Len Runkel

Alf Cooper  00:03
The copyright of this recording is vested in the ACTT History Project LenRunkel  laboratory technician of Technicolor et al, interviewed by ALF Cooper on the ninth of November, 1988 side one. Len, first of all, where and when were you born?

Len Runkel  00:34
I was born in Wood Green in on the 29th of May 1922

Alf Cooper  00:42
now what kind of schooling?

Len Runkel  00:44
Oh, I, I went to ordinary schools until I I went to a grammar school, and then I matriculated, and I went into an insurance office for a few weeks and then Ernie pop Runkel , that's your uncle, yes, my father's eldest brother. Yeah. He said, Well, you know, why doesn't he come in with me? Now, I can't quite remember now where his workshop was. I can't, I can't place myself before the war, if you know what I mean. But anyway, I was apprenticed to be a camera mechanic without any indentures. Of course, family business. Yeah, it was very good because I really, from a point of view of education, I didn't need a matriculation to become a camera mechanic.

Alf Cooper  01:49
Well, it stood you in good stead. Later,

Speaker 1  01:51
oh, in very good stead. Later, yes, but it was very interesting, very interesting because the old man, Pop was very old fashioned. Of course, he'd done his apprenticeship round about the early 1900s

Alf Cooper  02:12
Do you know who he did it with?

Speaker 1  02:14
I believe it could have been Edwards in the East End of London, was a tool maker, yes, yes, yes. But I, you know, I wouldn't be sure of that. I do know that he was a lifelong Tory and a lifelong member of the AEU. Even when he was working for himself, he still paid his dues. Was before the AEU. Of course, he was a member of the tool makers union, or whatever they were called, called, you know, and he was in that before the 1418, war. I think,

Alf Cooper  02:50
going back to Edwards, weren't they the lathe people?

Speaker 1  02:54
They made, they made tool tools, yes. Lathes, mills, guillotines, all that sort of thing. I think yes. But of course, he got involved very, very early, in the early 1900s he got involved with with the Cine business. He talked of his early days, and I suppose that was it was before the 1418, war that he met Arthur Kingston and lines, and he worked for some time with for Vinten, I think, and Newman Sinclair. But I recognise now, when I moved away from from him, that that most camera mechanics were stuck in a time mould. As far as engineering was concerned, their engineering base was in the early 1900s when they moved over to film, they divorced themselves from general engineering, and they stayed with films so, so they were doing things in the 1950s that nobody else would dream of doing, like hand cutting threads, you know, on a chaser. You're the piece of broomstick and and a chasing tool we used to cut internal and external threads that way, and think nothing of it. Of course, you could get your customer away in a quarter of an hour instead of tomorrow weeks. But it was, it was very interesting. And of course, you, Alan, remember that that dirty workshop we had in new Cavendish Street, don't you? That's right, yes, at the time when we were producing, that was after the war. That was after the war yesterday. Oh, yeah, well, I managed to, I think perhaps I ought to tell you about my father. See, my father was a clerk of the chapel in Fleet Street in. Immediately after the first war. Now, his father was a German, so he joined up. He was born in 1898, he so he was just, I think, just over 15 when he joined the army. Because the only safe place then, for a half German was was to be in uniform. You know, it wasn't so bad in the last war. And his father was a very interesting man, because he was, he was a had been an officer in the Ulands. His he was a baron in his own right. His father was a, some sort of a minor prince, and there's a place called Runkel on the Larne, and he had, he must have had a political problem, because he fled to the channel ports, left his horse, he took his horse with him, and left his horse and and boarded a ship. Of course, his education, my grandfather's education, then, was confined totally to being a gentleman, so all he knew about was wine and food. So he became a waiter, and he was a founder member of the Socialist International, a matter of which I'm very proud. In fact, yes, because he had most unpromising start, as far as I can see, to be a socialist. Well, the old man, of course, brought up in these conditions was was having been in the army from when he was a child, really, until until the end of the 18 war, he became a musketry sergeant in the Royal Fusiliers and and he went back to his job, which was a wholesale news agents, which was Howard Marshalls, in in the Fleet Street area somewhere. And I know, but he was clerk of the chapel at the time of the 26th 1926, strike. And he they used to tell the great doings there was, there were black legs getting in, trying to get the papers out. And they had the the information that they were going to publish the following day a news sheet and get it out of Fleet Street. So all, all the trade union officials in the district rang up every carting  company they could get hold of and ask them to be in Fleet Street at six o'clock following morning. Well, nothing moved. I understand for 72 hours, because they all turned up. They were all prepared to break the strike when it came down to it, because nobody was paying them. Was it? The old man was very pleased with that. But he was equally very upset with Ernie Bevan, because he rightly sold the miners out of bastard. He was quite sure that Ernie Bevan, Sold themm out

Alf Cooper  08:00
sold us out down the river?

Speaker 1  08:02
Yes  so, but I used to get some pleasure, great pleasure, out of this. As I say, my uncle True Blue and always carried his union ticket, although he'd worked for himself for years and didn't seem to have any need for a union ticket. He was the most mixed up man, politically I've ever come across. And his son, Jim Runkel was a very early member of ACTT, a newsreel member, very early 3435 . And of course, he used to work in the workshop quite often, building his own stuff and so forth. When the war came, I was, I was politically aware enough to want to do something about it, you know, and I I hadn't really, I hadn't completed my time, or anything like that. And Ernie wouldn't stand in my way. Uncle Ernie and I talked my father around. And so I joined up long before I needed to, because I said I wanted to go into what I wanted to go into, you know, which was the tank regiment, actually. So I went into the tanks at Catterick in 1940 Yeah. And I started off as a mechanic, a driver mechanic, then I became a fitter, because I'd got workshop experience, you know, and I soon got fed up with that. That's the dirty end of the stick, and decided I'd go back to duty. So I took a wireless course, I took a wireless instructors course, and I took a gunnery course, and then, and then I decided I'd take a chance on it. I got a couple of. Rights, I applied for a commission, and I went for all these boards and so forth. Mostly the boards consisted of deciding whether they could live with you and decided whether you knew which knife and fork to use. The standard answer to the board is, why do you want to be an officer? You said, then I'll be able to be instrumental in killing more Germans. And if you gave that answer, you were home and dry. That's just how thick they all were. And I'm not kidding about it anyway, I was from that point of view, all right, I suppose. And I went to Sandhurst, which was a doddle, because I'd done a drill instructors course so there were no problems about learning square bashing. I did my drill instructors course at Caterham. All the drill instructors at Sandhurst were guards. You know, the only problem I had was that they couldn't believe that you needed, that you needed only half a pace. And the old regimental Sergeant Major of the square was named RSM Brand, Brigand  Brand, they used to call him. Used to stick his chest up and say, You call me Sir, sir, and I'll call you sir, sir. And used to take communications drill across this square. You know there'd be about 10, I suppose you'd be at one end, and you'd have a squad of about eight blokes 150 yards away. And then they had one one bloke next to them, and another squad next to you. And you'd got to drill them from this distance, you know. And of course, having done a Caterham course, I gave them half a pace, which, which is standard practice for a trained soldier. So the guard said, and I remember the RSM came up to me and said, Why are you only giving them half a pace? You're supposed to give them a pace. I said, I was taught to give him half a pace, sir. Where did, where did you learn to instruct sir? I said, at Caterham, sir. He said, Well, carry on, sir. Bloodied, ridiculous. Anyway, Sandhurst was beautiful. I you know, it was thoroughly enjoyable. I suppose I missed out. Probably the most important thing that probably got me to Sandhurst more than anything else was, was the fact that my father was a very, very keen cricket and footballer. And I wouldn't say I was any too much good at football, but I did show a fair amount of promise at cricket. And when I was about five, four, something like that, we my father moved from the wholesale news agency business into the retail business, and he was managing a shop at Cookfield in Sussex. Well, Sussex, of course, the major religion of Sussex is cricket. Christianity comes second. And so, you know, the kids were welcome in the nets from as soon as they could hold a bat. And they used to run. They ran two Wednesday teams, two Saturday teams, two Sunday teams, cricket, the Cookfield Cricket Club, and everything possible was done for a cricket all the local Gentry, everybody turned out Cricket was important. There wasn't any way that if you showed any promise, you weren't going to be all right, you know, I can remember they used to blood the kids when they were about 12 or 13, they got a game. They thought they could win. They'd stick you in the first team at number 11, and if it was going well, you'd get a bat, you know, marvelous, really, marvelous. And so, of course, I, you know, Cricket was very important factor. So when I, when I joined the Army, of course, one of the first things I did was to find out what cricket I could play, and I joined in August, August. So you're right in the middle of the season, and I'd been having nets and so forth before I joined up. So that's, you know, I, I did quite well. I played for the unit at Catterick, and then we were moved to to, oh, what's the big plce? Tidworth, yes. Tidworth and I played for the garrison. Tidworth, and happened to make a pretty reasonable 50 the day before I went for my interview. And that was that was best. Days work I ever did, frankly,

Speaker 1  15:08
the other great thing in my life, of course, which I have almost forgotten, was music. Before then, my mother made me practice the piano from when I was very tiny, and I just took exam after exam and so forth, until I was about 12 or 13, and I heard some jazz, and I wasn't happy anymore, and I couldn't play it on the piano. I couldn't play anything on the piano that wasn't from the music. And the bug that bit me was Goodman. Benny Goodman, so I one Christmas, after lots of birthdays presents and Christmas presents and whatnot, I managed to get together five pounds, 10 shillings and six ence , which was a bloody fortune, and I bought a clarinet. And I must say, when I was working for my uncle, I suppose I was, what were we on, 1215, Bob a week, something like that, something like that. And with the clarinet and alto, I could go out and earn three pounds for three hours work in the evening, four hours work in the evening. And I was very seriously thinking about, you know this, this has got to be good, because when the war broke out too that there were lots of them went in the forces, of course, musicians, the good musicians, went straight in the bands, which you can't blame on for, can you? I got an ETU ticket, musicians union ticket, without too much trouble. They didn't even ask me how old I was, as far as I remember. Yeah, now I suppose that would have been Hardy Radcliffe, wasn't it? Wouldn't it, General Secretary of the MU then whom I met later, much later. Yes, it could be. I'm talking about 1939 1940 1938 perhaps,

Alf Cooper  17:10
you know, I didn't record. I was the first flute.

Len Runkel  17:20
Yeah. Well, my great pleasure was jazz, though, really, you know, you played in the dance band that made money, but there were lots of places you could, you could go to play jazz. There was a place in the Seven Sisters road. What was it called over one of the shops, something, nail. Was it the something nail, but you could turn up there any time and just sit in, yes, you know they'd have a jam session going all the time. There was the place in Southall, the Red Lion. Southall, did you well? You gotta remember, I was born in Wood Green. My father was born in Battersea, but brought up in near Wood Green, so obviously we were within the sound of Tottenham. Well, Tottenham, Hotspur, yeah, which was, was also quite an important thing still, is to some extent, yeah, well, they are, you see, anyway, this, this music bit was, was very good. I, I know I made enough to buy myself a dinner jacket in very short order. And it was, it was great, really something I enjoyed so much, you know, that I could easily have become a pro, although I don't. I think people have a strange idea about dance band musicians, because it's bloody hard work. You've got to be very good at sight reading, otherwise they don't employ you. And you've got to sit there, and you've not got to miss a note all evening, if, I mean, if you miss one, you you're not going to get another engagement with with that agency, or whoever it was. But marvelous discipline for somebody who wanted to be a musician. You know,

Len Runkel  19:22
that sort of musician I got, I say, I got fed up with classical music. I

Speaker 1  19:27
could only play the piano from the dots, and I have the problem now. I've got an organ at home now because I can't play a clarinet anymore, and that I'm afraid I can only play the right hand from the dots. Oh, I had a very good war anyway. Alan to not to drag it out. I I went from Sandhurst to a I was got a commission to the sixth Royal Tank Regiment. I never went to them. I went to a unit in Livermere park near Bury St Edmunds, which was an infantry tank unit. They they had Matildas, very ancient, poor old thing. They used to reckon, if you had the crew out pushing and you're going down hill in top flat out, you could do eight mile an hour, you know, Matilda. Oh, yes. Well, we used to do that anyway, but I mean

Alf Cooper  20:34
on deliberately.

Len Runkel  20:37
Well we, you see, you'd go, I could remember a time when the Americans had just started, or was it the Canadians? I wouldn't be sure now, but I do know that there was one village in Suffolk who didn't like the British Tommies  so much as he liked these Canadians or Americans, I suppose, because we hadn't got any bloody money as a second lieutenant, you see, you've got 10 Bob a day, three pound 50 a week, three pound 10 a week. Then, which was, you weren't going to spread yourself much on that. Were you? You got to face it, yes, you got to buy Well, well, you were given an allow, an initial allowance for a uniform. You got to remember, everything was on ration, and everything was was priced. Wasn't it price controlled? If you couldn't get ripped off, you know, quality? Well, no, the quality, I used the Sandhurst tailor, and the quality of the stuff was excellent. I've still got two service dresses at home. Mine

Alf Cooper  21:46
was I went to Horn brothers, and it was cheap,

Len Runkel  21:52
yeah, but they were reasonably priced. And in any case, you see, you only wore that on occasion you were wearing battle dress? Well, we had this problem, as I say, of one little village, and I wish I could remember its name now that we were in a tented camp very close to this village, the only pubs near or anything near, cafes or anything were in this village, and they didn't make us very welcome. And I know the CO, when we got a movement order, the CO, you know, you have a briefing. All the all the officers go in, and he sits down, he tells them which what we're going to do. And he said, Well, we could go via Thetford to where we were going out to Ipswich way or somewhere, he said. But that does take us a couple of miles out of our way. I think we'll go through the village. Now, this village had a dead right hand turn at one end of it. You'd got to turn right at the end. We'd got at this time. What tanks were they? They were the big old tank, the diesel job British made, made it at Southall

Alf Cooper  23:13
of the AUC place. Yes,

Len Runkel  23:17
they were a two stroke diesel. They were big Valentine, the Valentine? Yes, they we'd graduated from a petrol to this two stroke diesel. Now, you know how a tank steers. You stop one track and speed up the other one spin round. Yeah. So he decided that we would go out through the village. And we'd had a bad time in this village. And I'll tell you what, there wasn't a shop on that left hand side, for a 150 yards that could open its door when we'd gone through, because we took up all the road, all the paving stones and all the pavement, and put it straight up on all the doorways, just going around that corner. Bloody beautiful. That was, well, you could have a great, great fun in a tank. You know, I remember, of course, driving a tank when I was a cadet down Camberley High Street. Now, the busses used to turn round at the top of Camberley High Street was a sleepy place then, and Sandhurst, the main gate entrances were on the right, halfway down the hill. Don't they? You know where they are? Yeah, of course they I went not Swan again, and right at the bottom of the hill is where we turned in to get round to the tank park at the back. And I was we'd been out on an exercise and I was driving this thing back, and obviously this bus driver that was in this lay by, turned round, decided he could get away before I got parked parked, but he didn't. Now, according to the laws of the road, I had entirely had the right of way, but he didn't have a side to his bus. I know that this scrunchy noise, and decided I better pull up and have a look. No The one of the officers training officers was in the turret, that's right, you better pull up. You've done this bus they weren't exactly his words, but bus driver was very upset, because, of course, it was everybody prepared to swear that he shouldn't have pulled away anyway, until the road was clear, what was he doing? Pulling out and you can't stop a tank. You can't, yeah, probably you can't stop a tank on a tanner, you know. Anyway, I found Sandhurst easy, as I said, because I'd done a driving and maintenance course. I was I'd got a qualified p1 instructor, wireless operator and instructor, and I'd done all the gunnery courses. It was no problem. You know, map reading isn't exactly an intellectual pursuit, as far as I could ever see, you know. So I thoroughly enjoyed Sandhurst, because really, I didn't have to work very hard drill instructors. course, I'd done it all, you know. We were quite well trained, and man management consisted of them telling you that your troops came first, which you would think that anybody who was going to Command anything recognised that as a fact. But I did come across lots of cases where it wasn't, wasn't, so I know that. Well. I know that the tank regiment commanding officers, and any one of the tank regiments, if he caught you having a cup of tea, if you came back from the line, and you'd probably been out 10 days, you came back from the line and he found you having a cup of tea, a brew up, or a wash, or whatever, and your troops weren't yet in their billets, he'd tear you loose. Quite right. Two things. The first thing you looked after was your equipment, your tanks. Made sure they were properly under cover camouflage, and then you saw that your blokes were alright, then, then you looked after yourself, and not until then. And that, that was the absolute law in the tank units, I'll tell you that. And what is more, you're one of a crew of five, say in a Sherman or a Churchill, or whatever tank, there are five blokes in it, and you're the commander of that tank and the troop. And there are a number of jobs that have got to be done regularly, maintenance jobs, and you did your maintenance. I think the tank commander was periscopes, gun sights, things like that. You know, the gunner looked after his gun, wireless operator looked after his wireless and then there was you assisted in reloading the tank, filling it up with ammo and all that sort of thing. But there was a job to be done, and you had to do it. There was no way you were going to stand about with your fancy stick under your arm. Well, they did it. And if you did that, I don't think you'd get the best results. Anyway, you've got to be one of the boys. I mean, you face it, you see, there's another problem that tank officers had when you were in the field. The only place you were going to sleep was under a tarpaulin stretched from the side of your tank. Well, there's room for five in there, and you're one of them. Now, if you didn't earn their respect, you didn't get any it wasn't a question of rank. going to give you respect, if you could do all their jobs and help them and be reasonable and keep trouble off their backs. If you could in the way of CMPs and CLAP and things like that, then you were a good bloke, and they'd go anywhere for you and with you. But if you were one of these snotty nose bastards, you know, stands to attention while you're talking to me and all that, well, you were asking for it, I reckon. And lots of them got it and serve them bloody. well right, but they hadn't come from my background anyway, which was a working class background, really.

Alf Cooper  29:54
Then can we go back a bit, just a second, to your uncle's business? Yeah. Yeah, it was called Runkels Then was it? It

Len Runkel  30:02
was N D Runkel  and son cinematograph engineers. Yeah, yeah, Goon,

Alf Cooper  30:10
but did he? Did your uncle ever work for Kingston and lions?

Len Runkel  30:15
He worked with Kingston. Now tell you his, his earliest memory, and mine, as a matter of fact, was King in about

Alf Cooper  30:23
This . Arthur Kingston. Yes, this is

Len Runkel  30:25
Arthur Kingston in about 1928, I think about 2728 I remember pop Runkel  Ernie bringing with him on a weekend visit the Kingston home recorder, which we he was involved in making. He made the tools for and the Kingston home recorder was a large disc that sat on your grammarphone  Yeah. And then you put on to it a small alli disc. And you had the unit which you mounted on the tone arm, an old fashioned tone, arm  yes, see which had two needles. Now the big disc had was already cut, 78 and you put this down to start it, and it started cutting the allidisc. And meanwhile, you performed into this horn, which was attached to both the needles and the tone arm, the Kingston home recorder. And it sounded about as good as the as the Edison recordings. I guess it was all right, you know. And it's pretty cheap to run, really. These, these 30 thou alli discs, was all it cost to run the bloody thing and winding it up, of course. And needles, oh, and needles, of course. Yes, you've got to you, you cut it with a steel needle, but you played it back with a thorn, and it got to be a thorn that it wouldn't stand up to.

Alf Cooper  32:11
But that  was when Kingston was working on his own, before he became Kingston and Lions. Was it?

Len Runkel  32:17
I wish I knew the answer to those questions, because too long ago, because

Alf Cooper  32:21
I can remember going to Kingston and lions when they were in Mallet  street. You know, where the Pillars of Hercules is just there. Oh, yeah, that's where Kingston Lions  were with that. I you know, when I first knew it, we used because I was working at the bush, and we used to have camera repairs done up there. Yeah, that's, that was Kingston Lion But I don't, didn't often see Kingston there. I saw all man Lions

Len Runkel  32:55
I can't be sure. I do know. I remember this very clearly, that Ernie op Runkel and and this, this the Kingston home recorder. Yeah, and we had one for years. I suppose it fell to pieces eventually. It was, it was excellent, really. Was a toy, a gimmick. You know, how many he sold, I don't know. I don't think it made him a fortune, but

Alf Cooper  33:23
no, well, nothing Arthur Kingston did really made him a fortune.

Len Runkel  33:28
|Well perma camera must have done him fairly well, mustn't it,

Alf Cooper  33:32
yeah. But I think it financed his other inventions that didn't take. Oh, I see, yeah,

Len Runkel  33:37
yeah.

Alf Cooper  33:42
So he was a brilliant bloke , yes, I believe, yeah. I can barely remember him when you now, then you came out, the war ended. What happened then?

