Yes - 1975 was a bit traumatic. Jo was pregnant but, due to some poor advice from her local GP, she almost miscarried. She was in hospital for a while, but, thankfully, come July 5th, all was well and Gary was born. It had been a hot summer and apart from the obvious stress she was under from a potential miscarriage, the heat was pretty uncomfortable for her - especially in the latter stages of her pregnancy.
Jo's folks came down and were a big help to us at that difficult time. Gary was hale and harty however - although he was a bit of a bawler, but, unlike Lucy, once it was bedtime, he slept, which was a great relief for us. I'm not sure if Gary would have survived if we hadn't had some peace at night - he was hard work during the daytime - especially when he became a toddler. Tantrums in the middle of shopping malls were a regular feature. Lucy didn't do that - but she still caused us stress - she, on the other hand, seemed accident prone. I still have this image of her splitting her ear and her tongue - the latter, in particular, was a scary sight as the two halves of her forked tongue lolled about in her mouth, apparently with a mind of their own - it was a bit Damien-esque.
By now, the houses on the other side of Caldecot Way were complete and occupied and, in one of them, there was a lively little red-headed girl called Annie, who Lucy befriended. They became bosom pals for a while - but I blame Annie for teaching Lucy the local vernacular. Cockneys and North - sorry, Norf - Londoners don't pronounce "th" - they use "f" instead, and this was how Lucy spoke for as long as we lived in Broxbourne. Here's the terrible twosome:
I mentioned earlier that the Barries had 2 children of similar ages to Lucy and Gary and they used to play together often as well, particularly in the even hotter summer of 1976, when local temperatures soared into 3 digits. Here's Gary with Karl and Lucy with Sasha:
Lucy is standing on what was the top half of the high chair we had then.
I was, of course, still commuting in to the West End of London. It was all still relatively new and exciting. I used to love walking round the streets and parks at lunchtime, spotting famous names and places. I also did this partly to avoid the alternatives, which, inevitably involved drink - I was working for Distillers Co. Ltd. (now Diageo) after all.
I had a long narrow office at work and, like every other manager in the company - and the group, I think - even one as young as I was - I had a cocktail cabinet in my office. You could almost synchronise your watch to the ritual unlocking of the cabinets at 11 am each day. Most managers either had customers, suppliers, or even just friends, in to join them for lunch. A few stiff Black & Whites then out to one of the many fine hotels and restaurants that surrounded our office. There were no restrictions - you could go anywhere - even across the road to the Ritz, but you had to do your little "sales pitch" - when you order your drinks, say in a loud voice "2/3/4 large Black & Whites please". That was enough to justify the most fabulous of lunches.
Distillers as a group, found it too easy to make money and there seemed to be no real spending controls in place. One of my missions was to introduce some of the managers in James Buchanan & Co to some financial realities, and the huge advertising budget was my first target. I tried, with some success, to get the Marketing guys to at least try and relate the amount of advertising spend in each country to the (potential) volume of cases sold. Often, spend in one country would be completely disproportionate to the population and the amount of whisky they could consume.
Anyway, I digress - back to the entertainment budget. In Devonshire House, we even had a fantastic Managers' Canteen - silver service, top quality food and as much booze as you could drink. This alone was very costly, but, as I said above, most days the majority of managers were out entertaining at the fancy hotels and restaurants that surrounded us in the West End. My immediate boss, John Williams - nice guy - took me out several times and helped me through the cultural maze of fine dining. Don't forget I was just a young guy from Glasgow who, apart from a few meals in the Reo Stakis Steakhouses that had sprung up in the late 60's/early 70's - Gammon Steaks and Mateus Rose the house specialities - hadn't a clue about some of the food on offer in London, nor the etiquette that went with it. I didn't know how to eat an artichoke, or what whitebait was in those days.
Soon, however, I was becoming an expert - in my eyes anyway. My palate was certainly not as refined as many around me - particularly those who were involved in the blending of the whiskies - but I did get to the stage where I could tell if one particular place was passing off another whisky as Black & White. We used to feed back this information to our marketing guys and soon the establishment that was cheating would get a visitation from those higher up the tree.
My regular haunts were Fleming's (http://www.flemings-mayfair.co.uk/bar_restaurant/flemings_grill/), Hotel Bristol (don't know what it is now) and the Park Lane Hotel (now a Sheraton). I was encouraged to invite Jo along once or twice - and her first visit to the Park Lane was memorable. Just like I was when I first went out to these fancy places, Jo was a bit naïve in the ways of the restaurant world. The barman asked her what she wanted to drink and, thinking quickly and not wanting to appear ignorant, Jo promptly said "martini". Now what she was thinking was actually Martini the brand, which was a pre-mixed cheap vermouth very popular at the time. What she got, however, was a proper, James Bond style, gin martini (shaken, not stirred) - and she hated it!
