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Mike Lane

Page history last edited by Ian Gillis 6 years, 5 months ago

Introduction

 

Sadly, Mike died on 18 October 2017 at Alton in Hampshire, after a short stay in hospital.

 

Tributes

 

from John M -

I remember Mike Lane. He was in section 726 at Radar Systems along with myself, Bert Adams and others, he was a quiet type, but amiable and easy to work with. I remember we did a day trip together once, can't remember where, but we made a diversion to visit his brother who was a farm manager. His brother welcomed us and showed us around. Our paths diverged later and I lost touch. Sorry to hear the news of his passing.

 

from Nick P -

This year will be the first Christmas in about 45 years when the postman does not bring me a card from Mike Lane. Sadly, Mike died on 18 October 2017 at Alton in Hampshire, after a short stay in hospital—with one of those illnesses that starts seemingly simple but that masked fatal complications. I know that seasoned Marconi veterans might by now be saying “Mike Who?”, but even if his career with Marconi Radar was too short to build very many memorable relationships, his has been perhaps the longest friendship I have ever experienced from a work colleague.

 

It all started when I joined the company in September 1970. As Field Services’ latest recruit, I was sent to the PCTA at Great Baddow to learn my new trade. Technical and emotional chaos seemed to rule the day, because a bunch of irreverent engineers from Elliott Automation had brought their part-completed hardware and software from Borehamwood to be the brains of the SLEWC systems destined for RAF stations Neatishead and Boulmer. In those days, there were clear problems in integration, not only for the team freshly relocated to the Marconi payroll and their new homes around Chelmsford, but also in melding the individual companies’ differing standards in engineering.

 

Mike had a thankless task—he was up to his neck in muck and bullets trying to commission the interface between the main Elliott data processing systems and the radar simulator equipment that was intended to provide training exercises for fighter controllers at Neatishead, and everything that was labelled “simulator” was in those days highly prototype. Some would say that it looked as though it had been assembled using a knife and fork, rather than a soldering iron, and some of the key engineers responsible for its development had remained in Hertfordshire rather than becoming Essex men. So, Mike was working in some areas almost completely without support—perhaps that is one of the reasons he was more than helpful and friendly to the fellow lost soul that was me at the time.

 

Time, as they say, heals all wounds, even those suffered by radar simulation hardware and software, and the two of us ended up working together in Norfolk when the stuff was delivered to site, together even to the extent of being billeted, as one, at the nearby RAF Coltishall. In some ways, that was a home from home for Mike, who had joined the RAF from school in Dulwich as a boy entrant and progressed to Sergeant specialising in radio communications, notably tropospheric scatter systems. So, the complexities of “sheet-change day” in the Sergeants’ Mess annexe (actually an airmen’s H-block) were as nothing to him. I noticed that Mike made very little, almost nothing, of his previous ranking seniority over the junior technicians with whom we worked; having come from other technical disciplines he had become rather good at dealing with others less well-informed than himself, maybe because when a new technology does not come naturally or immediately to someone, they can choose to become rather good at explaining it rather than flaunting their supremacy. And Mike had chosen to be rather good, to the benefit of me as well as so many others.

 

I found out a lot about Mike’s background during our weekly return trips by car from Chelmsford to Norfolk, and would groan solemnly at him when faced with being a captive audience in his ageing Triumph Herald estate for yet another Monday’s early morning monologue on the financial history and prospects for agriculture in England. But that was the mark of the man—a catholic interest in fields outside computers and radar systems, topics which Mike had the enviable ability to leave aside whenever he wanted to. Natural history was very important to him, and as a result we toured a lot of Norfolk in the evenings, off-shift, with him lubricated only marginally by the very occasional bottle of his favourite tipple. Brown ale was a drink that many publicans had become reluctant to stock but it was so desirable to Mike that he went against the grain by insisting on asking for it wherever we went. Stubborn, or what?

