E.K.Cole Southend-on-Sea & Malmesbury 1939-71

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Collecting and preserving the history of EKCO Electronics / Avionics 1939-1971
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The Clerk's Tale – Life as an Estimator

Derek Bossom – EKCO 1952-74

This will read like the Canterbury Tales you have had the Engineer's tale and the executive's tale and now the clerk's tale.

I joined Ekco almost by accident in 1952, we had moved from London and I was in need of gainful employment as they say so one day I was cycling past Ekco and almost on impulse I knocked on the door and asked if they had any jobs. I was taken to see a Mr Laird the personnel manager and was told there was a vacancy in car radio sales, anything is better than nothing so I accepted and started the following Monday with the princely salary of £6 per week.

My only claim to fame during my stay at Ekco is I once punched Mr Brunker in the stomach, but more of that later.

Car radio sales was headed by a Mr Caiger the technical staff were Ralph Atkinson and Chick Ashley, the sales staff Len Matthews, Wally Eveling and myself, the work was not very demanding, mainly answering the telephone and writing letters, anything technical was passed over to Ralph or Chick, in fact after a few weeks it was difficult to see why my services where needed.

The daily routine was enlivened one day when Mr Caiger called Wally and myself into the office and said there are two bicycles in goods inwards for me go and load them into my car here are the keys. It was only a small car and it was obvious the bikes would not go in, we reported this fact to Mr Caiger who puffed on his pipe for a bit and said they must I have got to get them home, so back we went and after a few moments thought we took the bikes to pieces and loaded them in through the sunshine roof put the smaller pieces into the boot and on the back seat rather like a DIY kit for a bike, he must have got them together again because we never heard anything more on the subject.

A few weeks later I was told my services were no longer required in car radio sales but there was a job in stock control so I moved.

On Monday I presented myself to the stock controller and was put with what were called chasers to get to know my way around. After that I went to the ordering section and it soon became apparent the name order clerk was synonymous with scapegoat anything that went wrong was blamed onto the order clerk and it became one of my "duties" to sort these problems out.

One morning one of the line foreman came rushing in yelling the whole line is stopped we have run out of .01mfd capacitors, first thing look on the record card, all ok there, next check with the stores all ok there also received and issued then check on the line, several of the girls were also helping with the search, the items came in a distinctive green and red box and as one of the girls got up one of these boxes was revealed she had been sitting on it as the seat was not high enough. One panic over but another awaited me when I got back to my desk. The Stock Controller was a Mr Carter; he in turn was responsible to Mr Clementson under whose belligerent gaze stock control operated. Mr Carter brought mustard sandwiches for lunch believing you did not need ham if you had mustard.

Anyway when I got back to my desk there was a scruffy piece of paper about the size of a postage stamp with a number and psm urgent on it. I hunted through all the psm capacitors but could find anything to match, then trimmers, then ceramic where I found it, went to Mr Clementson was greeted with where the hell have you been, told him I had been searching for a psm capacitor but it was a ceramic, who said anything about a psm he said so I showed him the piece of paper but psm to Mr C meant please see me not protected silver mica.

One thing I learnt from my visits to the stores was that all storemen are possessive, one would think it was their own property they were storing so reluctant are they to issue it or to divulge any information about it, this all changed one Saturday morning when I came across the head of stores locked in a passionate embrace with a young lady behind a pile of boxes, cooperation improved enormously after that and it became almost a pleasure to visit the stores.

It was while I was in stock control my fist had its unfortunate meeting with Mr Brunker's stomach, it happened like this… stock control, costing and buying department were all in one large open plan office, at the end were double swing doors, I had just put my hand out to push these doors open when Mr Brunker came crashing through the other door my fist went through the gap in the two doors and hit him smartly in the stomach he grunted and glared at me but as my cards were not in my pay packet on Friday all was well.

My other meeting with Mr Brunker was years later while I was working for Charlie Gambel, I was asked to deliver some estimates to Mr Brunker. Now he was guarded by a ferocious woman whose name I have forgotten, wait here I was told while she went into the inner sanctum but she left the door open. Mr B was leaning back in his directors chair reading the newspaper, without any warning she whipped the paper out of his hands and said the estimates are here, at least Mr B said thank you.