The huge expensive lunches, and all the drink that went with them, soon took their toll on my waistline. Jo reckons I was at my heaviest ("cuddliest") then - but I'm not quite so sure. I'd certainly put on a lot of weight and was no longer the skinny boy she'd met early in 1970. I soon made a point of not having fancy lunches every day, instead walking round the West End, sightseeing and window shopping. Walking up Bond St. to Oxford St. was always a favourite - I could also detour round Savile Row (scene of the Beatles' famous rooftop concert in 1969), or cross Piccadilly down to Jermyn St. - lots of places to go and things to see.
A favourite stopping place was Chappell's music store in Bond St. It was mostly browsing - we didn't have that much free cash then - but I did make the occasional purchase - especially when I saw a sale. I recall buying Pink Floyd's "Relics" and a Jack Bruce double album that was a kind of Best Of.
I don't remember who told me about it, but the Guinea Grill (http://www.theguinea.co.uk/) in Bruton Lane, just off Berkeley Square, soon became a regular. A superb pint or two of Young's Special helped wash down their excellent, Desperate Dan size steak pie. It doesn't sound like much of a diet or diversion from the norm, but I can assure you this involved far less food and alcohol consumed than on any visit to a restaurant or our Managers' dining room. Of course, I've since paid a couple of nostalgic visits back there in recent years - one of them was with Dave Williamson, who I didn't know until we came to Banchory in 1983, but he worked for BP in the floor below me in Devonshire House at the same time as I was there - and he also used to drink in - or preferably, outside - the Guinea Grill at lunchtimes. Small world.
I had the opportunity of a couple of West End theatre visits as well, when entertaining fellow Managers who had travelled down from our bottling plant at Stepps. Doug Tasker was my counterpart up north and he and his wife Marjorie, used to look after Jo and I whenever we went "back home". The one show I remember especially well was Willy Russell's "John, Paul, George, Ringo ..... & Bert", which starred the then unknown and heavily bespectacled and curly headed Barbara Dickson.
As I said earlier, all of this was taking a toll on me - and don't forget, I wasn't doing any exercise at all. I had given up football before we got married. After my knee operation in 1970 and being out of the game for a year, I had lost a bit of my enthusiasm for it, but it was rekindled in 1975 when I heard about a relatively local club, based down in Enfield, called the Norsemen (http://www.norsemenfc.co.uk/). They were/are a large club playing in the Southern Amateur League, which meant playing all round the London area, including matches at the Bank of England's sports grounds at Roehampton, where England trained in those days.
Now this was a whole different ball game from what I had previously been used to back in Glasgow, where black ash and red blaize pitches were still the norm - as was inter-gang trouble spilling on to the football field. All of the S.A.L. matches were played on fine grass pitches with proper changing facilities and strong social sides. There was nothing finer than jumping in the plunge bath at Norsemen after a hard winter's match, with somebody bringing you a pint as you soaked your aches away.
I was pleased to get playing again, but there's no doubt it caused some tension at home. I hadn't quite appreciated all the logistics of getting to and from home and away matches. By the time I started playing, our little Fiat 850 had given up the ghost on us and I had to either travel by train or get a lift. This often meant me leaving home at 11 am on a Saturday and not getting back until mid or late evening. As I said, the social side was very good. Our pints were constantly refilled from jugs of beer, so you had no idea how much you had had to drink.
I started in the 8th team, worked my way up to the 1st team (which was a very high standard and needed a lot of training time), then settled back down in the middle teams, latterly as Captain.
The other near tragic event that happened in 1975 was an IRA bomb that blew up part of our offices. London was on high alert in those times - as now, I guess - same problem, different enemies. The commuter's biggest fear was that the IRA would plant a bomb on a tube train. Everyone was watching everyone else - particularly if you put your bag down. Fortunately, that didn't happen then, although three decades later one of the next generation of Stewarts nearly got involved in 7/7.
The bomb was planted in a bus shelter just outside the Ritz in Piccadilly, immediately opposite Devonshire House. Luckily for us, it exploded at 9pm at night when our offices were closed, but when we arrived in the morning, it was a scene of chaos. The windows on our offices facing the blast had all been blown in and the wooden window frames were stuck, like giant javelins, in the plaster in the opposite walls. The blast had had a ripple effect, blowing out the windows on the car showroom on the ground floor, but then no damage was done to the floors immediately above that until it hit our 5th floor. Read all about it here - http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/october/9/newsid_2531000/2531191.stm
After Gary was born, we had lots of visitors from Scotland - especially during the summers. Here's one occasion when Mum and Dad came down with their caravan:
The car in view is Barry's famous old brown Consul, which was to feature in future holiday traumas - but more of that later - I've written enough for now. Look out for the next instalment, covering the rest of the period that I was working in London.
No comments:
Post a Comment