Fragment 22: The Life & Times of a Social Experiment
More booze, more soap, a few delights, and a painful introduction to corporate politics
It’s Springtime 1967 and Jef, Ivan and I are now flatmates in the upper floor apartment of a detached house in the village of Adderbury, near Banbury in Oxfordshire.
Below us, in the ground floor apartment, live Louis and his wife. Louis, who is a member of the United States Air Force, works at nearby Upper Heyford USAF airbase. He is black and he is a hoot. His wife is vivacious and also very funny.
Visiting them, I see my very first American refrigerator. It is huge - at least six-feet high and with two-doors, like a large wardrobe: much bigger than anything we have over here at the time in the UK. Louis opens the doors wide to reveal that it is full of …booze. They have a separate fridge for food! Jef, Ivan and I find numerous excuses to visit and are always welcomed. In addition, as previously mentioned, we regularly visit The Plough public house.
However, our social life is not all about getting drunk. Not quite. Jef is an extraordinarily confident and competent young man, well-suited to his public relations role at Alcan, and in great social demand generally. He seems to be forever acting as best man at friends’ weddings and can turn out hilarious speeches for these occasions - he tries some of the jokes out on Ivan and me.
And he is a great cook. I am indebted to Jef for teaching me, for example, how to chop an onion, how to prepare stock, and how to cook a bolognese sauce. The fact that we eat well probably insulates us against some of the worst risks of excessive drinking. Jef also teaches me the finer nuances of ironing clothes. A very practical mentor!
Anyway, coming in to the summer of 1967, two things stick in my mind:
One: on 8th June 1967, Procul Harem’s A Whiter Shade of Pale goes to the top of the UK pop charts. As you will know from previous fragments, I was never a great pop music fan, but I really liked this unusual song that provided a ubiquitous backdrop to that summer. Worth also mentioning, perhaps, that another stand-out record that we played a lot was The Animals version of House Of The Rising Sun which had been released in 1964. (For what it’s worth, on 1st June, the Beatles released Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but that doesn’t stand out in my memory as much as the two songs above.)
Two: Ivan, who, by the by, is quieter and more introverted than Jef, comes home from his work at General Foods with some samples of a new food product which has been described as follows:
If ever a product can be said to have been tailor-made to fit in with known consumer preferences it is Angel Delight. Research showed that there was a ready market for a bland, quickly-made creamy textured dessert in certain clearly identified flavours, and Angel Delight was produced to satisfy this market. It was an immediate success, and almost straight away almost doubled the instant dessert market.1
Well, bland it may have been but to sit listening to A Whiter Shade of Pale and House of the Rising Sun, with a dish of Angel Delight to hand, was wonderful. And, if a young woman happened to be alongside as well, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!”2
And there was a young woman. We went out together for a couple of years before drifting apart. One memory that particularly stays with me is the keepsake that she had of her grandfather - a plain postcard upon which was handwritten:
Dear wife, Left my coat at <place name> station. Please collect.
Her grandfather and grandmother had married and honeymooned. Immediately thereafter, grandfather set off to fight in the First World War. Shortly afterwards, he was killed in action. The card was the only memento that her grandmother had … apart, of course, from the fact that she was pregnant with my girlfriend’s mother.
And what of my work? It went ridiculously well. Then it didn’t go so well.
It has taken me a long time, a very long time, to work some of this stuff out: the ease with which, in numerous situations, I was able to progress, until the tide turned. Why?
Within eight or ten months I was appointed a sales trainer, the first rung on the P&G ladder. The role that Jim Young had performed for me, I now performed for other recruits. This meant that I would buzz off to wherever was required and train young chaps - always chaps - in the 4 x 4 sales process.
One of these instances took me to a city in the north of England where a long-term salesman - let’s call him Tommy - had retired. I started out with the new chap, making the important point from the outset that, at P&G, we did NOT oversell. No, sir, this was a cardinal rule. It was, I preached, vitally important to maintain the correct stock levels of each product line, and overstocking was absolutely verboten.
The first shop that we went to seemed to have rather a lot of Daz in stock. And the next. And the next. And the next. Towards the end of the first day I realized that this territory was absolutely loaded to the gunwales with the stuff. The stock counts that we did that day had taken us beyond stockrooms and into corridors, staff rest rooms and, even, staff lavatories. Daz was everywhere. And whereas I would have expected someone to complain, no-one did.
The final call of that day was to a large store. The shelves were groaning under the weight of Daz. There were about three facings of Persil (the arch-enemy, Lever Bros, brand, which was the national leading product at the time) to twenty or more of Daz.
“You’ve certainly got sufficient Daz,” I said to the shop manager.
“Aye,” he replied. “Tommy was a good lad.”
