WilF's career move away from the Post office came in 1966 when he went to Alfred Herbert Machine Tools in Edgwick, Coventry as a draughtsman to work on machine tool control systems. he had absolutely no experience either as a draughtsman (other than a few hours spent doing drawing homework at college) and no experience in electrical or electronic control systems either. John Davis got WilF the interview and WilF seemed to be able to blag his way through because they offered him the job on the spot. John later went on to become a university professor, of mathematics ..... WilF says he doesn't think he ever thanked him properly. Anyway WilF seemed to blag his way through the first few weeks and found that he had a bit of an aptitude for the work, which he enjoyed tremendously. The boys and girls already working there were very kind and gave him an enormous amount of encouragement and help and WilF would like to mention the following: Jack Penny, Keith Knight, Doug Allsop, Brian Lambert - there were many others but .... WilF's memory not being what it once was ..... well, you get the picture! After a short time there was an 'opportunity' to transfer to Herbert Lutterworth due to the Edgwick operations being scaled-down, so WilF was duly transferred there. Actually the 'management' made the announcement that they did not believe there was a big future in automated (ie numerical control) machine tools and so they were going to concentrate the company's efforts on the more traditional machine tools in future. This has to go down as one of THE classic industrial management mistakes of all time. Alfred Herbert were up amongst the world leaders in machine tool numerical control at that time; within a few short years thay had disappeared completely. Alfred Herbert
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