Building Manager for Honeywell Brentford

In my early career at Honeywell, mainly in Brentford, I was finance person. Having started my time there as a temporary credit controller I advanced my career in finance and became a divisional financial controller. Alongside this I worked in evenings to qualify as an accountant (mainly because there was extra pay attached to qualification!).

My boss, the manager of commercial finance, was a rumbustious Australian. We got on well but I was impatient to develop my career further. I told him I wanted to be a direct report to the Finance Director.

In due course, the FD asked me to see him. He was rather an abrupt man and started telling me (with some justification) I was not a very good accountant but he had something else in mind for me. He was looking for someone to be Commercial Manager. What did that mean? Well, taking responsibility for most of the overhead costs the company had. At the time we had about 40 offices and workshops, a vehicle fleet of 1600 cars and a few vans.

It also included travel, expenses, and purchasing for the whole company. I therefore had a team of about 50 people.

The Church across the road

There was a lot to this job, but this story is based on Brentford, which was the UK Head Office. Obviously I had the Chairman and CEO and all the directors who mostly lived on the 9th floor of Honeywell House, as it was then called. It has had a few names since but now is the smaller of the 2 linked buildings now known as Great West House, on the corner of Boston Manor Road.

So you will get a few anecdotes here, linked only by my life in the building and things happened there.

Across the road there was a church, I think the Park Baptist Church (thank you Janet McNamara for telling me!)

I believe it eventually merged to become part of the Free Church. They told us as neighbours that they were going to demolish it and erect an office building to incorporate a small church or maybe chapel. A few months or years later they did demolish it and it became an open site with rubble. I was short of parking at the time and contacted them to rent the car park which we did and occupied for a few years until they decided to get on with building. Eventually they built a small office (no church!) which has been there ever since but rarely occupied. It now is supposed to be the UAE Dept of Education though I don’t think there are many there! After that we had some arrangement with the Inverness Lodge. There were not many spaces there, but in any case I think the need was reducing.

The related story was I was sitting at my desk one day, shortly after we had decided to stop having a lot of spaces reserved for directors. The company had gone all lefty and woke. It was also the time when top people were getting carphones so I got the inevitable call from a very entitled director (and one that I always disliked). "Guy, there is no space in the car park. What are you going to do about it?" As politely as I could manage I suggested he might park on the street. This was before the days of CPZs and he could do what anybody else did - find a space a few yards away!

Disappearing doors

Then there's the saga of the toilets. The board made the decision to improve the toilets. There were 22 of them - 2 on each floor up to the 10th - and I think 3 or 4 stalls in each of them. The property manager who worked in my team went to the market and selected a contractor. All went smoothly until one Saturday I had a call from the rather timid security man who worked the weekend. I had had a previous call from him when he asked for my help after he had locked himself out, something that caused me more mirth than genuine concern. He worked for a security contractor and I advised him he ought to ring his boss because there was nothing I could do. I suppose he was calling from a phone box as he would certainly not have had a mobile in the 1990s

A few weeks later I had another call. 'Men came in and they are taking away all the toilet doors'. I sat briefly contemplating the possibility come Monday there would be a few hundred people who worked there being forced to become full hippie, going to the toilet with no doors. A frantic set of calls to my team 'What the F*** is going on - you had better fix it for Monday". They did. There had been a delay in our contractor paying his subcontractor. All was resolved and modesty defended.

All proceeded to completion. I made a celebratory tour with senior management. Even the pernickety CEO expressed satisfaction. Went on to other things.

Then I had a call.

Hello, is it Guy Lambert?

Yes who are you?

I am Brian Brickie, the CEO of South East Contractors, who have been doing your toilets. Your staff keep promising to pay us, but they haven't and we have £195000 outstanding on your account. Please pay urgently.

Good to meet you Mr Brickie, but it is not you who were doing our bogs. It was David Grace, our contractor.

I have never heard of David Grace and it is us who have been doing the work. I will send the purchase orders you have sent me.

He sent me the documents by fax (ah, faxes).

They were purchase requisitions signed by a bunch of people I had never heard of, and which said in big letters 'This is not a purchase order but an internal approval document and has no legal effect'.

I pointed this out to him and apologised. I was sorry for him because he had clearly been had by this David Grace. He said we should pay him anyway, but I did not agree.

My Property manager observed he never trusted a man with a beard. I enquired why he had therefore chosen the neatly bearded David Grace as his contractor. He did not respond.

Immediately I informed my boss, who informed our security director, a retired colonel. I think my boss knew I was innocent but clearly Colonel and the rather unpleasant HR director thought I was bang to rights. I had a very uncomfortable meeting with the 2 of them but managed to convince them not me, guv.

The development manager knew nothing about this, he said, but eventually admitted that David Grace had built him a conservatory. I was not very happy about this, and nor was Colonel and the HR man, and he was summarily dismissed.