This wasn’t the response I’d expected. “Yes,” I ventured cautiously.
“Tommy really looked after us.”
“Good.”
“Has the cog arrived yet?”
This threw me. Again cautiously I ventured, “The cog?”
“Aye, cog for’t Daz machine.”
I waited.
“Tommy told us, on the quiet, like, about the breakdown on’t Daz machine…” the store manager paused, then, “He told us about the new one being stuck in transit on board ship in’t Suez Canal.”
Oh, well … I’m guessing that Tommy had won a set of steak knives or something in his last month! That or he just wanted to go out in style. Whatever, he must have broken every sales record in the book.
But I did have a problem. I didn’t find selling the products fulfilling. I kinda thought that a trained monkey could do it. Mind you, I did progress into other activities in addition to the sales training role.
One area of product development at this time was separate stain-removing detergent additives. A competitor, Lever Bros, version was called Luvil. I was tasked with monitoring the shelf facings that the product was getting in stores, and assessing the off-take.
Another development was the launch of Ariel in the UK - the first in a new product category of biological soap powders. It was big news generally, and it was big news for me because I was offered the role of a liaison between the UK sales force and the Ariel brand team.
This took me into a whole new world. I got regularly to visit P&G UK HQ in Newcastle on Tyne, and was involved in activities connected with the Ariel launch. Staying at the Gosforth Park Hotel on numerous occasions, I met our Sales Director, Roy Franchi, with whom I got on very well, and got involved with the Ariel brand team.
This also led to my meeting people from the advertising agency, Garland Compton3. I had not previously known that such companies even existed, and I found getting to understand what they did and how they operated absolutely fascinating.
The main Ariel launch for the sales force took place in the Manchester Free Trade Hall, its interior decked out for the occasion to look like a space ship. When everyone was seated, a large screen showed film of us all ‘leaving the launch pad’. First, an aerial shot of the Free Trade Hall, and then, as the spaceship rose, the expanding panorama of Manchester, and rapidly on so that the outline of the UK was clear. This, if I remember right, was accompanied by some guitar work from Hilton Valentine, the member of the Animals who delivers the wonderful arpeggio that starts House of the Rising Sun. Then we accelerated on into space and only when we were fully clear of the planet was the audience informed that we were about to learn something so secret that it could only be revealed when we were, literally, out of this world. And, voila, Ariel!
Now, I know, this is corny as hell but, boy, did it get me. You mean to say people actually got paid for organizing and creating this kind of stuff!?! Wow! Here was an area of activity that brought business and theatre together! If this was Marketing, or part of it, I wanted in.
But life wasn’t necessarily going to make it easy for me to make the transition. One evening, a member of the brand team and I went to a club in Newcastle for a few drinks and in search, maybe, of female company. He was senior to me, but a nice guy. Or so I thought.
The following morning, someone asked where we had been and, thinking nothing of it, I described something of our escapade. Bad move. The look I received from my companion of the evening before told me everything I needed to know. He was absolutely furious.
It wasn’t that I’d said anything particularly awful - anyway, our activities had been entirely uneventful. But he was a married man and proved to be insanely concerned that whatever innocuous comments I might make could reflect badly on him by throwing his moral standing into question. He told me that I had had no authority to say where we had been. I said I was amazed at his reaction but sorry if I had upset him. He refused to be pacified. I had made an enemy. And, in short order, I found myself back in my sales role.
In 1968, I was asked to take over a new territory based on Leicester. So, back home, so to speak. And, indeed, I did return to George and Nellie’s flat for a short time but, having now experienced my own independence, it really was not something that I wanted to return to. Their flat was poky and uncomfortable and there could be no privacy.
Remember Colin from an earlier fragment, the old school friend who had introduced me to the the Leicestershire County Players? Well, we ended up sharing a fairly large ground-floor bedsit on Leicester’s Ratcliffe Road.
Remember, also, Rupert, the Reverend Rupert Bliss, a.k.a. Uncle Rupert, influential since my earliest days? In early 1969, he comes back in to the picture. On a visit to see how George and Nellie are, I learn that they have been invited to spend a few days at Rupert’s retreat in Sussex and that, if I so choose, I am included in the invitation. Clearly, it would help if I go because I could drive all three of us there and back. I agree. So it is, that we head for Midhurst for the weekend.
Something extraordinary is about to happen.
Thanks for reading.
Image at top: Shutterstock
Foley, J. The Food Makers: A History of General Foods (1972)
Wordsworth, William. The French Revolution, as it appeared to Enthusiasts (1809) and The Prelude (1850)
This pre-dates the acquisition, by Saatchi & Saatchi, of Garland Compton.
I enjoyed that :-)