Len Runkel

Forename/s: 
Len
Family name: 
Runkel
Work area/craft/role: 
Company: 
Industry: 
Interview Number: 
61
Interview Date(s): 
9 Nov 1988
13 Sep 1989
Interviewer/s: 
Production Media: 
Duration (mins): 
150

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Interview
Interview notes

The 9 Nov 1988 interview was conducted by Alf Cooper and Alan Lawson (sides 1-3), and Alan Lawson on 13 Sep 1989 (sides 4-6).

Transcript

NOTE. At the end of this transcript is an earlier shortened version highlighting the main points

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It provides a basic, but unverified or proofread transcript of the interview. Therefore, the British Entertainment History Project (BEHP) accepts no liability for any misinterpretation of the content of this interview.

However, the BEHP wants to make every effort to improve the quality of these transcripts and would welcome any voluntary offers to proofread this and/or other interviews. If you want to help, please contact BEHP Secretary,  sue.malden@btinternet.com

Unknown Speaker  0:03  
The copyright of this recording is vested in the ACTT History Project

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Len runs laboratory technician of Technicolor et al,

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interviewed by ALF Cooper

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on the ninth of November, 1988

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side one.

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Len, first of all, where and when were you born? I was born in Wood Green in on the 29th of May 1922

Unknown Speaker  0:42  
now what kind of schooling?

Unknown Speaker  0:44  
Oh, I,

Unknown Speaker  0:47  
I went to

Unknown Speaker  0:49  
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

Unknown Speaker  1:02  
Ernie

Unknown Speaker  1:04  
pop uncle, that's your uncle, yes, my father's eldest brother. Yeah. He said, Well, you know,

Unknown Speaker  1:13  
why doesn't he come in with me? Now, I can't quite remember now where his workshop was.

Unknown Speaker  1:21  
I can't, I can't place myself before the war,

Unknown Speaker  1:26  
if you know what I mean.

Unknown Speaker  1:29  
But anyway, I was apprenticed to be a camera mechanic without any indentures. Of course, family business. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker  1:39  
it was very good because

Unknown Speaker  1:43  
I really, from a point of view of education, I didn't need a matriculation to become a camera mechanic. Well, it stood you in good stead. Later, oh, in very good stead. Later, yes,

Unknown Speaker  1:56  
but it

Unknown Speaker  1:57  
was very interesting, very interesting because

Unknown Speaker  2:03  
the old man, pop was very old fashioned. Of course, he'd done his apprenticeship round about the early 1900s

Unknown Speaker  2:12  
Do you know who he did it with?

Unknown Speaker  2:14  
I believe it could have been Edwards

Unknown Speaker  2:19  
in the East End of London,

Unknown Speaker  2:24  
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 AU. Even when he was working for himself, he still paid his dues. Was before the AU. Of course, he was a member of

Unknown Speaker  2:42  
the tool makers union, or whatever they were called, called, you know, and he was in that before the 1418, war. I think, going back to Edwards, weren't they the lathe people? They made, they made tool tools, yes. Lathes, mills,

Unknown Speaker  3:03  
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.

Unknown Speaker  3:19  
He talked of his early days, and I suppose that was it was before the 1418, war that he met Arthur Kingston and lines,

Unknown Speaker  3:30  
and

Unknown Speaker  3:32  
he worked for some time with for Vinton, I think, and Newman Sinclair. But

Unknown Speaker  3:41  
I recognize now, when I moved away from from him, that that

Unknown Speaker  3:49  
most camera mechanics were stuck in a time mold. 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

Unknown Speaker  4:08  
that nobody else would dream of doing, like hand cutting threads, you know, on a chaser. You're the piece of broomstick and and

Unknown Speaker  4:18  
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.

Unknown Speaker  4:31  
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,

Unknown Speaker  4:42  
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,

Unknown Speaker  4:52  
I think perhaps I ought to tell you about my father. See, my father was a clerk of the chapel in Fleet Street

Unknown Speaker  4:59  
in.

Unknown Speaker  5:00  
Immediately after the first war.

Unknown Speaker  5:03  
Now, his father was a German, so he joined up.

Unknown Speaker  5:08  
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 U lands.

Unknown Speaker  5:35  
His he was a baron

Unknown Speaker  5:37  
in his own right. His father was a, some sort of a minor prince, and there's a place called Run call on the lawn, and

Unknown Speaker  5:47  
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.

Unknown Speaker  6:09  
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.

Unknown Speaker  6:26  
Well, the old man, of course, brought up in these conditions was was having

Unknown Speaker  6:32  
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

Unknown Speaker  6:44  
and and he went back to his job, which was a wholesale news agents, which was Howard Marshalls,

Unknown Speaker  6:51  
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.

Unknown Speaker  6:59  
And he they used to tell the great doings there was,

Unknown Speaker  7:04  
there were black legs getting in, trying to get the papers out. And they had the

Unknown Speaker  7:10  
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 car team 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.

Unknown Speaker  7:42  
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.

Unknown Speaker  7:49  
But he was equally very upset with Ernie Bevan, because he rightly sold the miners out of bastard.

Unknown Speaker  7:57  
He was quite sure that Ernie Bevan, Soldier sold us out down the river? Yes,

Unknown Speaker  8:04  
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

Unknown Speaker  8:17  
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 Runkle

Unknown Speaker  8:30  
was

Unknown Speaker  8:32  
a very early member of ACTT, a newsreel member, very early 3435

Unknown Speaker  8:39  
he me.

Unknown Speaker  8:44  
And of course, he used to work in the workshop quite often, building his own stuff and so forth.

Unknown Speaker  8:52  
When the war came, I was, I was

Unknown Speaker  8:56  
politically aware enough to want to do something about it, you know, and I I hadn't

Unknown Speaker  9:04  
really, I hadn't completed my time, or anything like that. And

Unknown Speaker  9:09  
Ernie wouldn't stand in my way. Uncle Ernie and I taught 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

Unknown Speaker  9:30  
Yeah.

Unknown Speaker  9:32  
And I started off as a mechanic, a driver mechanic,

Unknown Speaker  9:38  
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

Unknown Speaker  9:46  
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.

Unknown Speaker  10:00  
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.

Unknown Speaker  10:13  
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 drive. That's just how thick they all were. And I'm not kidding about it anyway, I was from that point of view,

Unknown Speaker  10:31  
all right, I suppose. And I went to Sandhurst,

Unknown Speaker  10:37  
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.

Unknown Speaker  10:50  
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 RSN brand, Brisbane 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.

Unknown Speaker  11:15  
And used to take communications drill across this square. You know there'd be about

Unknown Speaker  11:21  
10, I suppose you'd be at one end, and you'd have a squad of about eight blokes 150 yards away.

Unknown Speaker  11:29  
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,

Unknown Speaker  11:45  
which, which is standard practice for a trained soldier. So the guard said, and I

Unknown Speaker  11:52  
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.

Unknown Speaker  12:11  
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 centers more than anything else was, was the fact that my father was a very, very keen cricket and footballer.

Unknown Speaker  12:27  
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

Unknown Speaker  12:35  
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.

Unknown Speaker  12:50  
Well, Sussex, of course, the major religion of Sussex is cricket.

Unknown Speaker  12:55  
Christianity comes second.

Unknown Speaker  12:59  
And

Unknown Speaker  13:01  
so,

Unknown Speaker  13:03  
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 Cofield Cricket Club,

Unknown Speaker  13:18  
and everything possible was done for a cricket

Unknown Speaker  13:24  
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,

Unknown Speaker  13:37  
I can remember they used to blood the kids when they were about 12 or 13,

Unknown Speaker  13:42  
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,

Unknown Speaker  13:52  
you know,

Unknown Speaker  13:55  
marvelous, really, marvelous.

Unknown Speaker  13:58  
And

Unknown Speaker  14:00  
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

Unknown Speaker  14:17  
I'd been having nets and so forth before I joined up.

Unknown Speaker  14:21  
So that's, you know, I, I did quite well. I played for the unit at Catterick, and then we were moved to

Unknown Speaker  14:34  
to,

Unknown Speaker  14:36  
oh, what's the big play? Tidworth, yes. Tidworth and I played for the garrison. Tidworth, and happened to make a pretty reasonable 50

Unknown Speaker  14:50  
the day before I went for my interview.

Unknown Speaker  14:56  
And

Unknown Speaker  14:58  
that was that was best.

