One of the companies to which I applied when I was seeking a job in Harlow, was B & R Relays, and I was invited to visit them for an interview. This seemed to go well, with the eventual offer of a job, but when I heard details of what would be involved, I realised that I would become nothing more than a store-man. I was rather offended by this, and declined the position, pointing out that as the holder of a Higher National Diploma in Electronics I would expect a more appropriate role. I also wrote to Cossor Electronics, who replied that they were not taking on new employees for their Development Labs at that time, but that I should apply later that year. I wrote again emphasising my desire to qualify for housing in Harlow, and as a result they offered me a temporary placement in their Test Department, pointing out that experience there would be an asset when I applied later. I accepted the job, and after a few weeks, I qualified for a Harlow Corporation house, and June and I moved in.
Our new home was at 14, Vicarage Wood, and although of the latest no-fines concrete construction, was a modern two-bedroomed terraced building with a proper bathroom and a small garden complete with a brick shed - a great improvement on our earlier rentals. When chatting with other Cossor employees during tea and lunch breaks, I often heard them complain about the high rents charged in Harlow. This amazed me, and I always pointed out that I had been paying four pounds ten shillings a week for just three rooms in a house in Enfield with its lack of modern facilities, but now had a proper modern home at a weekly cost of only two pounds ten shillings. Rent money was again the subject during the tea break chat on the day I received my first Cossor wage packet, when I made the mistake of mentioning my good fortune in now getting around fifteen pounds a week basic pay instead of the nine pounds ten shillings I had previously received as an apprentice. Apparently, because of the fact that I possessed my HND in Electronics, I had qualified for the top Inspectors rate. However, in view of my lack of any previous experience and youth, this did not go down well with the others in the department, and there was very nearly a strike as a result. I learned an important lesson that day - pay is something about which you keep your mouth shut! June's pay also rose when she joined Cossor as a typist, and the elimination of the costs of travel to her old job was an added bonus.
After a month or two, when chatting with someone who joined the other Inspectors at lunchtime, I happened to mention that I had been the editor of my college's magazine. He suggested that my HND qualification and my literary experience could get me a job in his department, Technical Publications, which I could try whilst waiting for a Laboratory vacancy. I was interviewed by it head, Mr St Clair, who seemed quite keen to get a qualified person into his department, but who astonished me by offering me a salary of eleven thousand a year. At a meeting of the Harlow branch of the British Sub Aqua Club which I just had joined, I forgot my earlier gaffe about pay, and stupidly mentioned my amazement at being offered this enormous amount. This incensed Jenny, the wife of the chairman John Godfrey, as although he was foreman at another local company - B & R Relays (!) - he was only earning nine hundred. From that time, if increases in club subscriptions or other expenses were proposed, she never missed an opportunity to remark, Well, you can afford it! However as I was only twenty-two years old, the starting salary I actually received was only one thousand pounds p.a., but I never found any reason to mention this to Jenny.
The other ten or so authors in Tech Pubs - as it was commonly known - were mainly ex-servicemen who had held technical ranks, so I was quite an unusual addition to the department. There were also two draughtsmen - who dealt with illustrations, a couple of typists and a clerk, all under the supervision of Chief Author, Les Lambert. There was a free-and-easy atmosphere in our office, where we mainly prepared handbooks for electronic equipment but also proposal documents for tenders for new equipment designs. Text would be hand-written on lined paper sheets which were passed to the secretaries to be typed-up, then returned for editing and possible retyping. Some of the military products which we covered were Classified or Top Secret, so we had to sign the official Secrets Act forms, and have our work on those checked by TPOs - Technical Publication Officers - who visited us regularly from The Ministry. The necessary security of our office was maintained by its single door always being kept locked, so visitors had to knock and be checked before admittance, but we authors had plastic cards which would unlock the door for us automatically. Eventually a bell replaced the need for knocking, but one of us still had to get up and unlock the door when someone rang, which was a little irritating as practically everyone who rang was admitted. We got round this inconvenience after a while, by connecting the bell-push wire to the automatic door lock so that a push on the button opened the door, and only a glance at whoever entered was needed.
After working on maintenance manuals for some minor pieces of the equipment in the BCP - Branch Command Post - of a radar system which was designed to track intruding aircraft and fire Thunderbird missiles at them if necessary, I was given the task of creating the manual for the brand-new Secondary Surveillance Radar - SSR - Airborne Transponder, the SSR1600, which was in the last stages of its development. This device used transistors - with just a couple of glass transmitter valves - and other discrete electronic components, mainly mounted on boards that could be pivoted up from the unit frame. As the design had been constantly modified during development, parts of the internal circuits for a functional section were located on different boards, its components being placed wherever space could be found. To understand the operation of each section, it was helpful if its circuit diagram showed all its components together, not scattered over several boards. To provide this for eventual users of the manual, I devised a rather novel way of showing the circuits of the transponder on only four fold-out drawings, a design of which I was quite proud. I managed to snaffle a copy of the completed manual, and have it to this day.
