Summary CV

 

1962 Joined Military & Naval Projects Group, Radar Division, New St., Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company.

1962-71 Project Nassau Phases I & II (South Africa Northern Air Defence Sector). New St. then Baddow. Spent 1970 in South Africa during installation of Phase II, as Site Systems Engineer.

1970’s Moved to Crompton Works, Writtle Rd., promoted to Chief of Special ATC Systems; mainly sales support work but including Plot Extractor Test vehicle for the CAA in 1976 and a Locus 16 display system for BAe Warton terminal area. Demonstrator for ATC Demo facility. Operational requirement study for Astrid display system. Further trips to Brussels, Kuwait, Malaysia, Brunei, Norway and Denmark.

1979-85 IUKADGE; trips to Los Angeles during bid phase then Section Chief of six engineers responsible for specification of Display & Voice Communications Subsystem.

1985-86 Proposal Manager for UKAIR CCIS, Nimrod Enhancements and PoACCS.

1987-91 Study Leader for study of Plot Assignor process, for replacement of PRDS at LATCC West Drayton and on impact of Mode S on RDP systems. Proposal manager for UKADS ST908 Study and ATCC for Oslo FIR. Requirement Authority for new S361 Raster-based ATC workstation. Visits to Bretigny and Brussels.

1991-97 Requirements Manager for JORN (Jindalee Over-the-Horizon Radar Network) based in Melbourne Australia, including additional spells as Risk Manager and Surveillance Manager.

1997-98 Requirements Manager for JORN based in Eastwood House.

1998 Took early retirement from the company then known as Alenia-Marconi Systems.

 

Preface - The Company I Joined

I joined Marconi straight after the Royal Air Force; as one of the last few to be called up for National Service, I'd opted to do a three-year regular engagement to give me extra money following a year of training as a Ground Radar Fitter at RAF Locking. So Marconi was my first taste of industry and I was fully occupied learning not only the technology but also the procedures. I was, however, conscious of the after-effects of a major reorganisation and echoes of departed pundits such as Peter Max still reverberated through the corridors of Marconi House.

But it wasn't until over 54 years later that I fully appreciated the reasons for the state of flux I sensed - when the following text was sent to me by John Brown:

 

I remember from earlier correspondence that you had joined MWT in 1962.  That year saw a significant movement of staff out of Radar Division.  It was triggered by Peter Max leaving to become General Manager of Cossor Electronics at Harlow.  The Company had been acquired by Raytheon, and they were intent on moving into, what had been up to that time, the MWT monopoly in both military and civil radar business.  Cossor had been strong in the SSR field, so the two areas were complementary.  The Radar Division Civil Sales Section was especially depleted by its Chief, Alan Carnell, moving across to Cossor, and being followed by many able people, including Henry Mason.  A further colleague of Peter Max was his Head of Installation Planning, Cyril Newland, who, together with a dozen of his key staff, had joined him.  At that particular time, Dr Tom Straker who had, only the year before, taken over from Colonel Elford, was attempting to address the Salary Scales, which were fairly mediocre, whereas Cossor was in a position to be far more generous. The relevance of this was that in the Civil Sales area, MWT became less successful than it had been, and Decca, Plessey, as well as Cossor, achieved notably better sales from then on.

 

So this was what I had joined - and I see now why I went first to the ATC empire at Church Green, before being moved to ease the greater demands of Project Nassau.

 

 

Working for Radar Division in the early 1960s

 

By Ian Gillis  - Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company 1962 – Alenia-Marconi Systems 1998

 

The Job

On my first day of gainful employment I had a more responsible position than I had on my last day some 35 years later.

 

I'd driven down the A1 from RAF Boulmer where I'd spent two years as a Ground Radar Fitter and had kicked my heels at Church Green for a couple of days before they decided what to do with me. Eventually I was sent to New Street to join a new project that was just gearing up.

