Starting work
On Monday 16th October 1950 I caught the trolley bus from Chalkwell School to Priory Park gates, walked across the park and reported to the East gate of EKCO's works at 7.50 am, as told to do so in my letter of engagement. There were many others in the Waiting Room - surely they were too old to be apprentices? Gradually the numbers reduced as I realised these were new 'works' employees. A youth, much about my age, asked for me and I was led through the offices to Mr Neale's office where he was waiting, and greeted me warmly. He was a very perceptive person and realised how I was feeling in a strange environment on my first morning.
My first six weeks were to be spent in the Auto Shop - full of Ward Automatic turret-control lathes, and older overhead belt-driven Ward lathes. The foreman was George Kirby, a genial father figure; the charge hand I was put with was Ernie, a likeable northerner. I was first shown how to use a micrometer, and to become proficient with it, since it was used extensively for checking the piece-parts manufactured by the lathes. Generally, I was made to feel very welcome, although, as the Apprenticeship Scheme had recently started, I was the first they had encountered.
After a time working alongside the fitters, I was allowed to do some setting-up myself, and then have it checked out by the fitters. I made the inevitable mistakes of moving the long wooden arm, which moved the over-head belts on to another pulley wheel, too fast, resulting in the belt jumping off the intended pulley. A fitter then had to laboriously climb up a ladder and move the belt back on again. Apart from these occasional mistakes, I gained confidence and competence, and was allowed to do other jobs around the workshop, including the spinning manual presses. These were usually operated by female labour, who, though rough and often coarse, were cheerful souls.
When I first started work in the clattering and noisy Auto Shop, with its mixture of smells, paxoline, coolant fluids, oils, and so on, I used to come home after my nine hour day with a splitting headache; gradually, I got used to it and adapted from my school life. The day started at 8 am and finished at 6 pm, with one hour for lunch; on Fridays, we were allowed out at 5 pm. Friday was pay day; we queued by the Clocking Machine in the Stores area at 5 pm, and were called out one by one by the pay clerk to receive our pay packet. I was paid £2-10s-1d (less deductions) for a forty-four hour week. For clocking on, we were allowed no lateness tolerance; up to three minutes late, we lost fifteen minutes pay, and more than this half an hour, and so on.
One further memory of the Auto Shop, given today's stringent Health & Safety Regulations, I remember with some amusement, was the use of steaming baths of carbon tetrachloride, that were used for de-greasing, and were also very effective for dry cleaning our overalls and brown dust-coats. We must have inhaled gallons of the stuff!
When it was time to move workshops, (after six weeks), I was quite sorry - I had become accepted by more or less everyone, and made some good friends. However, it was off to the Press Shop. This time it was work on a far larger scale; complete television and radio chassis, and heavy work at that. The press tools were massive and often needed three people to transfer a tool from a trolley to the machine. Everyone was on piecework, and the attitude was quite different. To have an apprentice placed with an operator usually meant their piecework rate would be adversely affected. My situation was not helped by my apprentice predecessor who had gained a reputation for being idle and disinterested - so it was assumed that all apprentices were the same. After a spell, I was moved to a different part of the Press Shop and was lucky to click with one of the setters. Thereafter, I had no problems, and they were sorry (or so they said anyway!) when it was time to move on.
This time it was the Stores, and I was taken to meet Mr Juniper, the Superintendent, and Charlie Pead, the Foreman. I was allocated to Cables and Small Components, (resistors, capacitors, laminations – for transformers), and supervised by another Ernie, (who was elderly but very helpful) and his assistant, Reg, who was younger - about 28 or 30.
One day, I was allocated to a working party to Rochford Aerodrome to move and load dozens of EKCO Thermovent heating units stored in some ex-RAF seco huts on the eastern side of the Aerodrome. On another occasion, it was to take a barrow / trolley down to Goods Inwards to load heavy boxes of transformer laminations. Having off-loaded them again into Stores, an hour or so later, I had to load them back again on to the trolley and transport them to the Assembly Lines in the Main Factory, also known as the Willow Run (after the famous American factory).
When I initially joined EKCO, it was decided that I would follow the Engineering Apprentices Training, which meant the National Certificate Course, undertaken at Southend Municipal College. I started with Year S1, (having been excused Pre-S1 because of my secondary education). The Engineering Department was under Mr Bernard Thomsett, a blunt and almost self-educated man who had been a Chatham Dockyard Apprentice; he was obviously very proud of his successful struggle to higher education, but rather spoilt it by his over-long stories of self-glorification and name-dropping of his association with Clayton & Shelley, two electrical academics. Mr Thomsett was an ardent socialist and revealed this when he came in to the S1 class shortly after I had joined it. As I recall, he considered the class too large, and, (I heard later), that the City & Guilds Craftsman's Course needed more students. In his blunt way, he demanded to know who had been at private schools; some hands were raised (including one of my fellow EKCO apprentices). "Right, you're out then!" The number remaining seemed to satisfy him, and I breathed a sigh of relief; one time when a state funded education was an advantage. I think as most of us discover in our life this is usually the converse!