I enjoyed working in Tech Pubs, and desires of becoming one of the Design Engineers with whom I collaborated quickly faded. It was a fun place to work at times, with lots of interaction between everyone. One diversion in which we participated was the compilation of a Dotty Dictionary, which tested our mastery of words. The quiet of the office would occasionally be broken by someone calling out, I've got one!, whereupon John French, the official recorder of entries, would take out his fountain pen and notebook, ready to note down the suggestion. A couple of my own submissions were: Stringent - A male violinist, and Ephemeral - a VHF antenna, which did meet with general approval, but others might be greeted with universal groans and not deemed worthy of inclusion. We also collaborated on an attempt to complete that day's Times crossword, but I was not able to contribute much to that.
After a couple of years, when some of the other Contract authors who were placed there from agencies, mentioned the advantages of working that way in view of the allowances for travelling, etc. that could reduce one's tax bill, I began to consider this method of increasing my income. Unfortunately, there was a rule that domestic authors such as myself, could not transfer to an agency and stay working at Cossor, so when I did decide to make the change, I had to go elsewhere. The nearest placement that the agency I chose could find for me was at Marconi in Basildon, where I again worked on Avionics products. My first project was for a unit employing Doppler Navigation, a system which had been developed in the 1940s that used Doppler effect radar interaction with the earth in dead-reckoning calculations to navigate aircraft. Once an airplane had taken off, and the necessary coordinates for starting and finishing points had been entered into this unit, the pilot could hand over the flying of the craft to it and the automatic pilot. I did other work there, but it was not very demanding, and the atmosphere in the office very subdued.
I found it rather odd that the employees at Marconi all seemed to think that it was a tremendous privilege to be permitted to work there, an attitude totally unlike that of the staff at either Cossor or Ediswans. After I met Avril, who became my second wife, we did attend a dance at their other factory at Chelmsford, but I never really felt comfortable at that company. So, when I later chanced to meet Roger Fine, who was one of the Contractors working at Cossor when I was there - in the spares shop at the garage at The Stow - I enquired if he knew of any alternatives. He revealed that he had started his own agency, employing authors not as agency employees but working on a free-lance basis, which gave them even more tax advantages. When he asked if I would like to join him, I replied that I would, if he could get me back into Cossor. He was able to arrange this as I had been away from there for an acceptable time, and I returned there to enjoy several more years back with old friends.
One of my older friends was David Pritchard, who had been a bomber pilot during the war, but who then, besides his Tech Pubs job, regularly wrote articles for MotorSport magazine. When he heard of my interest in photography, he used his contacts to arrange a trackside pass for me at a Grand Prix event at Oulton Park, where drivers like Graham Hill and Jackie Steward were racing. I was able to snap away at the cars as they whizzed past only inches away, but wished I had taken ear plugs with me as the noise of their engines so close by was deafening. David invited Avril and I to dinner one evening at his home in Stevenage, where we met his wife, affectionately known as Midge. When invited to the dinner table, we found bowls filled with chunks of raw meat beside our plates, and although I had heard of steak tartare, did not think that it would look like what we were seeing. Our misgivings were quelled when a pot on top of a spirit lamp stand was delivered to the table, and we were invited to use long-handled forks to cook the fillet steak chunks in the hot oil of The Fondue. David's conversation was always peppered with lots of very graphic swear words, but they were delivered with such charm and in an impeccable manner, that even ladies never seemed to be offended. One story that he related was about when he and Midge were on their way to a wedding, and were travelling on a rather bleak part of the M1. Midge asked David to stop at the next service station as she needed to use the lavatory, but he replied that they had passed the last one a few minutes before, and that the next was miles away. David was told he must stop as the need was urgent, which he did, but pointed out that there was no cover beside the road behind which she could hide. She declared that she would therefore get into the back of the car to relieve herself, but that David needed to find her a receptacle that could be used for the deed. The only vessels that could be found were the sherry glasses of the present they were taking to the wedding, so they were unwrapped and one handed to Midge. David said that he was amazed at Midge's accuracy when aiming at the small container, but even more by her ability to stop each time she was told that it was nearly full and ready to be tipped outside. I gathered that a different present was later sent by post to the happy couple.
