A Temporary Accountant in London from 1976

For some reason this website from time to time decided to turn my writing inside out. It annoys me. I quite like the normal green type on a dark grey (?) background but sometimes I have to live with grey (?) on a pearly white background. I have to live with it until I find out how to fix it. You don't have to read it in any format, so if you are reading it it's your fault. Not mine.

I had returned to my childhood home in the Wirral in about 1974 because I hankered for the very different part of the world, with wild areas like the Welsh hills and the Peak district available from a short drive. I worked for a while in what had been the family business and this boosted my rather modest confidence having been appointed as the Assistant Management Accountant, a rather grand title for a senior clerk.

Life back in Liverpool is another chapter, but after a while I found myself pining for London and my friends here. A couple who were close friends were about to move into a flat in Acton which was under a controlled rent which I remember being £7 something per week, between 3 of us. Not surprisingly it was pretty horrible but with an electric heater augmented by a paraffin stove it was liveable under a duvet. I bought a second hand mattress (really) from someone in Holland Road, Shepherds Bush. I didn’t catch anything from it and I was fearless in those days. Though my friends said eurgh. Zoopla says that flat is worth £345K today but I suspect it’s a different place now!

So I turned up in Acton in the crazy hot summer of 1976, with a place to live but no job or income. I turned to the Evening Standard. Temporary Accountants required, West, Danes and Co. I went sheepishly (as I wasn’t a ‘real’ accountant) to their office in Bond Street. Brian Danes looked after temps whilst John West looked after permanent employees. Brian was a very traditional fellow (rumoured later to be National Front supporter – glad I didn’t hear that at the time) whereas John was a long haired young man, quite hippieish and the direct opposite of Brian. Business was always conducted over a glass of wine and the office usually accommodated a selection of unemployed or lightly employed ‘accountants’ who were mainly there for the craic. All very convivial and Brian immediately offered me a job with Rank Radio International, of Power Road Chiswick. Pay was £2.30 per hour, about twice as much as I had been paid in Liverpool so off I went.

Turned out there were a lot of ‘accountants’ there and it was because Rank – better known as Bush Radio – were relocating to Plymouth and wanted a team of temps to provide some continuity over the relocation. The perk there was staff sales, so I bought a black and white Bush TV for £30 – reduced because it was an obsolete model. My flat was becoming a home, wow. I was put in a room with one colleague – a permanent employee who was planning to make the move. He was then known as Harry Pitrola (though he changed it later) and was a Ugandan Asian. I had never really had any contact with an Asian before that and Harry and I became friends. He was (and probably is) an entrepreneur but not necessarily successful, I believe his previous enterprise had gone bust (hence the name change). He moved to Plymouth, but he hated it because of the racism he experienced there and came back to Hounslow after a few months. He also (like me) ended up working for Honeywell so we continued to see each other off and on. He interested me in a business proposition in Uganda, but it never came to fruition.

Before I went to Plymouth I got unwell with what my GP said was Rheumatic Fever, though I’m dubious about whether that diagnosis was correct, so I arrived in Plymouth a couple of weeks after the others. They were staying in the Holiday Inn (then very posh) and the guys had seen a good angle (they were all guys) and did a deal where they would give us £60 per week fixed expenses rather than living in the hotel which then cost about £57 per night. It was off season, so like my mates I could afford a little cottage in a place called Downderry in Cornwall. This was a weird life – a dozen young blokes, most from NZ or Australia on what then seemed to be a compulsory Europe interlude. Well what do 12 blokes do in the winter in Cornwall? There was a pub in the village and a lot more round and about. Enforcement of licensing hours and driving laws was made more sketchy by the presence of coppers, not very different from us in age or habits, in the pubs. My pay had increased, and we had these living expenses on top - £60 expenses compared with £10 rent. After about 3 months I had paid off my overdraft and credit cards and decided I couldn’t stay there if I wanted to avoid alcoholism. I needed a more normal life in London.