 

Another mark of the man was his affection for a filthy briar pipe, despite his apparent inability to keep the tobacco alight for more than a micro-second or two. I never witnessed Mike using the true pipe-smoker’s theatrical ability to emulate a volcanic eruption for the benefit of onlookers, but he attempted to compensate them for their loss by scraping the bowl of the darned thing with a pen-knife all the time. (Sadly, the effects of inhaled tobacco smoke seem to have played a large part in his eventual passing.)

 

Having served his time at Neatishead, Mike returned to Systems Department at Chelmsford to work on newer simulation systems, continuing under Brian Kendon. When I too had finished my time on-site, there was a ready welcome for me in the same office and I like to think we got on extremely well. Mike seemed completely unflappable, somewhat unlike our joint boss, and was always determined to get the best out of the system, both technically and managerially. One of our imperatives was the re-implementation of the simulator system to use much more affordable hardware—there was never to be another customer with pockets as deep as had been the MoD’s for Linesman/SLEWC. The initiative for faster, cheaper tabular display systems led to a deepening relationship with Lynwood Scientific Developments at Alton in Hampshire. Their obvious strength was in the customisation of keyboard/display terminals, and as a growing company they were hiring talent. They clearly valued Mike’s potential and cultivated him to an extent that eclipsed Mr Marconi’s esteem for him. “Spread your wings, Mike!” wrote Brian Kendon’s secretary on his leaving card, which must have been in the mid to late 1970s.

 

Mike’s career at Alton did not flourish in quite the way he had hoped. As I recall, his role was in the administration of the company’s internal computer systems, rather than actively engineering new ones, and the founders eventually sold Lynwood and went on to establish other start-ups. In the resulting upheaval, there was no longer a place for Mike. But, and it is a big BUT…it was there that Mike met his partner for the last 36 years, Fernande, who supported him through a cluster of other jobs. Such is now fashionably called a “portfolio” in today’s idiom when each of them has few readily identifiable prospects.

 

In September 2016, I met Mike and Fernande for lunch when they were on holiday in Suffolk. Happily retired, and still proud of the still-gleaming blue Citroen that they had test-driven to Colchester to show off to me when it was new (well over a decade ago), Mike did not seem to have changed very much at all. There was not quite so much scope for fun as there had been in the old days because Mike really did have a quality that I envy—that ability to move on and leave a past career behind, even including the humorous memories—so there seemed little point in unearthing the jokes from old times when he so easily preferred to live in the present. These were “jokes” like suggesting that his initials really stood for “motorised transport” and not Michael Thomas, or asking whether he went to special measures daily to keep that quiff of hair at the front of his head bleached white. (If Mike had been a horse, we’d have called it a “blaze”.) Where would have been the point, when his coiffure was by then uniformly grey? And as for making pincer movements on his oh-so-sensitive kneecaps, a manoeuvre always pointless unless you wanted to make him collapse into helpless giggles and become incapable of retaining his grip on whatever you wanted to “borrow”… well, there were ladies present!

 

But Mike seemed happy and healthy and deeply involved in the community around his home; chairman and factotum for the management committee for his block of flats, he was obviously the go-to chap if you wanted best and final quotations for replacing 37 letter boxes. He was blogging occasionally about the alleged price of Boris Johnson’s alleged haircuts and similar alleged matters and remained an enthusiastic photographer, a hobby that started with his first proper camera acquired during an RAF posting to Singapore. Mike had done a fair bit of travel in his time, but made as light of those experiences as he did of most things, even including the time when he was sent abroad wearing his “hairy blues” to sow the seeds of Saddam Hussein’s downfall. Sadly, I can no longer ask him if he was kidding about that. (He was.)

 

Elizabeth, Thomas and Rosemary have joined Fernande in asking that his funeral service in early November is limited to his close family. Apparently, he had become so widely liked and respected in his local community that, rather than the sizeable wake it might become, they prefer Mike’s send-off to be a quiet one. RIP, Mike, I’m sure you would have wanted it that way too.

 

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