Donal's Early Career
A Work in Progress
42
When I was sixteen, in 1960, I l went to work at Burroughs Wellcome's chemical research laboratories in Beckenham, Kent, England where I was a lab assistant. They gave a day off a week for continued education. On those days, that I didn't take the train, I would ride my bicycle from Camberwell to Beckenham to Norwood two afternoons a week to attend Norwood Technical College. I'd then ride home to Camberwell. About 20 miles all told through London traffic.
My favored route by bicycle to Beckenham took me on a private road past Dulwich College, a private school for boys with a noted art gallery and an accomplished list of former pupils including P. G. Wodehouse. On non-college days my route home took me down steep Sydenham Hill where a traffic light waited at an intersection with a main road at its foot. I rode a fixed-wheel bike and kept up with the busy motor traffic going downhill to stop at the light.
I had started to think of being a writer and I saw a job listed in the newspaper that would mean living in a village in Kent, as an assistant to an author. I sent a letter to apply listing my current employer. Perhaps he had looked up the Burroughs Wellcome number in the directory as I was very surprised to be summoned to the phone. This phone, in the age of landlines, did not ring in the lab where I worked but in the administrator's office. I was embarrassed to take the call and have a short uncomfortable-to-speak freely interview with the author in front of three women secretaries. It might have been H. E. Bates. I wasn't offered the job, but I kept looking.
Geraldine was the young woman who summoned me to the phone. I was far too shy to approach her but she was my age and I thought attractive. There were two other young women in the admin office besides Geraldine. They would mingle with the young lab assistants as we queued for our weekly pay packets.
Those who were not salaried staff were paid on Fridays when at lunchtime we would line up to receive our pay packets which in my case was four pounds, some shillings and pence. We were paid in cash.
The girls from the admin office were among those who assembled. Christine, Valerie who later became engaged to Roger, and Geraldine. Christine, a tall girl, wore a short tight miniskirt to work one Friday when we were waiting to be paid. Roger slapped her hard on the bottom while we were standing in line. He was that sort of person. He later complained, a few days later, that on copulating with Christine on the carpet in the back of his van she wasn’t even wet.
Just as at school, William Penn Comprehensive School, now long defunct, my older brother had preceded me working at Burroughs Wellcome. He was in his third year there and getting ready to leave and go to University with a grant that provided enough money a student could live cheaply. He had studied for the needed A level certificates while taking the day release I also enjoyed.
Organic chemistry was not for me. One day, carelessly, while manipulating some chemicals in a fume cupboard for an experiment, I managed to drip some drops of a lachrymator, stuff that makes you cry, onto one of my shoes. Not long afterwards, I walked over to the dining hall to pick up a tray and get some lunch. As I walked down an aisle between lunch room tables I did not notice people hurriedly rising from their seats and exiting the building. It was a warm day and the evaporating drops on my shoe were wafting behind me as I walked. It was powerful stuff.
I got another job as a lab technician at Whitbread's Chiswell Street brewery in the City of London. This was a job where I could walk to The Oval underground station to take a train to work. The brewery had cellars that dated back to Shakepearian times. The Lord Mayor of London's ceremonial coach was kept at the brewery behind a glass wall in a temperature controlled room. The brewery which used the drop method of fermentation was several stories high, one of the higher buildings at the time, a film had been made from the roof of the fires in the City of London one night when London was heavily bombed by German aircraft in World War II.
At first my job involved running an experimental brewery. The chemistry of fermentation was not then, and probably is still not fully understood. The problem to be solved was head retention. A phrase that elicited laughter when I used it in America. Whitbread's problem was that their renowned bitter beer did not have such a big foamy head as Watney's carbonated beers. What could be done by varying the ingredients that go into beer to get a better head on the beer, one that would last longer and not dwindle quickly as it currently did.
My project was to run the glass brewery which had been constructed to try out various recipes. It modeled the real brewery and descended two floors with a metal staircase around it. I wore a white coat as one of the professional staff. I might have been 18. Most of the work in the glass brewery was done by a young fellow wearing a brown coat who had been brewing beer long before I arrived to take charge. Together we mashed in and made second runnings varying the recipe and doing the best we could to provide some good samples to the senior brewers who conducted tastings.