Unknown Speaker  15:00  
Days work I ever did, frankly,

Unknown Speaker  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

Unknown Speaker  15:27  
heard some jazz, and I wasn't happy anymore,

Unknown Speaker  15:33  
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,

Unknown Speaker  15:46  
after lots of birthdays presents and Christmas presents and whatnot, I managed to get together five pounds, 10 shillings and six months, which was a bloody fortune, and I bought a clarinet.

Unknown Speaker  16:00  
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

Unknown Speaker  16:09  
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.

Unknown Speaker  16:19  
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

Unknown Speaker  16:28  
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?

Unknown Speaker  16:36  
I got an ETU ticket,

Unknown Speaker  16:39  
musicians union ticket, without too much trouble.

Unknown Speaker  16:44  
They didn't even ask me how old I was, as far as I

Unknown Speaker  16:49  
remember.

Unknown Speaker  16:51  
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

Unknown Speaker  17:04  
1940

Unknown Speaker  17:06  
1938 perhaps,

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

Unknown Speaker  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.

Unknown Speaker  17:37  
What was it called over one of the shops, something, nail. Was it

Unknown Speaker  17:43  
the something nail, but

Unknown Speaker  17:46  
you could turn up there any time and just sit in, yes, you know they'd have a jam session going all the time.

Unknown Speaker  17:56  
There was the place in Southall, the Red Lion. Southall,

Unknown Speaker  18:02  
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,

Unknown Speaker  18:16  
Tottenham, Hotspur, yeah, which was, was also quite an important thing still, is to some extent,

Unknown Speaker  18:24  
yeah, well, they are, you see, anyway, this, this music bit was, was very good. I,

Unknown Speaker  18:32  
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

Unknown Speaker  18:54  
dance band musicians, because it's bloody hard work.

Unknown Speaker  18:58  
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,

Unknown Speaker  19:08  
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,

Unknown Speaker  19:22  
that sort of musician

Unknown Speaker  19:24  
I got, I say, I got fed up with classical music. I

Unknown Speaker  19:29  
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.

Unknown Speaker  19:43  
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 live.

Unknown Speaker  20:00  
Me a park Bury St Edmunds,

Unknown Speaker  20:05  
which was an infantry tank unit. They they had

Unknown Speaker  20:12  
Matildas,

Unknown Speaker  20:15  
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.

Unknown Speaker  20:29  
Oh, yes. Well, we used to do that anyway, but I mean

Unknown Speaker  20:34  
on deliberately.

Unknown Speaker  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?

Unknown Speaker  20:45  
I wouldn't be sure now, but I do know that there was one village in Suffolk who didn't like the British Thomas so much as he liked these Canadians or Americans, I suppose, because we hadn't got any bloody

Unknown Speaker  20:59  
money as a

Unknown Speaker  21:01  
second lieutenant, you see, you've got 10 Bob a day, three pound 50 a week, three pound 10 a week. Then,

Unknown Speaker  21:09  
which was,

Unknown Speaker  21:11  
you weren't going to spread yourself much on that. Were you? You got to face it,

Unknown Speaker  21:18  
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,

Unknown Speaker  21:33  
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 was I went to Horn brothers, and

Unknown Speaker  21:50  
it was cheap,

Unknown Speaker  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?

Unknown Speaker  22:03  
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 CEO, when we got a movement order, the CEO, 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.

Unknown Speaker  22:47  
Now, this village had a dead right hand turn

Unknown Speaker  22:52  
at one end of it. You'd got to turn right at the end. We'd got at this time.

Unknown Speaker  23:00  
What tanks were they? They were the big old tank,

Unknown Speaker  23:07  
the diesel job British made, made it at Southall

Unknown Speaker  23:13  
of the AUC place. Yes,

Unknown Speaker  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,

Unknown Speaker  23:29  
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, 450 yards that could open its door

Unknown Speaker  23:52  
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

Unknown Speaker  24:00  
on all the doorways,

Unknown Speaker  24:04  
just going around that corner.

Unknown Speaker  24:10  
Bloody beautiful. That was,

Unknown Speaker  24:14  
well, you could have a great, great fun in a tank. You know, I remember, of course,

Unknown Speaker  24:21  
driving a tank

Unknown Speaker  24:23  
when I was a cadet down Camberley High Street. Now, the busses used to turn round at the top of Camberley High Street

Unknown Speaker  24:32  
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

Unknown Speaker  24:54  
that was in this lay by, turned round, decided he could get away before I got pregnant.

Unknown Speaker  25:00  
Passed,

Unknown Speaker  25:01  
but he didn't.

Unknown Speaker  25:07  
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

Unknown Speaker  25:15  
this scrunchy noise,

Unknown Speaker  25:18  
and decided I better pull up

Unknown Speaker  25:21  
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

Unknown Speaker  25:32  
they weren't exactly his words, but

Unknown Speaker  25:35  
bus driver was very upset, because, of course, it

Unknown Speaker  25:39  
was everybody prepared to swear that he shouldn't have pulled away anyway, until the road was clear, what was he doing? Pulling out

Unknown Speaker  25:49  
and you can't stop a tank. You can't, yeah, probably

Unknown Speaker  25:54  
you can't stop a tank on a tanner, you know.

Unknown Speaker  26:00  
Anyway, I found sound Hurst 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 gallery 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

Unknown Speaker  26:38  
man management consisted of them telling you that your troops came first, which you would think that anybody who was going to Command anything recognized that as a fact.

Unknown Speaker  26:53  
But I did come across lots of cases where it wasn't, wasn't, so I know that.

Unknown Speaker  27:01  
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,

Unknown Speaker  27:27  
he'd tear you loose.

Unknown Speaker  27:30  
Quite right.

Unknown Speaker  27:32  
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,

Unknown Speaker  27:46  
and not until then.

Unknown Speaker  27:49  
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

Unknown Speaker  27:58  
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

Unknown Speaker  28:16  
was periscopes, gun sights, things like that. You know, the gunner looked after his gun, wireless operator looked after his wireless

Unknown Speaker  28:26  
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.

Unknown Speaker  29:01  
Well, there's room for five in there, and you're one of them.

Unknown Speaker  29:05  
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,

Unknown Speaker  29:14  
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,

Unknown Speaker  29:27  
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. Were right,

Unknown Speaker  29:46  
but they hadn't come from my background anyway, which was a working class background, really.

Unknown Speaker  29:54  
Then can we go back a bit, just a second, to your uncle's business? Yeah.

Unknown Speaker  30:00  
Yeah, it was call uncles. Then was it? It was Ed uncle and son cinematograph engineers. Yeah, yeah, Goon,

Unknown Speaker  30:10  
but did he? Did your uncle ever work for Kingston and lions? He worked with Kingston. Now tell you his, his earliest memory, and mine, as a matter of fact, was King in about

Unknown Speaker  30:23  
Mrs. Arthur Kingston. Yes, this is Arthur Kingston in about 1928,

Unknown Speaker  30:29  
I think about 2728

Unknown Speaker  30:33  
I remember pop Uncle Ernie bringing with him on a weekend visit

Unknown Speaker  30:43  
the Kingston home recorder, which we he was involved in making. He made the tools for and the Kingston home recorder was

Unknown Speaker  30:55  
a large disc that sat on your grammar firm Yeah.

Unknown Speaker  31:02  
And then you put on to it a small alley disc.

Unknown Speaker  31:08  
And you had the unit which you mounted on the tone arm, an old fashioned tone, yes, see which had two needles. Now the big disc had was already cut, 78

Unknown Speaker  31:24  
and you put this down to start it, and it started cutting the alley disc. And meanwhile, you performed into this horn, which was attached to both the needles and the tone arm,

Unknown Speaker  31:38  
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 foul alley 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

Unknown Speaker  32:07  
it got to be a thorn that it wouldn't stand up to. But that was, that was when Kingston was working on his own, before he became Kingston and lions. Was it?

Unknown Speaker  32:17  
I wish I knew the answer to those questions, because too long ago, because I can remember going to Kingston and lions when they were in manate street. You

Unknown Speaker  32:28  
know, where the Pillars of Hercules is

Unknown Speaker  32:31  
just there. Oh, yeah, that's where Kingston lines 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,

Unknown Speaker  32:46  
that's, that was Kingston line. But I don't, didn't

Unknown Speaker  32:50  
often see Kingston there. I saw all man lines.

