the war, and he replied ‘Bloody hot, old boy, bloody hot.’ That was it. I’d often been looking at him in any case, especially during the period after lunch, because I’d realised that he spent a good deal of the afternoons fast asleep. He would lean slightly forward over his desk, in a posture suggesting concentration on the papers in front of him. His hand held the black biro just on or above the paper as though writing or about to write a figure in a column. His was one of the large, important sheets of columns that I had to work from for the monthly Figures and I saw on them a dribble of biro in several places, sliding down the columns, marking the moment when he’d nodded off in the middle of doing something – as though a one-legged spider had left its print while walking down the page. His desk was positioned behind one of the pillars, so that many people in the office around him couldn’t see him from the front at all. Cornwell sat immediately to his right so couldn’t see him directly. Cornwell probably knew anyway, and his own performance during the afternoons wasn’t exactly dynamic. The office jokers all knew about it and, from time to time, one of them, not infrequently Malcolm Windeatt, would drop a pile of folders on the floor near Bill’s desk. They landed flat with a loud smack. Bill would wake, blink and gaze vacantly around wondering what had woken him, and then, repositioning his writing hand slightly, drift back to sleep.

When I’d learned enough from Seedy, he was put onto his new job working on some different bits of paper, and I was in charge of The Figures. My desk was actually alongside Cornwell’s section, in Tommy Farr’s group, where they did exactly the same kind of work on different classes of technical goods. His number two was Nigel Maclening, who later became a close friend. Practically everyone in the office smoked and Carol Hill, a thin, chatty girl who lived near the Elephant and smoked like a trooper, sat in front of me and ran the weekly cigarettes raffle on Friday mornings. Behind me was a small mystery. All day I could hear almost non-stop chatting between a man and a woman who sat side by side. I would turn round sometimes when I heard the particularly high-pitched female voice, only to see that the woman, Dorothy, wasn’t speaking. Eventually I realised that it was the bloke, called Luckock, who had this unusually feminine voice (Dorothy’s was relatively deep). It was so pronounced that his gender was frequently mistaken when he spoke on the telephone. Spinster and married man with children, they gossiped all day, usually about completely trivial domestic matters, their scintillating discourse ranging over such topics as cleaning materials, recipes, the price of potatoes and the latest household gadgets. The work they did, like most of their colleagues, made such limited demands on their minds that they could do it competently without ever interrupting their engrossing conversations.

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Wisdom and respect

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Bert Martin, in his very quiet, completely self-effacing way, was the undisputed star of our section. As I discovered later, he’d joined the Unilever empire in Liverpool aged 14 as a boy-messenger. He retired from it at 65 as a Grade K clerk. We all attended his retirement ceremony held in the company canteen, where the Chairman, who had probably never set eyes on him before in his life, shook his hand and congratulated him on fifty-one years as a ‘loyal, reliable servant of the company’. It was the truth. There wasn’t much more you could say about Bert’s career with the firm. He’d kept his head down, done his job, never drawn any attention to himself and never once gone out of his way to pursue any kind of advancement or personal development. In those five decades of working for the same colossal employer, he’d progressed, largely by default, from messenger up to one grade above mine. His tiny physical form, dressed always in its dark blue, faintly chalk-striped, three-piece suit, represented, like Vic Marsh, an office ethos of Edwardian correctness. But, unlike Marsh, he would never have despised Seedy’s rebellious clothing policy and, while he would never have removed his own jacket, would never dream of objecting if others did. He minded his own business, kept his own counsel and gently encouraged those around him to think for themselves and work out their own destinies. We much younger clerical slaves, the serious ones as well as the jokers, all paid Bert maximum respect and valued his experience and advice. Harry Cornwell, who addressed us all simply by our surnames, always called him ‘Mr Martin’.

One of the things I noticed first was Bert’s early morning ritual, repeated daily without exception or deviation. Being that bit senior to the rest of us, he was entitled to a large blotter on his desk and a swivel chair with arms. Bert would remove his dark blue raincoat and hang it meticulously on the hook. He sat down at his desk, made sure the blotter was completely clear of office detritus like papers, pins or paper clips, and emptied onto it a precise quantity of Old Holborn rolling tobacco. He spread the tobacco thinly all over the blotter and then, with an idiosyncratic movement of the little finger of his right hand, flicked out the numerous bits of stalk, leaving himself with pure tobacco. He gathered the stalky bits together and dropped them into his waste paper bin. Finally, he rolled the exact number of cigarettes that long experience told him he would smoke during the working day. It wasn’t very many, because Bert rolled an extremely thin fag which he frequently allowed to go out. It was absolutely out of the question for Bert to begin his day’s work, or to accept any instructions, until the full quota had been rolled and stored in his special cigarette tin. Like many others, he arrived each day a bit before the official starting time, courtesy of Southern Railways, but would start work at precisely 8.30 am, not a moment before or after. One morning, Nigel offered to do the tobacco-sorting job for him and gave us a superb imitation of Bert’s every movement in this obsessive routine. His personal variation on the task involved finger-flicking all the tobacco off the blotter, leaving Bert with a small heap of stalks.