Len Runkel  33:53
Oh well, well, in 1944 I was, I was severely wounded at Anzio , and and I came. I was 15 months in hospital, and then I went before a board, you know, and he said the about the oldest medical officer I've ever seen he was, he was a full general, but he was about 100 years old. Not kidding, I was Lieu tenant because, well, you see, you've got, you've got to understand the way the army works. You You're, you're in action, and the second in command of the unit gets killed or wounded, and because you're the Senior Lieutenant, or because they the CO, see likes the look of you, says, right, your second in command. So your second in command now your captain. You've got to be a captain for three weeks before you get paid for it. You've got to, yeah. It three weeks before you get paid for it. Well, you're not in the line that long, about 12 days, 10 days, maybe. So you come out. Meanwhile, a captain's been drafted in. So you're back to troop commander, you see. And this, this goes on, although you can get, you know, very heated battle we had one or two before the grigliano,? where the CO OC got killed, and the second in command was in hospital. And I was commanding a squadron when I was 22 a squadron of tanks, but not long enough for the majority to stick. And you've got to have, you've got to be a major for three months before you become a captain, substantive captain. Very peculiar arrangement, you know, I say you don't get paid until you've been doing it three weeks. Well, the chances are, in action, that you're never doing it three weeks. I mean, the length of life of a tank commander in the desert in Sicily and in southern Italy anyway, was five and a half hours, I believe,

Len Runkel  36:11
five and a half hours. Yeah, and they'd spent a fortune training youn . It was quite expensive, really. Yeah, in the depth, well, I tell you why you you've got to be there to understand, really, that in action, there's nothing but noise and dirt. You'd think it was dawn or dusk all the time. Doesn't matter what sort of a day it was, it was always dawn or dusk because it's all crap and corruption and darkness all the time, and you can't see anything. It's no useclooking through a piddly little tent, you know, you can't see what you're doing. You can't see anything. So you've got the lid open and your head out, haven't you'd have a look. Well, you know, there were some bright boys sitting around waiting for these idiots to put their head out. Then again, you see, there are lots of strange unwritten cavalry laws attached to it too. For instance, in the desert, yeah, lots on did in the desert, if your tank was knocked out and you got out you, you were safe, they wouldn't fire on you. They leave you alone. You might get captured. You might get overrun and taken prisoner, but they wouldn't fire at you. You were out of battle. It was like a horseman who was off his horse. That was the unwritten law between the British and the Germans. You know, it changed in Italy because I think the Americans weren't obeying the law. But even so, even at that, your your expectation of life was round about this five and a half hours bit so you, you know you'd, you'd got to move your feet a bit quick, aren't you, if you wanted to survive. But say I was up to major twice, captain  innumerable times when I was wounded, I was I was second in command of a unit, but went back home, and straight away you're back to your substantive rank, which is full Lieutenant. You see, that's it. But I say I spent nearly 15 months altogether at Queen Mary's at Rohampton  you come

Alf Cooper  38:47
back? You didn't come back in the film industry?

Len Runkel  38:50
No, came back to Uncle shop. Yes. Well, same camera mechanic, see, but there were the problems you see then, before the war, he had one or two bread and butter contracts, newsreel cameras. He did two lots of newsreel cameras. I think it was Movietone  and and GB, because Jim, his son, went to work for GB, didn't he as a cameraman, and he used to have the cameras in, and we used to strip them down and repair them and make The alterations. And I remember

Len Runkel  39:37
that that dried up because a I think they bought new equipment, they bought new Mitchells,

Len Runkel  39:51
and then they why we weren't still servicing the cameras, I don't know, but we were still modifying them. On occasion, I. Yeah, and we also, we also did work for the BBC newsreel, didn't we?

Alf Cooper  40:09
You did maintenance, yes,

Len Runkel  40:12
because can I remember you had a Mitchell camera with a sound head on it, that's right. And I remember fixing the shutter because it also had a fade secondary shutter on it that's operated at the back. That's right, fixing that. Yeah, I didn't realize it until, until last year when I, when I met Alan again. Alan, Alan was the you were the engineering supervisor, where you at Ally Pally,

Alf Cooper  40:43
not engineer. I was, you know, I was the supervising camera man, yeah, yeah,

Len Runkel  40:48
so, so,

Alf Cooper  40:57
yes, right, yes. But then you then, then your uncle went into manufacturing,

Len Runkel  41:03
yeah, well, we had to, you see, because all the studios and whatnot had bought all this new equipment. It wasn't hanging by a thread anymore, was it, you know? So he decided that there was a niche in the market for two things, mainly, I think, a lightweight tripod for so the lightweight 35 camera and 16 mill camera the Newman Sinclair, which was a popular silent camera at that time, wasn't it just after The war? So we started into manufacture the top hat, short legs, long legs, and the pan and tilt head for the lightweight, medium weight cameras. And whenever I meet somebody who remembers them, they've always got nice things to say about them. Tripod, yeah, they were a good tri. That's that was a bloody good tripod. They say, I think mainly because they the Mitchell tripod had got this damned winding gear on it, hadn't it? No, not the Mitchell. Well, no which one was it had that? Why was the Moy head? And there was a Moy, I remember one with a little handle, Bell & Howell  and every turn it juddered on the screen. You could see it judder wkereas the correctly set up friction pan and tilt. There need be no judder

Alf Cooper  42:38
The Bell & Howell had a pan and tilt crank handles, yeah? But then there's also the Moy, but that was a scoop

Len Runkel  42:47
on, oh yes, yeah, IMO, Bell and Howell  Eyemo wasn't it

Alf Cooper  42:51
Eyemo was Bell and how well they made the IMO, they also made the Bell and Howell camera. They were the Rolls. Royce, really beautiful camera, but they didn't

Alf Cooper  43:07
going into the modern city. You'd like me to come as a sidekick to you. Somebody asked me before I got it,

Alf Cooper  43:20
mean something like yours.

Alf Cooper  43:26
So, so you were, you were with your uncle, then on manufacture, yes,

Len Runkel  43:34
yeah, I, I made the the base for the for the friction, head, board all,raised up. also, oh, another job which I quite liked, so I got them to do. Were those rack over focusing nets Do you know the one? I mean, you press the button in, turned it over, and it gave you the separation between focus and taking lens. So you did your focus, then you wrapped your pan a camera back to get rid of the the parallax parallax. That's right, yeah, yeah, that, that, that I quite like making those they were, they were a nice job. The funny thing about the tripods, and you probably remember it was that, that we couldn't sell the damn things. You bought them, and we had them lined up everywhere, and everybody liked them, and we had costed them an excellent profit at round about 40 quid a set. I think I don't know if you'll remember that. And you know, nobody wanted them. You know why nobody wanted them? Because come but somebody came in and told us, and I think it was you, Alan, that said to the oh, man, they're too bloody cheap. We doubled the price and sold all we could make. And that's a fact. That's the film industry for you in it. If it's cheap, it can't be any good. That's right, that's right, yeah, I tell you the other thing. I'm going to turn over. Okay,

Alf Cooper  45:21
you couldn't say the other thing you were going to

Len Runkel  45:23
say, Yeah, we made editing equipment, a counter.

Len Runkel  45:34
One way, two way, 35 16 yes, they're synchronisers, weren't they? Synchronisers? Yes, we, yes, you, yes, that's right. It's what we call them, then synchronisers. It's Technicolour calls them counters. Yeah, we made those on the big mill in the basement the because they were one foot sprocket. Yes, and that, that was the only machine we had big enough to to register the 64 teeth, 64 sprocket teeth on that um . They they were nice. But then again, I don't think he made any money out of them, you know, because I suppose he was a little bit like Arthur Kingston, you know, we made also a stack of studio shutters. Now I can't really imagine what they were for. Now that they were a three bladed shutter, about nine inches, 10 inches square, you had two pieces of steel, black, crackle, finish a hole in the middle, what was about two inch diameter, three inch diameter, and three blades inside, and a puffer. So you could open it and let go and it closed, or you could open it and put a peg in, and it stayed open. And I know that we sold about a dozen of those to Pinewood. What the hell they were used for? I don't know. The old man had the idea of making them, and we made them, and I remember having problems getting the material. It was some sort of plastic material. And I walked all around these various little addresses that pop had given me to get this sheet of material black plastic wasn't plastic then, obviously it was some form of Bakelite or bakalized material to cut the shutters out. On one shutter was was shaped like that. And then there were two others that were shaped like an iris, really, you know, yeah, what they were for, I don't know, but they sold very well. But there was again  They were very cheap. I think we made them for about six quid each, and sold them for 10, I think. And, you know, I think, when I look at them now, and the amount of work and design that had gone into them, they were worth far more than that, really, and they were so robust, nobody was ever going to break one right. Most of our stuff was very robust.

Alf Cooper  48:21
How long did you stay with your uncle ?

Len Runkel  48:24
Well until, until December 1947 now, in early 47 I'd come and joined him. Rejoined him in 46 about 18 months, two years, and he had a recurrence. He'd already had a stomach ulcer, I think then he got a duodenal ulcer. And there again. You see this. We were too damned old fashioned and really too young. I was too young and didn't know enough about industry at all, because here we had a perfectly good workshop. Industry was booming in 1946 and 47 you know, there was oceans of engineering work for everybody, and because we hadn't got any work for cameras, and very little for lenses, and we were practically out of business. You know, when we could, I think I could have walked into EMI when I lived in Hayes  and probably got months of good quality, well paid work. You know, if you'd got lathes, screw cutting, milling, we could do anything. No, but I'm talking about subcontracting for ourselves. You see, they always paid subcontractors better than they paid their own departments. Remember, because they hadn't got any overheads for the subcontractor they weren't employing when it came to. The sub contractor so they could afford to give him a part of what it cost them to employ somebody. That's why you've got so much unemployment now. It's because all this sub contracting everywhere, because of this anyway. So we were more or less out of work. We had the odd bloke coming in, but he said, Well, I think, no, he was in hospital. He was very ill. We went to see him. And then his wife, you remember Dolly, Runkel  do you his wife who was very domineering woman. She was, she was the one who'd kick your backside if she thought you weren't working hard enough and whatnot. He wouldn't. He only got touchy about how you worked. For instance, if you, if you can think of a Newman Sinclair camera with the side back and front plates had got masses of eight ba screws. I think they were all round. Well, if we had to make a new plate for one of those, because it had been changed from hand crank to motor or something like that, which often happened, all those screw slots had to line up all the way. And what's more, you didn't go and buy a gross of 8 BA stainless screws. You went to Grosses, or the place across the way from Grosses, and you bought, yes, you bought and made countersunk screws. He wasn't going to have any of that other rubbish. You rubbish. This machine made rubbish in my work, if we haven't got the capacity to make them, we'll buy them. Yeah, but all the slots had to line up in a piece of wood. It's easy to line the slots up. You can give it a little bit more alley. No. Alli . Got to take your hand brace and your countersink and just whisper out another couple of thou  and try. I mean, can you imagine the length of time it took, and there were some 36 screws, I think, went round there, all tiny, but that, that was the standards he required. It good enough wasn't good enough. It had got to be perfect. And he was very difficult. But otherwise he was he was great, he was great.

Alf Cooper  52:32
But you were saying he was in hospital,

Len Runkel  52:34
Yeah he was very ill And he said, we've got no work. We can't afford to pay you. And we, when we came out of the army on six pounds a week, that was, that was the the rate, the AEU rate, full rate, for a tool maker, that was six quid a week. Was a bit of a blow to me, because I'd been a staff captain in German on 24 pound a week. I and you say, Why did I come out? Because I could see 1929 all over again, the wife and child and who want? Who wants? Middle Age army officers. They're useless. All those I met in the army were useless. They could only drink and play, play bridge, really, most of them peace time. Anyway. So I started to look round, and I saw I lived in Hayes , then in Middlesex, and I saw in the local paper an advertisement for a maintenance engineer, Technicolour limited

Alf Cooper  53:45
nine and stop.

Alf Cooper  53:47
What year was that? That was 1947, Alfred. And who did you see when you first arrived white? You saw Frank White. Frank White. Yes.

Len Runkel  53:59
Amazing interview. I thought he, he pulled a micrometer out of his desk. He said, measure that for me. So I measured it for him, you see, and he'd got, he'd got tents on his mic. So I read those as well. I don't know what sort of people he'd been employing. But he he thought that was remarkable that I should give him four figures from straight forward micrometer, which is so basic, you know, it's ridiculous. What machinery have you used lathes and mills? What what other machines? I said, Well, we've got two chasing lathes in this family business. They're unusual. He said, Yeah, you won't find one of those here. What screw cutting you we've done? I said, Well, you know you spent, I guess, on cameras. You spent three quarters of your life. screw cutting. Hence the need for for chasing tools and hand chasing, because you you cut the cost so much. It's out this world, you know. But if you sit with your foot on the lathe and the lathe in back gear and keep putting it down and waiting for it to go, it's doddle in it. You're you're not earning any money. You can't be screw cutting is very slow. So anyway, I told him all that I'd done and what machinery I'd worked on. And of course, they had a lot of machinery made by the same company, didn't they, Bell Howell made every damn thing, didn't they, really, you know, so I got to start in dry maintenance, two and seven pence. hapenny  an hour.

Len Runkel  55:56
Yeah, and

Alf Cooper  55:59
then you went, I know George. George Goodman, no.

Len Runkel  56:02
John Francis. John Francis was, was the foreman, the day shift foreman, yeah. John Francis, two and seven pence hapenny per hour

Alf Cooper  56:12
per hour for a 45 hour week. Yeah.

Len Runkel  56:17
But Frank White, when he interviewed me, made it known that I would be required to work Saturdays and Sundays because the plant was closed on Saturdays and Sundays. He worked around the clock. That's right, they work. You see, Monday to Friday, three shifts, Saturday and Sunday were for maintenance. Was

Alf Cooper  56:40
Who was a chief engineer when you started. Was Mac Ames  still with us?

Len Runkel  56:43
No, there was one after Mac Ames and before Peasegood Rusty. Rusty, what was his name? Erwin, Rusty, Evans. Yes, he, he was just at that time, you know, deposed, I think, because I can remember then easegood coming in. That's right now we our shop was about wasn't quite as big as this room, and it was on the dry end of 12, five. Do you remember that was the maintenance shop? So you, you put your tool box where you could

Alf Cooper  57:22
just over half the size

Len Runkel  57:25
couple of stairs. It was so tight that you had two days off every week. It's about 10 foot, 10 foot square, or something like that. Yeah. And there were,

Alf Cooper  57:37
there were about six of us were there, yeah, and George Goodman was the foreman. He was the night shift charge hand, yeah, only

Len Runkel  57:46
Only one Foreman that was, that was John Johnny, Johnny Francis, yeah. Now he was, he was half Spanish, John Francis, and he spoke excellent English with with an accent, because he also, he was very well educated bloke. He had, he had Spanish, French and Italian.

Alf Cooper  58:07
He was a good engineer, but he hadn't got much mine, any

Len Runkel  58:12
much what? Spine? Oh, no.

Alf Cooper  58:15
He was a governor man. We had a lockout . No, we had a strike. Remember, we couldn't find him when you were in the AEU, when you came early?

Len Runkel  58:32
No, I wasn't. I wasn't in a union. When I came there was I'd been in a family business. I but what upset me was that I always wanted to be in a trade union, you see, because I couldn't see how you could work if you weren't in a trade union. And when I came to Technicolour  I thought, Ah, now at last, now the first week I was there, Bert Craig and George Elvin  came down for some reason, and I told them I was not only interested in joining the trade union, but I would like to be a contracting member in of the of the Labour Party as well, although I was a local member in Hayes  you see. And Bert said, Oh, that's great. Yeah, we'll soon have you in. Don't worry about it. And Alfred Cooper was about eight months before he got me a ticket, and why it should have been any more than one general counsel, I never figured out well,

Alf Cooper  59:22
I was upset about. You got to remember, in those days, in those days the laboratories were second class citizens, and they remember, I know that I was always trying to and when I ultimately became chairman of the branch, if you remember, we pulled ourselves up by our boot strings, and then we began to get some sort of but it was a fact that things used to and another thing was nobody, nobody got fantastic wages. We were short of money. We were short of staff, really. And now, I mean, you get a new member or a new organizer. So. But careful. I said it before, yeah, nobody on the union staff should earn more than the people on the job that's gone out the window. In fact, the members would have, liked to , earned the money that the staff get sometimes. But anyway, we ultimately got you in. When did you become active in ACTT?

Len Runkel  1:00:23
Well in almost immediately, I remember that Jock  Bain, I think, was a collector for the Union. Scott Adam,

Alf Cooper  1:00:43
a

Len Runkel  1:00:43
great bloke, great bloke He was

Alf Cooper  1:00:45
couldn't understand

Len Runkel  1:00:49
and he wanted to

Alf Cooper  1:00:51
be maintenance, wasn't

Len Runkel  1:00:52
he? Most of them were originally in wet maintenance. Most often were. He was fed up with being the floor steward for the dry maintenance, so I copped it. And that must have been about 1948 and I'd only been 10 minutes in the union. And then, now what happened then? Do you remember what was the name of the foreman of the pin belt department? I

Alf Cooper  1:01:29
was asking you the same question. Johnny Allen worked under him, and he came and lived with me. When his wife kicked him out, we put him up because he didn't know where to live. Dead. Now he was, he was, in

Speaker 2  1:01:38
many ways, he was a hateful bastard, between you and I and the gate, yeah, but, but he did know his job. He was very good

Alf Cooper  1:01:48
at every Ellen was a pin belt.

Len Runkel  1:01:53
I can't remember. Wait a minute.

Alf Cooper  1:01:55
A pin belt is a strip of monel  35 millimeter wide, with registered pins in every perforation hole down one side and a slightly, slightly smaller dimension of pins and the other side. And they were put on drums, which was something like three foot six across, four foot across. There was four drums to each record, yellow cyan  and magenta. And they went, I suppose, something like 25 yards in distance, didn't they? So that was an endless book when it was soldered. And the solder, the soldering joint had to be such that it didn't interfere with the pitch at all in the perforations. And they were soldered on the machine when they were put on, wrapped on, and they was and these pin belts had to be maintained. Pins came out. They were all soldered in silver solder. The pins were silver.

Len Runkel  1:02:48
The pins were German silver. They were lead, soldered in,

Alf Cooper  1:02:53
silver soldered in, no head solder on the back. What happened that on these pin belts, The Matrix, with the matrix, which was an opaque, registered image and that would absorb dye, it would go through the dye tank at the same time as the blank, which was 35 milfield, went through a liquid to cut a wash tank, and they will meet up in the roll tank after the after the matrix had been through the die tank, and it would go through rollers, which squeeze the two together. And then, prior to going through the prior to going through the this roll tank, the the diet the matrix went through a wash, which was so calculated to such an extent that it knew exactly how much dye it  left on the matrix to put on to the blank stock, which was the yellow record, went through first. And that went round the whole of this belt, which was what, something like 200 feet. I spent 100 yards  wouldn't it? Yeah, and the blank have a this is the thing where it got its name. It was a very technical process. And the blank would leave, would leave the the belt, and go through a drying cabinet, the matrix would go down at the decrow, where it was washed off completely, and then go through a drying process. The blank hsdto be controlled on its drying so that the size when it met the cyan record was exactly the same size from shrinkage and stretch again, from liquid content, so that it's exactly the same size when it met up with the cyan record, which had done the same thing, through a cyan dye tank and into another cyan roll tank that would go around the belt. They get both the blank would then go through another drying cabinet, and the cyan  would go through the de crow the blank would ultimately meet up again in the magenta record roll tank the matrix would have. Gone through a magenta die, and it once again, had to be exactly the same size, because we had no latitude on register whatsoever. And every per every perforation was registered on one side, all down one side was register pins. And ultimately go out from the drone, because now it comes off the IVs as well. At the end, you should come and come to the RB and go straight through series of rollers in  the projector, and they were running the 171 80 for a minute.

Len Runkel  1:05:30
Well, finally,

Alf Cooper  1:05:34
switch on the machine. Final,

Len Runkel  1:05:35
the final setup, which, which, I had a lot to do with you started off with, first of all, a soundtrack negative in a continuous loop

Alf Cooper  1:05:50
later when we got 2000 foot  Yeah,

Len Runkel  1:05:53
then you put your blank on and you printed against the negative on a track printer. A matter of fact, it was a converted Model D, Bell, Howell  Model D, 1917, we put ball races in it. It was set up very accurately, because we were rather proud of quite sound quality at technical you know, we wanted it minus a half or going towards zero, if possible. Minus two was acceptable, but we wanted it below minus one to be, you know, for real quality that used to go through a developer. The this is just the blank. Now it's been, it's been printed, soundtrack only, optical, optical. It would then go through a viscous developer, which would put a bead of hydroquinone in viscous over just the optical area, yeah, yeah. When that was developed, which it did in a drying tank, 24 rolls, top and bottom. Very heavy, very heavy elevator, it went upstairs and went through the fix. So then it was dried, and then it was presented to the yellow, then the cyan, then the magenta .

