The photo (copyright © Alan Roberts) is of the burned-out skeleton of a factory on Leicester’s Humberstone Road. The fire occurred in January 2017. Half a century earlier, when it was the Brevitt Shoe factory, I worked there for six months.
The previous fragment outlined a tranche of teenage uncertainties, insecurities and self-delusion. All leading up to a point where I had six months to kill before heading off to the Royal Air Force. How was I to occupy the time? Well, money was in short supply so I thought I’d see if I could get a job. But where might one be found? An idea occurred: when George, Nellie and I had previously lived in Leicester our home was just a stone’s throw from the Humberstone Road and I recalled that, sometimes, Brevitt Shoes posted job vacancy notices. I went to have a look.
Outside the premises there were no messages about job vacancies. Sod it, I thought, and went through the front door anyway. At the reception which, from memory, was basic, although a tad better looking than in the above photo, I asked if there was any work to be had. “Wait”, I was told. A couple of minutes later a chap turned up and asked me a few questions - basically name and address - and asked me if I’d be prepared to work in the warehouse. “Yes”, I said. That was it.
Subsequently, I turned up to join the warehouse team. To my surprise, the team numbered just one person. Therefore, Mac, a wiry wee Glaswegian of probably forty years of age with a red face and a nose that looked as though it might have been violently remodeled on numerous occasions, was both my boss and my co-worker.
Our mission, so far as I could understand it from Mac’s heavily accented delivery, was to receive ‘tickets’ from somewhere else in the organization. Each was a request for a particular style and size of shoe. It was our mission to pick the relevant item or items. Hmm, so far so explicable.
The warehouse occupied a floor of the building - I think it was the fourth floor - with a ceiling height that must have been around 4 metres. As far as I remember, there were eight floor-to-ceiling racks, each with three load-bearing shelves. Each rack was about 10 metres long, so there was a total of around 240 metres of shelving. The only other furniture was in ‘the office area’ - a small table, no larger than a metre square, and a couple of bentwood chairs.
At 10 o’ clock on the first morning of my employment Mac announced that it was time for tea. He shuffled off and returned a few minutes later with a teapot. Would I like a cup? Yes, please. Two mugs were filled.
I sat down, took a mouthful, and immediately sprayed most of it out across the table. It was the shock: the taste was not of tea but of Scotch whisky. A pot of tea, according to Mac’s recipe, was 25 per cent whisky. Literally.
This explained a great deal; above all, why nothing much got done. Mac would amble about among the racks with a ticket or two for a while in the pre-tea-break part of the morning. He might even find one of the target styles. He might even - a real rarity, this - find the right style in the right size. But, as the day went on, and more cups of - ahem - tea were drunk, the keen-eyed shoe-spotting faded away.
As time went on, I discovered that, upon leaving the warehouse each day, he went straight to the pub: I just marveled at his ability to stay upright, let alone do anything else.
Meanwhile, back in the warehouse, the inevitable upshot of all of this was that the response to nine out of ten tickets was that they were ‘out of stock’. And it usually took several weeks before giving up a search and closing out a ticket. And, mysteriously, nobody seemed to question any of it.
It didn’t take me long to work out that the warehouse was stocked with samples of all the Brevitt shoe styles made going back over a period of years. These were then available, if customers complained, as replacements for shoes that were below standard. The most common faults, I learned as time went on, had to do with women’s shoes, specifically the quality of stitching on the uppers and the strength and longevity of the heels.
Analysis
Over the following weeks I was able to fathom what was going on. There were samples of a very large number of styles of shoe: hundreds, some going back a couple of decades. This, in and of itself, seemed crazy: it was surely hard for a customer to go back to a shoe shop and legitimately argue that: “One of the heels on these shoes has come adrift. It’s just not good enough! I only bought them from you fifteen years ago.”
A particular problem was that, when new styles were launched and new samples supplied to the warehouse, Mac shoved them where there was shelf space. “A wee bit of room” was the only rule that governed their placement. Over a period of years the shelves had, of course, filled to overflowing so, increasingly, ‘a gap’ or ‘shelf space’ became synonymous with ‘an area of shelf less crammed than another bit of shelf’. In short, the result was 240 metres or more of chaos.
Action
I didn’t really think about it, I just started doing it. Sorting things out, that is.
It was hardly a difficult choice because the alternative seemed to be to sit at the little table all day and get bladdered. And Mac, bless him, was not the world’s greatest conversationalist.
So, since no-one else seemed to be remotely interested in what went on, I spontaneously started trying to sort things out. First, I created a space at the start of what I labelled Aisle 1 and, taking a guess at what I thought might be the earliest samples, started to move things around.
Inevitably, it was a slow process but, within two or three weeks, things started to make sense, and as time went on things started to get really sorted. Around the end of four months, if memory serves, I’d got the whole warehouse pretty much in date and style number order.
Remember, this was 1964/65 and there wasn’t a computer in sight. Indeed, the exercise was a very analogue affair. Throughout, Mac sat sipping his tea. I explained what I was doing and he just went along with it.
Results
The outcomes were dramatic. The original 'find rate’, which had probably never exceeded five per cent of the total requests, was early on beaten into a cocked hat. And the success rate accelerated as the project continued. When the task was complete, any request could be accurately responded to (assuming the styles were actually available, of course) within a couple of minutes.
Mac’s warehouse was hardly a magnet for other people and it had honestly never occurred to me that my efforts might change that. We’d perhaps briefly see a couple of people a day. But new people started to show up, sometimes singly, sometimes in twos and threes. They wore suits and looked ‘senior’. Indeed, they were, I was told, ‘Management’.
One or two at least had the decency to introduce themselves and maybe ask a question or two. Others just walked in, walked through through the aisles, and walked out - all without saying a word.
Then one day, sometime after the task was complete, a chap turned up, approached me and asked about my plans. I explained that I would shortly be joining the Royal Air Force. “That’s definite, is it?” he enquired. “Yes.”
Shortly thereafter another chap turned up. This, I was told, was Arthur Atlas. He was the boss. He said hello, wandered back and forth in the aisles for a few minutes, then left.
Next, one of ‘the Management’ came to visit the warehouse and told me that, if I changed my mind about going into the Air Force, they would like me to stay on and would pay me £30 a week. Doesn’t sound much, does it? But, to put it into some sort of perspective, the maximum George ever earned in his life was £20 per week. I restated my intention to leave. A little later still, the offer was augmented by the promised addition of a company car. Nonetheless, I had no intention of changing my plans. I left.
Thinking back …
I didn’t consciously think about this episode in my life until quite a while afterwards but when I did it struck me as truly bizarre. What a weird set-up! When I arrived there, the warehouse was not just sub-optimal but completely ineffective, useless, literally a waste of space. The main purpose it served was as a warm, dry place for Mac to get paralytic every working (euphemism intended) day.
What had ‘Management’ done about this? I presume they didn’t just think, “Well, the warehouse is currently a waste of space and needs organizing but, one of these days, a random bloke will walk in off the street and sort it out.”
It’s all the more peculiar because I know that Brevitt shoe manufacturing was always of a high quality. So why was this bit of the organization left in such a hopeless state? I’ve never fathomed the answer to this. And, by the way, I hope that my efforts did not subsequently cause problems for Mac because, despite his ramshackle and pickled existence, he was a good-hearted soul and I liked him.
Coming next time … finally, life in the Royal Air Force.
Thanks for reading.