Unknown Speaker  32:55  
I can't be sure. I do know. I remember this very clearly, that Ernie Powell, uncle 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,

Unknown Speaker  33:20  
but

Unknown Speaker  33:23  
no,

Unknown Speaker  33:25  
well, nothing Arthur Kingston did really made him afford to. Well, the perma camera must have done him fairly well, mustn't it,

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

Unknown Speaker  33:42  
So he was a brilliant blow, yes, I believe, yeah. I can barely remember him when you now, then you came out, the war ended. What happened then? Oh, well, well, in 1944

Unknown Speaker  33:58  
I was, I was severely wounded at ancill,

Unknown Speaker  34:01  
and

Unknown Speaker  34:05  
and I came. I was 15 months in hospital, and

Unknown Speaker  34:11  
then

Unknown Speaker  34:12  
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,

Unknown Speaker  34:28  
I was left 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,

Unknown Speaker  34:41  
and because you're the Senior Lieutenant, or because they the CEO, see likes the look of you, says, right, your second in command. So your second in command now your captain.

Unknown Speaker  34:53  
You've got to be a captain for three weeks before you get paid for it. You've got to,

Unknown Speaker  34:59  
yeah.

Unknown Speaker  35:00  
It three weeks before you get paid for it. Well, you're not in the line that long,

Unknown Speaker  35:04  
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 CEO see got killed, and the second in command was in hospital. And I was commanding a squadron when I was 22 a squadron of tanks,

Unknown Speaker  35:36  
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.

Unknown Speaker  35:48  
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

Unknown Speaker  35:59  
length of life of a tank

Unknown Speaker  36:03  
commander

Unknown Speaker  36:05  
in the desert in Sicily and in southern Italy anyway, was five and a half hours, I believe,

Unknown Speaker  36:16  
five and a half hours. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker  36:19  
and they'd spent a fortune training yesterday. It was quite expensive, really.

Unknown Speaker  36:27  
Yeah, in the depth, well, I tell you why you

Unknown Speaker  36:32  
you've got to be there to understand, really, that in action,

Unknown Speaker  36:37  
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

Unknown Speaker  36:49  
because it's all crap and corruption and darkness all the time, and you can't see anything. It's no issue looking 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

Unknown Speaker  37:11  
for these idiots to put their head out.

Unknown Speaker  37:16  
Then again, you see, there are lots of strange unwritten cavalry laws attached to it too. For instance, in the desert,

Unknown Speaker  37:24  
yeah, lots on did in the desert, if your tank was knocked out and you got out

Unknown Speaker  37:32  
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.

Unknown Speaker  37:46  
That was the unwritten law between the British and the Germans. You know,

Unknown Speaker  37:52  
it changed in Italy because I think the Americans

Unknown Speaker  38:00  
weren't obeying the law.

Unknown Speaker  38:03  
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,

Unknown Speaker  38:13  
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, kept in innumerable times when I was wounded, I was I was second in command of a unit, but

Unknown Speaker  38:28  
went back home, and straight away you're back to your substantive rank, which is full Lieutenant. You see,

Unknown Speaker  38:36  
that's it.

Unknown Speaker  38:38  
But I say I spent

Unknown Speaker  38:41  
nearly 15 months altogether at Queen Mary's at Rohan, you come

Unknown Speaker  38:47  
back? You didn't come back in the film industry? No, came back to Uncle shop.

Unknown Speaker  38:53  
Yes. Well, same camera mechanic, see, but there were the problems you see then,

Unknown Speaker  39:01  
before the war, he had one or two bread and butter contracts,

Unknown Speaker  39:08  
newsreel cameras. He did

Unknown Speaker  39:11  
two lots of newsreel cameras. I think it was movie turn

Unknown Speaker  39:16  
and

Unknown Speaker  39:18  
and GB,

Unknown Speaker  39:21  
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

Unknown Speaker  39:37  
that

Unknown Speaker  39:40  
that dried up because

Unknown Speaker  39:45  
a I think they bought new equipment, they bought new Mitchells,

Unknown Speaker  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.

Unknown Speaker  40:03  
Yeah, and we also, we also did work for the BBC newsreel, didn't we?

Unknown Speaker  40:09  
You did maintenance, yes, 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.

Unknown Speaker  40:30  
Yeah, I didn't realize it until, until last year when I, when I met Alan again.

Unknown Speaker  40:36  
Alan, Alan was the you were the engineering supervisor, where you pally, not engineer. I was, you know, I was the supervising camera man, yeah, yeah, so, so,

Unknown Speaker  40:57  
yes, right, yes.

Unknown Speaker  40:59  
But then you then, then your uncle went into manufacturing, 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,

Unknown Speaker  41:13  
you know?

Unknown Speaker  41:15  
So he decided that there was a niche in the market for

Unknown Speaker  41:20  
two things, mainly, I think, a lightweight

Unknown Speaker  41:24  
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?

Unknown Speaker  41:38  
So we started into manufacture the top hat, short legs, long legs, and the pan and tilt head

Unknown Speaker  41:49  
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 try. 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, Nick, which one was it had that? Why was the Moy head? And there was a Moy, I remember one with a little handle, and how

Unknown Speaker  42:22  
and every turn it juddered

Unknown Speaker  42:26  
on the screen. You could see it judder with the correctly set up friction pan and tilt. There need be no judder

Unknown Speaker  42:38  
the bell. And the bell and howl had a

Unknown Speaker  42:41  
pan and tilt crank handles, yeah? But then there's also the Moy, but that was a scoop on, oh yes, yeah, IMO, Bell and hell, I wouldn't I Mo was Bell and how well they made the IMO, they also made the bell and hell camera.

Unknown Speaker  42:59  
They were the rolls. Royce, really beautiful camera, but they didn't

Unknown Speaker  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,

Unknown Speaker  43:20  
mean something like

Unknown Speaker  43:21  
yours.

Unknown Speaker  43:26  
So, so you were, you were with your uncle, then on manufacture, yes,

Unknown Speaker  43:34  
yeah, I, I made the the base for the for the friction, head,

Unknown Speaker  43:41  
bored. All those up

Unknown Speaker  43:45  
also, oh, another job which I quite liked, so I got them to do. Were those rack over focusing Max. 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 paralytic parallax. That's right, yeah, yeah, that, that, that I quite like making those they were, they were a nice job.

Unknown Speaker  44:15  
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.

Unknown Speaker  44:38  
And

Unknown Speaker  44:41  
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.

Unknown Speaker  44:53  
We doubled the price and sold all we could make. And that's a fact. That's the film industry for you in it.

Unknown Speaker  45:00  
If it's cheap, it can't be any good.

Unknown Speaker  45:05  
That's right, that's right, yeah, I do the other thing. I'm going to turn over. Okay,

Unknown Speaker  45:21  
you couldn't say the other thing you were going to say, Yeah, we made

Unknown Speaker  45:27  
editing equipment, a counter.

Unknown Speaker  45:34  
One way, two way,

Unknown Speaker  45:37  
3516

Unknown Speaker  45:41  
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 technically a cause on counters.

Unknown Speaker  45:51  
Yeah,

Unknown Speaker  45:54  
we made those on the big mill in the basement the because they were one foot sprocket. Yes,

Unknown Speaker  46:00  
and that, that was the only machine we had big enough to to register the 64 teeth, 64 sprocket teeth on that term. 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.

Unknown Speaker  46:28  
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

Unknown Speaker  46:42  
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.

Unknown Speaker  46:55  
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.

Unknown Speaker  47:03  
And I know that we sold about a dozen of those to Pinewood.

Unknown Speaker  47:07  
What the hell they were used for? I don't know.

Unknown Speaker  47:10  
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,

Unknown Speaker  47:48  
yeah, what they were for, I don't know, but they sold very well. But there was a game. 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,

Unknown Speaker  48:02  
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

Unknown Speaker  48:16  
right. Most of our stuff was very robust.

Unknown Speaker  48:21  
How long did you stay with the vehicle? Well, until, until

Unknown Speaker  48:26  
December 1947

Unknown Speaker  48:29  
now, in early 47

Unknown Speaker  48:34  
I'd come and joined him. Rejoined him in 46 about 18 months, two years, and

Unknown Speaker  48:42  
he had a recurrence. He'd already had

Unknown Speaker  48:46  
a stomach ulcer, I think

Unknown Speaker  48:49  
then he got a duodenal ulcer.

Unknown Speaker  48:53  
And

Unknown Speaker  48:55  
there again. You see this. We were too damned old fashioned and

Unknown Speaker  49:00  
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 haze and probably got months of good quality, well paid work. You know, if you'd got lathes, screw cutting, milling,

Unknown Speaker  49:40  
we could do anything.

Unknown Speaker  49:43  
No, but

Unknown Speaker  49:46  
I'm talking about subcontracting for ourselves. You see,

Unknown Speaker  49:51  
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.