The Engineering Department had just moved into splendid purpose-built and well-equipped premises. We were generally fortunate with a good lecturing team - my first year was Ken Varcoe (Electrical Engineering), Mike Drinkall (Mathematics), and Mr Jennings (Mechanics). 1951 was the 25th anniversary of the foundation of EKCO, which had grown from a small workshop producing Radio Battery Eliminators (sold through bicycle shops) to a huge engineering combine manufacturing radios, car radios, televisions, plastics, electronics and avionics, film and radar equipment, Nucleonics, and electrical components, as well as lighting and heating equipment.
To mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the company founding, the Company commissioned trains to take employees from all the UK factories to Harringay in North London for a special performance of "Rose Marie on Ice". Each employee was given a sandwich box and drinks and you could take your spouse or a friend. I asked Joy Field, a friend from the Municipal College days, and we enjoyed a wonderful evening; the show culminated in Mr & Mrs E K Cole being conveyed by husky drawn sledge around the huge arena.
After a three-month spell in the Stores Department (which included a two week stint in Tool Stores), I was told I would be joining the Car Radio Assembly Production Line. Mr Entwhistle was the foreman and Miss Diana Coppin was the super-officious Chargehand. Initially, I was put alongside the various women operatives to learn each stage of production; some were connecting and soldering a few components, others were doing more complicated work such as the station turning drive cord assembly. The work was timed so as to achieve a continual 'float'.
After a short time I had learnt the various operations and found the work very monotonous; women were better at repetitive work and could chatter away at the same time as they were working. Sometimes to alleviate the monotony, I would mischievously purposely work extra fast, sending down an extra 'float' of work which meant the operatives had to work harder - and they complained! Diana would then move me further down the line to deal with the extra work - served me right. One morning I nearly invoked a strike as I plugged my soldering iron in at 7.55, instead of 8 am - I was accused of starting work too early - irons took five minutes to warm up and I was setting a bad example.
The factory was a noisy, hot and smelly place. I can still hear the air-driven screwdrivers being used, and the clatter from the overhead gantries where cathode ray tubes were loaded into Hessian bags and conveyed down on a rail to be taken out by operatives on the television assembly lines.
As Sutton Coldfield (Midland TV transmitting station) had opened the year before, and Holme Moss, near Manchester, was to open in 1951, the demand for TV receivers was very high. Southend at that time was geared to producing five thousand a week! Car radio production in comparison was far less: our two versions of the CR117 amounted to about five hundred Ford versions per week, and five hundred Standard models (sold through Car Show Rooms). The Ford contract was important to the Company - every Ford Consul and Zephyr was installed with a radio; a rather plusher version was introduced for the Zodiac when that entered production at Dagenham.
One recollection from this time was a case of pilfering, which made an amusing tale. A fellow apprentice, Dick Jarrett, who was a colleague on the S1 ONC course, was attached to the Millwrights Section in the Maintenance Department, and told me the following story. One winter's evening, shortly before finishing time, one of the fitters got a colleague to help him to tie a large Record Bench Vice with cord from his neck, the weight being supported on the crossbar of his bicycle. He then hid it under his gas cape. When the "finish work" signal pips sounded at 6pm, the fitter cycled out with the rest of the works personnel towards the East Gate. It was an icy evening, and as the fitter neared the Exit, he unwisely raised one hand as a greeting to one of the Duty Security men, and called out "Goodnight". At which point, the bicycle wobbled and slid on the slippery surface, dumping him on the roadway. The Security man ran across to give assistance, but couldn't help noticing that the cyclist was having extreme difficulty raising himself up. He smelt a rat! When he tried to assist the person to his feet, he found him to be unusually heavy; further investigation revealed the Record Bench Vice. Needless to say the fitter was sacked.
Just prior to the Christmas holiday, the EKCO Social and Sports Club organised two major evenings at the Kursaal Ballroom, one for the works employees, and the other evening for the staff employees. The resident orchestra, Howard Baker, provided the music and the singers, and the EKCO management funded a super buffet on both evenings. It was a most popular event, and with the Kursaal Ballroom having the largest sprung floor in the southeast, you could really feel its movement on the final hokey-cokey of the evening!