Alf Cooper  1:07:30
It was later when that okay, when you first

Len Runkel  1:07:33
right downstairs and was projected without being touched, to another damn great elevator where it was then taken off. That was the PA so it wasn't touched. That

Alf Cooper  1:07:45
didn't come many years. It continued from it came out, started as raw stock the mid 60s. We finished that. Finished up in the projector, really 60s, we got to that. And incidentally, the other thing was the be the positive, the positive, the positive joining room, we actually cut out all stock joins and what have you before it came off the elevators, the elevators were long enough for a man to know that was a join coming through, and it would take all stock joins out. Yeah, whilst it was still on the elevator, we had a little detector, years after, not long before the post its mid 60s packed up, mid 60s,

Speaker 2  1:08:28
yeah, when did you go into shipping?

Alf Cooper  1:08:33
I went to shipping when I first went on the staff. They made me shipping manager, and that was when, after the lockout.

Len Runkel  1:08:41
Well, you're talking about mid 5454

Alf Cooper  1:08:43
the lockout . Yeah. Well, you weren't, you weren't doing it. That's right. Later on I ran the Eastman plant. That's right. No, it's all Eastman. But in

Len Runkel  1:08:55
I think the the thing that nobody realizes outside of Technicolour, or the old people from Technicolour, is the degree of precision which had to go into the preparation of the negative for shooting in Three strip of the positive for receiving the inhibition and of the matrices they they the film came in from Kodak In cans  split, nothing else. No, we did the post well eventually, but you did used to run pos. When I first went to Technicolour, they were perforating pos all day,

Alf Cooper  1:09:51
to recently, at one time, because it was so bloody covered  you would

Len Runkel  1:09:55
have pos perforations. We ran the whole process on negative perforation. Operations up until 1952 so you, if you see a piece of Technicolour release and it's got neg perfs on it, you'll say, Well, that is pre 52 because it was in about 1952 that we put positive pins in in the camera heads on the optical printers, because all your matrix is printed optically, you see. But the standards were fabulous. I say Kodak would give you, for instance, a misalignment of a perforation, one set of four, the next set of four, because they're perforated eight at a time, aren't they? But Kodak gave themselves a thou . We gave ourselves half a thou the sizes a perforation, a negative perforation should be point 0730, plus or minus 4 tenths  Technicolour plus or minus 2 tenths , 110, across the rounds, 1104109, 1041096 for Kodak, 10981011102 for Technicolour

Len Runkel  1:10:41
because that's what I told you earlier. Technicolour, very often would send our blokes to Kodak to get them out of trouble .

Len Runkel  1:11:14
Yes, yeah. Just isn't good enough. We can't accept this

Alf Cooper  1:11:19
stuff because we ground, we ground our own punch and dies. And we Yes, but

Len Runkel  1:11:22
strangely enough, first punches and dies. We bought from Kodak. And now, you know what a lovely job they were. Do you know how much they were? A punch, six quid. I can't believe it when I found out  for six pounds. So in cutlery stainless, firsts, cutlery stainless, it was absolutely perfect as regard to dimensions and the finish on it was impeccable. How could you make that for that money? The dyes as well, of course, the you, every now and again you got involved with punch and die maintenance, whether you liked it or not, although normally we had enough in the tool room for there to be a continuous change over. But now and again, you could be in trouble, and you'd got to do it. It wasn't as complicated as you might think, because you took the punch and die out of the head as a setup, put them in the RAM in the tool room, and locked the die down and the punch up, and made sure that you were central on registration. Yeah. Then you took your you put some clamping pieces around the die so that you've got to go back exactly where it came from, took the die out, pinned it up so you closed all the worn holes down, put it on the grinder and ground it. Then you lapped it for about an hour until you got a mirror finish, and put it back where you got it from. Then you did the same with the punch, and then you sheared the punch through the die so that you got a total fit, yeah, perfect fit. And then stick it back in the machine, and you did all sorts of strange things. You could get little hairs. So you take some half thou  brass, shim and perforate that a couple of times, even, even a piece of four O's polishing paper, in desperation to take that built

Alf Cooper  1:13:20
up. You know, you know, and maintain them, and maintain the pins in and George, George,

Len Runkel  1:13:26
I don't know he;s  a Yorkshireman. I know that he was a man I didn't like.

Alf Cooper  1:13:33
With  a motorbike That's right. And he started during the war. We had girls come to the place. He got pally with one the girls working in his department didn't his wife take a chopper to him. She kicked him out, and he had nowhere to go. And we took him home, and I remember Rosa, and I let him use our spare room  for a few months, and then he went, then in the finishes out, set up home with us. How they go? And they got married. Eventually, sure. What the hell was his name? See, this is the thing that makes life difficult. Difficult, the

Alf Cooper  1:14:07
this very exacting standard, did the did the maintenance engineers have to be retrained for this? Or no, they

Len Runkel  1:14:17
No had to fall in. You know,

Alf Cooper  1:14:18
we had a fantastic, fantastic set of tool makers.

Len Runkel  1:14:24
Yeah, we did. Alfred, I know you can't speak too highly of them, and neither can I, but I'll tell you something. In the 50s, we built some 22 optical printers, right? And their price ranged from from 30,000 to 70,000 each. And you know what they found? They were perfectly designed, and they were perfectly made that they wouldn't run film. They had to give them to dry maintenance to make them run film. And that is a bloody fact, because there's a bit more to it than drawing dimensions. There's. I don't know there's a feel for it. If you're going to line up a pair of register pins, you do it by eye, and after a couple of years, you can do it correctly every time the tool room would put it up on a box plate. I don't blame them. Take, take a 10 thou Johanson clock and line them up by tilting the pin until the clock ran through. And that wasn't good enough. You'd got to do it with an eyeglass and preferably a piece of film. And we used to take a piece of film Three perforations, and stick the middle one on the big pin with no leaves on the movement tilt it up. And then with your glass, you'd push the film down and watch how the perforation engaged on the other pin. And you tilt the pin until you got it to fall on perfectly, and then you'd come back the other way, and you'd go backwards and forwards like that. It was the same with polishing leaves. The tool room would take a new leaf. Now we use that do you recall the Pathe  A printer? Pathe, camera? Yes, that great open work movement. Well, that was the basis for what we call the negative movements, what you'd call the projection head on all the Technicolour optical printers, was that 1902 set of leaves and cranks and whatnot, because of the excellence of registration you got from it, you know, and you parted those leaves and they they appeared perfect, but it was only by sitting with them with a surface plate hand jewelers rouge four rows polishing paper and rubbing away hour after hour, and then stoning off the high spots and going again until you've got a mirror finished. But that would take a piece of negative through without scratching it, because negative scratch on everything it touches.

Alf Cooper  1:17:16
We still had breakdowns. We still used to moan like hell  at the time,

Len Runkel  1:17:22
the tool room were most upset about it, and so was the drawing office when peascod said, Look, I can't stand this any longer. Who was the chief engineer. You will in future, install the printer and then hand it to maintenance and they'll commission it. Because what's happening now is you're messing about for six weeks with the department getting it tested, and we still haven't got the printer, and in the end, they've got to do it, so they might as well do it straight away, and it was a cause of great contention, partly because our blokes weren't getting as much money as the tool room  blokes, although they were earning more because of weekends and shift work, a lot more, you know, and partly in the tool  room, because they said, but look, you know, it's perfect. It's to drawing, you know. Well, you know, sorry, but that's, that's not what we're talking about. We're not talking about it being to drawing. We're talking about it being about it being right. The piece of film is the governor, and it was the same. And I felt, I felt very sorry for them, because if you get a complicated optical printer where we'd have three paths on the projection head and two paths on the on the camera head. And so you'd got three feeds and three take ups capable of reversing. So they were all feeds and take ups, yeah, with latches and whatnot on them. The camera dry, the magazine, drive and take up. And that had to be reversible as well, obviously. And the overlay drive and take u . So you've got rollers everywhere, little film rolls everywhere that were very capable of scratching all the film that went through them. And what's more, you could take a height gauge and run over all those rolls and make them perfect, and the film would still want to run off. Because you had got to set the machine up, thread it up, run the machine, and then tension the sides of the film and pack the roll studs, or reduce the shoulders on the roll studs until you've got equal tension coming and going on every roller on the machine. And then it was only for that machine. You couldn't, you couldn't proceed then to take that stud off and fit another one. That stud was custom built for that position on that machine. And the drawing office used to get upset about this. The tool room. Got very upset, but, but the chief engineer said, look, that works. This doesn't so that's the way I'm going to have it. And it was, it was very interesting, I suppose. But the tool room were most upset about it. I know that very upset. But the other thing was, of course, that there are, there are fits that you feel. You know, if the shutter  shoes on a movement are too loose on the can, then it will have a tendency to bruise the flats or even punch. And if they're too tight, you actually get movement on the screen.

Alf Cooper  1:20:44
It wriggles. It doesn't settle.

Len Runkel  1:20:46
Yeah, and, you know these, these problems were only really overcome because of experience, not not being particularly clever, but because you've done it so damned often over so many years that you ought to know how to do it. And you did, you know, as I feel rather sorry for the people who are there now. I was up there last, last,

Alf Cooper  1:21:16
oh, anything goes. No, the standards of

Len Runkel  1:21:19
They don't know anything about the industry, you know, and the people whom they are serving now, either the managers of the laboratory or their customers don't really know anything about it. Either they don't know what excellence is. They're happy with rubbish

Alf Cooper  1:21:38
among these car Emerick moves. It's all right, 20 years

Len Runkel  1:21:41
ago, most, I would think 60% of what is now shipped out of all the laboratories 20 years ago at Technicolour anyway, would have been in the bin.

Alf Cooper  1:21:50
I bet they don't do much reclaiming. Now my Christ, I bet they don't do much reclaiming our stinking, rotten job that was had that much to know, yeah, and I had a pleasure had the pleasure of turning the tool room  down and all the big noises in the end they put those goddamn tooth spelt on, I told them before they started. That was what I was saying earlier. I knew full well with various toxic solutions. And one thing to know that we were using was so does not that no way would they drive those at any speed with couplings? Instead of having proper couplings, they put, they put these goddamn tooth belts on, didn't they? And as soon as the sprays and that got the belts, they were like skating rink. So I was always out every tank from one tank the next. I couldn't keep two tanks ready in the finished act to do what I asked in the first place was very

Alf Cooper  1:22:40
mixed. Blessings.

Alf Cooper  1:22:42
Now I've got them on the feet of my car. Yes, my timings on that, Yeah, mine and all. But at least they don't any liquid to get to them. But yes, we used to do an enormous the standards required in the Oliver days. So great that if it wasn't right, it didn't go

Len Runkel  1:23:08
we always had a problem too, I think, with the Americans, for a period during the 50s, Technicolour Limited was a long to itself. Then in uh, it was taken over again by the Americans in the 60s. Was

Alf Cooper  1:23:27
it something like that? What was the name of the managing director that we had originally happy? No, happy was just, he was about, he was in the control at one time. And then he started writing strictly,

Alf Cooper  1:23:40
I, I remember falling out, was it wasn't Fatsack?was it

Alf Cooper  1:23:43
was it? Yeah, he was a, he was, he was a joint manager with Oakes, and then he became, but we're digressing a bit. When did you first become active in the ACTT apart from your flooor steward Joe for the dry maintenance, yeah, that

Len Runkel  1:23:59
bloke, whatever his name was, for some reason, was chairman of the shop, the the pin belt

Alf Cooper  1:24:07
bloke, George.

Len Runkel  1:24:09
And they want, I don't know what happened, but there was to be a negotiating committee of the laboratory, committee of the labs. Now you were on it. Sid Evington was on it, and for some reason or other,

Alf Cooper  1:24:22
I was chairman of it, very likely,

Len Runkel  1:24:26
George this George came up to me and he said, I fixed it with the governor. I want you to join the negotiating committee in town tomorrow morning. He said, What you do is you go to Hayes  station and you'll catch the 815 and on the 815 will be Middleton

Alf Cooper  1:24:50
Middleton. Middleton was the organizer at one time. Yeah, he

Len Runkel  1:24:54
was the lab. So I said, Well, all right, you know, so. I turn up there, I meet Middie , and go to a the first, that was when I first became involved, and that must have been about 1949 I reckon. Where

Alf Cooper  1:25:13
would he ask you to go and not me? I don't know. I was convener. There you were

Len Runkel  1:25:17
there already I expect, I don't know. I don't know.

Alf Cooper  1:25:22
Oh, probably, maybe,

Len Runkel  1:25:24
I don't know how it came about. He just asked me if I would, and I went. He was chairman of the shop at the time. And, well, perhaps you  weren't. You were representing your yourself. You were there by right? And perhaps it was it was the phone. We could have another one, yeah. So they just, Oh, yeah. Well, you that long streak can go. You know, he's troublemaker in that he can go. So I went on this, this lab committee, negotiating team. Very, very early. I sat quiet and listened for a long time.

Alf Cooper  1:26:05
I think about 1948

Len Runkel  1:26:07
I think it was 48 49 it was the FLA then, wasn't it, the Film  laboratory Association

Alf Cooper  1:26:17
chairman, Oliver, no,

Len Runkel  1:26:19
no, he wasn't,

Alf Cooper  1:26:21
not that.

Len Runkel  1:26:24
Now, I think he was call me Bill, Bill Harcourt. And shortly, I wouldn't know how long afterwards, but shortly afterwards, well, George iIrons was on it wasn't he George Irons, which is not before Monica, I remember Paul de Burr. Paul de Burr, who is now, who's recently got quite a large pat on the back for something or other in the industry. I heard it on the television the other night. Someone was it the

Alf Cooper  1:26:56
Paul de Burr that we had,

Len Runkel  1:26:58
I would think so. He was, he was an optical printer. He was a bit of a rebel, an optical printer. And this, this, I think was a rostrum camera man. So that sounds reasonable to me. Probably the same one. Anyway, I can remember the the early negotiations. They were fairly friendly, I would say Pathe  were there. You were chairman of the laboratory negotiating committee, but, but Sid Fuller Frank  Frank Fuller was the VP. Was the VP, VP? He was VP in the late 40s, early 50s. But there was a fairly friendly atmosphere. Really wasn't that

Alf Cooper  1:27:51
we tried, we tried to do things in a reasonable sort of way. You see, we had a certain amount of trust in one another, up to a point. Yes, there were certain people you couldn't trust, but in the main we tried to be honest with one another, because it was better if we could get what we wanted without a Fight.

Alf Cooper  1:28:20
The letter in Italy, and we went to London. We had all

Alf Cooper  1:28:29
Len Runkel  side three, you said, you said,

Len Runkel  1:28:35
a bit early. When was it? Said you could trust me. Oh,

Alf Cooper  1:28:39
yeah, we tried to keep the you see, in the early days, there was a certain amount of respect, yeah, some of the employers we respected, and there was a lot of respect for Elvin. Oh yes, there was a lot of respect for Elvin. In fact, I can quote not who's a bloke. He was, he was, he was the, he was the managing director of Pathe eight, and I remember we were having a was it what he was no, he finished up down at Cleveland, Phillips. No, not Phillips. Phillips was the first. Phillips was the first chairman of the laboratory branch committee. He came from. He came from. But no anyway, sorry. Anyway, the the managing director of Pathe  labs at that time, we were talking about Tom O'Brien, yes, and they were talking about the bloke  himself. And this will give you some idea, the the camera idea between the two sides in those days, where they said that you could wine and dine. You could wine and dine O'Brien, and it wouldn't cost you a fortune. You could whine and dine bloody George, but you couldn't buy the bastard. And there was, and it was a fact that they respected that if they said something, they meant it. And there were certain employers that I personally i. That although I disagreed with them, I knew that what they said they meant, and I knew they wouldn't go back on saying it. And therefore that proves that certain amount of Yes, I ultimately, although, although someone hated  my guts, they always had a respect for me and told me so, for that same reason, I

Len Runkel  1:30:16
was I, as I say, it was my first, the first time I had been involved in negotiations at top level anyway, and I was agreeably surprised at how comfortably it was all conducted, really, although things changed from time to time, in the main it was, it was easier, if anything negotiating up in town, the results weren't always better than it was locally, you know. But no, there were one or two that I didn't like. Now, Phillips was one of them. I didn't trust. Phillips,

Alf Cooper  1:30:59
I used to be our first, first lead chairman,

Len Runkel  1:31:01
whatever. I didn't trust the Hendersons.

Alf Cooper  1:31:09
Oh, no, they were, they were a bit, oh, I don't know. They were small firm that thought they were big

Len Runkel  1:31:14
and and the bloke I never got to the bottom of was that Humphreys bloke.

Alf Cooper  1:31:20
Which one was this? Was this?

Len Runkel  1:31:22
Remember he died, didn't he shortly after the 25th anniversary?

Alf Cooper  1:31:27
You don't remember Terrano, no, Randol. Terrano was the one. Yeah, the one after  Terramo, I'll never forget it. We were all up there when, when Humphries  was on strike, and he said, I built this firm up. I brought it up from the gutter  and I built it up, and I'll see it back. And I went back and said, Yes, and I can see that being very, very soon before you get back there. You know, that sort of attitude, because I was called in on their their local negotiations, and ultimately, he sent us the letters that he caved  in completely, we won everything that wasTerrano Now there was a two brothers. Well, each other brother was a there was an optical printer. Wasn't he one of the highest paid in the game at one time, I believe. But the

Alf Cooper  1:31:50
the man I think you're talking about, he came from Olympic Howard.

Alf Cooper  1:32:10
Ye4s Howard. And then he didn't. He died a couple of years later, I suppose I don't remember him. He was a very pleasant man. He was very shy and and I say, I never really got to the bottom of him, but he was, he was never aggressive in any way. But I, of course, I don't know what his blokes thought of you coming with those simpering

Alf Cooper  1:32:37
things, yeah. But of

Len Runkel  1:32:41
course, I recognize now Alfred that we were taken for a terrible ride, because, in fact, they got a license to print money, and we didn't really know it.

Alf Cooper  1:32:53
We had a long time. We'd always been, if you remember, we'd always been led. And we were, we were we were suffering. And I don't know what year this was, but I came in, I came in as chairman of the chairman of the branch, and I was sick and tired of the sort of wages we were getting. Yeah, and I'll tell you, I used to look at all these flash names for cameramen, the way they were treated, and they got credits and everything else. And God damn it, the guys in the lab saved every one of them as big as they were at times. Oh yes, and we're gonna, I can remember some of them it was, you know, and the times he and yet, the labs always got the blame for everything, didn't it? And everything they wanted was a week before they'd even shot it?

Len Runkel  1:33:41
Yeah, I was put off by the attitude, I must say, of production people who would be asking us to black films that they were still working on,

Alf Cooper  1:33:59
right through the industry, from the labs to the production side. In my view, what subservient? Yeah, lab side all seem to be subservient to the to the to the might, possibly because we didn't get credit. Didn't mean to say we didn't contribute any

Len Runkel  1:34:17
Partly the labs own fault, I think Alfred the fact that they undervalued themselves, that they were more industrially based than any of the others. We were, whether we liked it or not. We can call them laboratories. We were working in film factories.

Alf Cooper  1:34:36
I would never have it called Don't film out like a sausage, and they didn't mind

Len Runkel  1:34:41
you calling it a laboratory, as long as they paid you as if you worked in a factory, which they did. They treated us and paid us as factory hands. From an engineering point of view, of course, you were an absolute evil. They had to have you. But, my God, they

Alf Cooper  1:34:57
didn't want you. I

Alf Cooper  1:34:59
think. Thing that you, the thing that you, I think, Well, I'm sure you haven't forgotten, because, in fact, Alf has  said this, but it's out of sight, out of mind, you know, you're tucked away in the way, in the dark somewhere, yeah, just like when, you know, I was talking to Gordon Cullum you know, and he's being tucked down for 40 years, you know, and he's just nobody really knew him, other than the people who had actually worked with him . But it's, you know, it's the same thing. But again, I think the one thing that, if you like, you think the labs have, which I think you didn't have in the studios so much, especially after it was, you know, when you're on from picture to picture, continuity was continuity and a feeling of esprit de corps.

Len Runkel  1:35:53
Oh, yes, that. That's quite true.

Alf Cooper  1:35:55
Talking about Gordon McCallum. Gordon  McCallum is a rabid Tory, wasn't he? That's right. Yet the two are not compatible. He was a bloody good trade union compatible.