Unknown Speaker  50:00  
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.

Unknown Speaker  50:15  
So we were more or less out of work. We had the odd bloke coming in, but

Unknown Speaker  50:21  
he said, Well, I think,

Unknown Speaker  50:23  
no, he was in hospital. He was very ill. We went to see him. And then his wife, you remember

Unknown Speaker  50:31  
Dolly, Uncle, do you his wife who was very domineering woman. She was,

Unknown Speaker  50:38  
she was the one who'd kick your backside if she thought you weren't working hard enough and whatnot. He wouldn't.

Unknown Speaker  50:46  
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,

Unknown Speaker  51:11  
all those screw slots had to line up all the way. And what's more, you didn't go and buy a gross of ABA stainless screws. You went to grosses, or the place across the way from grosses, and

Unknown Speaker  51:32  
you bought, yes, you bought and made countersunk screws. He wasn't going to have any of that

Unknown Speaker  51:37  
other rubbish. You

Unknown Speaker  51:40  
rubbish.

Unknown Speaker  51:43  
This machine made rubbish in my work, if we haven't got the capacity to make them, we'll buy them.

Unknown Speaker  51:50  
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. Alley.

Unknown Speaker  52:03  
Got to take your hand brace and your countersink and just whisper out another couple of hours 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,

Unknown Speaker  52:19  
but that, that was the standards he required. It

Unknown Speaker  52:23  
good enough wasn't good enough. It had got to be perfect.

Unknown Speaker  52:27  
And he was very difficult. But otherwise he was he was great, he was great. But you were saying he was in hospital, yeah, he was very ill.

Unknown Speaker  52:36  
And he said, we've got no work. We can't afford to pay you.

Unknown Speaker  52:40  
And we, when we came out of the army on six pounds a week, that was, that was the the rate, the AU rate,

Unknown Speaker  52:49  
full rate, for a tool maker, that was six quid a week.

Unknown Speaker  52:55  
Was a bit of a blow to me, because I'd been a staff captain in German on 24 pound a week.

Unknown Speaker  53:02  
I

Unknown Speaker  53:04  
and you say, Why did I come out? Because I could see 1929 all over again,

Unknown Speaker  53:09  
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

Unknown Speaker  53:22  
bridge, really, most of them

Unknown Speaker  53:25  
peace time.

Unknown Speaker  53:27  
Anyway.

Unknown Speaker  53:30  
So

Unknown Speaker  53:32  
I started to look round, and I saw I lived in haze, then in Middlesex, and I saw in the local paper an advertisement for a maintenance engineer, Technicolor limited

Unknown Speaker  53:45  
nine and stop.

Unknown Speaker  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.

Unknown Speaker  53:59  
Amazing interview. I thought he, he pulled a micrometer out of his desk. He said, measure that for me.

Unknown Speaker  54:09  
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.

Unknown Speaker  54:18  
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

Unknown Speaker  54:26  
straight forward micrometer, which is so basic,

Unknown Speaker  54:31  
you know, it's ridiculous. What machinery have you used

Unknown Speaker  54:36  
lathes and mills?

Unknown Speaker  54:40  
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.

Unknown Speaker  55:00  
Crew cutting.

Unknown Speaker  55:02  
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

Unknown Speaker  55:19  
doddle in it. You're you're not earning any money. You can't be screw cutting is very slow.

Unknown Speaker  55:26  
So anyway, I told him all that I'd done and

Unknown Speaker  55:30  
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,

Unknown Speaker  55:41  
so I got to start in dry maintenance,

Unknown Speaker  55:47  
two and seven pence. Hate me an hour.

Unknown Speaker  55:56  
Yeah, and

Unknown Speaker  55:59  
then you went, I know George. George Goodman, no. John Francis. John Francis was, was the foreman, the day shift foreman, yeah. John Francis, two and seven pence hate me per hour per hour for a 45 hour week. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker  56:17  
But

Unknown Speaker  56:19  
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.

Unknown Speaker  56:32  
That's right, they work. You see, Monday to Friday, three shifts, Saturday and Sunday were for maintenance. Was a chief engineer when you started. Was Mac games still with us?

Unknown Speaker  56:45  
No, there was one after Mark Ames and before peas good, Rusty. Rusty, what was his name? Erwin, Rusty, Evans. Yes, he, he was just at that time, you know, deposed, I think,

Unknown Speaker  56:59  
because I can remember then peas good coming in. That's right now we our shop was about wasn't quite as big as this room,

Unknown Speaker  57:09  
and it was on the

Unknown Speaker  57:12  
dry end of 12, five. Do you remember

Unknown Speaker  57:16  
that was the maintenance shop? So you, you put your tool box where you could just over half a

Unknown Speaker  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,

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

Unknown Speaker  57:44  
yeah, only

Unknown Speaker  57:46  
one Foreman that was, that was John Johnny, Johnny Francis, yeah. Now he was, he was

Unknown Speaker  57:54  
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. He was a good engineer, but he hadn't got much mine, any

Unknown Speaker  58:12  
much what? Spine? Oh, no.

Unknown Speaker  58:17  
He was a governor man. We had a locket. No, we had a strike. Remember, we couldn't find

Unknown Speaker  58:26  
him

Unknown Speaker  58:30  
when you were in the AU, when you came early? 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,

Unknown Speaker  58:42  
because I couldn't see how you could work if you weren't in a trade union.

Unknown Speaker  58:47  
And when I came to technical, I thought, Ah, now at last, now the first week I was there, Bert Craig and George Erwin 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 Labor Party as well, although I was a local member in haste, 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,

Unknown Speaker  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.

Unknown Speaker  1:00:00  
But careful.

Unknown Speaker  1:00:02  
I said it before, yeah,

Unknown Speaker  1:00:07  
nobody on the union staff should earn more than the people on the job

Unknown Speaker  1:00:11  
that's gone out the window. In fact, the members have, like, earned the money that the staff get sometimes. But anyway,

Unknown Speaker  1:00:19  
we ultimately got you in. When did you become active in Act? Well, in

Unknown Speaker  1:00:27  
almost immediately,

Unknown Speaker  1:00:30  
I remember that

Unknown Speaker  1:00:35  
John Bain, I think, was a collector for the Union. Scott Adam, a great block, great block. He was couldn't understand

Unknown Speaker  1:00:49  
and he wanted to be maintenance, wasn't he? Most of them were originally in wet maintenance. Most often were.

Unknown Speaker  1:00:59  
He was fed up with being the floor steward for the dry maintenance, so I copped it.

Unknown Speaker  1:01:09  
And that must have been about 1948

Unknown Speaker  1:01:13  
and

Unknown Speaker  1:01:14  
I'd only been 10 minutes in the union. And then,

Unknown Speaker  1:01:19  
now what happened then? Do you remember

Unknown Speaker  1:01:24  
what was the name of the foreman of the pin belt department? I 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 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

Unknown Speaker  1:01:48  
at every Ellen was a pin belt.

Unknown Speaker  1:01:53  
I can't remember. Wait a minute.

Unknown Speaker  1:01:58  
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.

Unknown Speaker  1:02:19  
There was four drums to each record, yellow sign 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.

Unknown Speaker  1:02:37  
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. The pins were German silver. They were lead, soldered in,

Unknown Speaker  1:02:53  
silver soldered in, no head sold on the back.

Unknown Speaker  1:02:59  
What happened

Unknown Speaker  1:03:02  
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,

Unknown Speaker  1:03:26  
and it would go through

Unknown Speaker  1:03:29  
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 diet 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 years, wouldn't it? Yeah,

Unknown Speaker  1:04:03  
and the blank have a this is the thing where it got its name. It was a very technical process.

Unknown Speaker  1:04:10  
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 act to be controlled on its drying so that the size when it met the cyan record

Unknown Speaker  1:04:30  
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 die tank and into another sign roll tank that would go around the belt. They get both the blank would then go through another drying cabinet, and the sign would go through the de crow the

Unknown Speaker  1:04:55  
blank would ultimately meet up again in the magenta record roll tank the matrix would have.

Unknown Speaker  1:05:00  
Gone through a magenta die, and it once again, had to be exactly the same size, because we had no latitude on register whatsoever.

Unknown Speaker  1:05:08  
And every per every perforation was registered on one side, all down one side was register pins.

Unknown Speaker  1:05:15  
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 the roll isn't the projector, and they were running the 171

Unknown Speaker  1:05:28  
80 for a minute.