 

I walked into the office and was asked if I knew anything about VHF radio; as it happened I'd just built myself a VHF tuner (exciting stuff then!), so I told my new boss Alec Stewart. So I became “it” - responsible for liaison with a major supplier for the procurement of a major VHF/UHF radio link system to provide the communications for a four-radar station air defence system. My line management went from Chief of Systems, through the Military & Naval Projects Group Manager Len Firmin, to the Divisional Manager who sat at the right hand of God.

 

There was a numerical hierarchy; “S” stood for Radar (from the days when it was Service Equipment Division -  hence drawings were prefixed with “SE”). S1 was the Divisional Manager, SM1 was the Project Group Manager and my boss was SMT1. I was SMT19!

 

One of the functions of this hierarchy was that all incoming letters were passed down from the top for action, so that at holiday times and with people working abroad one sometimes found some pretty serious stuff in the “IN” tray! Outgoing mail also took the reverse route, so one always tried to find an elegant phrase to impress the boss. I once wrote a letter about some mistakes that had been made in the allocation of radio frequencies; I wrote “frequency farrago” as I liked the alliteration and it was more professional than “frequency foul-up” or similar. I was summoned to Mr Firmin and asked to explain the meaning of “frequency farrage” as he'd misread the letter.

 

A major attraction for me was the wide variety of tasks we were expected to undertake – from the siting of radars through building specification to console design. Rarely did I do the same thing two days running; this meant that much of the work was a challenge. A typical example was to learn about explosive fusing systems so as to advise a contractor who was blasting a new operations bunker in the vicinity of a high-power surveillance radar (on our advice they played safe and used a chemical fuse not an electrical detonator!).

 

The Office

The office in room 433 of Marconi House at New Street had two serried ranks of desks, one either side of a central aisle. To the left was Systems Engineering, to the right was Sales. In the favoured place next to the window were SMT1 and SMS1, Alec Stewart and Leslie Pickard.

 

There was a strict dress code of dark suit and tie and separate-collar shirts and rolled umbrellas were encouraged. One new joiner turned up with a fuzzy blue angora wool pullover under his jacket – Mr Firmin noticed this and deployed the ultimate deterrent; his secretary Olive who was dispatched to inform the miscreant that his dress was not considered appropriate.

 

There was a regular turnover in office juniors as they were promoted to typists or secretaries; one office junior task was to collect the outgoing mail and documents to be filed from the communal out tray. Some of them were quite attractive and most of us were young and unwed; as the clip-clop of high heels came down the central aisle heads were kept down until the desirable creature had passed, then she was studied until she turned and walked out of the room and a room-full of heads returned to their desktops in microseconds.

 

We had no time sheets or clocking-in cards – just a neglected sign-in book – but the implicit trust was repaid many times over by unpaid overtime to get a rush job done. The only controls were by Cerberus at the gates of Hades in the form of a (one-headed) Marconi policeman called Nicholson who berated those who came in late from the pub at lunchtime. Our time was booked to overheads – Systems Engineering in those days was that of technical support to sales before a contract and “customer's friend” after contract and during implementation. Of course, time sheets were eventually introduced and the weekly time-wasting farce of number-juggling created an illusion of accountability, with those numbers  achieving increased credibility as they rose up the management chain. The ultimate degradation of “flexitime” was the nail in the coffin. I once heard two draughtsmen in the next office saying that what they enjoyed most about Marconi was the amount of “time off”.

 

Accommodation

I had digs within walking distance of New Street Chelmsford, with a Mrs Boreham of Byron Road – or was it Mrs Byron of Boreham Road? However I'd met a friend from Uni called Kevin Plunkett; a soft-voiced Irishman who lived in a bachelor house. He invited me to dinner at 1, Campbell Close – off Wood Street and opposite St. John's Hospital and conveniently placed for the local nurses' homes.