Len Runkel  1:36:07
Gordon McCollum, who was our man? Yes, I know Theresa Voland, who was she married to? Oh,

Alf Cooper  1:36:14
she was she, she was she was married to somebody else. But who was it? Was it a bloke or a dog.

Len Runkel  1:36:23
Oh, shoot. I mean, she was a Tory too, wasn't she, but I thought she was married to a sound bloke.

Alf Cooper  1:36:33
I don't think it was Gordon McCallum. I don't

Alf Cooper  1:36:35
think so. Anyway, Tories in the weeks, we wouldn't have needed trade unions. That's the only thing I can find wrong with the trade unions.

Len Runkel  1:36:44
I do think you know that George Elvin  made an apt remark to me back you know, when I first got to know him, he said, what you have to remember as a negotiator is that profits accrue from over either over charging for the article or underpaying the producer. Profits are undistributed. Wages. Don't ever forget it. There is some force in that, of course, because it's still true, isn't it, that the producer doesn't get his share of the cake. Oh, to the effect you know that my politics, if you like, are governed by the fact that 94% of all the wealth of Britain is owned by less than 6% of the population. They call it a democracy, and I don't see how you can continue to call a land a democracy under those conditions acn you

Alf Cooper  1:37:48
our problem in the early days in the labs, and I'm talking now from a tremendous negotiating point of view, and from from being a chairman and negotiating, to me at one time, we could not get hold of the of the accounts of them. That's right, that's right. And we didn't, and everybody was undercutting one another, so that we were led to believe that everybody's working on a knife edge or the business. And no way could we fathom out and ultimately, Ways and Means come along and we were able to find out what these means  were picking up, and it was still very difficult right up to the end. But well, then we realized that the cake was there to be taken. It just wanted sharing out more equitably. And I started. I started myself, but then, obviously, I used to be very, very fond of making word pictures in the course of negotiation. I always used to refer to them and it brought it out, explained it to them in very simple words. Words of  the one syllable. I remember how they wanted to cut our national health. They wanted to stop our national benefit. That's right, you know. And I went back the days after, when we first started, came tosomebody , ruin your they've done it now, do you Well, I what they're doing there now, then is out of my world. One while ago, they were giving up the cost

Len Runkel  1:39:13
of living. Bonus. Oh, they tried to, yes, I could. That's recently I'm talking about now again. Oh yes, yes, I think they've stuck to it a Technicolour. But I'm talking about Technicolour. Well, I think we've still got six weeks, but I do, I do know that that often enough that Alfred and I have had poor jobs to do for the Union, I know that we've come away from a negotiation far from satisfied and been practically instructed to sell it to a mass meeting, and you had to make a choice between refusing and resigning or doing your best to sell it. And I know on one occasion that. erm, I felt so unhappy about it. I made such a bad job of trying to sell it that they kicked it out. And I was, in fact, very pleased, really. But the reason I made such a bad job was because I didn't believe the arguments I was using, you know, and you can't do it very good if you don't believe it

Alf Cooper  1:40:18
was a period when some bright  spark at ranks had convinced us mathematically that the dispensary, the cost of living bonus, was to our advantage. Yes, No way could I buy that with all their mathematics. Do you remember that hell of a job? Yeah, up in

Len Runkel  1:40:32
town and then we had one. Do you remember with Stan Stan Warby and Monica, Toye that would be pulled in Stan Warby? Yes, we were all on a committee, and they did agree that the cost of not the cost of living bonus the the sickness benefit should be deducted, that you shouldn't make a profit when you were ill, you should at least be as well off. But there was no particular reason why you should be better off when you were ill. I proved there was. And anyway, Alf didn't like it, so he stepped back, and Georgie said, Well, we've agreed this. So we've got to sell it to the mass meeting. So you've got it. Len and I say I couldn't do it. I didn't believe it. I made an absolute hash of it quite properly, and I'm very pleased to say now, and I didn't do it purposely, but I couldn't have no conviction at all, with the result that they slung it out and the managements dropped it anyway

Alf Cooper  1:41:40
We went back in and we went back in and convinced them with these word pictures,

Len Runkel  1:41:44
I contend Alfs's word pictures were very amusing, as I think I told you this before on his tape when we both came off a night shift to go on negotiations. And we're going to we're going to have a pre meeting in George's office around about 10 or half past or something like that. And we're going, we're going to meet the afle two Soho square upstairs in the in the Asquith room 11 or something like that. You know, we came off nights. we were both on nights. And of course, we're feeling like murder. We've come up on the tube. We've had no sleep. Your stomach's churning, you know, the last thing the world when you saw what he you didn't wonder at that night. And we got up to Soho square, and we get in George's office and and we run, George gently runs through what the offer is that we've either got to reject or accept or try to improve or what have you. And Alfred Cooper, sitting there, said, dead quiet, and all of a sudden he says, Well, I don't know. He said, I think we'd be bloody ridiculous to turn this down. You know, it's not a bad offer. He said, You could do a lot worse than this. And he's going on and on. And George eventually said, why don't you go home, Alfred, if that's your attitude, for christ's sake, go home. He said, No, not bloody we're going home. I've got here. I'm staying we go upstairs and they outline the case again. And Alf stood up and he said, you've got the bloody sauce to put this piggling offer to us at a time like this, I'm not prepared to listen to it. And he walked out, so we all walked out. That was brilliant. His word pictures.

Len Runkel  1:43:33
That's absolute gospel . Absolute gospel. You know, I might have changed the words a bit. I've told it to you before, but it's still the same

Alf Cooper  1:43:49
God. Then from there on in, you're out working

Len Runkel  1:43:53
Yeah, used to say, give him a couple of large gins that'll stir his ulcer up, and then he'll sort them. I But the best thing was whiskey. Now, do you remember when, when the ITV was opening? Yes, and on the very day it's opening, they're on strike, aren't they? They're not going to open that evening, because we have an agreement. Captain Brownrigg

Alf Cooper  1:44:19
for now, before then, would you be Goon? The

Len Runkel  1:44:21
strange thing was, of course, that Captain Brownrigg once he once he'd swallowed the medicine, and once he saw an agreement, and he realized that everybody had got a category. He knew exactly what everybody should be doing and how much they should be earning. It was so naval, wasn't it that he went for it, hook line and bloody singer. And he was there after, you know,

Alf Cooper  1:44:44
that was in the Waldorf, yeah, a bloody

Len Runkel  1:44:47
really promoted the Union from then on, because he thought these agreements were marvelous. They looked they looked like his navy pay list suited him down to the ground. He knew exactly what was

Alf Cooper  1:44:58
happening. I.

Len Runkel  1:45:01
It. And in fact, I remember he told one of people, one or two people, where they could go because they wouldn't join the union. Do you remember Alf? But they got me drunk. His idea of hospitality was to give you a tumbler and watch the words, a little gin, please, right? And he'd fill the tumbler full of gins. You

Alf Cooper  1:45:22
see, I had two of those in 10 minutes. Went from there to the Cafe Royal

Len Runkel  1:45:29
and all he offered you was Angostura, nothing else. There were no there was no lemon,

Alf Cooper  1:45:35
no pink gins, which consisted of a tumbler gin twice. How come? About 20. We went to the Cafe Royal and to have a meal. After that, I had the canapes? there and wine. And we were walking up to George, and I went back to the office. We were walking up Frifth Street. We went past the club, the Campari club. You saw I've just joined, just come in. I went in there with George. And I didn't know what the Campari was at that time, because it was a new thing, very nice. And I had two things with it, you know, proper vegetation, two of those. And I come back into the to Wardour  street. And for the first time in my life, I couldn't drive my car home. I fell asleep in Burt's office, and there I stayed for hours before I could go my scully, the god damn record has how much I think that day. And that was a sign in somebody else's ready agreement with outlandish pay within that region, boys, and what we got for the bloody

Len Runkel  1:46:37
Alfred, do you remember that, that 28 hour week agreement we signed with

Alf Cooper  1:46:43
No that was, that was a Visnews business, yeah, three, three days on and three days off, yes. And I was working at Tech, and I'll tell you something now, Lynn, I don't know how it affected you, but we finished negotiating that over at Acton Horn Lane . Acton, yeah, and I came away from there, and for days, I thought myself, No, you mustn't do it. However, stayed at Technicolour and didn't go for one of those bloody jobs. We could have had a job, and I thought we're going to be no ultimately, you know, honestly got the better of it, but because I know people have called me a liar, I would never deliberately tell lies,

Len Runkel  1:47:22
but that way it was, out of this world

Alf Cooper  1:47:24
And I didn't think it was where for me for but I know when I looked at the rates of pay we negotiated on that deal and what I was getting and what I was doing for what I was getting there, that's right, murder. But anyway, I stayed where I was, and they've robbed me ever since. Think they've even sold my pension scheme for somebody else, left me with a Prudential and the blokes are going out now with more money for 12 years service as a golden handshake than I got for forty  and they're getting more money a week than I get a month, and they've got a cost of living attached to it, and they sort of business 3% per year. It's better than zero for 1213, years  right, yes. Scandal going, I'm still I,

Len Runkel  1:48:13
I think, of course, what really changed Technicolour, we couldn't go into business, was the lockout. It was, it was a family before then after that, it subtly had changed. For a start, of course, we agreed, as a trade union, to send all the people who had gone in to Coventry. So we didn't speak to them for months. We didn't speak to them, did they? Did we except to work? Do you remember, there's no future to it? Really, there was a no, it doesn't work, does it? But it upset them more than it upset I think, you know,

Alf Cooper  1:48:57
ultimately, we, ultimately, we blended a bit with them, but we were very, very angry at the time. I found it

Alf Cooper  1:49:06
when you say the results of the strike. It wasn't until after the lockout that Oliver, olive the rot set in when Oliver went. Because, well,

Alf Cooper  1:49:19
I got all right, Mike Allen, I got all right with Michael. Allen

Alf Cooper  1:49:23
Mike Allen was all right, but you still couldn't rely on what he said. today was going to be exactly the same next week,

Len Runkel  1:49:30
when you had to, you had to chase him up. But I thought Mike Allen was, was a trustworthy sort of a guy and generous to some

Alf Cooper  1:49:40
Generous with his own money. That's the funny part about, oh

Len Runkel  1:49:43
yes, he would, he would wine and dine you excessively, you know, but because, whether it was on, it might have been on Technicolour,

Alf Cooper  1:49:53
Alfred, no, no, I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about, for example, Bob Hunt  you know, Bob Hunt adopted a child, yes, and then soon. After that he died. Now I know for a fact that that Mike put his hand in his own pocket for his wife. Because, because, you know, I went through the same process myself and Leslie, Leslie Oliver,

Len Runkel  1:50:14
because, mind you, of course, the wind of change had started then. Because the American monopolies Commission, or whatever it was called, broke the monopoly between Kodak and Technicolour  didn't they,

Alf Cooper  1:50:31
well now, 20th Century Fox, yeah, 20

Len Runkel  1:50:34
Took tem to court, yeah. And although we know we had, you see, we had a three colour mono pack from Kodak in 1948 because the Olympic Games were photographed on it. Do you remember? And in fact, we converted one of the developers at Technicolour so that it would be running all the time. And it was, what did we print? It on Alf. All that stuff was printed

Alf Cooper  1:51:15
Eastman stock, wouldn't it?

Len Runkel  1:51:18
Well, you see, Eastman stock didn't officially, didn't officially exist. It was Kodak mono pack. Now I was thinking of the machine we printed on. It was a Debrie , a Debrie Mattysco? three colour printer, and it was running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the whole of the Olympic Games. And except when we had it for service, because it didn't like working that hard. It dried out very quickly. It was, it was a bit of a bugger of a machine because it was ran hot. The lamps, the light source, was too close to the gate, really, to get enough for colour, you know, anyway, when, when that monopoly you say

Alf Cooper  1:52:04
Olympic Games, you were talking about? Sorry, I misread you.

Len Runkel  1:52:04
 Yeah, the Olympic Games, thatwas 1948 wasn't it? Olympic Games? Yeah. And yet, you see that process didn't surface until Kodak and Technicolour were split under the monopolies thing. And then, of course, we went into the doldrums for a bit because, of course, Rank got straight in on colour, didn't they, albeit slow and Technicolour had upset a lot of people. You know, I think you'll leave it, I think they could have behaved a little more sensibly. I'm not saying they could have done any different, because we were, we were full of colour pictures, but I think when you turn somebody down, you could take them out to lunch and do it with a smile and not say, well, that's your bloody hard luck, isn't it, which they did to too many customers. So when the alternative came along, in spite of the fact that they all knew very well that when if it came to quality picture and sound, that Technicolour were going to give them quality, they would still get a service from these other people. And as has always been true, of course, the paying customer in the cinema doesn't know the bloody difference between quality and rubbish. You know, one of the great problems with our industry, isn't it, is that we make film, we produce answer prints for directors and cameramen be and they want perfection, and perfection isn't always commercially viable because the public don't know the difference. I mean, I've sat through a print that was so bad in the cinema that, you know, I'm thinking, my God, how did this get out? I mentioned it to the family, or whoever I've been with. Oh, great picture. I didn't see anything, didn't see anything. But you've seen everything.

Alf Cooper  1:54:22
Every single the public thought everything was Technicolour. Yeah, all the rubbish was tTechnicolour We were actually sending our projectionist out round the cinemas to light that, to line up the lights on the projectors for them, West End and all well. Do you know

Len Runkel  1:54:39
this went on regularly. The you the chief projectionist or his assistant would go up to the west end before one of the major answer print shows regularly, he'd be in one of the theatres in in the West End line up the lights, read them out,

Alf Cooper  1:55:04
get them balanced. Jim Gary, Jim Gorrey, what was the other guy? Alan  King Alan. King.

Len Runkel  1:55:09
Alan King before? Jim, yes, yes, oh, yeah.

Alf Cooper  1:55:15
And they're very popular.

Len Runkel  1:55:17
I know that when you were talking earlier, were you about Technirama and Vista vision? Lazy eight? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Well, of course, see about the time when television started, apart from us being kicked because the other colour labs were getting in. The industry itself was getting kicked because television was the biggest competitor it had ever had, wasn't it? So instead, I think I was a personal opinion, instead of saying, Now, let's go for the very best stories, well acted, beautifully produced in comfortable cinemas. They said, No, let's go for gimmicks. The Movietone frame is out. Now, we want wide screen. We want all these fancy formats. Now, if you consider that, even then you were probably had to an aperture cost you a couple of 100 quid to make. You know, even then and now, they cost a lot more every time somebody decides to change the format. You've got the camera aperture to change, haven't you? The print all the printer apertures to change before you can process the damn film and what for it's probably rubbish anyway. If it had been a good film, nobody would have noticed whether it was bloody Vista vision or wide screen or what they would have noticed anything about it. They just say, Cool. What a cracking picture. You know, that was, you know, if anybody can remember what Crocodile Dundee was photographing, can they who cares? What a great picture, what a great seller. You know, what's this Fish called Wanda. I wonder. Who cares? It's making money everywhere, and that people are enjoying it. There's reason it's making money. And yet, you know, in that early 50s, mid 50s period, here they were spending 1000s, and you've got Todd going to his Todd AO process now, 65 mill neg beautiful. I know how beautiful it is. Alfred and 70 mill prints. I know how beautiful that is. But how much did it cost the industry? Hey, do you know? Can you dare you think what it cost the industry?

Alf Cooper  1:57:41
A print of Lawrence of Arabia cost the price of a three bedroom semi, a three bedroom detached  That's it, yeah.

Len Runkel  1:57:47
I mean, yeah. And that was an industry that was on its backside because of the competition of television. It was, it was busy being and

Alf Cooper  1:58:00
everything had to be done in a rush. You remember, draw up roughly all the equipment I wanted in the Eastman plant, yeah, to service 70 mill. And the drawing, drawing office and the and the maintenance and the and the tool room made all the stuff for me, the lot to see which way to equip, to equip the Eastman  part, which was a small section of Technicolor in those days, because the IBS were still running. And I was over there then, and got again, and I I was running this. And I tell everything, everything I wanted to lay out, because that one thing I like laying out a new department. I really loved that job

Len Runkel  1:58:40
that was, it was, it was a nightmare

Alf Cooper  1:58:44
Lens. People were coming around. We had putting the stuff in the maintenance because the tool rooms making the stuff up, and they were fitting it all in and overnight, sort of this,

Len Runkel  1:58:55
you know, a foot splicer. If you're going to do it to real standards, you want a lot of time to make it right. We converted 35 mil splices to 65 and 70 mil. I see a various width. Obviously the negative had got to be a different width splice to the positive. I mean, you, you were getting a 72, thousplice, weren't you, you were getting a regular positive splice. Negative. Wanted a 35, thou splice, and getting that width flat, it's all right. You can grind it flat. You can lap it flat, but once you start to clamp it on. And then, yes, then we had to DeGauss everything because of the the magnetic stripes. We had to build printers from scratch, and they were a nightmare not to scratch. And we ended up with little jets of air. Little, tiny jets of air. We made up bits of bits of copper tubing, squeezed the ends and put a couple of pounds of air on a plastic tube to blow between the film and leaves back and front, so that the film was running on a cushion of air. It didn't drag against the you know, fabulous things we had to do to make this damn process work. It costs 1000s, but what did it do for the industry? Really, well. Actually, I think probably 65. And 70 are a bad thing to quote,

Alf Cooper  2:00:46
although I think they were ridiculous. Thanks.

Len Runkel  2:00:49
A lot of money. My goodness, they cost a lot of money. And think how much it cost you to replace a reel if there was something wrong with it Alf  oh yes, if it was misprinted, you couldn't

Alf Cooper  2:01:03
reclaim

Len Runkel  2:01:03
Colour raw stock. 70 mill was was fabulously expensive. You know

Alf Cooper  2:01:12
it was, it was, it was talked like they were the packing cases  how much were the packing cases costing you? Oh, it cost. It cost us 25 quiet acted I had to get some new dyes made, some new some new dyes made up for the side plates. That's right about 800 quid to have the god damn things made up just to punch the side plates out the circles, yeah, just the aluminum, the aluminum cores in them. Oh boy. They you know, the cost transit case is fantastic. That's what I say, a seven reeler

Len Runkel  2:01:37
on one year, the year of Lawrence of Arabia, Technicolour could easily have gone bankrupt if it hadn't been for Lawrence of Arabia

Alf Cooper  2:02:01
all put out on my machine. Yes, one, one, somebody move developer, Eastman,

Alf Cooper  2:02:05
developer. And we took all that, all that stuff

Alf Cooper  2:02:09
off. What was the name? What was the number of those two bloody stocks? They altered the they altered the format of the 53534815354, I can't remember the numbers, and I know that.

Alf Cooper  2:02:23
I do know that through that period, we went through a nightmare of changing formats on printers, projectors. I think I spent months wearing out Swiss files, recutting apertures, you know, and then building them again. God Almighty. Anyway, eventually, anyway, I was made foreman, so I watched somebody else do it. Then

Alf Cooper  2:02:51
we've had some wonderful mass meetings in which we've had a lots of trouble. And I can't remember any detail Well, we knew that nightmares and headaches,

Len Runkel  2:03:00
we used to have a mass meeting for you see, Denham  were very much anti Technicolour. Now, mainly because, I suppose when it's true, you've got to face it, it was true, and I understand why, because of the monopoly, the number of people who could represent Technicolour as against the number of people who could represent Denham. So if we wanted something, we got it. I mean, you went to an annual general meeting or a laboratory committee or whatever, moved second through, wasn't it? Although I tried to talk them out of that sometimes. So did you? Alfred, be fair and say, look, look, don't it's unfair to press it in that way, because we don't need it that badly, and it's only going to upset them at Denham or wherever. But so Denham didn't like us. They wouldn't have an Alf near the place. That's true in it

Alf Cooper  2:03:57
never went there with Monica backing up Monica as  shop steward. She said, You talked me into it, and you keep talking to stay in. You know, because I she was a good girl. I Good girl. They needed somebody who was going to try to be fair. And as I said earlier, Len, bear me out. I tried very hard as chairman of the branch not to pre protect Technicolour  because I didn't think it was fair. And whether I succeeded, I don't know, but I tried, but it was a fact. And another thing you see, once upon a time, do you own a position? Could Have we could have had three people from from on the on the lab committee, not because I had three people from tech, from from Denham, or three people from Tech. That was all wrong. There should have been some from there and some from here And we tried very hard. We sort of preached that.