Unknown Speaker  1:05:30  
Well, finally,

Unknown Speaker  1:05:34  
switch on the machine. Final, the final setup,

Unknown Speaker  1:05:39  
which, which, I had a lot to do with you started off with, first of all, a soundtrack negative in a continuous loop

Unknown Speaker  1:05:50  
later when we got 2000 Yeah,

Unknown Speaker  1:05:53  
then you put your blank on

Unknown Speaker  1:05:56  
and you printed against the negative on a track printer. A matter of fact, it was a converted Model D, Bell, how Model D, 1917,

Unknown Speaker  1:06:07  
we put ball races in it.

Unknown Speaker  1:06:11  
It was set up very accurately,

Unknown Speaker  1:06:15  
because we were rather proud of quite sound quality at technical you know, we wanted it minus a half

Unknown Speaker  1:06:23  
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

Unknown Speaker  1:06:38  
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

Unknown Speaker  1:06:59  
the optical area, yeah, yeah.

Unknown Speaker  1:07:04  
When that was developed,

Unknown Speaker  1:07:07  
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.

Unknown Speaker  1:07:22  
So then it was dried, and then it was presented to the yellow,

Unknown Speaker  1:07:28  
then the cyan, then the material. It was later when that okay, when you first

Unknown Speaker  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 didn't come many years. It continued from it came out,

Unknown Speaker  1:07:49  
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,

Unknown Speaker  1:08:03  
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

Unknown Speaker  1:08:14  
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,

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

Unknown Speaker  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. Well, you're talking about mid 5454

Unknown Speaker  1:08:45  
the lock. Yeah. Well, you weren't, you weren't doing it. That's right.

Unknown Speaker  1:08:51  
Later on I ran the Eastman plant. That's right. No, it's all Eastman. But in

Unknown Speaker  1:08:59  
I think the the thing that nobody realizes outside of Technicolor, or the old people from Technicolor, is the degree of precision which had to go into the preparation of the negative for shooting in Three strip

Unknown Speaker  1:09:16  
of the positive

Unknown Speaker  1:09:19  
for receiving the inhibition and of the matrices

Unknown Speaker  1:09:30  
they they

Unknown Speaker  1:09:33  
the film came in from Kodak In Cannes, slit, nothing else.

Unknown Speaker  1:09:39  
No,

Unknown Speaker  1:09:41  
we did the post well eventually, but you did used to run pause. When I first went to Technicolor, they were perforating pauses all day,

Unknown Speaker  1:09:51  
to recently, at one time, because it was so bloody COVID, you would have pulse perforations. We ran the whole process on negative perforation.

Unknown Speaker  1:10:00  
Operations up until 1952

Unknown Speaker  1:10:04  
so you, if you see a piece of Technicolor release and it's got Ned perfs on it, you'll say, Well, that is pre 52

Unknown Speaker  1:10:13  
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.

Unknown Speaker  1:10:26  
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 foul. We gave ourselves half 1000

Unknown Speaker  1:10:45  
the sizes a perforation, a negative perforation should be point 0730,

Unknown Speaker  1:10:50  
plus or minus 410,

Unknown Speaker  1:10:53  
Technicolor plus or minus 210,

Unknown Speaker  1:10:57  
110, across the rounds,

Unknown Speaker  1:11:01  
1104109, 1041096

Unknown Speaker  1:11:03  
for Kodak, 10981011102

Unknown Speaker  1:11:07  
for technical because that's what I told you earlier. Technicolor, very often would send our Brooks to Codex. Little trouble. Yes, yeah. Just isn't good enough. We can't accept this stuff because we ground, we ground our own punch and dies. And we Yes, but 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?

Unknown Speaker  1:11:32  
A punch, six quid. I can't believe it when I found us

Unknown Speaker  1:11:39  
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.

Unknown Speaker  1:11:54  
How could you make that for that money? The dyes as well, of course,

Unknown Speaker  1:11:58  
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.

Unknown Speaker  1:13:07  
So you take some half foul bras, shim and perforate that a couple of times, even, even a piece of four O's polishing paper,

Unknown Speaker  1:13:18  
in desperation to take that built up. You know, you know, and maintain them, and maintain the pins in and George, George,

Unknown Speaker  1:13:29  
I don't know who's a Yorkshireman. I know that he was a man I didn't like.

Unknown Speaker  1:13:34  
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 him 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

Unknown Speaker  1:14:07  
this very exacting

Unknown Speaker  1:14:09  
standard,

Unknown Speaker  1:14:11  
did the did the maintenance engineers have to be retrained for this? Or no, they had to fall in. You know, we had a fantastic, fantastic set of tool makers.

Unknown Speaker  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

Unknown Speaker  1:14:36  
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.

Unknown Speaker  1:14:48  
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.

Unknown Speaker  1:15:00  
I don't know there's a feel for it.

Unknown Speaker  1:15:04  
If you're going to line up a pair of register pins,

Unknown Speaker  1:15:08  
you do it by eye, and after a couple of years, you can do it correctly every time

Unknown Speaker  1:15:16  
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

Unknown Speaker  1:15:34  
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 tall room would take a new leaf. Now we use that do you recall the path? A printer? Path, a 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 Technicolor optical printers, was that 1902

Unknown Speaker  1:16:34  
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

Unknown Speaker  1:16:53  
hand

Unknown Speaker  1:16:54  
jewelers rouge Four rows polishing paper

Unknown Speaker  1:16:59  
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. We still had breakdowns.

Unknown Speaker  1:17:20  
We still used to moan like Ella at the time,

Unknown Speaker  1:17:25  
the tour 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.

Unknown Speaker  1:17:35  
You will in future,

Unknown Speaker  1:17:39  
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,

Unknown Speaker  1:17:56  
and it was a cause of great contention, partly because our blokes weren't getting as much money as the tour and blokes, although they were earning more because of weekends and shift work, a lot more, you know, and partly in the tour room, because they said, but look, you know, it's perfect. It's to drawing,

Unknown Speaker  1:18:16  
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.

Unknown Speaker  1:18:42  
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 taker. 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 gage and run over all those rolls and make them perfect, and the film would still want to run off.

Unknown Speaker  1:19:22  
Because you had got to set the machine up, thread it up,

Unknown Speaker  1:19:29  
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.

Unknown Speaker  1:19:57  
And the drawing office used to get upset about this. The tool room.

Unknown Speaker  1:20:00  
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

Unknown Speaker  1:20:11  
very interesting, I suppose. But the

Unknown Speaker  1:20:14  
tour room were most upset about it. I know

Unknown Speaker  1:20:17  
that very upset.

Unknown Speaker  1:20:20  
But the other thing was, of course, that there are, there are fits that you feel. You know, if the shuttle shoes on a movement are too loose on the can,

Unknown Speaker  1:20:32  
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.

Unknown Speaker  1:20:44  
It wriggles. It doesn't settle. Yeah, and,

Unknown Speaker  1:20:52  
you know these, these problems were

Unknown Speaker  1:20:56  
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,

Unknown Speaker  1:21:12  
as I feel rather sorry for the people who are there now. I was up there last, last, oh, anything goes. No, the standards of 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

Unknown Speaker  1:21:38  
among these car Emerick moves. It's all right, 20 years ago, most, I would think 60% of what is now shipped out of all the laboratories 20 years ago at technical anyway, would have been in the bin.

Unknown Speaker  1:21:52  
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,

Unknown Speaker  1:22:00  
yeah, and I had a pleasure had the pleasure of turning the tool and 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

Unknown Speaker  1:22:40  
mixed. Blessings.

Unknown Speaker  1:22:42  
Now I've got them on the feet of my car. Yes, my timings on that, Yeah, mine and all.

Unknown Speaker  1:22:50  
But at least they don't any liquid to get to them.

Unknown Speaker  1:22:54  
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

Unknown Speaker  1:23:08  
we always had a problem too, I think, with the Americans,

Unknown Speaker  1:23:14  
for a period during the 50s, Technicolor Limited was a long to itself. Then in uh,

Unknown Speaker  1:23:23  
it was taken over again by the Americans in the 60s. Was it something like that? What was the name of the managing director that we had originally

Unknown Speaker  1:23:33  
happy? No, happy was just, he was about, he was in the control at one time. And then he started writing strictly, I, I remember falling out, was it wasn't fast snack, was it? Yeah,

Unknown Speaker  1:23:46  
he was a, he was, he was a joint manager with oaks, and then he became, but we're digressing a bit. When did you first become active in the act, apart from

Unknown Speaker  1:23:57  
your flowers, Joe for the dry maintenance, yeah, that bloke, whatever his name was, for some reason, was chairman of the shop, the the pin belt

Unknown Speaker  1:24:07  
bloke, George.