Site of old canteen
Renault dealers on site of old canteen, note original roof
Photograph courtesy of Chris Poole

What is now a Renault car dealer used to be the Ekco canteen, where in my day one could get a very good meal for 1 shilling in real money 10p in today's coinage, I was once up to the dessert stage and was munching my way through some apple crumble when I bit on something very hard which made me jump a bit, it was a small ball bearing, I called for the manager who came trotting out and he was so pleased I had found this bearing he did not even apologise it had come from a piece of the kitchen machinery they had been cleaning that morning.

Chief buyer was a Mr Gregory his office was one of a line along one side of the open plan office; there were Messrs Brunker, Clodd, Gregory, Clementson, Allan and Price.

Mr Gregory had the most amazing filing system, the top drawer of his desk was full of tiny pieces of paper with a name or number or date on them when asked a question such as when is the delivery on the new cabinets due, he would scratch through this drawer select a piece of paper and say Wednesday, I often wondered if the piece of paper selected was really of any relevance.

During my sentence in stock control I met Mr Gambel, he or his second in command would come to the office for information and was usually shunted over to me, when his second in command left he offered me the job, as it carried a higher salary and senior staff status I accepted.

This move opened a whole new world to me, up till now I had been concerned only with production but now I came into contact with the development side of the company, the lads in the white coats, and what a grand bunch they turned out to be. About this time we were starting development of our first tape recorder and I had the job of collecting information in order to arrive at an estimate. I entered the appropriate lab to the usual torrent of abuse and before I could ask any question one of the lads whipped off his shoes and socks and insisted on showing me his ingrowing toenails, not a pretty sight!

The office I shared with Mr Gambel was a long thin one and our desks were facing each other. This meant as Mr G had his back to the light it was easy to read any letters he received by reading them backwards. I became very good at reading things backwards!

At this time Ekco Electronics products were made at Rochford and it was decided to give the Rochford Factory its own estimating department. A Mr Tucker was put in charge, myself and two or three others were moved out there, this was a bit inconvenient because most of my information was still at Southend and I spent a lot of time shuttling between the two.


Ekco Electronics Rochford factory shortly after completion in 1960
Photograph courtesy of Southend Museum Service

Eventually the Rochford works closed and we all moved back to Southend, Mr Taylor asked me to become the estimator for the Electronics side (I can't remember what happened to Mr Tucker) and production was moved to the ground floor of what had been the new D&E building.

By this time Pye had taken over and Radio and T/V production had almost stopped. There were very few new units coming from the labs and it was clear to me things could not go on like this for much longer. I had always wanted to live in a more rural position and about this time the opportunity arose to do just that, so I left in about 1974 and moved to Suffolk.


Part 2 An Estimators estimation of estimates

To paraphrase Messrs G & S "When there are estimating duties to be done an estimators lot is not a happy one". Even Mr Barnham said he could please all the people some of the time….if only…

As the name of the department implies our function was to tell the management how the prices of various units being developed changed as development progressed until the product was fully engineered and all drawings and stock lists were available when we would do a last "estimate" which would really be a costing as all the correct information and prices would be available.

Most units would be estimated at least three times, firstly when it was not much more than a twinkle in the engineer's eye when "Guestimate" would be a more appropriate term, at this time we were totally dependant on the goodwill and cooperation of the engineer concerned. Luckily this was always forthcoming and if I was lucky they would let me take the unit away to work on.

The mechanics of producing an estimate are, in theory, quite simple.

  1. list all bought items and put the cost against each item and total.
  2. list all internally manufactured items and all assembly items estimate a time for each operation, multiply this time by the rate for the department, add on the overheads, put the two together add to the material cost, et voila one Factory Standard Price, hereinafter referred to as the FSP. Any tooling charges were usually shown separately.

The assembly or manufacturing times for in house items were calculated using "Synthetics" these are really statistics and we all know what they are!! We were not allowed to use a stopwatch for reasons I never really discovered, so we used synthetics, there must be an enormous volume somewhere covering every human activity from Angling to Zoanthropy. A Relaxation factor is built in known as tea and pee. Every operation is broken down into its smallest elements, for example: - to prepare a 6 inch piece of PVC insulated copper wire, it sounds a bit like Mrs Beaton. First get your wire, measure the wire, strip both ends, twist both ends then solder both ends. All these elements are added together to get the final basic time, this basic time is then modified depending how many are being made. It is based on a much modified Bedeaux (I think that is how it is spelt). But when the new bloods arrived in the form of Barry Matthews and his colleagues, this was considered very old fashioned and out of date, but that was how the management wanted it done so that was how we did it.