Len Runkel  2:04:54
Sort of was on a connotation base issue, wasn't it? It was it was, it was difficult not to be, not. Be as bitter as they appeared to be at times, you know, but they did. They didn't like it. I got invited there once to speak to a mass meeting at Denham, and I was very much put off by the fact, and I don't know whether it was done on purpose that they put all the youngest, best looking girls at the front sitting on the floor, showing everything they'd got which which really is great distraction. And what is more, I'm sure that they knew it, you know, which makes it worse, doesn't it? Because if you're both pretending it isn't happening, that's all right, but, and it was very difficult, and I forget what I'd got to sell to Denham that bloody day. I can't remember now, but something that got to be sold to Denham, which, which was, was done, all right, but I, I did think that there was an antipathy. And apart from all the all these young girls showing all they've got on the floor.

Alf Cooper  2:06:08
Now, the problem with Denham  was that the night staff and the day they staff at one period, they had a sort of night night steward, and that made life  a bit difficult.

Len Runkel  2:06:21
They didn't agree with one another. You know, they both turn up at a laboratory committee meeting and take opposing views. This was very, very difficult, really, now, but it happened.

Alf Cooper  2:06:36
But the lads did have one thing in common. They tried to, they tried. They had such short shift in their opinions on the general counsel for years, and it didn't improve very much with the television coming into it. In the finish, they sort of run their own affair without troubling head office too much, which was, yes, well, was the wrong thing, but it was practical. We did. We did. Yeah, in fact, it got to a state where, frankly, an organiser only came when invited at Technicolour,

Len Runkel  2:07:11
because, well, we did. We had the problem often enough that the organiser for the lab committee wasn't always of the calibre of the amateur officers. Is that fair comment?

Alf Cooper  2:07:30
We did very well when we when we had Brian. We had Brian was very close, yes, the other, the other organiser, we had Middleton. Oh, he was a dead loss. He didn't know anything about anything. Did he? Bessie Bond was very, very good at doing all the males and they really wasn't she.

Len Runkel  2:07:49
Bessie Bond was superb. Administratively, everything was to hand at every meeting you went to. It was It was organised. She was a brilliant negotiator, you know, and we found that unless we were going to call him Bert Croke or or George Elvin, that we would probably screw more out of our management at Technicolour than they would, you know, done on anybody they care to send, but

Alf Cooper  2:08:21
the different kettle of fish, who Bert Crake, he came from the labs, and he was a little air about him, which, in some ways, I thought was better than Georges Crake. But he was a tremendous with one off, you know, he had no ambitions to go anywhere, to be anything except to do a job.

Speaker 2  2:08:45
All he wanted to do was to improve your lot as a trade union. He was a lovely fellow, a lovely fella. I

Alf Cooper  2:08:51
think the, I think perhaps the greatest thing I remember about Bert Crake  he was one of the best optical printers there was in the business. Yeah, he gave it up.

Alf Cooper  2:09:01
Yeah, about eight quid a week left.

Len Runkel  2:09:04
I tell you another thing you see now, he never wanted to be general secretary, but when George down with TB, he took over, and it wouldn't be unfair to say, because I think we said it at the time to each other, you know, the unions never been run better. Without a word. You know, you wouldn't like to put a finger on what was going on, but there was no noise. It was all happening, wasn't it natural? He was a lovely fellow. He was a great bloke. I loved him, really,

Alf Cooper  2:09:39
nothing was too much trouble. No, he was a lab, man. He knew our problems. He knew what hell it was to work in the dark. Is an optical printer

Len Runkel  2:09:50
when it comes down to it, you see, about 80% of this industry never actually have a piece of film in their hand. Do they? You see. There's editors who do and there's the loaders that do. But from then on, why should the producer want to play with a piece of film, or the director want to hold a piece of film? He might look through the camera and so forth. He doesn't really know what a piece of film is as such. Now laboratory is a piece of film. Is their bread and butter all the time, and its care and consideration is everything, isn't it? I doubt whether even camera man appreciate what sort of stress that a piece of negative coming into the lab puts everybody under you think that much of a piece of negative, you know, it is. It's more important than life itself, that piece of negative, and you do nothing but worry about it from the minute you've got it until the minute you got rid of it. You know, did you

Alf Cooper  2:10:55
Did you get involved in FISTAV? Work? FISTAV FISTAV Federation, the International Federation, fista, no,

Len Runkel  2:11:06
no, that I was, I was on the on the the, what was it called? The film industry training, Trade Union Association? No, what were all the unions used to be on a committee. I was on it for years.

Alf Cooper  2:11:23
Oh, that, what was that you weren't involved with the tripartite agreement? No, no, no, no, I didn't have anything involved in that. I didn't FISTAV Was the international organization.

Len Runkel  2:11:35
Oh, yeah, that's the one who kept paying for you to go to East Germany. Yeah,

Alf Cooper  2:11:39
Night and caused an outro or out break at Spoleto because they were working on the name of it, and they refused to. Nobody wanted to put laboratories in it. And I stuck out for that one at Spoleto, but I thought you were involved at one time. The other thing I was going to Cuba pardon  what about the court case that you Oh, yes, well, I can't remember when that there

Len Runkel  2:12:08
were two court cases. I said, I don't know whether they were the 50s or the 60s, the Boulting brothers one, but then none of us gave evidence we were there. But that was that was all written submissions, and it was Gerald Gardner on the one hand, and the and what the QC, the Boulting QC was the nephew of the then Chancellor, before Halsham, Before Gardner. Because, you see, Gerald Gardner was the most senior QC in the business, wasn't he? Because he refused to be a judge because, because of tyhe death penalty. He, you know, he wouldn't put himself into the position where he might have to pass. But I remember listening to him, my wife and I attended. Every day I took leaves to be there, you know,

Alf Cooper  2:13:03
I'm going to turn over because I....................................................................................

Len Runkel  00:01
Uh, now you talked about court case? Yeah, there were two, two court cases, which which ran consecutively, and the Strand. What's the name the law courts? Yes, and one of them concerned this chap who'd got a crew together as the producer and employer, he'd taken them to Spain and abandoned them without paying them, and they were left with no money. The hotel bills hadn't been paid, and they'd got to get home, you know, and they were shorts and documentary personnel, and when they came back, obviously, they came to the executive committee and told what had happened. And the executive committee took it to the General Counsel, and we took this boat to take it away, so he took us to court because we had stopped him earning his living. Now, how? One minute now, George Elvin knew Gerald Gardner, and so did our solicitors of the time. No, it was before Thompson's Stellarbrass. Yes, Pollard,

Alf Cooer  01:26
Stellabrass and George Martin. That's it.

Speaker 1  01:28
And useless. Pollard was, he was a very nice old cop, but as you say, Stellarbrass moved away and that that, anyway, anyway that we're getting away from the point of so he sued us for taking his ticket away and taking away his livelihood. He was also an ex actor. Now George Elvins Clark, not George Elvins Clark, damn it. Gardens,  Garden, Gerald Gardners Clark was, was a very knowledgeable wheeler and dealer, and he managed to get the case heard by a judge who wouldn't be anti trade union. So he wouldn't be pro trade union, but he wouldn't be anti trade union. That was Justice Samuel Sam salmon, salmon salmon, Justice Salmon. And we had to 430 Christ, I've got to catch the five o'clock bus. The wife will be on it. And Justice Salmon was presiding, and I remember the the all the arguments. Now we were, we had to give depositions. Now I don't know why, but George said that he would, he would take the stand, but Croke would take the stand and I would take the stand. How we arrived at that I don't know why I had that honour. I shan't know. But anyway, we took the stand, and Gerald Gardner put us through our paces, and so did this other chap, you know? But it was simple, because all we had to do was tell the truth, you know, and then Gerald Gardner proceeded, the chap put himself on the stand, or his QC did. And Gerald Gardner, we were very impressed. The wife and I were very impressed, because at the time, Perry Mason was running quite a lot, you know, and he used to demolish them, didn't he, but he never demolished anybody like Gerald Garden, and demolished this one. It was pitiful. After about three hours, he was a blubbering wreck. And I said, you know, I remember saying to Jill, the wife, well, he might not want, want to dish out the death penalty to anybody, but he's damn near murdered. Yeah, of course, he lost the case, you know, because then there was the Boulting brothers, which, which was amusing, really, because in the end, it came down to the fact that that we'd taken there, they had lost their tickets because they hadn't paid their subs. And one of them went on the floor, and the shop steward said, I don't want you on here  your tickets out of date or some such, you see, and they got all their necks in a knot about this, and took us to court over this for preventing them from earning their living. And it was all done by deposition, as I said. But of course, so the QC' s had a lot to say, and Gerald Gardner particularly had a lot because. Beimg  as a senior QC, he had been at Winchester with Justice Salmon. We had the same judge again, and this was all due to picking the right dates and so forth by Gerald  Gardeners Clerk. And I remember him saying, course, you will remember Millord when we were at Winchester, because Millord had been his fag at Winchester, no less. And he went on about this. And then he said, of course, also he said, We are a closed shop, aren't we? Millrrd, he said, if they are expecting me to be sorry for them, because we are supporting a closed shop and it won't let them work because they haven't got a ticket. He said, I would point out, my laud, that we are a closed shop, the Bar Association is a better trade union than they ever knew how to be. But he said, The strange thing is, he said it was John Boulting on such and such a date at such and such an annual conference who moved that the studios be declared a closed shop, and it was seconded by his brother, Roy. And we have the minute here, if you would like it millaud

Alf Cooer  06:33
They were terrible. So

Len Runkel  06:35
they decided to apologize and withdraw, and they paid all the expenses, including the trade unions, they were the only two court case we were nearly involved in another court case. Now, what was that fat little slug who used to be in the sound department, whom we determined because he had leaked information about a committee meeting we decided could not hold office in the union. We didn't take his ticket away. Sound man, little, fat man,

Alf Cooer  07:11
do you remember him? That's right. And then got even, even got my wife embarrassed on London Airport with the trade unions there and Elvin said, no way will we ever take a case out against a member and and I couldn't get I, and I had my shopkeepers around calling me. Always knew you're a bloody crook. You know that sort of attitude. It got

Len Runkel  07:39
summonses each one of us, every member of the executive,

Alf Cooper  07:44
Legal Aid, on trial defender level. No way could I afford it, but I tried to defend myself and my wife. And at that time, I was because that's another thing at that. At that particular period, I was involved with all the time, all the airport trade unions, because, for some reason, other we're working all sorts of things at the time. And I was going over there and meeting up with and it was very embarrassing to think that we'd done 1600 quids of the kitty fund. You know, it was Ralph Bond, George Elvin, Sid Cole myself with a fall that had passed this money to the ACT Films. And did, actually, we loaned it to him, didn't we, free of interest, that's right, and, and that libel went out, and it looked as though that we just shared this 16 under between us and, and of course, you can imagine anti trade unionists and all that. They made a heyday of it. And even poor ol  Rosa got a bit of trouble of it over here. And everybody was saying, well, if it's not true, why aren't you selling them? You know? Well anyway, if you sue, what's the good of suing a man of straw? Ernie cousins, Lee and I'll tell you, subsequently to this, Ernie Cousins actually came up and asked me a few years before, a few years ago, after many, long years, he came up to me, and I respect him for it. He said to me, I wish you take my hand . I'll apologize what I did I should never have done, and I apologize I was wrong. Well I and I respected Ernie for that in the end, because you know it, but I know, I know actually was a pistol. Somebody else was making the bullets, and I know it was too. Was Charlie Wheeler? Well, I'm not making any names. Oh, well,

Len Runkel  09:30
I tell you what, at an annual conference, I walk in the main door at transport house, is it? And there's Charlie will Wheeler having a rest at the top of the stairs. And I say, Hello, Charlie, how you getting on? He'd retired by then, and we were talking about tomatoes. He liked to grow tomatoes from his own seed and so forth. And Ernie Cousins comes in, shakes Charlie by the hand and sticks his hand out to. Me. And I said, Don't bother doing that. I don't want to be contaminated. And Charlie said, Why do you behave like that? I said, Well, he nearly had me in court. He could have had me in jail because I couldn't have afforded to pay and I had to go to jail. I said, people like that, I don't want anything to do with especially when I had done nothing wrong, you know? Oh, you shouldn't be like that. Says Charlie. I said, Well, no, it depends whose side you're on, doesn't it? Charlie, no, you don't want to say that either. But Charlie was was having a push at the time. I forget what it was about. But

Alan Lawson  10:42
this is the len rankle interview, which was started on the ninth of november of 1988 now being continued on the 13th of september 1989 now in the in the intervening months, I'm sure you've remembered many of things that you would like to have said before, but on the very end of the interview in November, you were talking about difficulties, if you if that's the right word, with Ernie Cousins and also Charlie Wheeler about allegedly money missing that had gone to ACTT films. Would you like to enlarge on that?

Len Runkel  11:33
Well, Ernie Cousins had been for some reason, which I'm afraid I can't remember, now barred from holding office. Now he'd been from odd times, a member of the General Council, a member of the sound committee and various other committees, and for some reason, which I now can't remember, we had decided that he wasn't fit to hold office. And this, this has been upheld. I mean, I was just a member of the committee. I wasn't making this decision. Somebody must have, must have bought it forward. And Ernie cousins was very upset, and decided that he ought to get his own back on the executive. So he, he issued a summons against all of us, individual as individuals, on the exec  serving on the executive at that time, something to do with us transferring money, as far as I remember, from the general fund to ACTT films limited, which was quite untrue. But what it seemed to me at the time was, and to others of us, was that Charlie Wheeler, then the chairman, I think, of the sound section, was, was, in fact, the gun that was firing the bullet that was Ernie Cousins. And what happened? I'm not sure, but it all came to nothing. We got our summonses, and then they weren't proceeded with. And we were all very upset about it, and I was particularly upset because it was a criminal charge, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't just another trade union charge. It was a criminal charge. And a few years later, I remember going to an annual conference at the TUC headquarters, and there was Charlie Wheeler. So I had a chat with Charlie. He'd been retired a couple of years, and in came Ernie, Cousins, and I refused to shake hands with Ernie Cousins, and Charlie was quite upset about it. He said, why should you do a thing like that? I said, Well, you know, because he threatened to bloody well  put me in jail. As far as I'm concerned, I wasn't in any way blameworthy. We were all perfectly innocent, and I don't want thing to do with a man so frankly, I can remember that you should never speak ill of the dead, because I can remember that Ernie Cousins did pass away. And I it was something I said at the time that I wouldn't, wouldn't be likely to shed a tear about he, he had been attached to a lot of double dealing, I think Ernie Cousins. He wasn't the only one mind, you bill, but I do think that in this, in this, on this occasion, it was Charlie wheeling Wheeler who was pointing the gun. You know, of course, Charlie was, was very good trade unionist, and he was, he was very dedicated, but he was also, on occasions, a great manipulator of people. He would lobby odd members of the executive committee and the General Counsel outside of committee to see if he could get them to do what he wanted. You know, and some of us, of course, were quite wise to it in those days, you know, the laboratories, of course, were remarkably powerful. I mean, in most cases, I suppose, we solved the studios difficulties with their managements. They didn't ever seem to solve  them themselves. They they got us to black them, which of course, would be outside the law nowadays, but we used obliging lead to black, and usually, I think it worked. So people like ALF Cooper and myself and and oh dear, the name slip by, don't they, but, but members, at that time of the lab committee like Sid Sidney Ellington, who was the the Fuller Frank Fuller, yes, we, we didn't feel we were in any way beholden to or afraid of what the studio people would do to us. You know, if we didn't really because we felt we always behaved in a very correct trade union manner when they asked for assistance, we gave it to them and asked them what it was about afterwards, I can remember Jimmy Edwards being asked that once on television, when Equity were on strike and he was chairman of the variety artists Federation and a known Tory and the the BBC chap saying to him, What do you think of Equity being on strike? Mr. Edwards, and Jimmy Edwards said, as a trade unionist, it is not my business to inquire into the problems of a sister Union, but only to offer my whole hearted support, which I thought was the absolutely correct thing, and that was the way we felt about our responsibilities as lab workers to to the rest of the union or any other union that came to that. So we didn't need people like Charlie Wheeler, you know, to push us into a corner about what what our duties were we felt. We always carried them out. You mentioned ACT Films, which I was only in passing, I think, attached to that because there was a lot of silly stories. But what I do remember about ACT films was, I suppose I got elected to it in the fairly early 50s sometime. It's something I really wanted to be involved with, although it was an expensive committee. And as much as ACT films never made enough money to pay expenses or buy your drink or anything like that. No way. They always broke, you know, and Ralph Bond and Terry, who we've been talking about, John Terry. John Terry, you know, with the prime movers in all our financial endeavoors, and John Terry was was very, very helpful. He fell over backwards to be helpful, I think, really. But we were always living from hand to mouth, and we went on making films and losing money regularly throughout the 50s, until it got to the stage where we were, I think about to go out of business. And the actual circumstances, I don't know but, but obviously, ACT, Films, records would show them quite clearly when somebody approached Ralph and he he called a meeting of the Board of ACT Films, and he had a very startling thing to put to us. And can I remember there was that was Elvin and Charles Wheeler and myself, I think Tony Asquith, Sid Cole, I think Max Anderson had died by the time this happened, you know, But a very great mixture, really, of political attitudes. And there was Ralph Bond, as the General Manager of ACT  films, putting to us this proposition, and that was that he'd been approached by a business consortium who would like to buy ACT Films limited as a tax loss because we owed so much money. Well, this, this really was a little bit of a shock to us. I mean, we hadn't been involved in any financial fiddles. We didn't know how to manage them. It was really outside our ideology. You know, I. But it was perfectly legal. You know, I think our legal representative then was Stellabrass. Can you remember him? A lovely fella, and he said, One, it's all perfectly legal. And of course, Ralph has talked about it to me. So ACT Films limited, with all its assets, which were, in fact, films, properties that had been made and hadn't made any money, but in fact, owed money to the film Finance Corporation. We should change the name, and we changed it to Soho films limited. Having changed it, we then sold it. We sold it on a break even figure, which paid all the debts, and then we re articled a new company called ACT Films 1959, 65 whenever it was limited. And went on from there. And I do know that here, here we were, as trade unionists, ideologically, really opposed to this sort of financial deal being driven to a point where either ACT films, which was only really to employ unemployed technicians,

Len Runkel  21:32
could either go out of business or behave as the the market behaves in such situations, do something which we felt was quite beyond the pale , but, but it saved ACT. Films limited, of course. Strange thing was, we went on to make films. We went on to make losses, but eventually, you know, I suppose, because of the advent of television buying films. All the films came into profit. It was really a question of being able to hold on long enough.

Alan Lawson  22:12
. Let's go back a second. Now, the fact that ACT Films made a loss. Do you think this was the distribution and exhibition side of the industry that didn't want them to succeed?

Len Runkel  22:32
Well, we always thought that was true, because we've we didn't ever, as far as I know, get a circuit distribution. We never got Ranks or ABC. We got in the odd little house round here and there. You know, as I say, it wasn't until the advent of television that bought the properties that then bonk. They were in profit. We sold them. We sold them all over the world. We sold them to Australia and New Zealand. Eventually, the royalties all came in, you know, but, but as far as exhibition in this country was concerned, I think you're quite right. The exhibitors didn't want a trade union making films, so they did what they could to see that it didn't succeed, and we didn't ever get a distribution contract. We were often promised one, but they never came to fruition. And some of the films weren't bad. Oh no, they were quite, quite acceptable. We used, also, we used to push them round to all the laboatories to make sure that all the labs got some and in fact, I can remember saying, Well, you know, it's all very well you're going, you've been back to that lab several times on that one. What about Technicolour  again, a shot. But this is a black and white we're making. I said, Well, don't be damn silly. Technicolour can produce black and white as good or better than anybody. And Sid was the producer of the kitchen, which came to Technicolour, yes,

Alan Lawson  24:11
yes, you haven't said a lot about yourself as a member of many years standing on, you know, on council, and on the East Secand on the negotiating committee, you know what? What are the highlights of those you know?

Len Runkel  24:30
Well, I know my, my father's background was very much a trade union one. He was a clerk of the chapel in 1926 in in in the general strike. And so I suppose I grew up with, with trade union stories.

