It's been a while since I updated this blog - haven't had time this summer, but I'll make an effort now to trawl my remaining memory cells and get some more chapters done.
We start Part VII in 1979 as we're about to make the big move back to Scotland. We had managed somehow to sell our house in Broxbourne, buy one in Balerno - and bring Kelly in to the world - all in a few short summer months.
I'd made reference in previous posts to the amount of free whisky we had from my former employers, Black & White - even 2 years after I'd left them. This was to come in very handy when the removal men arrived. By now, I was working in Edinburgh and Jo was left to oversee the final packing up and vacating 44 Caldecot Way.
The removal men did their stuff and and loaded all our furniture etc on their van. It was now time to tip them - the only problem was Jo had no cash on her. Simples - in to the garage and give each of them a bottle of Black & White. The men couldn't believe their eyes. Their foreman made them all line up and personally thank Jo - much tugging of forelocks!
Our new house was a detached A-frame style house in a relatively new, but fairly mature looking estate to the west of Edinburgh, in the foothills of the Pentlands. the postal address was Balerno, but we were really more attached to Currie, as most of Balerno was a mile or so away across the main A71 road. Here's Gary, Jo & Lucy at the front window:
Cherry Tree Loan was a nice cul-de-sac and we easily made friends with a number of the neighbours. Jo was particularly fond of Evelyn (Patten?) - Auntie as she became known - directly across the road, but Judith and Morton Ogilvie at the end of the cul-de-sac were friendly too, as were the Goodfellows next door. Jan was particularly chatty. Jo liked her OK, but couldn't handle the fact that Jan had apparently finished all her housework etc by 10 am, at which time she then used to pop in to ours for endless coffees and chats. Jo could never get anything done - or at least that was what she told me!
Next door on the other side was a lovely older, retired couple, Rusty and Jessie(?) Reid. It transpired Rusty was from Banchory - but that's getting ahead of ourselves again.
My job was with Nuclear Enterprises, who were then owned by Thorn EMI and whose 2 factories were on the Sighthill Industrial Estate, just a few miles away. It was close enough to occasionally nip home at lunchtime. My immediate boss was Eric Harper Gow, Finance Director, whose father, Max, was the main man in Christian Salvesen, then one of Scotland's largest companies. It had Norwegian roots going back to the days of whaling, but was subsequently involved in all sorts of logistics type businesses, including, as I was later to discover, shipping etc agents at virtually every port in Scotland - but I must also save that connection for later.
The Personnel Manager (no HR in those days!) there was a chap called Alex Knight, who, along with Eric HG, had interviewed me for the post. He was a bluff - no, rude - character. I recall when I first entered his room and, as anyone would do, I offered him my hand and said "pleased to meet you" - it was not reciprocated. He barely looked up. When I eventually started there, I soon got to realise that, although he wasn't even a Director of the company, he was the real power there. It seemed that the Directors and the rest of the management team were shrinking violets and nothing got done without Alex Knight's approval.
Years later, when he had left the company and I took over the role of HR/Personnel, I was able to read his comments about me in my personnel file. "Too confident" was his remark from my 1979 interview. Alex Knight is/was a Jambo (Hearts fan to the uninitiated) and I saw his name mentioned in several of the shareholder scrambles that football club have had in the last 3 decades. He went on to run the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce as well.
Back at home, we were settling in OK. Now that we were back in Scotland we could have a full family Christening for Kelly and it was a pretty full house:
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| Back l-r: Pat Jamieson; Mary & Brian Hanson; Grannie Lottie; Austin & Mary Donohoe; Mum; Reg & Dawn; Dad. Middle: Great Granny Banaghan; Priest; me & Kelly; Jo; Margaret Jamieson. Bottom: Julie Hanson; Lucy & Gary. |
Our family car, the Austin 1100 that I had used to take me to and from Harlow when we were down south, broke down fairly soon after we arrived back north. I have some recollection of it failing on the motorway near Linlithgow, where Brian and Mary then lived. Brian and I had started to play a bit of badminton and perhaps I was running him home after it? Anyway, a new car was now required to get me to and from work, so we bought our very first Nissan - then called Datsun - and I think the model was the Cherry - it was red anyway. It may have looked something like this:
Lucy and Gary (eventually) had to travel to get to their primary school and initially, it had to be on the public bus service - we only had one car and I needed it to get to work. Later on, when I got a company car, this became the family/Jo's car.