Using the privilege of my white coat, I sometimes wandered the old brick brewery, passing by the big wooden vats of beer on various levels, descending staircases that went by the stately board room where the Director's met down to the cellars where cobbled streets possibly dating from Shakespearian times were still visible among the storage tanks.
At school, I'd enjoyed acting in school plays and the brewery had a drama club that put on plays it staged before audiences at a nearby theatre near the Aldersgate station. Rehearsals were held in the evening and through the cast members I first encountered literary London. Our manager's secretary in the new computer programing department, Mary Adams was also one of the cast and she shared a flat with Maggie Clews, an announcer for the BBC World Service radio programs. They were friends with actors such as Tom Bell and poets such as Peter Porter. Mary would sometimes invite them to meet her after rehearsals in the private brewery bar. On one occasion after some jovial imbibing in the bar Tom Bell made off with a bunch of daffodils from the window boxes that lined Chiswell Street, presenting them to Mary as a bouquet. And So To Bed, was one of the plays the drama club put on. Another was HayFever, for which I got good reviews for my part from Mary's claque in the audience.
Most of my free time was spent studying for the English "A" level exams I needed to pass in order to apply to a university college. One of my teachers had suggested I become a journalist when I left school but I hadn't heeded that advice. I was intent on getting a degree in the sciences.
My story is one of continuing education. As the story goes, Whitbread management realized that it could no longer hire staff to work as clerks with quill pens now that computers were coming into fashion. So, aptitude tests were passed around and after taking one I was selected to go to an IBM training school to learn how to be a computer programmer. A computer room with a raised floor was being prepared to house the IBM 1440 computer that had been ordered. It was being built in a basement approached by descending a staircase that otherwise led up to Colonel Whitbread's private accommodation in a private wing. A refrigerator and supplies of bottled beer were kept adjacent to the cool air-conditioned computer room. We sometimes encountered the Colonels's butler entering the building from the courtyard.
Now a trained programmer, I was sent to work at Stowells of Chelsea, part of the Whitbread Group, whose distribution center for the wines they sold to restaurants, clubs, wine bars and off-licenses was just off the King's Road.
At Stowell's, I met Bill Sowerby, who taught me to how to properly answer the phone: Russell, speaking, not Mr. Russell. A well tailored management trainee, he seemed to mostly be a liaison between the new team of ex-IBMers that Whitbread had hired to manage the computer project and Whitbread's old-school management led by the Colonel, who had led his own paratroop regiment in the recent war and who regularly entertained the Queen Mother at the Brewery as well as organized horse racing at Cheltenham.
At Stowells of Chelsea I became acquainted with punched cards. Besides their use for collecting information, they fit very well into the inside pocket of a jacket and it was the custom in those days to always carry a few in your pocket ready to pull out and write notes on while at the pub, say.
Punched cards are paper cards which when punched with holes encoded eighty columns of alphanumeric information a tabulator could read. I worked on my own at night running boxes of punched cards through a sorter. Each card represented a transaction. Then, I ran the sorted cards through the tabulator to print a report organized by customer. I was warned not to let my tie get caught in the tabulator which read cards at high speed.
Jim Lewis was the manager who had set up the punched card system at Stowells that was due to be replaced by the incoming computer at Whitbread. The Whitbread Group encompassed many breweries throughout England and Jim would soon move on from Stowells to a brewery in the Shires to be the data processing manager. In the meantime, he was keeping things running during the day managing the young women who punched up the cards from the invoices sent and payments received. The tabulator was programmed with wires plugged into a board, much like an old telephone exchange that had many holes in front of an operator to select. Jim had programmed these boards to produce needed reports. Stowells was a profitable subsidiary with higher margins on its products than beer. Eventually, some decades later Whitbread would sell off its beer business to concentrate on restaurants and hotels.
The first computer program I was assigned to write was a make-work project given to me by my manager, Michael Russell, no relation. He had been recruited by John Dunbar, his senior, also his former colleague at IBM. It was a bell ringing program where eight imaginary hand bells would play a tune directed by the program.
The last program I wrote was to make mulitple Cray-1 vector register instructions chime. That was after I had quit programming to write full-time and then returned to programming several years later in order to make a living having achieved success as a poet at the expense of becoming somewhat destitute.
A learning experience.
Dick Russell (C) Richard M Russell
2025