Alan Lawson  24:48
Yes, I probably said all you say that, yeah, yeah. So,

Len Runkel  24:51
of course, being in a family business, and if you will remember them, I think I was. The only left wing trade union supporter there. Yes, in that business, really? Oh yes, there was op Runkel was a strong Tory. Goodness knows why? Because he, you know, I mean, he'd worked as an engineer all his life, and he's working for himself by then, but, but so what his son, Jim, who was one of the founder members, Jim Runkle of ACTT, very early member. You probably knew him as an early member. He started with the newsreels and then went to sound section, and he supported ACTT under any circumstances, but voted, Tory. There was a chap they had working for them, who Laurie, who had been there since he was a boy. There was my cousin and I, Leslie Wilshire and myself, just back from the army. I He was a Tory. Leslie still is, you know, I was the only one, so there was no chance that I was going to become a trade unionist there. But mind you, uncle said when we came back from war, I'll pay you the both the tool makers rate, which was a princely six pounds a week anyway. So as soon as, as soon as uncle was ill, as you probably remember, and they, they got a bit of a panic on, and there was, there were stacks of money in the business, which I didn't know about then, and they wouldn't go out and look for other work, you know, if it was, if you didn't make it for a camera, you couldn't make it, which was practically the attitude, which is nonsense. Anyway. So I we had both to look for work, Leslie Wilshire and I had to look for work. And I saw this advertisement for Technicolour, applied for the job and got it on, on dry maintenance. And I'd got a head start, I suppose, really, you know, at least I knew something about film. Now, the first thing I wanted to do was to become a trade union member. So I went to Alfred Cooper and said, You know, I want to join the union. Oh, good. Well, what do I do? Ah, well, I'll give you a form. Well, after about three months of badgering, I got a form. And after another couple of months, and nothing had happened, you know, Bert Croke and George Elvin came to Technicolour for some reason or other, which I wouldn't know. Then, probably it was a negotiating committee meeting with the governor or something, but I don't know. So I got chatting to Bert Croke and said, When am I going to get my ticket? I'm working here without a ticket, which, as far as I could see, was some sort of a sin. Oh, it's but anyway, you know, it took about eight months to get that damn ticket. Well of cource. As soon as I'd got it, I suppose I started to make a nuisance of myself, because I was probably rather outspoken at times. I became the floor steward for my for the dry maintenance which we were then maintenance department, and I made a lot of noise on the committee for a time, and Alfred Cooper, for reasons which I can't remember, probably because he he'd been too outspoken about something or other, got his ass kicked off the committee at Technicolour. He was no longer the convener. He wasn't even on the committee, and the chairman at that time, whose name escapes me, he was the pin belt foreman. I remember that. Anyway, one day he came to me and he said, I've got the permission of the management. They want a representative from Technicolour on the negotiating committee in town. You're to meet this man Middleton on Hayes station at half past eight tomorrow morning and go with him. That was MIDI. You remember MIDI? Yes, I do, yes, whom I always rather liked, in spite of what they had to say about him, still and off I went to negotiating committee and became a member of the negotiating committee just merely because they said, Here's Technicolour with what we had about 900 or 1000 members or something, and they were entitled to more than Alfred Cooper on that committee, and that's how I became a member of the National negotiating committee.

Speaker 1  25:38
Stopping the thing  I'm wondering if the hiccup on your membership was anything to do with the fact that you perhaps should have been AEU was that it,

Len Runkel  26:24
oh, no. Yeah, we had some AEU but it was predominantly an ACTT shop. Now, the hiccup was, which I understand perfectly now, was that the studios were a closed shop. The labs weren't Technicolour wasn't even 100% shop. Then so the back door in was a ticket we hadn't got what do they call it now, the reserved, you know what? That ticket we give to stringers and so forth. You know? It keeps them working where they are, they can't move without the permission of the General Counsel. Oh, no, I don't know. Well, we didn't have that rule then, so that, once you've got a ticket, boom, if you knew somebody in the studios would give you a job. You were in, and there were all these studio lads looking for work. So I perfectly understand why they were making sure a that I was if you've gone to work in the laboratory, you've gone there to stay, is

Alan Lawson  31:04
a probationary ticket? Is it possible? Anyway? No,

Len Runkel  31:08
no, no, it wasn't probation. No,

Alan Lawson  31:10
no, no, the one you're talking about now, no,

Len Runkel  31:15
well anyway, doesn't I remember it? I remember it being introduced very well. Anyway, it doesn't, no,

Alan Lawson  31:21
that's how you come on to the negotiating, yeah,

Len Runkel  31:24
that's just just by being somebody saying, Oh, well, he's noisy enough. Let him go. I think, yeah.

Alan Lawson  31:30
Then from from that, when did you get on to the council general counsel?

Len Runkel  31:37
I know that was about 1948 I suppose. But

Alan Lawson  31:42
really following on the negotiating committee, I

Len Runkel  31:45
should think it was about 1949 I got on to the General Council. I was on it for a year and off it again, I think mainly because I didn't make enough noise the way to get elected, I started to realise, if you wanted to be elected, was to make speeches at annual conference, the Annual General Meeting. Now it didn't matter whether those speeches were of any value. It didn't matter whether they they coincided with the needs of the trade union or your section or whatever it's, the fact that if you would get up and say something, the likelihood is they'd

Alan Lawson  32:30
vote for you, yeah,

Len Runkel  32:31
and I can. I was very, very nervous about public speaking. I hated it. I I don't exactly know why, because in the army, you know, I took enormous parades as adjutant of a large unit and adjutant of War Office school. I took abco regularly, you know, I commanded a bloody Squadron, but, but public speaking, by the time I got into the 50s, I didn't really want to know about, well, I think

Alan Lawson  33:08
it's, isn't that a different that's a different kettle of fish. 111, is, one is authority false, you know, yeah, capital A. The other one is not authority at all. It's a, it's, it's a

Len Runkel  33:20
persuasion persuasion yes, yes. Anyway, I was very nervous about it, but I think I realized the only way I was going to overcome that problem was by doing it anyway and being nervous and like anything else. I mean, if you do it often enough, you're not frightened of it anymore. I found early that one thing also you should do is to is to learn the important parts of a speech, pieces of paper cards are deadly because their ambition in life is to get mixed up, yes and and they throw you. But if you only commit the facts to paper, the minimum of facts, like statistics or something, because you don't want to misquote those. The rest of it has got to be off the cuff. And if it was off the cuff, you couldn't lose your place. You just had to keep going. You know, you were in a position of, really, if you'll excuse the expression of shit or bust. And this, this worked very well for me. I also must admit, with some regret, that I played politics with the meetings I recognised from listening to a local labour MP, whom I knew quite well, and what he told me said, Tell a meeting what they want to hear. Tell them what they want to hear, and tell it them forcefully, as if they didn't know they wanted to hear it. So I but that works that that is marvelous, and of course, that gives you a sense of power which you're really not entitled to. I'm really a great believer in humility. I think the most important of all the attributes that man can have is humility and that sort of situation is the antipathy, lack of humility, isn't it? You know what I mean, yes,

Alan Lawson  35:28
but people in the mess don't want humility. Oh no, no, they don't.

Len Runkel  35:32
They want to. They want to be told. And now and again, of course, you also have to have a go at them, but you must never talk down to them. And on that basis, then I proceeded to get myself elected without any problem for years and years and years, I hope I made a contribution to the General Council and executive.

Alan Lawson  35:51
When did you go on to the executive

Len Runkel  35:56
in those days? That's what you got elected to, was the executive you could go to the General Council on the basis of the number of people in your shop and being a representative, but to be an elected member of the General Council meant you were on the executive. Well, for years, of course, Frank Fuller was the vice president and chairman of the laboratory committee. And he was, he was a nice old cop, yeah, was, was Frank, but he didn't always know which hat he got on, whether he was a lab supervisor or the chairman of the lab committee. But, but he nevertheless, he was, he was, he was quite effective. And and they were, I must say this, most of the laboratory management at that time were people who had been laboratory technicians. You know, it is only recently that they've imported people like Ray at Technicolour, who are purely accountants. They're not that technicians at all. They're just accountants.

Alan Lawson  37:15
But this is, this is the modern trend anyway. Oh yeah, managers are accountants.

Len Runkel  37:19
Yes, I think you know, quite frankly, that's what's ruined ruined American and British business is the fact that accountants, instead of being a tool of industry, are now the boss of industry, which is quite wrong, because they never look at anything except the bottom line. You know, it's damn ridiculous, really. They are not prepared to sell loss leaders like Tescos are, for instance, you know. And you have to do that in every industry, I think, particularly in in laboratories. When you, if you have a very big customer now and again, you've, you've got to give them a very big perk,

Alan Lawson  38:01
you know, yes, yes. Did much of that go on? I suppose it did. Oh

Len Runkel  38:08
yes, I was never involved in it, but the Technicolour organization as a whole, and I was told this by more than one person, for instance, who was working at Technicolour limited England, going to Hollywood, to the Technicolour plant there for some liaison purpose, and being told, as soon as they got you there, they put you in your hotel and asked what, took you out to dinner, took you back to your hotel, and asked, you know what, whether you preferred a brunette, a redhead or a blond  for the night, all on expenses. Oh yeah, well, don't do that sort of thing here. But then I found that Technicolour had a suite in London, and I went out one night after a negotiation. Alfred Cooper and I and Ray No. Allen, John Allen. John Allen, not, not. Johnny Allen, no. Alan, who was the managing director at the time of Technicolour, an accountant, Scotsman, nice bloke. You could always get something out of him. He was, he was all right, you know. But he said, I'll take you out. We've finished the negotiations. I'll take you out to dinner. So he took us to a club Jermyn street, or somewhere around there, you know, was very plush, and they rolled out the red carpet as soon as they saw Mr. Allen. So obviously he went there often, you know, and there was the on. came the dancing girls. He loaded the table with the bottle of everything, and all the splits. And there were only four. Of us, mind you. And the dancing girls came on, you know, and I know that one of the chaps there, Paddy O' Gorman, was with us, said, My God, that's a big girl on the end there they were topless. And of course, these dancers and Ray said to him, do you want her later? And it would all have been on Technicolour  expenses, you know. So you talk about perks, I've no doubt that you name it, and it was there, but I only saw a glimpse of it. But as as to certain perks they did, they did to push the boat out very, very thoroughly to some of their lots of their customers. And I'm told that Technicolour weren't as forthcoming as Kay's and Humphreys were. But mind you, Humphreys went out of business, and Kays have just gone out of business. Well, yes, but they're on their way. They between you, you and I, and whether it's general knowledge, I don't know. Technicolour were offered Kays  a couple of weeks ago why they should bother to buy it, I don't know. Because if it folds, they'll get the work anyway, because Denham  are nearly gone, really anyway. So, yeah, there was a lot of perks, but I think what we didn't realize, you know, as negotiators, as lab workers and as senior personnel in some of our laboratories that really printing film was a license to print money. I say that now because in terms of percentages, Technicolour now, often work Saturday night, Sunday, Sunday night, and then I'm talking about two and a half times and treble time shifts for production. Have the whole plant in God for a night shift of treble time. Now that can only be possible if there's a lot of money about because Technicolour Hollywood aren't going to stand for spending money like that. If the money isn't there, are they? So I don't think we ever as a negotiating committee, either at national or local level, did as well by our members as we should have done had we had some the hindsight, which we have now, which I feel I have now.

Alan Lawson  42:54
But is that? Is that because, if you like, the number of labs as depreciated, or, you know, been so reduced.

Len Runkel  43:05
Well, if I tell you that my second son is one of the print managers at Technicolour now, and he told me that they were proud to say that they had a month, I think it's three or four months ago, where they equaled technicolours Best, which was back in the 60s, best month of production. Good lord, footage now we were on three strip then yes. Now we're on Eastman colour  or Fauci or whatever it is. So if they can afford to pay printers and developers 25,000 a year now I know they're working all the hours  God since for it, they must have been able to pay an equivalent amount, then they would have been able to it's all relative. It's all relative. Yes, yes. So so they were, they were making a lot of money because we weren't particularly well paid. The labs always were poorly off. Yeah, um, I think that we had some clever people, mind you, negotiating against us in those days, apart from, apart from the accountants, which came later, Leslie Oliver, who was a left winger, or certainly left of centre, I wouldn't even say it was a liberal. I think I told you before that his wife ran for as a labour candidate for Stoke Poges, rural district council now that which, if there was ever a lost cause that. Work come across any anyway, so Leslie, who's who was apprenticed when he was 13, I think, as an engineer, and served his time and did stills, and eventually did three strip stills on the old Cabra process, and then joined Calmness? in Hollywood. Nothing

Alan Lawson  45:21
gonna stop you, right?

Alan Lawson  45:33
Len Runkal side five recorded on the 13th of september 1989, he was saying he joined Calmness,

Len Runkel  45:43
yeah, in Hollywood. I think he was with Calmness in his railway truck. I'm not quite sure whether that was in Hollywood, but it wasn't too far away, I don't think. And they had a two strip process then, didn't they? It was the two color process or the Black Pirate was, was one, yeah, which I, which I talked about, I think yes, one that annoyed me with, with Les Austin Ellis, whom I met the other day. Anyway, he, he was a very, very knowledgeable bloke. Leslie Oliver. He knew how to deal with people, and he was a pleasant man, and he was open handed, but there are some things he wouldn't listen to. I remember in the in the early 50s, I formed an opinion that as trade union negotiators, we spent much too much time talking about differentials, but we shouldn't talk about differentials, particularly in a department, because we ought only to talk about the rate for the job in that department. There might be more than one grade, but the rate for the job in the department, and then a foreman ought automatically to get so much above that rate, an assistant supervisor so much above that, and a supervisor so much above that, and the percentages should be set so that he can never fall behind his men, whether a foreman, assistant supervisor, supervisor, or whatever and you don't have ever to talk about their rates. They are minimally operating on the basis of a minimal percentage above all the time without any problems. This appealed to me very much, and I tried, over a period of some time to to get the negotiating committee to believe that this was a good idea. And eventually I did, but I could never shift Oliver on a thing like that. You know, at local level, when I said to him, but doesn't, doesn't it make sense? I said it, it only makes sense that you refuse it on the basis that the foreman, the assistant supervisor, and the supervisor are getting much less than any percentage we could negotiate, but because their rates aren't in the book, they won't tell us how much they're getting, And you won't tell us how much they're getting, but one day, we'll find out how much they're getting. You know, after a few years, as matter of fact, we got the assistant supervisors to put their rates down, and some of them weren't doing as well as their blokes were, of course, that you know that really shows you that managements don't deserve good, dedicated workers who will put in all the hours  God sends for them and not forever be messing them about they promote them because they're good at their job, and then proceed to underpay them.

Alan Lawson  49:03
Yeah, well, this is, this is rather like before the war in the BBC. You were given the title engineer, but you weren't paid the money.

Len Runkel  49:12
Yes, yeah, it's ridiculous, but that was one of my hobby horses. Anyway, this question of differentials. Now the other one was that that nearly got me into a lot of trouble and shouldn't have done was job evaluation. Now, I've always reckoned recognised that time and motion study are anathema to any trade union organisation, but a genuine scientific job evaluation is a sensible and proper way to go about finding out how much a job is worth. In my opinion, how do you set a rate for a job? By discussing it, say. oh , well, he's got this to do and he's got that to do. Well, he ought to. He's worth more than so and so. All right, we'll make it so, so much a week. Well, why shouldn't you do that scientifically? Why shouldn't you go through a whole plant and say, what are all the operations that that man or that woman has to carry out, and if you start from the basis that nobody is going to lose any money, nobody will have their rate cut, and nobody at all will be in a worse position at the next negotiation, we should be able to evaluate each job and set a price for it on the basis of going up not coming down. Yeah, and Technicolour started to do just that. Of course, there were all sorts of pitfalls, and I was, I was very worried about it. I was the convener at the time, and I was worried about it. On the other hand, I still felt that it was a very worthwhile operation. And they started with the optical printing department at Technicolour by writing down every job they had to do, all the different types of printing, all the different operations dealing with the handling of of negatives and dupes and stock, checking their their leaders and their lights, drawing their Stock, rewinding over printing, map printing, you know, all down, and they got through the optical printing department, and they got, I think, something about an 8% rise out of just out of the job valuation. And then, and then Ray Sharp, yeah, the communist Ray Sharp made such a fuss on the executive that we had to stop it. And I was sorry about that. Frankly, very sorry about that, because I would, I certainly would be quite prepared to, and I did at the time say, yes, certainly I am partially to blame, because I've allowed them to do this. In fact, to some extent, I've even encouraged them to do it, as long as we're there watching and we know what their parameters are. And this isn't work study. This isn't time and motion. It's nothing like that. It's what we do at a negotiating committee meeting without knowing what we're talking about, you know? But I still think that that done properly and done openly, yes, yes, with everybody knowing about it, and with the representatives of the Department concerned, and the trade union and the management all there while it's happening, and agreeing each of the factors that are put forward that you have a more, much more sensible way than than the way they say Now is that I'm worth more than he is, or as I found in many, many negotiations at local level, particularly, that I don't mind how much he gets as long as it's less than I get. In other words, if he'll take a cut, I will consider that I've had a rise the most strange attitude. But that's the way it was. You know, we had exactly the second same thing with with negative assembly. They used to have three rates in our negative assembly department, negative cutter, who was next to God, and the foreman, a neg assembler and neg  breaker down. Well, the neg breaker down. When the stuff came in from the rushes, he cut it up into pieces. Yeah, the assembler assembled to the editors cues and so forth. After the rushes had been approved and the answer print had gone through the neg cutter, he was the bloke who actually cut the negative for the dupe and the master, for the master and the dupe, you know, I mean, and those were the grades. And of course, there were technical or a number of very difficult. neg cutting jobs because you occasionally got two strip, occasionally Cinerama, and then we almost exclusively went into all those new formats that came out. Yeah. Yeah, you know, they if they were worth making in a fancy format, they were worth making in colour. Technicolour was the only people who could deal with them in the early 50s, you know. So, so they the neg cutters really had a very, very responsible job, and yet that neg Department said, Oh, there. It shouldn't take me four years to become an neg cutter. I ought to better come a neg cutter. In a year, you won't even become an assembler. In a year, if you're an neg breaker down, God said you'll only be rewinding for six months. Anyway, they won't let you touch a piece of negative with a pair of scissors for ages. But doesn't that make the job worthwhile? Doesn't that make the top rate even more enhanced? If it takes you several years to learn the job, if you can learn it in a couple of years, what the job? What's the job worth? No, they couldn't see that. This is a short sightedness, which which the working man really digs his own grave with in many ways, isn't it? It's why we've got no apprentices now, but plenty of HOD carriers. You know,

Alan Lawson  56:16
now, from your point of view, what what are the highlights for you in the in your in your career?

Len Runkel  56:24
Well, I think getting, getting on to getting on to the executive for a start and the and the lab negotiating committee, I felt that was very responsible. To be honest, I could never really see why they should trust somebody like me with a job like that. You know, it seemed to me, it's always seemed to me, I know that you've got to have lay members who are looking on, but ACTT has largely depended on its lay people to do the job, when, on many occasions, really, those jobs should have been done by professionals, and they were too thinly spread. I mean, you know, we only really, we really only had two professionals. You can say perhaps three. But God bless her. Bessie Bond wasn't a Bert Croke or a George Elvin, if I take out three major officers of the early days. Yeah, but

Alan Lawson  57:43
stopping you a second. I mean, if you like, Bert had the advantage over both George and Bessie. He'd worked in the industry, worked in the industry. So I mean, if you like, he was originally a lay member and became professionals

Len Runkel  57:58
Very professional. Wasn't saying that he was very professional. George, of course, was, was

Len Runkel  58:11
such, such a brilliant reader of a situation in short notice that that he was incomparable. I think Bert wouldn't have put himself up against George, but, but Bert was a superbly organised Individual, beautifully organised. He was so professional in the way in which he knew the agreements he knew he'd negotiated, them all from scratch, and he knew what the jobs meant, what all the jobs meant. You know, he was a true professional, but George was the barrister, if you like, the QC, who could look at the brief, ask you three or four questions, and go in there and speak at length, intelligently about it, very intelligently. And you say, Well, you know, where does he get that information? But he's got it from inference. He's asked you the questions he wanted to know the rest of it, he he knew how it ought to be, you know, and he was, he was absolutely brilliant. How he consumed so much booze and remained so sharp. I'll never know. It was fantastic. He'd got hollow legs, hadn't he,

Len Runkel  59:47
anyway, but they were great Bessie. Bessie was very good at organising laboratories because the laboratories were in many ways easy to organise anyway. Okay, their wage rates were set down. They were responsive to industrial action, which both she, when she was laboratory organiser, and the managements, knew that they were responsive to industrial action. If somebody said, Will you? And they said they would say, yes. They were of that mind, you know, but otherwise, all of it was a lay input. And often you got the situation, I think you got it very much at Denham, where they didn't want to involve head office, with the result that at various little laboratories, they'd be signing local agreements, which was cutting everybody else's throat, really, oh yeah. And I think this, this was happening when you got to the situation in the studios where they were negotiating their own rates for a job, they thought they were doing very, very well, but really and truly, if they'd known the complete picture, they they would have been crying at what they just negotiated for themselves, wouldn't they? But this, this was happening in the laboratories. That's why I think it's, you know, it's very necessary to have an organiser who really knows his agreements and the parameters of those agreements. And also, you've got to have the lay people there who remember the spirit of the agreement and say, Ah, wait a minute, we didn't sign that clause on the basis of so and so. You should remember as well as we do that we signed that clause on the basis of such and such, which is an entirely different interpretation.