Then we came to the coppers. They came to see me. They said they had to come round from Southgate and to miss the traffic they would come for about 11.30. I had asked the remaining development man Tony o come down from his office in Hemel Hempstead to face the cops, but they only initially wanted to talk with me. Can we get a tea? Of course. We drank it. Do you have a canteen? Yes, would you like lunch. Yes please. So I paid for 3 lunches. So do you want to interview Tony now? Oh no, we have no time for that - we have to get back to Southgate. We will arrange another date.

A series of trips, interviews and lunches ensued. They told me they had identified 'David Grace'. DG was a former head teacher in Kent who had passed away som time ago. Fake DG was known to the police as a fraudster and they would follow it up. After several months they said they had not found 'DG' and believed he had emigrated to S America. We had been paying DG but he had been employing the other company to do most of the work and buy the materials. He had said he was the development manager for Honeywell and had convinced them. We had been happily paying him and he had been happily banking what we paid him. The coppers told me they had files on the case which would more than fill my office and they would send them to Keir Starmer, or whoever was the CPS at the time, but they didn't think they would proceed with anything as DG had flown the coop. My already shaky faith in the Met was further shaken (I feel better about them now!).

Before Good Friday

Throughout 'The Troubles' we did a lot of business in Northern Ireland. It was a horrible period and we had been identified as a target as we did some IT work for the government - an outfit described as Belfast Computer Services. This kept our tame Colonel busy and every now and then we had fire drills. We had one one day and we gathered on the front lawn outside the office.

I remember it more green. Anyway, when I got down there was one of those black Samsonite briefcases in the middle of the lawn. I spoke to the concierge. He didn't know whose it was and it was ticking.

Fortunately it was a nice day so we hung around chatting whilst we waited for the firemen. But it wasn't firemen who came. Our Colonel was taking charge, and a Land Rover appeared. Inside the Land Rover there were soldiers. They looked at this briefcase from every angle. Eventually one of them lay down and crawled across the lawn with various tools. He got to the briefcase and examined it. After a while he opened it and retrieved the alarm clock that was inside.

The Roof

Do you remember the hurricane that wasn't? We knew it wasn't because National Treasure Michael Fish told us it wasn't.

Going into the Brentford office (having gone a circuitous route to avoid fallen trees and indeed a fallen box van) I discovered trouble at that mill too. I was originally told that the roof had blown off. This turned out to be an exaggeration, but a lot of it had lifted and a bit of ceiling had fallen on the head of one of the dinner ladies who worked in the canteen, then on the top floor. Why are they called dinner ladies? Well, I'm doing it and can't complain about it. And no doubt they deserve being thought of as ladies though it is rare for them to be members of the House of Lords or married to a knight.

Honeywell was a very friendly company (at least among those of us who were in everyday roles) and this woman felt like a friend. She was OK really, a cut on the head if I remember, but not serious.

But of course the real problem was NO CANTEEN. Good job the police event came later. My boss decided that the canteen should be on the ground floor anyway, as we had just decided to move the Data Centre and its infernal mainframes.

When we took up the floor downstairs we found a parquet wood floor. My boss, who was posh and had just got his lad into Eton (the school not the Eton Mess pub) wanted a management dining room so he could entertain clients in the manner in which they would like to be. He insisted on personally selecting the wine list due to his exquisite taste, and it needed polished parquet floor not the carpet tiles the rest of us had to endure. To be fair, he had a French wife so obviously a wine expert by osmosis.

As I will mention, the company was now called Bull. We had a staff competition to have a name for the canteen (wash my mouth out with soap - staff restaurant was now the correct description). I suggested Eddie Bull's (geddit?). I have always liked puns, even though John Dryden call them "The lowest and most groveling form of wit'". I reckon he can't even spell grovelling so I go with Alfred Hitchcock who said "Puns are the highest from of literature"

Signs

About this time we were sold to a French company called Bull. This caused as much mirth in the USA (where we had a sizeable business) as the name given to the Service offering of the US computer company that had just moved in across the road to the building which is now known as The Mille. The service offering was known as Wangcare which some people thought sounded rude. Well, I was one of them.

We had signs on the sides and the end of our building with our name (see pic above) but our logo had been updated and looked like this by then, reflecting our industry and high intellect. And our love of dogs, obviously

MY job was to replace the signs, which would need planning permission. The new name was a lot shorter and me and my team had a whizzy idea to make it bigger and squarer and really put our new image across. Didn't work on the sides (those pesky windows) but would be great on the end, right by the M4. We commissioned something which we were told was the biggest single pane illuminated sign in Europe, or perhaps in the galaxy, who knows?

It was refused planning permission because the Department for Transport said it would distract drivers. You can see the point, though a few years later this Marks and Spencer ad was displayed even nearer to the M4. I found this one more distracting, but that's just me.

Eventually we got the signs approved though that led to other problems: it involved dozens of fluorescent tubes and there wasn't much access to them through the walls so most of its life a proportion of the tubes were out, which upset me and more importantly the communications director, who claimed he joined Honeywell because of his love of the Honeywell logo. Lomance?

That's enough. I could bore for a week with stories about Brentford Honeywell but I'm beginning to bore even myself.