One of WilF's early Post Office Telephones experiences left him a bit shattered at something he would probably now call 'corporate stupidity' (he's come across a hell of a lot of that in 40 odd years) but at the time just seemed petty and ridiculous. WilF was working with a gang that were stripping telephones, wiring and other equipment out of a Coventry factory, Smith's Stamping Works, about 1962. There were a large number of old candlestick telephones to be removed; these were old and very obsolete even in 1962 and were then just seen a scrap metal and bakelite by most people including the GPO bigwigs. WilF just knew that they would be valuable one day - he wanted to keep one or two but was told he couldn't rescue any at all and that they were all to be smashed-up. So that was that. But it was quite, quite ridiculous ..... now they are worth serious money of course, but that is not the point, history was being destroyed and WilF was distraught at being involved in corporate vandalism (still is distraught when he thinks about it today).
During his Post Office career WilF was fortunate to be able to attend college on day release and was able to gain a Full Technological Certificate in Telecommunications which was considered a very worthwhile qualification for senior Post Office technician grades at the time. WilF wanted a graduate qualification, though and this was a difficult thing to obtain whilst working for the Post Office in those days. He had also been 'shunted' into an office job and this was not going down too well with WilF. About this time WilF had a 'life changing' experience (LOL) ...... Based in Telephone House, Coventry at the time he had just returned from a survey of some small rural telephone exchanges in Northamptonshire (part of Coventry Telephone area then) and was just parking his PO van in the underground car park when he pulled on the steering wheel (as you do) whilst getting out of the van ............. and the steering wheel and column came away in his hands! The van had only returned from the Tile Hill (Torrington Avenue) service depot two days before so WilF was moderately 'put out' by this. Actually he was in something of a rage, probably his first real 'rage', being only nineteen years old at the time. He insisted on the mechanic attending immediately but was told to 'drive it over here' by the workshop manager. Unbelieveable!
Shortly before this WilF had been subjected to an end-of-training promotion interview and been denied his 'job of choice' because he was 'over-confident' - that was what he was told bt the prat that interviewed him anyway. Any one who knew Wilf when he was eighteen (that would be about five people including his family) would have laughed themselves silly at this label. Shy? Good God shy doesn't come near to a suitable description; Wilf was the most painfully shy person you could shake a stick at, at this age!
Anyway, these episodes and a few other things prompted WilF to start looking for a career move which, in the event, took him away from communications technology for a few years. So WilF went for an interview at Alfred Herbert's in Coventry and this period of his working life is described in the Machines link on the Technology Pages. After a few years, WilF came back to communications and so that part of the story continues below ..........
So, after two years with Alfred Herberts at the Lutterworth factory WilF saw which way the wind was blowing and volunteered for redundancy. He made this decision feeling that it was all but the end for the Alfred Herbert Group and that he would be best to get out now while there was still some money left in the redundancy fund. This seemed to be a sensible move as the Group folded completely not very long after WilF took his money and ran! He became self-employed at this point and spent some time working as a service engineer for local factories in and around Coventry, firms too small to employ their own engineer or electrician. To make up the work to a more-or-less full time occupation WilF did a few house rewires and some domestic repairs, anything in that line really to keep the wolf from the door. This was the early nineteen seventies so things in Britain were pretty dire on the work front but it wasn't a bad life at first.
WilF then got to thinking that this was going to be a pretty limited career and started to look for something a bit more challenging and permanent. The opprtunity came with an offer of a job with the Pye Group in Cambridgeshire. He went to the interview feeling that he would be unlikely to be offered the job, which was a position as an installation estimator for business and office communication systems. It seemed that the Pye company, Pye Business Communications, thought that he had the ideal qualifications for the job and he was offered the position there and then - 'when can you start?' .... erm next Monday? OK, then! So, he did start on the next Monday and was ensconced in the Royston Offices of the company and lodged in a hotel just up the road in Arrington, The Hardwicke Arms. During his first week WilF was rather disconcerted to find that the company was in the early stages of a redundancy scheme; having been recently involved with this at Herberts he was not a little put-out about this, especially as there seemed to be quite a few suitable candidates for his own job amongst those who were being considered for redundancy. He made this known to his own boss and his boss's boss and received some rather placatory and patronising responses for his trouble. Anyway, the whole thing did not give WilF a great start as far as the installation and service engineers were concerned and he had a great deal of sympathy with their attitude (WilF tried hard to work around this but often had the feeling that this point was held against him by many people during his stay with Pye, with hindsight, he was on a hiding-to-nothing and this was a large contributory factor to his eventual decision to leave, but more about that later).
WilF worked hard at learning his new job, getting himself accepted and generally coping with the travelling (he still had his home in Coventry and for six months or so was commuting daily between home and Royston). It was during this time that his two-year-old daughter Anita asked her mother, Vera 'who was that strange man I saw you kissing last night, mummy?' - actually it was WilF, but she had not seen him for so long she had forgotten she had a father! Anyway, eventually and after a few false starts WilF and Vera found a house in Fenstanton that they could actually afford to buy with the proceeds of the sale of their house in Coventry. So, moving day comes and WilF gets a few days leave from work, books the Pilkington's removal van and leaves (the old) home with Anita and the few priceless possessions in the company car, leaving Vera to do the last minute cleaning at the old place. To be continued ...........
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