Alan Lawson  1:01:43
You see, I think the the name put it, I think, is if you like one of the strengths of or it was one of the strengths of ACTT

Len Runkel  1:01:51
yes, yes, oh, don't mistake me. I'm not saying that that isn't so, but I do think that sometimes, if you get some very strong personalities, the professional who knows a little bit more than the layman about the perhaps the legal implications and the implications to other parts of the industry, he can be bullied. That professional can be bullied by the lay man who's got all the voice and all the shop behind him into agreeing to something which really shouldn't have been agreed to. That's why we had to, we had to say, wasn't it that it's got to go to a negotiating committee. It's got to go from the negotiating committee to the executive committee. Then if the executive committee are compared to recommend whatever it is, then we'll take it back to the members, but it will have been to the negotiating committee and the executive first to make sure that we're not doing something which is improper.

Alan Lawson  1:03:02
Can you remember any instances where it, you know, been done the other way around?

Len Runkel  1:03:08
Oh tes yes, certainly at Technicolour, we had the problem of Ray sharp, who was, I think he was really he was put there particularly to cause trouble, quite honestly, because some as soon as, as soon as he couldn't get on the committee any longer he he bought himself a string of businesses and moved out. And he was a progress clerk, actually at Technicolour  but he he manipulated. He manipulated the committee at Technicolour into calling out the neg developers on strike. When really the last thing in the world in either laboratories or their interest, was to go on strike at that moment, and Alfred Cooper  went blue in the face, telling them, now is not the time you know that you don't go on strike when the lab has got no work in it. I mean, I know for a fact that some years ago, Fords used to do that, didn't they? Fords used to fill their car parks and then make some statement to the membership at Dagenham that would be sure to cause all the strike in the world. And they'd go out on strike for a fortnight when the car parks began to empty. Fords would withdraw the statement, and they'd come back to work, and they'd save the fortnight's wages now, which was very clever. Yeah, you know, eventually they saw through it. But it was, it was 10 years, I'll bet, before they saw through it, they got caught every year. Anyway, Technicolour, Technicolour, the the the shop, did exactly the same damn thing. They went out on strike at a time when the old man who was wanting to have a row with RaySsharp, particularly to put his nose out of joint, and the rest of and the rest of the laboratories had run all their work down, there was no overtime. People were standing about that's not the time to go on strike. Alfred Cooper and I were saying we were shouting our heads up, for God's sake. In a couple of months time, we'll be inundated with work. Then is the time to threaten, for God's sake, not when there's nothing here, when they'd be glad of us outside the damn gate, and that that was, that was a manipulation which worked because, because of local autonomy, because they stirred the neg developers into going outside the gate and supported them. Now, if this jumps to a committee had said to the neg developers, hold hard. Don't be damn silly. We'll take this through arbitration. At the moment, I forget it was a merely a change in working practice. I think they wanted some of them to come in on a mid shift. You've got your day shift neg developers who do the dupes and so forth. Then you've got your early night shift and your late night shift. So the negs are coming in from around about seven o'clock on, and there's a continuity of all the hours up till seven o'clock in the morning or eight o'clock in the morning, when the next early shift comes in. And nowadays, of course, they run neg during the day. But at one time, we never ran an neg  during the day. Was only run at night. Anyway, it was, it was really, it was a storm in a teacup, and shouldn't have happened, and it shouldn't have happened at that time. And that was where I say, you know, yes, it does sometimes get out of hand. It had all happened before head office could do anything about it. It didn't matter that Alfred and I were on all the committees in the world shutting our heads off up here, because you'd got this ganging up, if you like, of the extreme left and the extreme right. You've got people like Winifred, Crum Ewing, what were those other two

Alan Lawson  1:07:48
Cave Chin was one? Hascom Hascom Hascom the still man, yes,

Len Runkel  1:07:56
Hascom and on the left, you'd got Ralph Bond, Sid Cole Max Anderson. Max might have been dead by then, but you've got a cohort of left wingers, and you'd find that they were ganging up together. Now, why? Because? probably because you've got a situation where the right wing would do anything to make the unions look bad, and the left wing would do anything to upset the general easy running of any of the units that they were involved with at that time, they were stirring, weren't they, you know, there was, I think, I believe there was a conspiracy, and that, you know, so we were out on our own, out on our own, huh? Absolutely,

Alan Lawson  1:08:54
partly answered the original question. Highlights, yes, but not only of your career, within ACT within your career in the business. Well, or are they really connected with ACTT?

Len Runkel  1:09:16
No, no, they're not really I know. I know that merely in terms of experience and and ability, that in 1953 there was a vacancy in my department for a foreman. I was the convener. And you know that they wouldn't make me up. And didn't do I they made somebody up who was totally unsuitable, both in terms of his abilities and his ability to manage people. And that that cost me, you know, really cost me and my family and. And a couple of quid a week. Then, I suppose, for three or four years before then I became a foreman, because I was only convener for a 12 months, only holding the fort. I think I was too soft for their liking. And then they wanted a production engineer on the transfer machines. Now, you know about the three strip system Anyway, don't you? The transfer machines were the heart of it. Well, the sort of people they'd employed to look after the transfer machines were wet maintenance. What we knew technically was wet maintenance personnel, which are, well, they're engineers, I suppose, but not of too much background. You, if you know what I mean, you wouldn't let them touch your camera. You wouldn't let want them to do too much your car. So the way in which they approached all those film pulleys and all those alignments and all those pressure points and turns that the film had got to go through all the drying cabinet was was very cavalier. There. They just took a pulley off and put one on. They wouldn't check it for alignment. They'd presume it was all right in a hot box that's been getting hot and cold, you know, several times a day for months and years on end, and it's distorted to bugger you could take nothing for chance, really. Anyway, he just the chief engineer. Decided he wanted a production engineer on there who knew something about engineering and film. So I got the job now that my word that was a cross to bear, I'll tell you because, because, of course, the existing Foreman and on there didn't like that one little bit, did they? I've come from the dry side, you know, we'll be sort about for a couple of tents on on the matrix and optical printers. But, you know that it was, it was a hell of a challenge, and that that was a highlight, in terms of the fact that instead of being totally on top of a job that I knew inside out and nobody could tell me anything about, I was suddenly involved in solutions, in dyes, in all the paraphernalia of hot film and wet film, you know, really, although I'd done my own developing as a photographer, you know, for years. But of course, when it boiled down to it, you still say to yourself, well, if you get everything right, it'll run right. So you take a straight edge, and you take a spirit level, and you start to work, and you work your way through those bloody machines until you got them right. You know which, which? That was it. That was the answer, really. But I wouldn't say that. Although I took the job on, I wasn't sure that I was glad I had after a while, I must say, because it's such a filthy business anyway. But then, then I went back to my own department to run it anyway, because the supervisor become ill, he'd had a heart attack, and they didn't like what was going on in there. So he said, the chief engineer said, Well, you've done a great job as far as it's gone. How much more can you do? I said, there isn't any more I can do. He said, Well, good. I could do you with your back on your own department, go and start to straighten them out again. Will you so back to printer schedules and splicer servicing and whatnot, which, which I loved, actually,

Alan Lawson  1:14:16
that was that that particular business is a highlight to you, really? That is a highlight?

Len Runkel  1:14:23
Well yes I mean, it was, it was a total departure from the gentle attitude. I mean, well, you've walked in many camera maintenance shops. That's what dry maintenance was. gentle. Don't want any noise around here. We don't want anybody coming here, making it dirty or waking us up or anything like that. We've got a job to do on it. You know, well, you know exactly what it's like. Whereas you know these great, thundering, bloody developing machines and transfer machines were bloody nightmare is for. Been around now.

Alan Lawson  1:15:06
I mean, now what about the kind of the disappointments you've had? There must have been moments when you were feelings of despair.

Len Runkel  1:15:15
Yes, yes, I suppose the great in from a trade union point of view, the greatest moment of, I don't know what you call it a let down. I suppose that I remember having quite a in the 60s, whereas we'd been, what, 18 years or something, trying to get the 40 hour week in the laboratory. You know, it was a never ending, never ceasing struggle, the 40 hour week with all the reasons why you couldn't possibly have a 40 hour week on three shift working, you know, which is all nonsense, of course. I mean, they're doing a 37 and a half hour week now, they just turn up on time and leave on time, not working overtime, you know. So it works perfectly well, but there were all reasons in the world why we shouldn't have a 40 hour week, and eventually we got it this. This was absolutely tremendous, you know. And I go to the next Annual Conference thinking, My God, you know, we've really probably achieved the ultimate. And somebody stands up and says, When are we going to have the 35 hour week? I thought, I thought, Oh, my God, no, we've been trying to get rid of four hours all this time. Now he wants to get rid of five, and he wants it immediately, that that, that really, that it might have been the straw that broke the camel's back, I don't know, but that did really set me back, just that despair. Well, almost you think, Oh, well, I really don't think I can face that again. It was so frustrating this this hours of work business. You know, it's so frustrating now that that was one of the worst things. And of course, of recent years, when I haven't been involved this, last 10 years, have been traumatic. The double standards which exist in Parliament and in the country about trade unionism. You know, the the journalists who all hold their ticket, their NUJ ticket, and wouldn't dream are going to work without it, because they'd be kicked out on their backsides, are all talking about what a nasty thing a closed shop is, you know, and what nasty people trade unionists are. I could kick them. There's the barristers who take the trade unions to court about their closed shop, and they have got the strongest closed shop. There is by far the strongest. At long last, I see that even even Lord Hailsham has been committed to saying over this business with the solicitors and barristers sharing their briefs and so forth. This is all due to metal, meddlesome Maggie, and Hailsham has been a gate supporter over but I think that's why things are going wrong now, because the the three big establishments, the doctors, the dentists, the solicitor for solicitors and barristers, are being interfered with, and I think they're too entrenched, even for bloody Maggie to get at them. I think they'll have her. Yes, it's happening, isn't it? Really, you can see it.

Alan Lawson  1:19:05
Lets hopefrom the point of view of satisfaction, what's been your greatest satisfaction?

Len Runkel  1:19:15
I think on several occasions, we signed agreements and and we got them, got them through to the members, and the members accepted them. And that has always been a great satisfaction to me, is that you could go to the whole of the membership. They don't do it now, of course, they do  it shop by shop, but we would have a mass meeting, and you'd explain to them what the new agreement was and why you thought it was acceptable, although I remember coming badly unstuck on one of those, yes, I probably told you about that, didn't I the the. It. That was the the time that the managements wanted to get rid of that part of the the National Health increment, when they were paying sickness benefit, they wanted to deduct it, which they succeeded in doing now, they wanted to deduct it, and the committee decided it was they should be allowed to deduct it, and the and the executive and the general council and the membership, I'm glad to say now, chuck that out. And there was another one which was more important, was the cost of living

Alan Lawson  1:20:40
Oh, yes, to incorporate it. Yeah, I wanted

Len Runkel  1:20:42
to incorporate it and and stop it, you know, and the membership wouldn't have it. I thought badly about it, really, because I It wasn't something that I could argue properly. And George put me up to sell this, and I couldn't sell it, and I knew I couldn't sell it. I wasn't doing a job. I couldn't do a job. I didn't believe in it. You need. You need to believe in it. Yes, yes.

Alan Lawson  1:21:13
Looking, looking, looking back, overall, you know, everything you've been through, if you could start again, would you want to change course? Do you think, oh,

Len Runkel  1:21:28
personal life as well, well,

Alan Lawson  1:21:30
well, professionally,

Len Runkel  1:21:35
I could have stayed in the army. This I remember the CO coming to me when I was about due for release, and saying, How would you like a seven and five, seven regular and finals said, when, when Tommy goes have his majority and see those houses in about 300 we were in Germany, about 300 no 800 yards on the other side of the barracks square, nice, long way away were all these beautiful detached houses. Bring your wife and child out and pick any one of those five. They're not taken. Oh, dear, dear, dear, because I was earning 24 pounds a week. I mean, that was a fortune. Yes, yes. Now I came out six quid a week, 24 pounds a week. Yeah, living like a gentleman, and that that would have been free, and the wife of kid would have been beautiful, but there you are. I was worried about the geddy bank?, the fact that I was now grade C. That uncle. And was saying, when you come out, when you don't sign on, don't take a DV, come out, you know, so I came out. So to some extent I regret that.

Alan Lawson  1:23:19
Would the army life have suited you to think,

Len Runkel  1:23:22
well, what's not to suit about living in an officer's mess? I must say that I don't like the didn't like the fact that, in peacetime, they were bringing their wives and girlfriends into the mess all the time, so it didn't seem so much like home. But if you had a beautiful house and servants and your own horse and groom, you know you'd be hard put, wouldn't you not to, not to enjoy that really and nice office to work in plenty of clerical staff doing all the work anyway, I used to take a ride into into a Bad enhausen? once or twice a week, check with the RTO see that the list coincided with the people that were coming and bring the troops that have been were going to be posted back to the holding unit, you know, I'm getting a staff, captains pay, and I was going to get them a majors, a majority and staff majority pay.

Alan Lawson  1:24:31
Would you? Would you have had much in common with the people?

Len Runkel  1:24:34
Oh, yeah, I got on fine with them. Yeah, we were all tank men. Had been through the war, you know? Yeah, we you learn how to live that sort of life, don't you? Oh yeah, I could manage it well enough I say I didn't like too much the freedom of the mess for the wives and girlfriends, because you should be allowed. to have a drink and swear over a game of cards if you want to in the mess, I think even if you have got a swear box. But that was one thing I regret. I sometimes regret the fact that in about 1954 or five, something like that, Morton Lewis said to me, Len, I would like you to come and work for me. I said, I'm an engineer. Morton, what do you want with an engineer? He said, I don't want an engineer. I want you to come and work for me. And I did. I said, No, I think I regret that, because I think I would have been quite happy on the production side and quite capable of dealing with the with what he was doing then, which was, you know, he wanted somebody to negotiate contracts and things like that, which wasn't too great a problem, as far as I could see. But there again, I said, No, didn't I got three young children by then, and I was living fairly close to where I worked, and I got it too damn easy. I think, I think, really, that was what it was about, that perhaps, perhaps a little hangover from the 30s, you know, and the father who was in and out of work for a while in the 30s, and the belief that you, you know, a steady job was something, once you've got it, you wanted to keep it.

Alan Lawson  1:26:32
Yes, I understand that. I had this feeling, yeah,

Len Runkel  1:26:36
yes, yeah, yes. It's probably a problem of our generation to something,

Alan Lawson  1:26:42
it's something that's in inbred, yes, yes.

Len Runkel  1:26:47
What? Times were hard in the 30s, when we were kids, you see, and we couldn't help but listen to what our parents have got to say about it, I guess, you know, so so that that was part of the problem. Yeah, but right, I doubt, I doubt whether I made as much of my assets that I could have done but, but eventually I became the supervisor, anyway, of the maintenance engineering department. Anyway, I couldn't do any better than that, or want to do any better than that. I suppose you know, I was completely autonomous. There was nobody could tell me what to do or how to do it.

Alan Lawson  1:27:28
Well, that's, that's worth something. Yeah, that is worth something.

Len Runkel  1:27:35
I even get phone calls now from, perhaps it might be from my second son who says, they've got a problem. What did we What did you used to do about it? Or from one of the chaps in the department say, how did we do so? And so, you know, because there are areas now which are becoming lost, perforating that's becoming lost. You see, if you walk outside of the manufacturers, there's no perforating. Now, we used to perforate all our own stuff technically to half the tolerances at Kodak, yes, because we needed, needed that for register. And so you, you did learn a very great deal about film, which, which people later on wouldn't learn. I mean, the sizes of a piece of film are indelibly imprinted on my memory, because we used to read them out hour after hour on the tool maker's microscope when you were on that duty of looking after the perforators. You know,

Alan Lawson  1:28:40
because this is, this is one of the things that, you know, I've, I've, you like, learned I was, you know, quite a few of the interviews I've been involved in is the the technical excellence of Technicolour. Oh, yeah, I never realized this before there was always

Len Runkel  1:29:03
we had fantastic standards and an enormous pride in those standards. You know, I mean, movement on the screen had got to be stopped. You'd got to find out exactly where it was coming from and why, and make sure, not only make sure you stopped it now, but but make sure that your servicing prevented it from happening. Who hasn't done what they should have done, and what can we do to make sure that it doesn't happen again? Our sound quality when we were doing three strip, obviously, we worked on black and white ordinary POS release and we put the track on before we put the colour on. Now, those track printers, which were built at Technicolour, were of a fantastically high quality. They were a Model D Bell. Howell Basically, although they were built there single sprocket, no, sorry, double sprocket, one large tooth a month, small tooth, and they were serviced three times a week. They were serviced on a Tuesday and a Thursday at night while they had their meal breaks on Sunday, all day a thorough service, and that included threading the film up, checking the tensions, and something which I instituted later on, which, if you got the right pieces of film, you could do, which was a marvelous check for cross mod, which was to use interference fringing Newton's rings. Oh, yes, you put a piece of negative up cell side emulsion.to right , yes. Then you put a piece of clear, absolutely clear, clean leader up, cell to cell, tension  it properly. Turn all the room lights out, and take a torch and shine it at an angle with the gate over the roller back and turn it over, and you can see the interference fringing running backwards and forwards Newton's rings. Now you don't print those, because normally your emulsion to emulsion , yes, but here you are cell to cell, and as you see this interference fringing, you can you can press a roller here and there, or bias it to make it dead even across the whole of the frame of a maximum width. And if you achieve that, your cross mod goes into plus instead of, instead of you working at minus one minus a half, you can go to plus a half. You know, marvelous, standard, fantastic, beautiful.

Alan Lawson  1:32:01
I'm going to stop here again.

Alan Lawson  1:32:02
Len Ronkel  side six

Len Runkel  1:32:17
now you asked me if I had any really big disappointments. Well, when Technicolour had their their big reduction, 1978 we went from three strip to colour pos, and we put in, we put in a Technicolour designed color pos machine designed to do 330 feet a minute, release. And the tool room was sacked. About half a maintenance department was sacked. But they retained the tool room supervisor, who then took over wet and dry maintenance, which were amalgamated, and I became his assistant. That was a disappointment to me, because he knew nothing about maintenance. He was a nice bloke, and he was a good engineer, but he was a workshop engineer, pure and simple, you know, give him a drawing, make anything, but he didn't know anything about the machinery, which he admitted. Mean when during the late 50s and early 60s, when Technicolour were building lots of optical printers at Technicolour, they used to build the printer in the tool room, install it in the printing room, and then we had it the maintenance department, dry maintenance department had it, took it to pieces and rebuilt it so that it would run film, because it wouldn't run film, you know, not absolutely scratch free, jump free, with all the correct seatings. High, High Definition overall, and and so forth. There were lots of little tricks of the trade that you can't put in a draw on a drawing. You know how to do it, but see, you only learn by experience, I suppose, don't you? And and he admitted that, that that was a fact, that he didn't know anything about maintenance, but we weren't manufacturing any longer, so here I am running both bloody departments, and he's sitting there in his office drawing the money. And I didn't mind that either, really, but what, what did upset me was when I. When the chief engineer came in one day and said, Oh, that. And I, I and was actually involved in the building of the first wet rotary printer. And I am one chap was building it, and I was telling him exactly what I wanted, you know. And I hadn't seen the governor. He didn't know what was going on anyway. And then the chief engineer went into a meeting one day, and we had this meeting, the chief engineer said to me, Bernard was away for how's that machine that Bernard's building getting on? I said, which machine that Bernard's building? Well, he said, that wack printer as I thought I was building the bloody thing. Well, you know what I mean? I said, No, I don't really know what you mean, that that is annoying, you know, because I never believed in doing that with my chaps. If somebody said, if the chief engineer or the plant manager said, how such and such a machine going getting on, I'd say, oh, what? Jack is just putting it back together again. He sorted out the problem for you now, and you'll be back in business so and so. Or John is doing so and so to it not I am, just because I'm running the damn department that I dislike that intensely. You get the reflective glory anyway, if your machine's running well, if the plants running, well, don't you? Well, you don't need to take it all. And there's this bloke sitting at his desk at the machine I've, I've nearly finished that machine, you know, whoa, that that I didn't like that.

Len Runkel  1:36:52
But eventually, of course, he retired, and I got the job anyway. So didn't make any difference, did it?

Alan Lawson  1:36:56
What? What would you like to be remembered for as far as ACTT is concerned.

Len Runkel  1:37:06
I thought about this the other day and I remembered something that I did think was was really worthwhile, and now I can't damn well remember what it was.