 

Dinner was a dish called Campbell Pie, a kind of cottage pie but with a filling of spaghetti bolognaise sauce plus a can of baked beans, topped with mashed potato browned in the oven and, for the avoidance of doubt, the topping was inscribed with a four letter word beginning in SH and ending in IT.  So I had a taste of independence and good food and a plethora of hot and cold running nurses and I couldn't wait to join as a resident myself. The house Senior Man was Dick Williams, with Pete Westwood (a South African graduate), Murray Redman and Kevin. I went to Dick's 70^th birthday party a couple of years ago! (Sadly Dick died in January 2013).

 

The house was owned by Mrs Luckin-Smith (from the High Street hardware store) and was officially rented to someone no-one had ever heard of, but there were no inspections, which was a good thing as we burnt the furniture one winter when it got too cold and we couldn't afford coal. The kitchen sink was often found to contain the engine from Dick's car and all the food tasted of Gunk for weeks afterwards.

 

The yard outside was paved with empty bottles with a narrow path running through them; these were an emergency bank in case of acute thirst and no money, they were then taken down to the pub to claim the deposit on each bottle and purchase a pint each.

 

One person was designated as duty cook for each evening; he bought the ingredients, cooked the meal and entered the cost in a little black book. At the end of the month the contributions were evened up between us. With rent and food the cost was a little over £3 a week, which made me feel quite rich with my salary of £750 a year! I learned to cook there; I've still got my Bee Nilson's little Penguin Cookery book (we cooked most things but never penguins). Each person had his specialities; Dick's was usually Campbell Pie, Murray's was sausages and chips, Pete had a vast range of exotic spices to burn our mouths with and I did Spag Bog or, at times of financial stress, a huge pan of cream of onion and potato soup. I once made a rabbit stew; someone fancied dumplings and said that there was a packet of suet at the back of the pantry. During the cooking a horrible odour emanated from the pan and an exploratory incision revealed advanced gangrene in the dumplings. The inquest decided that the suet had been there for several years, since before the oldest resident had moved in.

 

The social life was fantastic; we were on the list of available men at the nurses' home and most nights were spent at the pub or at parties. I had a sweet little powder-blue Q-car Mini with a Shorrock supercharger under the bonnet which often took us to one of our favourite pubs, the Western Arms at Silver End, run by a philosopher publican Tom Ayscough who had some magnificent motor cars and the finest collection of single malts I've seen before or since. Thank goodness for quiet roads and no breathalysers!

 

The Jollies

There was great competition to be fed at Company expense amongst the younger staff. The occasional lunches in the New St staff dining room which were of a good standard but figured quite low on the kudos. Sub-contractors who fed you well were popular – as I'd been trained on the Kelvin-Hughes rapid-processing photographic projector (used to project a large radar situation display), I often had a good lunch with Bob Sinclair at Hainault. Sometimes we were found wanting in the sophistication department – I remember a very posh lunch at English Electric House where I dolloped horse-radish sauce on my trout only to find that it wasn't the mild stuff you put on your roast beef and had to carry on talking to a customer while the top of my head was in severe danger of explosive detachment.

 

The best jollies were the overseas trips – my first was a radar survey in Kashmir, in the time of no satellite phones when you felt able to make your own decisions on the spot. I think the wonderful places I managed to visit during my career was largely instrumental in keeping me employed for a miserably low salary in one job, for life.

 

Professional or Heartless?

I didn't notice it at the time, because it was the only way I knew, but there was very little acknowledgement of the non-work life of employees or involvement of the family. Only when the Elliott people arrived from Borehamwood did I find a culture where employees socialised together in the evening after work and discussed work in the pub and bosses could meet wives and go some way to understanding what made their employees tick. Later I found that regular project parties were the norm in American companies. I don't think it was a Marconi policy so much as an evolved culture – but I believe that Marconi would have been a better place to work if it had not been so stuffy.

 

The End

My last day was in April 1998 – in a cubicle farm hunched over a Sun workstation and using RTM to do requirements management, bored out of my brain. The company had changed names so many times I no longer felt any loyalty to whatever it was called, and the line management chain was so long that it disappeared in the clouds of barrow-boys and accountants.