If the unit to be estimated came under Avionics I would go and see Bill Graville, if it was not one of his units he would tell me where to go (In the nicest possible way of course). The E190 and the E390 weather radar came from Bill while the high voltage units being developed came under Mike Rose.

If it was an electronic unit I would go to Tim Davis who would pass me on to the correct engineer.

To take a specific example, Safe load indicators. These came under Bob Hubbard so I would go and worry him for a while and get as much information as possible, if it was very early in the development stage I would add on what I grandly called a contingency but what my "friend" Bob would call a fiddle factor. This would be done two or three times before the unit was fully engineered.

One of the Engineers, I forget which came up with a capacitor made by Mullard which is unusual. I wrote to them asking for information and prices. Back came a letter saying sorry cannot help this is not of our manufacture. I borrowed the catalogue and had the page copied, this I sent to Mullard with a note on the bottom "get out of this" a few days later a letter arrived starting with "having recovered from the embarrassment of not recognising our own products" and giving me the information I required.

The worst estimate I ever put out concerned a small modification to (I think) a GPO chassis. It consisted of adding about 6 new components to a small aluminium chassis; there were only about 10 of them, one of which was an electrolytic capacitor and a clip to retain it.

We sat a young lady down in empty office in the Rochford Factory gave her a hand drill and said, drill a hole there and put a nut and bolt to hold it,…. I had already told her she had two minutes per chassis to drill the hole secure the clip with a bolt, shake proof washer and nut…

After about 20 minutes she came into the office, 'hello said I finished?' She burst into tears and said 'I can't get the drill to work', the drill looked alright to me but we gave her another drill and left her, she came back again still in tears because the drill would not work. This time I went with her and tried the drill myself, after about 6 turns it went through, 'there you are, you try'. She sat down and started turning, after a few turns I realised she was left handed and was turning the drill the wrong way, it ended up with me drilling the holes while she put the nut and bolt in. So a job that should have taken about 20 minutes took about 2 hours. Not one of my better efforts.

In the office next to me there was a group of people under a Geoff Upton who took our figures, checked them and produced FSP's for all the sub assemblies in any given unit. This was a great help at times because if the engineer said it is like DP12345 I could look up the price complete and use it.

Another disaster, not of my making this time, occurred at the Dynatron factory. they were asked to produce 12 cable-forms each about 6ft long, and to deliver them three per month. If they had made them all at once the problem would not have arisen but they chose to make them three each month. Due to the small quantity it was not worth expensive jigs so they bought a long tape measure and stapled it to the bench for the girls to measure against.

The first three were made and dispatched and accepted as OK, next month the next three were returned as being too short. They were checked against the measure and found to be OK so were sent back only to be returned again as being too short, after much scratching of heads the tape measure was checked against a steel rule and found to be short. It turned out each week the girls washed the benches down and the tape measure had shrunk!

The GPO, by law had to put any contract out to tender. But what they did is ask Siemens or TMC to quote for 200,000 and ask us to quote for 500, One such contract was for 'contactors', which consisted of dozens of Phosphor Bronze contacts, as it was not economic to tool up for such a small quantity I wrote to TMC asking the price. Back came a price with a catalogue in which was the price of the finished article less than the price they quoted us for the contacts alone, you can't win.

Some of the units I worked on never saw the light of day, there was the E214 developed by Eric Fielder this was a computerised table for a vertical mill or the Fail Safe unit for a Guillotine developed by Bernard Hutchins, or perhaps they did after I left!

On the whole I really enjoyed my years as estimator for Electronics I was not tied to a desk all day and could come and go freely into the labs and drawing office.

I will end with two coincidences, we have lived in Suffolk for 30 years and in our present home for 5 years, the neighbour one side worked for Ekco Ensign and the other an elderly gentleman by the name of Swan told me his father worked for Mr Cole when he was making battery elimininating circuits in a shed in the back garden.

I also met and made some good friends and via the wonders of the Internet have made contact with one or two ex-employees after a break of 30 odd years.








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