On the day when the EKCO Works closed for the Christmas holiday, the factory was a dangerous place to be - especially for a seventeen year old - dominated by at least three thousand women on the assembly lines! Although alcohol was specifically forbidden from the premises, the workers would smuggle bottles in and hide them - sometimes under the floorboards - weeks beforehand. By 10 am, the bottles would appear and the place got rowdier and rowdier. After the lunch break, when most poured (literally) into the local pubs, things rapidly deteriorated - until the Works Manager said 'enough's enough', and sent everyone home. During the final jollifications, I recall one young man was stripped totally and sent down the production line! Any man was at risk anywhere on the site.
I was fortunate in that I went to Dev & Eng only eight months after starting with EKCO; on the training plan it was normally the final year that one entered the Research Department. Thus, on 12th June 1951, Mr Neale over took me to Mr Maynard's laboratory. Mr Maynard was a large, rather severe looking-man with a moustache and heavy glasses and clenching a pipe between his teeth. He had two assistants, both in their early twenties, Colin Rance (ex-Westcliff High School) and Geoffrey Galpin (ex- Southend High School). I was regarded as the lab boy. This was a TV laboratory, which had just designed units for the new T161 triple-link chassis. The other TV lab was run by Mr Norman Atkinson, (a more approachable person), and his two assistants were John Bussell (RF) and George Baeselmann (a brilliant time-base engineer who was eventually poached by Ferguson's), plus a lab boy, John Baker, (about the same age as me). A tall bird-like figure with dark piercing eyes was M V Callender (Max); a clever brilliant academic who drifted in, held highly erudite conversations, and then drifted back to his own office again. Very union-minded and leftist, he was somewhat remote.
My work was mainly measuring dozens of pre-production chokes, transformers, and coils in the Standards Room - on a complex Sullivan and Griffiths Bridge and various Wheatstone Bridges. The Standards Room was in the charge of a Mr Morgan - a delightful fatherly figure who was kind to all young apprentices (such as me) and always was on hand when we got out of our depth - which was fairly often! Occasionally, I had to go and use the test equipment in the Test Engineering Standards Room - again the staff were always helpful.
One day, I had a bit of a drama: Colin Rance was working on a 15" CRT, which he noticed had gone 'soft', and he saw that a crack had appeared near the EHT cap. Showing great presence of mind, he quickly disconnected the tube, thrust it into a canvas bag, and rushed out of the door, which fortunately gave immediate access on to the Sports Field. As the tube could have imploded at any time, it was finished off by a hammer being hurled / aimed at it, followed by quite an explosion.
I also saw in Mr Atkinson's laboratory some colour TV transmissions, being received from Alexandra Palace; for its time, the quality was somewhat garish and it would be another thirteen years before it would be a public service. I was also given some experimental work to check the tolerance limits of the line hold of the new T161 and its RF circuit sensitivity (as a result of adverse comments raised by Test Engineering) - invariably their engineers were correct! My working hours were cut to thirty-seven and a half hours per week to coincide with other workers in the laboratories.
In July, an invitation was sent to my parents inviting them to visit the EKCO Works at Southend to have a conducted tour, followed by tea with Mr Laird and Mr Neale. Mr Neale said I would be one of the guides, from which I gathered that all parents of first year apprentices had been invited. I learnt later from my parents that before the tour, they had expressed surprise to Mr Neale that I would be one of the guides, as they thought I would not have the confidence to do this. They were much heartened when he told them that they might be surprised. At the subsequent tea (at which I was not present), they said how much they had enjoyed the tour, and that I had done well. Mr Neale was an excellent judge of young people, and I count myself very fortunate that he was responsible for the apprenticeship scheme.
At the end of August, I was transferred to the Car Radio Laboratory, initially housed in a large hut in the centre of the EKCO site. The laboratory was in the charge of a dour Scotsman, Mr Carlton Chapman, who had been chief engineer of the Rutherglen factory during the war. He had as his assistants George Rolfe and Bob Harvey. The atmosphere was enlivened by the visits to the lab of Ralph Atkinson and Chick Ashley (a Canadian) who were the two-salesmen/area representatives? Ralph was about thirty-five years old, rotund and very urbane; Chick, in his past, had been a lumberjack and was older and a more gritty character. I used to look forward to their visits, as the lab atmosphere was rather serious for a seventeen year old.
Sales of EKCO car radios were rather limited as the main competitor was Radiomobile, owned by Smiths, who had the monopoly of the car instrument market, so the company could lean on car manufacturers to recommend Radiomobile. The exception to this was Ford, who did not fit Smiths' instruments in their cars; therefore, following a bidding competition, EKCO had won the Ford contract, which was highly prized.