Bert’s main job was monitoring and recording the use of foreign currencies in our orders and invoices. For this job, he was supplied with a rare and special piece of equipment: the red stamp pad. When an order placed on, for example, an American supplier, passed across Bert’s desk, he red-stamped it FOREIGN CURRENCY and wrote alongside it the day’s rate of exchange between the pound and the US dollar. The same was done to suppliers’ invoices being passed for payment. Periodically, Bert would fill a folder of orders or invoices which needed to go to Comps for calculating the day’s total currency commitments. Bert took the folders himself and this simple journey revealed one of his many scientifically based behaviours. He’d read that, when you walk round a corner, you save yourself strain and unnecessary energy use if you lean into the corner in the way that motorcyclists do, your own weight contributing to your momentum as you go round. When we saw Bert get up and move towards the open corridor with his folders tucked tightly under his arm, some of us would quietly get up as well to watch what he did at the end of the corridor. Without fail, and to our delight, Bert dutifully leaned into the right-hand corner as he approached it.

He smoked at his desk like many of his colleagues, but, unlike most of them who used an ashtray liberated from a pub, used an ashtray of his own design. It was a small baked beans tin which he’d covered with white paper. Hooked onto the rim was the cigarette holder he’d fashioned out of a paper clip. He rested his roll-up on it and any ash that it dropped fell straight down into the tin. Bert’s fags were always going out and this was surely part of his deliberate policy of smoking as little as he could. From time to time, out would come his Ronson lighter to revive the current roll-up, which he smoked right down to the last few centimetres. Anyone nearby who had run out of matches was welcome to ask Bert for the loan of his lighter, indicating his need with some codeword I’ve forgotten. Bert would then throw the lighter to them quite firmly, saying ‘Well caught’ as they caught it. Those, like Nigel, who most seriously cherished these little Bertisms would then reply ‘And well thrown, Bert’.

On the side of Bert’s ash-tin was a small pink diamond. There was another stuck on the pillar nearest to his desk and facing it. There was another on a pillar near the corridor. What were they for? It was science again, human biology this time. Bert had read that office workers and others in substantially sedentary occupations breathed very shallowly, and increasingly so as the day went on. This may partly have accounted for the post-prandial sleeping Bill Winterburn. Any time Bert spotted someone yawning during the afternoon, he would advise them to do some deep breathing, so that fresh air could reach the very bottom of their lungs and drive out the stale vapours lurking there. The pink diamonds were Bert’s personal reminders. Every time he noticed one of them, he stopped what he was doing and took some deep breaths. So, as he passed the distant pillar at the beginning of every trip to the Comps, Bert’s lungs were fed with deep draughts of new air – admittedly drawn from an atmosphere heavily laden with everyone else’s cigarette smoke. It’s worth noting from our times when smoking in enclosed public places has been legislated out of existence, that smoking in the office, or anywhere else, simply wasn’t an issue in those days. Anyone who wanted to smoke did so, and most did. Taking your jacket off was much more serious. Today, the opposite applies. Office dress code is much more relaxed, but you can only smoke now by joining a small, chilly huddle of people standing outside the building in the grey drizzle having their ‘smoking break’. Some employers even deduct pay for this privilege.

Most of Bert’s special pieces of useful knowledge came from his Evening Standard, read on the daily train journey back to his suburb in inner Kent. Whenever he found something he thought would benefit us, he cut it out and showed us the following day. There were dozens, almost all now forgotten, but the wasp one rather amused us. Apparently only the female (or it may be the male) wasp will sting you, so if you see a non-stinging wasp coming towards you, there’s no need to panic or to kill it. You can tell which is which by the antennae on the front of its head. The non-stingers don’t have antennae. So, when a wasp is dive-bombing you at heaven knows how many miles an hour, you keep perfectly calm and study it closely as it homes in on its target to see if it has any antennae. Then act accordingly, avoiding the unnecessary destruction of the harmless ones. We all approved of this in theory, but felt that the speed and accuracy required for its successful practical application might be beyond most normal humans.

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