How glad I was to be able to take early retirement!

 

 

 

More Memories

My first "exotic" trip with Marconi was a radar survey in Kashmir in 1965. The air route between Jammu and Srinagar climbs over a wonderfully scenic area called the Banihal Pass, at about 12,000 ft. Un-pressurised aircraft following this route used to crawl over the pass with little to spare before descending to Srinagar. The latter had little in the way of navigational aids. Unfortunately the valley bifurcated before the pass, one fork crossing the pass, the other ending up at the face of an 18,000 ft mountain called Sundartop. One day a plane full of senior IAF personnel lost its way in mist and made a violent and bloody unscheduled landing against the near-vertical face of Sundartop, which led to a survey team planning the installation of a radar to prevent recurrence of such an event.

 

The team was led by Leslie Pickard, in true pukka sahib mode - many a Tata truck driver was forced to back round precipitous bends by the sight of a red-faced sahib casting loud aspersions about his parentage in fluent Hindi. 

 

 

 

Others in the team were Ron Walter (ATC Systems), George Andrews (Power Engineering), Ken Smith (Installation).

 

 

The highlight of the trip was a medically-advised stay on the Nagin lake (near Shalimar) in an elaborate and luxurious houseboat, being waited on hand and foot with our every need catered for, while we "acclimatised to altitude" (the lake was at about 5K ft).

 

 

 

There was a modern tunnel for the road traffic under the pass, then a disused tunnel at altitude and an even more disused road over the top which was driven in an interesting manner by IAF jeep drivers used only to the plains of the Punjab. But the scenery at the top was really spectacular.

 

 

The clutter environment suggested 50cm - the customer wanted the high power version but the SR100 would have had to be housed in a pressurised building (complete with airlocks) because of the altitude - like much Marconi Radar equipment it only worked properly at Great Baddow. Unfortunately the survey team's recommendations were overtaken by the withdrawal of the aid from the UK which would have paid for the radar, because of yet another Indo/Pakistan war. And, increasingly, pressurised aircraft were used to give the dangerous terrain an ample clearance.

 

 

 

 

The First "Martello"

I've just returned from driving around Corsica - while there I was interested to pass the original "Martello".

 The following passage is from "The Rough Guide to Corsica" (May 2009) and is reproduced under the copyright waiver for short extracts in reviews.

The Tour de Mortella.
The ruined Tour de Mortella, isolated on the coast 7km west of St-Florent, is the most impressive pièce of Genoese architecture hereabouts. Built around 1520 as an anti-piracy measure, the tower fell into disuse over time due to its inaccessibility, until the Corsican wars of independence, when it was reoccupied by French soldiers to guard the sea approach to the gulf. In February 1794, a British fleet under Lord Hood (which included the 64-gun Agamemnon commanded by the young Horatio Nelson) sailed in to blockade St-Florent, and was amazed when its two ships — a 74-gun and a 32-gun­ were beaten off by the tower's three cannons, sustaining severe damage and suffering some sixty casualties. Only after two days of continual pounding from four guns placed on land (at a mere 137m from the tower), did the 38-strong French garrison surrender. As a result of the British bombardment, the tower was cleft in half, but its renovated ochre-washed walls still strike an impressive profile. More than two centuries later, towers modelled on this one still stand ail over the world — from Key West in Florida to the islands of Mauritius — having been erected by the British as coastal defences.

 

Cartoons

(Click thumbnail for a larger version)

 

A Christmas card for the C³I Section - c.1990. People featured are: Nick Cahill, Mike Glemson (SP?), Wendy Gill, Malcolm Richardson, Flo Edmonds (our secretary), Peter Dowse, Dave Bridge, Andy King, John Bentley and Reg Brooke.	Links the "Supergun" components for Saddam Hussein with the high data rate links required for the London Air Traffic Control Centre.

 

 

 

Project Nassau