At work, I seemed to be fitting in OK and I was learning a bit about how Thorn EMI operated. The Managing Director of Nuclear Enterprises was actually based down south, in Beenham, Berkshire and only seemed to come to Edinburgh once a month or so, so the local management of the two Edinburgh factories pretty much got their own way - and Alex Knight was a much stronger character than my boss, Eric. It was also a heavily unionised site and that's perhaps why the Personnel Manager had such a prominent position.
For the uninitiated, we had 2 operations going at the 2 factories which were diagonally opposite each other. One was nucleonics - which I never truly fully understood - and the other was ultrasound imaging. The latter was pretty pioneering - the company had worked closely with Professor Ian Donald (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Donald) who is credited with being the first to develop the use of ultrasound imaging in pregnancy. Nowadays, images of the foetus in the womb abound, but this was cutting edge stuff then.
I got to know the managers that reported to me:
- George Connelly - a bluff, chain smoker who liked his drink. He and his wife Pat were a pair - we had a couple of nights out with them, including our first introduction to Edinburgh's fine Chinese restaurants. I had commented on how much better the Indian restaurants in Glasgow were, compared with those out east, but we hadn't quite appreciated that the converse was true when it came to Chinese food. The one we liked then was called - I think - the New Dragon Pearl - at the top of Leith Walk. Their speciality was Lemon Chicken, which was then an unknown dish to us.
- Raymond Stewart - a very likeable cheery chappy who went on to work for John Muir (Muir Homes) and moved to a new Muir house at North Queensferry. Raymond was the first to encourage me to play a bit of golf - he took me out to the public course at Carrick Knowe and was very patient with me - I couldn't hit a cow's a**e with a banjo in those days.
- Derek Hazlewood - a little chap with a dark moustache and a rather brooding air - I think he was going through some domestic difficulties at the time. He was the one that introduced me to his 5-a-side football group that used to play at the Tartan Club (Scottish & Newcastle Breweries Social Club) on Sunday from 4 pm to 5pm, I recall.
Having developed a liking for real ale during our time down south, I was keen to find somewhere locally that I could get a decent pint - and take the family, as we had got used to doing in Broxbourne. The Marchbank Hotel - now sadly no more - fitted the bill nicely. It was a short drive away, past the village centre and up the hill. Nicely isolated and with large grounds for the kids to run around in on a nice day - and it had Lorimer 70/- on handpump. Fond memories.
Whilst being back much closer to our families was nice - it was less than an hour's drive to Glasgow/Paisley - it made summer holidays a bit trickier. We had got used to the convenience of being so close to the Channel and being just a relatively short drive to the various ferry ports. Now we had 400 miles or so to drive before we even got that far.
We persuaded Brian & Mary to join us on holiday, camping in France one year, so the two families set off in 2 cars, taking the shorter ferry crossing at Dover, then stopping off in Paris on our way to the seaside resorts in Brittany. I'll never forget our first experience of driving round Boulevard Périphérique (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulevard_P%C3%A9riph%C3%A9rique). It was chaos trying to get on to it - the traffic was whizzing by at an alarming rate. It was even worse for Brian who was trying to follow me. We eventually got in to the centre of Paris where we came across our next problem - where to park? Eventually, we found a bit of waste ground where we thought it was safe - and free - to park. Little did we know.
The following morning, we got up and walked round to get our cars and were horrified at the sight - all 8 tyres had, on the face of it, been slashed! In fact, on closer inspection, they hadn't been slashed at all - they had only been let down - I guess to teach us a lesson that we shouldn't have parked there.
We did do a little bit of the touristy thing before we left Paris - here's the girls and the kids at Notre Dame:
We did eventually make it safely to our campsite in Brittany:
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