Brian Danes didn’t have any jobs at that stage so I found another agency, Dunlop & Badenoch. I met Julian Dunlop, who I thought was an old Etonian but finding him on Linked In, it was a Catholic Abbey boarding school. Whatever, he was posh, and he got me a job in the city, with a firm of solicitors. I was in my fake hippie phase so I turned up in the very exclusive office in Finsbury in my normal uniform – T-shirt (usually a red one saying Belle-Île-en-Mer after a holiday), jeans and in summer a Wrangler jean jacket or an Afghan coat when it was chilly. Actually, not a real Afghan but a fake one made in Scotland out of sheepskin, given to me by a friend of my sister’s. All went swimmingly there: the work fitted superbly to my nerdish delight in preparing bank reconciliations. They had been trying to get this sorted for months but couldn’t find a suitable nerd so I was breezing it, usually finishing by lunch time and volunteering for other things in the afternoon. Until one morning. My boss called me in and said one of the partners – I remember him being called Sir David Wilson but the Sir may have been apocryphal – but someone of that name having worked at the same law firm is now a big wig at Goldman Sachs. Anyway, this David Wilson, whom I have never knowingly met, had seen me entering the building that morning. He complained to my boss (bear in mind accountants of any sort are definitely non-U in a top lawyers) that I had looked ‘windswept’ and not the kind of person he could gaze on without an attack of the vapours. Sort out your style or do one. I talked to Julian and he encouraged me to find a new job – it would be easy (and it was), which I did. This is me when mildly windswept – I had a much better beard later.

I was back in the claws of Brian Danes and he connected me with a man who I had worked with at Rank, who was now working for Babcock and Wilcox. This was a weird assignment. The office was in a former hospital in Great Dover Road (which appears now to be apartments, and the company club across the road has disappeared below another block). The office was set out in rows, a bit like a schoolroom, with each row consisting of a number of spaces – I think 4 – on a single desk, so we were laid out like schoolboys. I sat in my designated space and said hello to the elderly man (well, over 40 for sure) who sat next to me. He was called Eric and I asked him what his job was. He said he was the Office Boy. I was puzzled by this and said in a gentle way that he seemed a bit long in the tooth to be an Office Boy. He explained he had joined the company when he was 16 and was the youngest then, and was still the youngest now, so was still awaiting a promotion. I needed a biro and was told the stationery office was available between 12 and 1. I went there and the rather fierce man behind the window said I had to prove my previous biro had run out of ink before he considered my request. I returned with mine but he detected remaining ink. I demonstrated it didn’t work and he reluctantly weakened.

But other things at B&W were good. They had a canteen where you could get lunch in a cafeteria for not much, but you could also opt for the restaurant, where there was waitress service and a set meal of three courses including half a pint of beer, also dead cheap. After lunch, over the road to the club for a pint or two (also subsidised) and perhaps a game of snooker on the several tables provided.

My task was to recover overdue debt. At Rank I had been ringing up corner electrical shops all over Britain. They perhaps owed £100 and I remember one of them where the lady who answered the phone told me her husband had passed away and she had therefore had to close the shop. She was paying off her debt but had to do it slowly, £1 per month I think, out of her widow’s pension. It was a different matter at B&W. The debtors were shipping companies and power stations and shipbuilders. The one I remember was a company called Hyundai (more familiar these days!) There was a large debt related to a ship boiler which had been outstanding for 30 years. It is fair to conclude that B&W were not really doing a good job managing its receivables. My boss told me there was a reason for that. Everyone on the board, including the financial director, were engineers by trade and not one of them had a clue about business.

I found the contact in Hyundai, who was called Mr Lee. Not easy to communicate by phone with Korea in the 1970s but I finally got through to Mr Lee. Or a Mr Lee. He asked me which Mr Lee I was wanting to speak to. He explained that there were dozens of people at Hyundai who were called Mr Lee. Fortunately, it was time for my summer holiday and I ended my relationship with B&W so whether that debt was ever paid will remain a mystery.

Well that’s enough for this chapter. I have no idea if this is of any interest but a couple of people seem to read it and it pleases me to write it. I seem to be getting towards writing an autobiography of a nobody. I expect the readers will get tired of all this very quickly!