Chronicles Part IX - 1987-90 (3)

The first year of the new decade was a pretty full and interesting year - at home and at work. I may have mentioned earlier that when the Clark family sold their main processing businesses to Geest in 1987, they had a 3 year non-competition clause. This led them to invest in the catching sector for the first time since I had come on board.

The Baltic had virtually been fished out of white fish and there were a lot of good quality, well maintained Swedish fishing boats up for sale at bargain prices - and the Clarks invested in a small fleet of them, acquiring UK fishing licences as well, and finding skippers to go to sea in them.

That was quite interesting, in that it was all new to me, but one other investment also took place at this time, and this was to be one of my main involvements for a few years. We had always bought large plastic tubs, or bins, from a rep who worked for Dynoplast, a Norwegian company, part of a large group whose origins went back to Alfred Nobel, whose name is now synonymous with the Prize of that name, but who was the original inventor of dynamite. John Long was the rep's name.

John approached us with an idea to set up our own plant to manufacture these plastic bins ourselves, rather than import them at high prices from Norway. So began an interesting project to find suitable manufacturing plant and also premises in which to operate. After a few false starts, we eventually settled on a new facility in Invergordon. There had been a huge aluminium smelter in this little Highland town, but it had closed down several years before and the local Enterprise Board had been trying to regenerate the economy, as the town and surrounds had high unemployment and social problems to boot.

Invergordon had been transformed from a sleepy little Highland village when the smelter was first put in. Thousands of workers - mostly from high unemployment areas in the West of Scotland - had been shipped in, with the promise of jobs. Now the smelter was gone, but the families were still there - one generation on, but with the very same unemployment issues as their parents had tried to escape from in the first place. The vast majority of the accents around town were still distinctly Glaswegian - in fact, it was a bit like Corby, where I had spent my early years. They say on weekends, it was like the Wild West in the town.

This background meant that any proposed investment in manufacturing in the town, with the prospect of even just a handful of jobs, was met with open arms by the Highlands & Islands Development Board (HIDB - later to become HIE). John Long himself was to move in to the local area, but I would be working with him and would have to travel to Invergordon regularly. Now this was no easy task - especially in the dead of winter. Consider the logistics:

You can just see Invergordon in the very top left of the map above - and Banchory is in the bottom right corner. Up Deeside and over the Lecht, across Speyside to meet up with the A9, and from there over the Kessock Bridge, past the Black Isle and over the Cromarty Firth to Invergordon. My record was 2 hours 8 minutes and I was never caught for speeding. My most eventful moment came early one morning just as I passed over the top of the Lecht and was descending down the hill at the other side. Suddenly there was a big fat sheep right in the middle of the road - I had no chance of stopping and I hit it side on. It was dead - but the Volvo had virtually no damage to it - just a slight scratch on the number-plate.

Rotational Mouldings (Scotland) Ltd. was the snappy name we chose for our new plastics company - it soon became RMS for short. Within months, once John Long's former employers found out what he was up to, we were approached by Dyno to buy us out - before we had even got off the ground properly. I proposed 50:50 ownership of the Scottish operation instead and everyone agreed. This new relationship was to bring about a fair degree of European travel for me in the next couple of years - Düsseldorf, Oslo & Brussels to name a few. It also afforded us a very nice family holiday in the summer of 1990.

Before that summer holiday, however, I was still keeping fit - squash through the winter and, when the weather permitted, training runs at lunchtime, and indoor football, which soon elevated to twice per week. The new Beach Leisure Centre opened in April, 1990 and we were so keen to get a regular booking, I arranged to become the very first member there.

By the time spring came along, it was soon light enough to do early evening runs round Banchory. I measured out a number of circular routes for us - 6, 7.5, 10 and even 16 miles - and John McWhinnie and I would alternate the shorter ones with the occasional longer one, the latter usually on a Sunday morning. Jo reckoned my legs felt like solid concrete about this time.