Unknown Speaker  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.

Unknown Speaker  1:24:19  
Now you were on it. Said evington was on it, and for some reason or other, I was chairman of it, very likely,

Unknown Speaker  1:24:26  
George this George came up to me and he said, I fixed it with the governor.

Unknown Speaker  1:24:34  
I want you to join the negotiating committee in town tomorrow morning.

Unknown Speaker  1:24:40  
He said, What you do is you go to hay station and you'll catch the 815 and on the 815 will be

Unknown Speaker  1:24:49  
MIDI

Unknown Speaker  1:24:51  
Middleton. Middleton was the organizer at one time. Yeah, he was the lab. So I said, Well, all right, you know,

Unknown Speaker  1:24:59  
so.

Unknown Speaker  1:25:00  
I turn up there, I meet maybe,

Unknown Speaker  1:25:04  
and go to a the first, that was when I first became involved, and that must have been about 1949 I reckon. Where would he ask you to go and not me? I don't know. I was convener. There you were there already aspect, I don't know. I don't know.

Unknown Speaker  1:25:22  
Oh, probably, maybe, 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 we 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.

Unknown Speaker  1:25:43  
So they just, Oh, yeah. Well, you that long streak can go. You know,

Unknown Speaker  1:25:49  
he's troublemaker in that he can go. So I

Unknown Speaker  1:25:55  
went on this, this lab committee, negotiating team. Very, very early. I sat quiet and listened for a long time.

Unknown Speaker  1:26:05  
I think about 1948 I think it was 4849

Unknown Speaker  1:26:12  
it was the FLA then, wasn't it, the former laboratory Association chairman, Oliver, no, no, he wasn't, not that.

Unknown Speaker  1:26:24  
Now, I think he was call me Bill, Bill

Unknown Speaker  1:26:29  
Harcourt. And shortly, I wouldn't know how long afterwards, but shortly afterwards, well, George irons 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 Paul de burr that we had,

Unknown Speaker  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,

Unknown Speaker  1:27:13  
I can remember the

Unknown Speaker  1:27:16  
the early negotiations. They were fairly friendly, I would say

Unknown Speaker  1:27:24  
path A were there. You were chairman of the laboratory negotiating committee, but, but Sid fuller thankful. Frank Fuller was the VP. Was the VP, VP?

Unknown Speaker  1:27:40  
He was VP in the late 40s, early 50s.

Unknown Speaker  1:27:46  
But there was a fairly friendly atmosphere. Really wasn't that

Unknown Speaker  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

Unknown Speaker  1:28:06  
it was better if we could get what we wanted without a Fight.

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

Unknown Speaker  1:28:29  
lean around calls side three,

Unknown Speaker  1:28:33  
you said, you said, a bit early. When was it? Said you could trust me. Oh, 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 path 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.

Unknown Speaker  1:29:20  
But no anyway, sorry. Anyway, the the managing director of pathway labs at that time, we were talking about Tom O'Brien, yes, and they were talking about the book himself. And this will give you some idea, the the camera idea between the two sides in those days,

Unknown Speaker  1:29:39  
where they said that you could wine and dine.

Unknown Speaker  1:29:43  
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.

Unknown Speaker  1:29:52  
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.

Unknown Speaker  1:30:00  
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 made it my guts, they always had a respect for me and told me so, for that same reason, I was I, as I say, it was my first, the first time I had been involved in

Unknown Speaker  1:30:24  
negotiations at top level anyway, and I was agreeably surprised at

Unknown Speaker  1:30:32  
how comfortably it was all conducted, really, although things changed from time to time,

Unknown Speaker  1:30:39  
in the main it was, it was

Unknown Speaker  1:30:43  
easier, if anything negotiating up in town, the results weren't always better than it was locally, you know. But

Unknown Speaker  1:30:52  
no, there were one or two that I didn't like. Now, Phillips was one of them. I didn't trust. Phillips,

Unknown Speaker  1:30:59  
I used to be our first, first lead chairman, whatever. I didn't trust

Unknown Speaker  1:31:06  
the Hendersons.

Unknown Speaker  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 and and the bloke I never got to the bottom of was that Humphreys bloke.

Unknown Speaker  1:31:20  
Which one was this? Was this? Remember he died, didn't he shortly after the 25th anniversary? You don't remember Terra No, no,

Unknown Speaker  1:31:30  
Randol. Terrano was the one. Yeah, the one act. Terra No, I'll never forget it. We were all up there when, when prisoner on strike, and he said, I built this firm up. I brought it up from the garden, 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 came in completely, we won everything that was terror. 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 the man I think you're talking about, he came from Olympic Howard. Yes, 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 things, yeah. But of

Unknown Speaker  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.

Unknown Speaker  1:32:53  
We had a long time. We'd always been, if you remember, we'd always been led.

Unknown Speaker  1:32:59  
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,

Unknown Speaker  1:33:30  
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?

Unknown Speaker  1:33:41  
Yeah, I was

Unknown Speaker  1:33:44  
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,

Unknown Speaker  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

Unknown Speaker  1:34:10  
to the mike, possibly because we didn't get credit. Didn't mean to say we didn't contribute any partly, the labs own fault, I think Alfred the fact that they undervalued themselves,

Unknown Speaker  1:34:23  
that they were more industrially based than any of the others.

Unknown Speaker  1:34:30  
We were, whether we liked it or not. We can call them laboratories. We were working in film factories. I would never have it called Don't film out like a sausage, and they didn't mind 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 didn't want you. I think.

Unknown Speaker  1:35:00  
Thing that you, the thing that you,

Unknown Speaker  1:35:03  
I think, Well, I'm sure you haven't forgotten, because, in fact, alpha 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 column, you know, and he's being tucked

Unknown Speaker  1:35:21  
down for 40 years, you know, and he's just nobody really knew him, other than the people who had actually worked with it.

Unknown Speaker  1:35:31  
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. Oh, yes, that. That's quite true. Talking about Gordon McCallum. Goon McCallum is a rabid Tory, wasn't he? That's right. Yet the two are not compatible. He was a bloody good trade

Unknown Speaker  1:36:05  
union compatible. Gordon McCollum,

Unknown Speaker  1:36:09  
who was our man? Yes, I know Theresa Voland, who was she married to? Oh, she was she, she was she was married to somebody else. But who was it? Was it a bug or a dog.

Unknown Speaker  1:36:23  
Oh, shoot. I mean, she was a Tory

Unknown Speaker  1:36:26  
too, wasn't she, but I thought she was married to a sound bloke.

Unknown Speaker  1:36:33  
I don't think it was Gordon McCallum. I don't think so. Anyway,

Unknown Speaker  1:36:38  
Tories in the weeks, we wouldn't have needed trade unions. That's the only thing I can find wrong with the trade unions. I do think you know that George Erwin 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

Unknown Speaker  1:36:57  
accrue from over either over charging for the article or underpaying the producer.

Unknown Speaker  1:37:05  
Profits are undistributed. Wages. Don't ever forget it.

Unknown Speaker  1:37:13  
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.

Unknown Speaker  1:37:25  
Oh, to the effect you know that my politics, if you like, are governed by the fact that 94%

Unknown Speaker  1:37:32  
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

Unknown Speaker  1:37:44  
a land a democracy under those conditions.

Unknown Speaker  1:37:48  
Can you 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,

Unknown Speaker  1:38:18  
Ways and Means come along and we were able to find out what these Geass 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. Were the one syllable. I remember how they wanted to cut our national health. They wanted to stop our national

Unknown Speaker  1:39:00  
benefit. That's right, you know. And I went back the days after, when we first started, came to Bobby, 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 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 Technicolor. But I'm talking about Technicolor. Well, I think we've still got six weeks,

Unknown Speaker  1:39:27  
but I do, I do know that

Unknown Speaker  1:39:31  
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,

Unknown Speaker  1:39:49  
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.

Unknown Speaker  1:40:00  
Term, 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 was a period when some bite 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 town and then we had one. Do you remember with Stan Stan Warby and Monica, somebody that would be pulled in Stan Warby? Yes,

Unknown Speaker  1:40:42  
we were all on a committee, and

Unknown Speaker  1:40:46  
they did agree that the cost of not the cost of living balance the the

Unknown Speaker  1:40:53  
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

Unknown Speaker  1:41:06  
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.

Unknown Speaker  1:41:25  
I made an absolute hash of it

Unknown Speaker  1:41:29  
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. We went back in and we went back in and convinced them with these word pictures, I contend

Unknown Speaker  1:41:47  
now'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.