Pricing was keen and was continually scrutinised by Ford. The CR117, being a push-button model, (as well as manual tuning), had a physical size disadvantage compared with the Radiomobile; it would not fit behind the dashboard fascia of many cars. A novel prototype had been developed which used a cam-tuning device to drive the tuning coils, and a design had been produced and provisionally known as the CR152. Apart from its novel design, it had the great virtue of being shorter in length than the CR117 and would therefore fit all cars. Surprisingly, it was Fords who became interested in the prototype which Mr Toft (the General Manager of Fords) spotted gathering dust on a shelf in the lab, and he encouraged Mr Chapman to restart development. One of the most difficult areas was the design of the cam for mass production, because plastic mouldings shrink differently and affect the correct tracking of the RF and oscillator circuits. A very serious young engineer, Geoff Oxley, joined the Car Radio Lab about this time and was given the job of designing the coils for the tuning circuits.
Whilst the CR152 was being developed, Ford had re-designed the Ford Consul, Zephyr, and Zodiac gear-change, and a parcel shelf was introduced under a slimmed-down dashboard. This necessitated a re-styling of the CR117 to sit on the parcel shelf and be finished in black crackle with a black front escutcheon. It looked pretty ugly, but I was given the job of introducing the changes to the radio and seeing in its mass production. Although John Yates in the Drawing Office primarily designed the changes, I encountered a technical problem with the aerial socket, because a grommet I used contained carbon - a lesson I remembered for the rest of my life!
At about this time, a short-wave converter was designed to work with the CR117, which showed promise, as a cheaper version of the CR61, a model of which was installed in the Royal Daimlers. We also, on occasions, did installations, for promotional purposes, for special customers – these included Eric Winston the Band Leader. Access to the Rootes Group had been denied to EKCO because of Radiomobiles's favoured position by virtue of the Smiths' monopoly as instrument suppliers; however, I was soon to learn one of my early lessons in the importance of influence! Lord Waleron was on the Board of EKCO and it was decided that he should approach Lord Rootes about the possibility of accepting an EKCO CR117 for evaluation trials in the new Hillman Husky undergoing development. The suggestion / proposal was favourably received and in order to demonstrate the non-selective nature prior to the trials, a CR117 was chosen at random, off the assembly line, and Ralph Atkinson took it to Ryton and installed it in a Hillman Husky. The subsequent evaluation trials were most satisfactory: a direct comparison was made with the Radiomobile and, after a punishing trial of the car; apparently, the CR117 was the only piece of electrical equipment still functioning at the end!
Without any adjustments to the CR117, it was installed in another Husky and the trial repeated. Again, the CR117 continued to function well. As a direct outcome of these trials, Rootes offered the CR117 as an alternative to the Radiomobile throughout its entire car range. At a later date, the new CR152 became the favoured car radio by Rootes following very similar trials.
From time to time, I went to the Ford's R & D works, at Rainham in Essex for trials work, with lunch at 'The Eastman', or I accompanied Mr Chapman on road trials of car radios to investigate specific aspects. Trolley Bus overhead lines used to give a rhythmic click-click whenever we drove round Southend or Ilford Broadway. Mr Harold Hunt, the Head of the Research Department, took a close interest in our work (not always welcomed by Mr Chapman), as he was a hard master to please. One day, when we were in the middle of trials with a new radio which I had just installed in our Ford Consul test car, Mr Hunt descended on the Laboratory and said he wished to take the car out for a demonstration of the prototype radio: I was to accompany him. It was the first time I had been out with him on a test run, and conversation was restrained.
After leaving the Works in Priory Crescent, he drove along Prince Avenue and then turned up Southbourne Grove. As we were descending the hill towards the junction with Fairfax Drive I could see that the traffic lights were at red; the car's speed did not change and I was getting alarmed. We went straight across the junction, mercifully with no crossing traffic. I plucked up my courage and said, "The lights were at red, Sir". "What lights?" he replied tersely, looking in the mirror. "I didn't see any lights!" I was grateful for the sound of Trois and his Mandoliers playing for the mornings "Music while you work", to cover the strained atmosphere in the car. I could not get back to the laboratory soon enough; I made a mental note to avoid being driven by Mr Hunt again.
In early summer of 1952, I was despatched to the CR117 production line urgently: The line had stopped. The problem was microphony in the pentode (EAF 42) audio stage. Investigations and comparisons showed that Mullards had brought in from their parent company, Phillips, a changed screen grid construction that was prone to microphony under our test conditions. The solution was to mount the B8A valve base on rubber and change the associated wiring from a single solid core to multiple strand. In July 1952, the CR181/F (Ford's modified CR117 for its new range of Consul, Zephyr, and Zodiac) started being produced on the Southend production line with no problems.
The following month, I heard that I had passed my S2 of ONC (Ordinary National Certificate).
Each summer, during the College break, EKCO would lay on a varied series of industrial visits to other companies, the Radio Show, as well as "Meet the EKCO Management" functions. It was a good company for which to work.