There was golf as well, of course. Talking of which, one day I got an invite from former colleague Bill Hazeldean to join him for a friendly game at his home course of Ellon. I accepted of course - even although he had been on the other side of the fence from the Clarks when Geest bought them out, I'd always got along well with Bill. Geest had since sold that business and there were new Danish owners, but Bill was still MD. Anyway, after golf, he took me to his home nearby, where his wife Gill had prepared a lovely meal for us. I was being courted. The conversation casually turned to Fraserburgh, where their business was based and I immediately made a comment that made it plain that I wouldn't ever consider moving there. I hadn't been asked outright, but this brought a fairly swift end to proceedings.

We started to plan our summer trip to Norway. The idea was that John Long and I would visit a few of the Dyno factories and meet some of our key contacts there, but we would combine this with a holiday and bring our families along. There was a ferry service from Newcastle up to Molde and we could drive back down the West coast from there and pick up the return ferry from Bergen two weeks later - roughly like the following:

(ferry route in red, car journey in blue)

 The whole adventure took 2 weeks and it was certainly a memorable holiday - at least for me. I'm not sure how my passengers remember it - if at all - they all had to get doped up to face the day's travel on the twisting climbs up and down Norway's beautiful west coast. I say beautiful, because it was - when you could see anything. Like our west coast - only more so - it's a wet climate, but when the sun shines - which it did perhaps two or maybe three times over the fortnight - it is stunning - particularly the glaciers and fjords. Most of our holiday was spent in mist and/or rain, however.

By now, Lucy was 17 and past the stage of going on holiday with her parents - or siblings - so it was just the 5 of us who drove down to Newcastle and boarded the ferry for what turned out to be a warm, flat calm crossing of the North Sea - we were sunbathing on deck. Eventually we arrived at the small town of Molde and headed for our accommodation - we were going native and staying in "huttes" - basically log cabins, most of which had turf growing on the roofs. Here's a fairly typical one - although I think this one was near the end of our holiday, near Bergen:

Our first day's travel took us slightly further north and inland a bit to the lovely city of Trondheim. I remember the wooden buildings. I also recall the small wooden "kirkes" in the surrounding countryside.

Not far from Trondheim was a place we just had to visit - even if only to say we'd been to Hell and back - that sort of thing would amuse a then 15 year old Gary:

When we headed back south west again, there were lots of mandatory stops en route to take the air:

The photo above was taken on Trollstigen. The following one was taken at Geiranger, just above the fjord of the same name:

The sun did shine occasionally - this one was taken at Loenvatn:

We made the most of this brief spell of good weather and did a bit of rowing:

Don't be fooled by the above pose, however - it was Gary and I who had to do most of the hard work. Ross, of course, was not yet 7. Here he is on a ferry wearing his Scotland shirt:

and here's a younger, thinner and more hirsute me on the short ferry from Aalesund to Vangsnes:

Fond memories.

The holiday came just in time for me, because things were going to get much busier at work in the coming months and years. The Clarks' 3 year non-competition clause was up in July and they didn't waste any time getting back in to fish processing, completing the acquisition of International Fish Canners (Scotland) Ltd. from Norway Foods and then its near neighbour in Fraserburgh, British Fish Canners from Hillsdown, both within a few short months of each other in the latter half of 1990.

It was also round about this time that I discovered some frustrating and disappointing news about my knee. It had been 20 years since my ruptured knee ligament - not long after Jo and I first met. My running had brought the problems to light and I went back to hospital to see what the matter was, and it was there that I was given the news that, although they had repaired my ruptured medial knee ligament, my cruciates had been damaged at the time of the training injury in 1970 and they apparently hadn't noticed and hadn't done anything about it then. No wonder my knee had never felt right.

To explain visually:

I'm writing this episode just a couple of weeks before I'm finally to have the knee replaced - over 20 years since discovering the news about my cruciates, and almost 44 years since the initial injury.

Back in the 90's, they told me it was too late to do anything about the cruciates. Had I been an Olympic athlete they may have considered rebuilding the knee at that stage, but the advice I was given at the time was simply to take care and carry on as is. If I'd discovered the news a bit sooner after the initial operation, I might have been tempted to seek out the surgeon who botched the job - but it was too late now.

Rather a morose ending to this episode of my Chronicles. I'll try to cheer up before I start the next chapter.