Unknown Speaker  1:41:55  
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 to Soho square upstairs in the in the Asquith room 11 or something like that. You know, we came off nights. You 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

Unknown Speaker  1:42:24  
when you saw what he you didn't wonder at

Unknown Speaker  1:42:28  
that night.

Unknown Speaker  1:42:31  
And

Unknown Speaker  1:42:35  
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,

Unknown Speaker  1:43:20  
you've got the bloody source 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.

Unknown Speaker  1:43:30  
That was brilliant. His word pictures.

Unknown Speaker  1:43:38  
That's

Unknown Speaker  1:43:41  
absolute Goon. 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

Unknown Speaker  1:43:49  
God. Then from there on in, you're out working. Yeah, used to say, give him a couple of large gins that'll stir his ulcer up, and then he'll sort them.

Unknown Speaker  1:44:02  
I But the best thing was whiskey. Now, do you remember when, when the ITV was opening? Yes,

Unknown Speaker  1:44:09  
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 brown rig,

Unknown Speaker  1:44:19  
for now, before then, would you be Goon? The strange thing was, of course, that Captain brown Rick 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, that was in the Waldorf, yeah, a bloody really promoted the Union from then on, because he thought these agreements were marvelous. They looked they looked like his navy Bay list

Unknown Speaker  1:44:56  
suited him down to the ground. He knew exactly what was happening. I.

Unknown Speaker  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 half? But they got me drunk. His idea of hospitality was to give you

Unknown Speaker  1:45:16  
a tumbler and watch the words, a little gin, please, right? And he'd fill the tumbler full of gins. You see, I two of those in 10 minutes.

Unknown Speaker  1:45:26  
Went from there to the cafe royal, and all he offered you was Angostura, nothing else. There were no there was no lemon, 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,

Unknown Speaker  1:45:45  
I had the paraties there and wine. And we were walking up to George, and I went back to the office. We were walking up Fifth 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 ward off street.

Unknown Speaker  1:46:15  
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 Alfred, do you remember that, that 28 hour week

Unknown Speaker  1:46:42  
agreement we signed with. Now that was, that was a vis news 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 online. Acton, yeah, and I came away from there, and for days, I thought myself, Noel, you mustn't do it. However, stayed at technical and didn't go for one of those bloody jobs. We could have had a job, and I thought

Unknown Speaker  1:47:12  
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, but that way it was, it was out of this world. 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

Unknown Speaker  1:47:34  
and what I was getting and what I was doing for what I was getting there,

Unknown Speaker  1:47:38  
that's right, murder. But anyway, I stayed where I was, and they've robbed me ever since. Think they've even sold a pension scheme for somebody else, left me with a Prudential and the blows are going out now with more money for 12 years service as a gold nail shape than I got for Fauci, 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, yeah, right, yes.

Unknown Speaker  1:48:09  
Scandal going, I'm still I,

Unknown Speaker  1:48:13  
I think, of course, what really changed

Unknown Speaker  1:48:18  
Technicolor, we couldn't go into business, was the lockout.

Unknown Speaker  1:48:23  
It was, it was a family before then after that, it subtly had changed.

Unknown Speaker  1:48:31  
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 accept 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,

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

Unknown Speaker  1:49:06  
when you say the results strike. It wasn't until after the lockout that Oliver, olive the rot set in when Oliver went.

Unknown Speaker  1:49:18  
Because, well, I got all right, Mike Allen, I got all right with Michael. 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,

Unknown Speaker  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

Unknown Speaker  1:49:40  
to some

Unknown Speaker  1:49:41  
money. That's the funny part about, oh yes, he would, he would wine and dine you excessively, you know, but because, whether it was on, it might have been on Technicolor, 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.

Unknown Speaker  1:50:00  
After that he died. Now I know for a fact that that Mike put his hand in his own pocket for his wife.

Unknown Speaker  1:50:08  
Because, because, you know,

Unknown Speaker  1:50:10  
I went through the same process myself and Leslie, Leslie Oliver,

Unknown Speaker  1:50:16  
because, mind you, of course, the wind of change had started then. Because

Unknown Speaker  1:50:22  
the

Unknown Speaker  1:50:24  
American monopolist Commission, or whatever it was called, broke the monopoly between Kodak and technical I didn't they,

Unknown Speaker  1:50:31  
well now, 20th Century Fox, yeah, 20

Unknown Speaker  1:50:35  
court, yeah. And

Unknown Speaker  1:50:39  
although we know we had, you see, we had a three color mono pack from Kodak in 1948

Unknown Speaker  1:50:50  
because the Olympic Games were photographed on it. Do you remember?

Unknown Speaker  1:50:55  
And in fact, we converted one of the developers at Technicolor so that it would be running all the time. And it was, what did we print? It on Alf.

Unknown Speaker  1:51:08  
All that stuff was printed

Unknown Speaker  1:51:15  
Eastman stock, wouldn't it?

Unknown Speaker  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 debris, a debris Matty po

Unknown Speaker  1:51:30  
three color printer, and it was running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the whole of the Olympic Games.

Unknown Speaker  1:51:41  
And

Unknown Speaker  1:51:42  
except when we had it for service, because it didn't like working that hard.

Unknown Speaker  1:51:48  
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 color, you know, anyway,

Unknown Speaker  1:52:03  
when, when that monopoly you say Olympic Games, you were talking about? Sorry, I misread you. Yeah, the Olympic Games, that

Unknown Speaker  1:52:10  
was 1948 wasn't it? Olympic Games? Yeah.

Unknown Speaker  1:52:15  
And yet, you see that process didn't surface until

Unknown Speaker  1:52:20  
Kodak and Technicolor 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 color, didn't they,

Unknown Speaker  1:52:34  
albeit slow

Unknown Speaker  1:52:39  
and Technicolor had upset a lot of people.

Unknown Speaker  1:52:44  
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 color 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

Unknown Speaker  1:53:18  
picture and sound, that Technicolor 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.

Unknown Speaker  1:53:35  
You know, one of the great problems with our industry, isn't it, is that we make film, we produce answer prints for directors

Unknown Speaker  1:53:45  
and cameramen

Unknown Speaker  1:53:48  
be and they want perfection,

Unknown Speaker  1:53:52  
and Perfection isn't always commercially viable

Unknown Speaker  1:53:58  
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?

Unknown Speaker  1:54:12  
I mentioned it to the family, or whoever I've been with. Oh, great picture. I didn't see anything, didn't see

Unknown Speaker  1:54:19  
anything. But you've seen everything. Every

Unknown Speaker  1:54:24  
single the public thought everything was technical. Yeah, all the rubbish was technical. 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 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,

Unknown Speaker  1:54:55  
he'd be in one of the theaters in in

Unknown Speaker  1:54:59  
the West.

Unknown Speaker  1:55:00  
Then line up the lights, read them out,

Unknown Speaker  1:55:04  
get them balanced. Jim Gary, Jim gorrio, what was the other guy? The gallon King Alan. King. Alan king before? Jim, yes, yes, oh, yeah.

Unknown Speaker  1:55:15  
And they're very popular. I know that when you were talking earlier, were you about

Unknown Speaker  1:55:23  
techno armor

Unknown Speaker  1:55:26  
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 color 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 movie tone frame is out. Now, we want wide screen. We want all these fancy formats. Now,

Unknown Speaker  1:56:15  
if you consider that, even then you were probably had to an aperture cost you a couple of 100 quid to make.

Unknown Speaker  1:56:24  
You know, even then and now, they cost a lot more

Unknown Speaker  1:56:29  
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

Unknown Speaker  1:56:39  
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,

Unknown Speaker  1:56:55  
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,

Unknown Speaker  1:57:07  
what's this fish called wonder. 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 Milne, 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? A print of Lawrence of Arabia cost the price of a three bedroom semi, a three bedroom detect. That's it, yeah. I mean, yeah. And that was an industry that was on its backside

Unknown Speaker  1:57:54  
because of the competition of television. It was, it was busy being and

Unknown Speaker  1:58:01  
everything had to be done in a rush. You remember,

Unknown Speaker  1:58:04  
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 eastern 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

Unknown Speaker  1:58:40  
that was, it was, it was a nightmare

Unknown Speaker  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

Unknown Speaker  1:58:53  
overnight, sort of this, 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.