One of the draughtsmen was Charlie Savage, who would retouch photographs of equipment to make them suitable for publication, but was also an accomplished artist and water-colourist, and taught these crafts to some of the authors during occasional lunch-time classes. Avril and I acquired a lovely picture of potato boats in a French harbor, and also an oil painting of the Grace Darling lighthouse. Charlie also presented our children with an oil painting of a clown on a unicycle in a field with his caravan in the background. Avril and I were delighted to receive this from him, and it was not until many years later that we learned that the children were disturbed by the slightly spooky air of the work and hated it! Charlie also took on commissions, and one day showed us one he had produced for a shipping company, which displayed a view of the rusty stern of an old cargo ship as it left harbor on the evening tide whilst the sun dipped over the far horizon. If I could have afforded it, I would have loved to have purchased that painting. The equipment photographs that Charlie retouched were usually taken by Geoff Long, who worked out of the adjacent Chemmy Lab, where he used a large process camera. He and I became good friends and he helped me a lot with my own photographic efforts, although the critiques of my efforts were not laced with any syrup. I had obtained a Minolta SR-T 101 camera from another employee who had purchased it duty-free in Hong Kong, and brought it home, to sell on and thereby help towards the cost of his annual holiday, and Geoff assisted me to get good results with it. He surprised me one day when I saw him carrying an old Magic Lantern, which he said he was taking to the company tip, but it took little persuasion to get him to give it to me instead. After I converted the holder to use a modern 12V quartz projector lamp, I managed to find some slides in an antique shop, and even made a carrier for my 35mm colour slides, which were all displayed on a white sheet in our darkened lounge, to the delight of our children. Nowadays the lantern resides under a small table in our hallway, and is much admired.
Working on my desk with large circuit diagrams to which I was constantly to referring when writing text was a problem, and I came up with an idea for a solution. I got one of the workshop chaps to bend some steel rod into a straight sided large U shape, where the distance between the sides was the same as that between the centres of the rear legs of my desk. I then borrowed a drill and a long series bit a tiny bit larger than the steel of my U shape, and made a vertical hole through my desk top and down into the centre of each of its rear legs. Finally, I inserted the legs of the U into the holes, to create a frame with its top about two feet six inches above my desk, onto which I could attach circuit diagrams with bulldog clips, thereby keeping them and my writing pad both easily visible at the same time. This arrangement worked very well, making me even more efficient at my job!
One morning when I did not need anything on my desk frame, I noticed a spider moving about at the top right-hand corner. I watched as he crawled out to nearly the centre of the top, paused there for a moment, then returned to the corner. Intrigued, I carried on watching as he next proceeded to a spot about halfway down the right-hand side leg, and paused there, but a bit longer this time. I was then amazed to see him move diagonally between the leg and the top rail through open space! It took a moment for me to see that he was moving along a web, and I began to understand his previous maneuvers. When he stopped at the centre of the top rail, he had paused to stick the end of some silk from his spinnarettes to the steel bar, and then continued ejecting this thread as he moved to the position down the frame's leg. When he arrived there, he had pulled on the silk thread to get it to the length of the diagonal between the two pausing points, then attached the shortened thread to the steel. He was then able to crawl across the gap, on the support he had created, to get to where he was to start the next step in his web creation. Over the course of that day as I worked on my tasks, I glanced at him from time to time, seeing how he used this same technique to create a beautiful typical picture-book spider's web across the corner of my frame. I thought he had finished at this point, but he began to move again, this time in a spiral, laying a very fine line of silk in the gaps between the thicker strands. I realized that this was the sticky thread used to trap flies and other insects. To stop the cleaners removing his creation when they cleaned the office that night, I left a note stuck to the top of that corner of my frame saying, Please do not disturb!
Another manual I prepared was for a Digital Display System unit, the DIDS 400, which instead of transistors mainly used Integrated Circuits which had recently come onto the market. This unit was the precursor of the modern computer monitor, but could only display a fixed layout of text on its CRT screen. I really liked Integrated Circuits as the ones used were mostly 5V Logic devices, which had inputs and outputs which had only two possible states, either 1 or 0. With transistor circuits, some components were included to get the circuit to work as required, but the designer could not always be sure why they were needed. So, when trying to write a description of how a circuit worked, I could be involved in an argument with its creator about the function of a particular component, but would always have to bow to his view because of his sometimes patronising position as the inventor. This was not the case with logic devices with their unequivocal two states, and I was sometimes able to point out to a designer of a circuit he was about to test that he needed another inverter so get a signal the right way up! I liked that! I was also quite proud of popularising a way of making logic circuits easier to read when a Nand gate was actually functioning as an or gate. (see the bottom line of the table on page 3-34 of the manual mentioned below). I was unable to purloin a copy of the finished manual, but as I was writing this chapter, I found it on the 'net, at https://www.manualslib.com/manual/3426988/Raytheon-Dids-400-402-2m10.html#manual. I had previously searched for this without success, so was delighted.