Len Runkel  1:37:21
I don't I remember one highlight at an annual conference during Ted Heath's reign, which would be about 1973 wouldn't it something like that? Yeah, when the house prices were going out of the sky. And as a minor personal triumph, the General Council deputed me to move a resolution which was really purely a political resolution about house prices, property prices and the way in which the Tory government jacked up the cost of living, and generally were making a bog of it, you know. And I went to the the LRD labour Research Department, and I told them the information I wanted, and they got it for me, and I remember making the speech which was going to be kicked out, except that the speech made the difference between it Being accepted as a general counsci resolution to to demand a change in the government's way of doing this or that, I forget, even forget what it was about now that I was pleased about that because I was heckled a couple of times by Winifred Crum Ewing and and the spur of The moment, I can't really remember the conditions, she said, But the government, she said, But the government have did that on such and such a date. And I said, yeah, now it's such and such a date, and it's still not implemented, and it shut her  up a treat, and I can remember that as being a highlight of an occasion when I'd got all the facts and I'd got something I could get my teeth into it, and I thoroughly enjoyed moving that resolution and getting it overwhelming, overwhelmingly.

Alan Lawson  1:39:32
What I was thinking that was something, yes, what I was thinking is, you know, what is there any particular thing you'd like to be remembered, you know, by by the members of ACTT well,

Len Runkel  1:39:45
one thing, perhaps, I suppose, which is when I did think that, over the years, that the engineers weren't very well treated in the laboratories. And. I'm talking about the people who come in just to scrub, pulleys  and change. I was talking about the people they employ. Employ them as tool makers, spend several years training them how to become film men, and then they are still round about bottom of the heap. You know, if you compare them to a printer who couldn't run without their services, or a projection that wouldn't run without them, and they're the splicers so underrated, really, a foot splicer is one of the most delicate and complicated machines to set up there is set up to really good standards. I felt that they were very being very badly dealt with over the years. And I never did really argue my own case very well, I must say. So. The case for engineers, I thought, was going by default, and I was the only one on the executive and General Council and and on the negotiating committee that was one, and ought to know, you know what I was talking about. And eventually I got George, after a long talk to him about the fact, I said, Look, you know, you can take a laboratory technician, here he is a bus driver who's got fed up with driving busses, so he comes into the laboratory to become a laboratory technician, and in 12 months, he's getting the rate  for the job. You get an engineer who's going to going to work on the printers and so forth. He's done his five years. He's interviewed, and he makes sure that he is capable of doing all the things that a reasonable tool maker ought to be able to do. And then you spend two or three years making him a film man, and then you pay him less than that bloke was driving a bus 12 months ago. I said, I don't believe that's right. No, all right, I take your point. I said, Well, if you do, you're the only bugger who does, because I'm not getting anywhere with the rest of them. So he said, Well, if you want to do something more for the engineers, you're going to have to start from grassroots and make a noise about it everywhere. I said, Well, I have been well, he said, start again. So I started again. And this is around about the mid 50s, and I'm going on and on about engineers at the lab committee meetings, at our local committee meetings, executive whenever I get the chance, General Council, I'm talking myself into the ground about this. And eventually, eventually they agreed that there was a case. Well, Sidney Cole , I think actually was one of those who said, that is a good argument, you know, and it ought to be considered while you're negotiating an agreement so but George said, Well to me personally, what? What the hell do we do to get them a better rate? I said, Well, what you must do is to make them recognise that they are employing one set of engineers who are a bit special to the industry. They've taken them as skilled and they've trained them to work on their expensive machinery, their most expensive machinery, dealing with their most expensive product, their negatives said, give them a name. Well, what we're going to call them? I said, Well, why don't you call them cinematograph engineers, which was what uncle called cinematograph engineer? Yeah, that's great. So we had cinematograph engineers and super cinematograph engineers, and I put that down to me personally. Yes,

Alan Lawson  1:44:02
I'm glad I

Len Runkel  1:44:02
remembered it. Now,

Alan Lawson  1:44:06
was there anything else you wanted to say?

Len Runkel  1:44:12
I don't think so. On a personal level, at the time when we had all those people chucked out and and this chap took over the running of the department, and after, after a little while, I I recognised that really there wasn't, it wasn't feasible for me to be doing his job when really and truly we hadn't got enough people doing the job that required to be done. So I put it to him that we were actually in a position of having to we were buying six wet heads from Germany for rotary. Colour printers for the Model C Bell Howell, I put it to him that that I could build those six machines because I couldn't really see why I should go on doing his job and that I would quite enjoy to do anyway. So as the heads came over, I pulled out a Model C and rebuilt it and put the wet heads on and commissioned them and put them in. And I did that for about, I think about it took me about 18 months. I think those six had some trouble with them, because one machine I converted was, in fact, a Quadrant  Super Eight Model C printer, and I converted that to 16 mil. So I had to actually make the sound head. Had to make the sound aperture and, and having bought a sprocket, make it fit, and make the screens for the internals and and all the the lamp and and the filter system that that was quite a job. It was hours of turning, which I hadn't done for years, which I'm thoroughly enjoyed, actually. So I the all the wet printers that Technicolour use now I built, personally

Alan Lawson  1:46:41
on turning. I've always, you know, always fascinated with, you know, watching, watching engineers doing, turning is wonderful. It's wonderful. You know, something up here. Yes, magic.

Len Runkel  1:46:54
It's satisfying, isn't it? But, but sometimes very worrying. You see, I can remember on that, on that particular head, I wanted a disc which had got to be six, one foot in diameter, was About, I think about five, eight in width and 15 thou  thick, because the light was spilling. And the only way I could do it was to take the aperture, take a hole back in it, turn it back and drop this disc in to fill all the apertures up, because you got to, you've got, I've got the three apertures on it, the head, tail and full aperture on the sound head as well, you know. And that, that I made out of ground stock. And that was, was a difficult job to turn because the tool had to be so sharp all the time, otherwise it was going to rip it up. You know, 15 thou  thick ground stock is terrible stuff anyway, you know, it's it's gritty. It's like turning sand. But that came out very well. There were lots of little jobs like that that I found towards the end of my working life, really, you know?

Alan Lawson  1:48:25
So you really went back to being a proper went back to being a proper engineer.

Len Runkel  1:48:29
Yes, that's right, I went back to be a proper engineer. I really thoroughly enjoyed it, because soon as he was on holiday, I was in the bloody chair, wasn't I? As soon as anything went wrong, I was in the chair, continuously putting it down mine but, but I was gainfully occupied, and I could now and again say, No, I'm a little bit too busy. Somebody else will have to go and look at that bloody machine or do something we had. We had another machine that came over that cost me a lot of heart aches I know was

Len Runkel  1:49:08
a double rank 16 mill print Peterson, it was a long, what they call a Panel printer,

Len Runkel  1:49:20
prints forward and reverse, yeah, the other ones. I mean, do, no, not really. I can. I visually. You can run it in both directions, yes. Now, if you, if you run a rotary printer in both directions, you've got have tensions on opposite sides for the sprocket teeth to pull at, you know, and this machine was bought from Hollywood. And it was a disaster, absolute disaster. It just wouldn't print film. You saw it on the screen, and it was, you know, it was hopeless, hopeless. And their chief engineer came over, Mike, I can't remember, now He was. He was one generation, second generation German, American. He was. And he said, You know, I'm working on this damn machine. He said, Hey, you got that? I said, Yeah, you sold it to us, didn't you? Yeah, yeah. He said, We were glad to get rid of it. Bloody doubt you were. He said, In fact, he said, we had it built by Petersons, and we put it in the cupboard. It cost us too much money. Yeah, they sold it to us, and we got to make the bloody thing work, because it because it was an overlay. It had an overlay facility on the, on the on the picture head, and that worked on a rack arrangement so that when you turned a handle, you put the tensions on all the little rollers one side of the sprocket and took it off on the others. You turned it the other way, and it did the opposite, so that you could run from left to right or right to left. You see heads or tails. All you have to do is change the aperture and press the button. In theory, that machine was a disaster. First of all, I put a new Bell Howell sprocket in the picture head that got rid of a foot jump we had on it regularly. I put a clock on that. Thought, God, it's coming from. The sprocket was a perfectly good Peterson sprocket. That's how they'd made it, and we bought it, you know, anyway, that got rid of that, but it was still shaking and jumping all over the place. So this this rack over business, I increased all the linkages by a quarter of an inch throughout all this mechanical rack so that it went farther than it did before that was a nightmare, because you had to take parts of the front of the printer and get your head inside to get things off, because you couldn't get at it from the back. There were too much electronics and the motors and belts. Oh dear. Anyway, eventually I got the damn thing running steady, and about every six months it used to go again because the operator would thread it up tightly, press his take up buttons to take his slack up instead of taking the slack up first. So it would snatch and move all the settings the film snatched and pulled all the rolls down, bent them, moved all the settings you got to start again, you know, from scratch. And after I retired, the chap who  took over from me. They told me, my son told me so that damn machines out again, you know? I said, Well, if you know, if you take it for 48 hours and do what you've got to do, which is start from scratch, all the straight edges, clocks, everything get down then and stay with it, and go right through it and get everything perfect, it'll be all right. Oh, well. He said. Jim Harris, the chap who  took over from me, who decided a bit of a big head, poor bugger he was. And he decided, oh yeah, he'd do that himself, because Len Runkel had always done it, and he had a heart attack and died before. And they were on the point of asking me if I'd go back and do it. They were on the point I don't know whether I would have refused or not. That annoyed me, in as much as I always made a point of saying, information is no good if you keep it to yourself, that's right. If I'm going to do a particular job that I think only I can do, because I know how to do it, I've got to take somebody with me and say, This is what you do. When this happens, you know, start from here. Don't do all of that, because that's going to waste half a day. Start from there, because that's where the trouble be. Because, you know, and I'd done all this, and none of them would step forward and say, I know what that wants. They let that poor bugger kill himself, really, and he was too much of a damn fool not to have sat back and said, who worked on that machine with Len last time it was him, you go and sort it. Oh, dear. Still, it's been an interesting, entertaining life. I wouldn't have missed the film business for the world. I love it. I wouldn't have wanted to be an engineer doing anything else except for machinery. No way good. There's something special about film machinery, of course, it doesn't do as it's told. It. You've got to give film the upper hand every now and again. If it doesn't want to go around around that corner, you've got to say, Well, how do you want to get around that corner and put your roller into suit? Not put it in because your height gauge and your clock says it should be there, but because the film wants it there. Well, you've got to do that sometimes, you know, you Right, yeah, great. Now I've enjoyed this too, really, recollections. Alan, yes, and I say I can recollect a time when I was not feeling particularly well standing at that damn great big lathe in the corner. My hand soft from two years in an officer's mess out of a tank turning. Do you remember that big old lathe in the corner? It used to have pop Runkel  would insist on having an undoctered tomcat who felt that the swarf under the lathe was the proper place for him to do it all.

Alan Lawson  1:56:05
Yes, it did smell. Yes, oh god, yeah.

Len Runkel  1:56:09
And it had never been cleared out all the war Leslie and I cleared underneath all the benches and all that, sacked up all the swarf and put it out for the damned  cat. Can't shit there now, can it so it went down into the coal, so that when we lit that, remember that damn Canadian stove, when we lit that boiler that did it for us? Oh, dear, but I do remember standing there, and I might still even have been wearing out a uniform when you came in. About tripod on the BBC, about tripods , yes, yes.

Alan Lawson  1:56:55
Very nice. Tripods. Anyway,

Len Runkel  1:56:57
they were good. I wish I'd had one now, I wonder if there are any about haven't

Alan Lawson  1:57:04
seen him. Haven't seen him.

Len Runkel  1:57:07
I saw a piece of documentary film about newsreels, I think, a few weeks ago, and I thought that was a Runkel  tripod. But I don't know that they'd be customers for some of the stuff we used to make those. Those focus. It rack over focusing things. Do you remember

Alan Lawson  1:57:30
throw over us? Yes. Is there a use for those? No, no. Not anymore. No. You see, you've got, you've got areas now and you're looking straight through. I

Len Runkel  1:57:38
loved that. That was a lovely job making those. So I remember taking you had a Mitchell I think it was a BBC Mitchell camera, which was sound, sound as well. Yes,

Alan Lawson  1:58:02
it was, I think there was a Vinten. Was it a Vint? It was a Vinton? Yes, it was the original. It was the original one. Put him by the It had

Len Runkel  1:58:09
also a fader on it, a lever at the back. Well, that was a Mitchell. Yeah, that was a Mitchell. I can remember removing the second shutter and blocking off where that fader again? I think that was BBC. I'm not sure I remember having to make quite a large boss to go over the the end of the of the shutter  mounting. Yeah, and I remember that that that new Mitchell that came out just after the war with the spring loaded gate to which, which everybody cried about. Only saw one. We had one. We didn't

Alan Lawson  1:58:50
have it. We didn't have one. We had, I think we had that. We

Len Runkel  1:58:54
had the gates were

Alan Lawson  1:58:56
like the old Bell, Howell ? Clapping in the way, yeah,

Alf Cooer  1:58:59
but, but it was, was

Alf Cooer  1:59:01
a peculiar

Len Runkel  1:59:02
arrangement. It scratched everything that looked at it.

Alan Lawson  1:59:06
Well, I'm not surprised. No, the the Mitchell we had, I think, was one of the original Ealing Mitchells then, oh, we finished up with anyway, that wasn't the moment. You there waiting.

Len Runkel  1:59:26
Did I? Did I remove the, did I remove the, the the sound portion of one of those?

Alan Lawson  1:59:34
I don't know. I can't, honestly, I don't remember. I know that we I know we had a Vinton with a glow tube, which was the original Vinton we had on the intermediate film process, which was 17.5 but remade to be 35 mil.

Alan Lawson  1:59:54
And then later we did have a Mitchell. Then later we had an Everett

Len Runkel  2:00:02
yeah, I had two Everett at technical. Is that running? Yes, yes, yes, we had two. Everett's there. Do you remember when Technicolour  I had a caravan printer? No, well they they decided it was when the lazy eight Yeah, but on location, it was much too much of a problem to get the stuff back to Technicolour  process print and out again, so we would use local labs. So we built two caravan printers, and they had a lazy eight movement, negative movement, yes. And the positive head was an Everest the camera was an Everest camera. Stop motion, no, fade and dissolve. That's it. I think, just a stop motion. Oh, it did have edge numbering. Yes. You had to have this edge number because going lazy eight, yes to single frame, yes, yes, you've got problems. So we had this optical edge numbering, yes, set up that went right in and actually shown on the on the sprocket in the in the camera. When they went out on location, the chap went with them to print. So the negative went into the labor local laboratory. Came out to him. He printed the rushes down to ordinary 35 that went to the laboratory and that they saw that and struck the set or or re shot, whatever. But that was on the spot. I suppose that that must have saved him a lot of time. Yes, oh yeah, rushes, you know, I know he went out to Italy, Spain,

Len Runkel  2:02:04
I think, Greece as well. They went all over the shop with these damn things.

Len Runkel  2:02:10
He had a Land Rover to tow it, yes, yeah, Land Rover caravan, and he was not supposed to sleep in the caravan. He was supposed to sleep in a local hotel, I think, or boarding house, or what have you. But I think they all slept in there, drew their money and slept with the printer. It had air conditioning as well. Had an air conditioning unit and a large land rover to pull it. And I can remember they used to have to take it out before every job, they used to have to take out the Land Rover and the caravan and all the glassware and all the equipment so forth to the nearest weigh  bridge, yeah, get the certificate and come back with it. And that was before every job. And then when it came back, we had to completely service the damn thing, although he serviced the movement. But it was a lazy eight of the Sapphire rolls that guided the film crossways movement, of course, that came down looped up, large ungainly loop out, up and around again to another large, ungainly loop when they got flapping about that, this damn great aperture, double frame aperture, interesting. There lazy eight, yeah, I could find two heads at Technicolour  I lazy eight. Now, if, if needed, yes, both horizontal and vertical. They're up in, up in the store, in the loft, as I used to call it, which is a penthouse store badly stored up there some very interesting, interesting things, must say, the the first break we had in was the Olympic Games in 1948 Yes, when Kodak and Technicolour

Alan Lawson  2:04:12
use monopack, yes the first time, yes, yeah, yeah,

Len Runkel  2:04:15
they used Eastman color, and it was kept off the market for another seven years. Was it on? That? Was it? Yeah, so for tech for Kodak to have kept that off the market, think about it. How much was Technicoloor paying for their matrix and release stock to make it worthwhile for Kodak not to be marketing that to the other laboratories, because it was there. It was a simple process, because we turned an ordinary black and white Duke developer into a mono pack developer, Colour Developer for the for this Olympic Games,

Alan Lawson  2:04:58
the economics of. the film  business fascinating  

Len Runkel  2:05:01
Oh yes, they are. They are. Well, don't you remember, you're talking about the economics. It was you who said to uncle that you're the reason you're not selling your tripod is because they're too cheap. Was it me? Yeah, yeah.

Len Runkel  2:05:21
After you'd bought all you wanted.

Alan Lawson  2:05:26
Oh, probably,

Len Runkel  2:05:30
but that, that is a fact, of course, I think, I think our original price was 35 quid for long and short legs, a head and a top hat, wasn't

Alan Lawson  2:05:38
it? I know you, you know, I know it was three. I know you've got the long legs, the short legs and the top hat, yeah, I

Len Runkel  2:05:45
think it was 35 quid. Didn't sell them. Only sold them to you, you know, until we put them up to 70, yeah, then we sold all we could make. That is a that's a fact, yeah, was the same with the oh one job a studio shutter. You probably weren't involved. I think we made them for Rank. I think we made them for Pinewood. They were about about nine inches square. They're three vinyl shutter blades inside these two pressed mild steel, and it operated with a little air Yes, pusher, and you could operate and put a pin in which held them open, yes, or you could open it and let go studio shutter. I don't know we costed the job. I think that was including the press deal, the vinyls, the hours to make them all costed about 15 quid a time. I think, I think the contract was for 35 pounds each. Yes, so you know, if you pick the right ones, it was a license to print money really.

Alan Lawson  2:07:00
Well, it's only a small amount.

Len Runkel  2:07:03
Yes, we only made about 20. But he didn't want to market them, you know, he couldn't be bothered.

Len Runkel  2:07:13
They were, they were easy. Still, it was, it was, it was lovely. Well, but it was a filthy hole up there, really wasn't it? Yes, terrible, yes.

Alan Lawson  2:07:30
Remind me where Endell Street,

Len Runkel  2:07:33
New Cavendish Street, it is, oh, yes, where the post office tower is now? New Cavendish Street. Yeah, you walk up past the BBC in Regent Street turned right and straight down new Cavendish Street, and just where new Cavendish street ended and another street started, and I can't remember its name now that that was, you went past goodge street, yeah. And there it was on the left. We had the basement and the first, well, there wasn't a second floor, ground floor,

Len Runkel  2:08:10
and I don't know what, what happened to it all. Jim. Jim. Jim went to left the studios, got a contract to build a television. A colour , I don't know a black and white television

Len Runkel  2:08:41
set up because recording setup of some sort. Tele recording, yeah. And then my cousin's husband, Harry Lock, who was a stage manager at BBC, was presentation bloke at BBC, Ali Pally  He left there and went to

Alan Lawson  2:09:08
Rediffusion, yes, yes. And

Len Runkel  2:09:15
he said, they're, they're looking, looking for a television engineer at Redeffusion, and I rang up Jim and said, they're looking for bloke like you. I think James at Red effusion, you interested.

Len Runkel  2:09:30
He said, Who will I get in touch with? And it was, dear. I forget his name now. Anyway, he got the job because I know a couple of years later,

Len Runkel  2:09:44
he had an enormous office at King in Kingsway, and I went up to see him, and he had a secretary in an office outside, and another secretary inside. I said, you know, what do you do for a living? Actually, he said, I buy the film stock. But before that, he was actually recording. He was fed up to the teeth with it. He packed it in. It was a great job. You know, I think it was enormous money, but he didn't like it, so he stopped doing it. Yes, mad. We've all done things, I suppose we are sorry for, yes. Well, thank you, Alan. I can't think of any more to say, unless you can think

Alan Lawson  2:10:37
of anything else to ask me. No, I think that's fine. We've I think we've covered it all out. I think so if you have second thoughts, will you always come back again? Have a third go?

Len Runkel  2:10:48
No, I know. I say I've got two sons still at Technicolour. You know, Len, my oldest is a control supervisor, and my second son, Lionel is one of the print managers. They're doing all right, Lionel. Lionel took his city and  guilds and color photography, and I got him a job at technical and now he's one of the governor for me, I'd have to be standing to attention now.

Alan Lawson  2:11:21
Anyway, then, thank you very much. Lovely. Thank.................................................................