One of the vital components of the unit was a delay line, which was used to enable a store of character codes to be continuously circulated to refresh the display screen fifty times a second. These delay lines were produced in-house on a machine devised by Mr Boutillier - Bootsy - a crazy looking, but fiercely intelligent, character who operated out of his own tin shack. The delay line required two wires to be wound, one clockwise and the other counter clockwise, round a central core. Bootsy solved the problem of how to get the two reels of wire to move around the core as it was fed forward in a unique way, by mounting the reels on sectors of gear wheels rather than full circles. I was fascinated by this machine, and often popped into his shack to watch his latest production run. He also had drawers filled with loads of nuts, bolts, screws, etc., which he had rescued from production departments when they would otherwise have been dumped as a manufacturing run had finished and they were left-overs. I could always be sure of finding something I needed for a job at home from this treasure trove.
Another project in which I was involved concerned a Defruiter system, which was being designed by a friend from the Diving Club, Ian Juniper, who also worked at Cossor, but in the Secondary Radar lab. A rotating Primary Radar dish beams radio pulses at an airplane, and the echoes are picked up by the same dish, and used to create a dot on a screen which indicates the 'planes position. A Secondary Radar aerial can be attached to the main dish, and this is used to get identification information, which can be displayed beside the dot on the screen. The system for this uses the secondary aerial to send out a coded stream of signals, which trigger responses from Transponders in the airplanes that identify it when they are picked up by the secondary radar aerial. Unfortunately, because this aerial can pick up responses from airplanes other than to which the main radar is pointing, unwanted information - fruit - can appear on the screen in incorrect positions. A Defruiter system tries to eliminate these unwanted signals by various means using lots of complicated electronic timing circuits. Ian had had to spend a long time explaining the intricacies of the circuits to me, and I had an even harder job trying to create understandable text for a maintenance manual. I do not recall whether my part in the project was ever completed.
A possible reason why I cannot remember the outcome of the Defuiter task is that my career at Cossor came to an abrupt halt when my annual contract as a free-lance author was not renewed. This was because of an objection from Deputy Chief Author, Dennis Powell, who complained that I did not respect his position and authority. This was probably due to his repeatedly telling me to stop working on something not work related at the ends of tea breaks, and me taking much too long to comply. It may also be hard to believe now, but then I did rather consider myself to be the bees knees as an author, and was probably rather cocky. Dennis felt that he was being undermined, and I do now understand that Les Lambert really had no option than to let me go. Roger Fine could not place me somewhere else immediately, so I had three weeks out of work, during which I did not qualify for any Dole money as I was a freelancer. Roger did find me a job, at Redifon in Crawley, but the fright caused by the unexpected break in my employment resulted in Avril going back to teaching earlier than we had planned.
The job at Redifon was to do with an Aircraft Landing Simulator, and the head of the newly created Technical Publications section was not very experienced with estimating what was involved and how long it would take to complete. Also he struggled to find any domestic authors, so most were contactors or freelancers like me, who tended to work pretty quickly. When the head man realized that everything was taking much less time than he had estimated, he hinted to us that we should all slow down a bit. This meant that although we had lots of time to chat, with little work to keep us busy it was very boring, and time passed very slowly. Another factor was that as Crawley was so far from Harlow, I lodged locally in horrible digs during the week, only returning home on a Friday night. Also, Crawley was not the most exciting place in which to spend evenings, the highlight of the week probably being a Bar Billiards match in one of the pubs. I was surprised when I came home one weekend to learn that Con Goss, the Treasurer of Harlow Diving Club, had 'phoned Avril to ask me to visit him at his factory in Walthamstow. I left Crawley even earlier on the following Friday, and stopped at Con's factory on the way home. He showed me round the place, which produced springs and pressings for industrial customers, and explained that his father had died a couple of months previously. This resulted in him becoming Managing Director, leaving his previous position of Sales Manager, vacant, and as he had heard I was not happy at Crawley, he suggested I take his old job. I countered by saying my qualifications were in Electronic not Mechanical engineering, and even though I had been through some engineering training, I was probably not a suitable candidate. He replied that most of the role involved talking to customers, and he knew I was good at that side of things from the lectures I had delivered at the Diving Club, and how I handled meetings when I was Chairman. I was still reluctant until he mentioned that he would be happy for me to take the job on a trial basis, and that of course, I would get a company car. This decided me to try the job on, since even if I stayed only a short while, I would be able to sell my own car, and thereby get enough money to pay an Income Tax bill that was due, but for which I had no money saved due to the out-of-work intermission. Thus it was thatI ended my time as a Technical Author and started a very different career.