Unknown Speaker  1:59:06  
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 72,000 splice, weren't you, you were getting a regular positive splice. Negative. Wanted a 35,000 splice,

Unknown Speaker  1:59:27  
and

Unknown Speaker  1:59:28  
getting that width flat,

Unknown Speaker  1:59:34  
it's all right. You can grind it flat. You can lap it flat, but once you start to clamp it on. And

Unknown Speaker  1:59:42  
then, yes, then we had to de Gauss everything

Unknown Speaker  1:59:45  
because of the the magnetic stripes.

Unknown Speaker  1:59:50  
We had to build printers from scratch,

Unknown Speaker  1:59:55  
and they were a nightmare

Unknown Speaker  1:59:58  
not to scratch.

Unknown Speaker  2:00:00  
And we ended up with little jets of air.

Unknown Speaker  2:00:05  
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

Unknown Speaker  2:00:26  
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

Unknown Speaker  2:00:44  
a bad thing to quote, although I think they were ridiculous. Thanks.

Unknown Speaker  2:00:50  
A lot of money.

Unknown Speaker  2:00:52  
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 now, oh yes, if it was misprinted, you couldn't

Unknown Speaker  2:01:05  
reclaim color raw stock. 3070 mill was was fabulously expensive.

Unknown Speaker  2:01:12  
You know, it was, it was, it was talked like they were the packing Kate, 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 Wheeler

Unknown Speaker  2:01:49  
on one year, the year of Lawrence of Arabia,

Unknown Speaker  2:01:54  
Technicolor could easily have gone bankrupt if it hadn't been for Lawrence of Arabia

Unknown Speaker  2:02:01  
all put out on my machine. Yes, one, one, somebody move developer, Eastman, developer. And we took all that, all that stuff

Unknown Speaker  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,

Unknown Speaker  2:02:19  
I can't remember the numbers, and I know that.

Unknown Speaker  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

Unknown Speaker  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, we used to have a mass meeting for you see, denim were very much anti Technicolor. Now, mainly because, I suppose when it's true, you've got to face it, it was true, and I understand why,

Unknown Speaker  2:03:14  
because of the monopoly, the number of people who could represent Technicolor 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

Unknown Speaker  2:03:51  
didn't like us.

Unknown Speaker  2:03:54  
They wouldn't have an elf near the place. That's true in it

Unknown Speaker  2:03:58  
never went there with

Unknown Speaker  2:04:02  
Monica

Unknown Speaker  2:04:06  
packing up Monica's 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 the color 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

Unknown Speaker  2:04:44  
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 him. And we tried very hard. We sort of preached that. Sort of was on a connotation base issue, wasn't it? It was it was, it was difficult not to be, not.

Unknown Speaker  2:05:00  
Be as bitty 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

Unknown Speaker  2:05:14  
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,

Unknown Speaker  2:05:29  
showing everything they'd got

Unknown Speaker  2:05:33  
which which really is

Unknown Speaker  2:05:38  
great distraction.

Unknown Speaker  2:05:40  
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. Now, the problem with denim was that the night staff and the did they staff at

Unknown Speaker  2:06:15  
one period, they had a sort of night night steward, and

Unknown Speaker  2:06:19  
that made laugh a bit difficult. They didn't agree with one another.

Unknown Speaker  2:06:25  
You know, they both turn up at a laboratory committee meeting and take opposing views.

Unknown Speaker  2:06:33  
This was very, very difficult, really, now, but it happened. 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 traveling 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 organizer only came when invited at Technicolor,

Unknown Speaker  2:07:11  
because,

Unknown Speaker  2:07:13  
well, we did. We had the problem often enough that

Unknown Speaker  2:07:18  
the organizer for the lab committee

Unknown Speaker  2:07:22  
wasn't always of the caliber of the amateur officers. Is that fair comment?

Unknown Speaker  2:07:30  
We did very well when we when we had Brian. We had Brian was very close, yes, the other, the other organizer, we had Middleton.

Unknown Speaker  2:07:40  
Oh, he was a dead loss. He didn't know anything about anything. Did he? Bessie Bond was very, very good

Unknown Speaker  2:07:46  
at doing all the males and they really wasn't she. Bessie Bond was superb. Administratively, everything was to hand at every meeting you went to. It was It was organized.

Unknown Speaker  2:08:01  
She was a brilliant negotiator, you know, and we found that unless we were going to call him Bert Crake or or George Elvin, that we would probably screw more out of our management at Technicolor than they would, you know, done on anybody they care to send, but the different kettle of fish, who Burt Crake, he came from the labs, and he was a

Unknown Speaker  2:08:29  
little air about him, which, in some ways, I thought was better than Georges Craig. 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. All he wanted to do was to improve your lot as a trade union. He was a lovely fellow, a lovely fella. I think the, I think perhaps the greatest thing I remember about Craig, he was one of the best optical printers there was in the business. Yeah, he gave it up.

Unknown Speaker  2:09:01  
Yeah, about eight quid a week left. I tell you another thing you see now, he never wanted to be general secretary, but when George

Unknown Speaker  2:09:11  
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.

Unknown Speaker  2:09:24  
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, nothing with too much trouble. No,

Unknown Speaker  2:09:42  
he was a lad, man. He knew our problems. He knew what hell it was to work in the

Unknown Speaker  2:09:48  
dark. Is an optical printer 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?

Unknown Speaker  2:09:59  
You see.

Unknown Speaker  2:10:00  
There's editors who do and there's the loaders that do.

Unknown Speaker  2:10:07  
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

Unknown Speaker  2:10:36  
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 get involved in fist staff? Work?

Unknown Speaker  2:10:59  
Five acts. Fist staff.

Unknown Speaker  2:11:03  
Federation, the International Federation, fista, no, 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. 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 fish staff. Was the international organization. Oh, yeah, that's the one who kept paying for you to go to East Germany. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker  2:11:41  
allies. Night

Unknown Speaker  2:11:44  
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

Unknown Speaker  2:12:01  
I was going to Cuba pun, what about the court case that you Oh, yes, well, I can't remember when that there were two court cases. I said, I don't know whether they were the 50s or the 60s, the bolting brothers one,

Unknown Speaker  2:12:15  
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 bolting QC was the nephew of the then Chancellor,

Unknown Speaker  2:12:36  
before halsham, Before Gardner.

Unknown Speaker  2:12:40  
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 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, I'm going to turn over because I.

 

Speaker 1  0:01  
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 Erwin knew Gerald Gardner, and so did our solicitors of the time. No, it was before Thompson's stellar brass. Yes, Pollard,

Speaker 2  1:26  
Stella bras and George Martin. That's it. And useless. Pollard was,

Speaker 1  1:32  
he was a very nice old cop, but as you say, Stella brass 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, clerk 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 Crake would take the stand and I would take the stand. How we arrived at that I don't know why I had that honor. 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 blubber in 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 bolting 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 the 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 QCS had a lot to say, and Gerald Gardner particularly had a lot because. Wings 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 Joel gardeners Clark. And I remember him saying, course, you will remember Millard when we were at Winchester, because Millard 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 clothes shop, aren't we? Millard, 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 lad, 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 bolting 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 mills.

Unknown Speaker  6:33  
They were terrible. So

Speaker 1  6:34  
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,

Speaker 2  7:11  
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 Elvis 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

Speaker 1  7:39  
summons, each one of us, every member of the executive,

Speaker 2  7:43  
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 Alvin, she 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 labels 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 Powell 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 end. 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,

Speaker 1  9:30  
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 a CT films. Would you like to enlarge on that?

Speaker 1  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 exact serving on the executive at that time, something to do with us transferring money, as far as I remember, from the general fund to a CT 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 war 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 only 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 early 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 sold the studios difficulties with their managements. They didn't ever seem to sell 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 union, 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 of 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 ICT 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 endeavors, 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 of 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 Stella brass. 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 ICT films, which was only really to employ unemployed technicians,

Speaker 1  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 bail, 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

Alan Lawson  22:12  
long enough. 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?

Speaker 1  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 bunk. 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 bleuresters 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 technical again, a shot. But this is a black and white we're making. I said, Well, don't be damn silly. Technicolor can produce black and white as good or better than anybody. And Sid was the producer of the kitchen, which came to Technicolor, yes,

Alan Lawson  24:14  
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 Sea and on the negotiating committee, you know what? What are the highlights of those you know?

Speaker 1  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.

Speaker 3  24:48  
Yes, I probably said all you say that, yeah, yeah. So,

Speaker 1  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 pop run call 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 Technicolor, 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 Crake and George Elvin came to Technicolor for some reason or other, which I wouldn't know. Then, probably it was a negotiating commit meeting with the governor or something, but I don't know. So I got chatting to Bert Craig, 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 source. 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 Technicolor. 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 Technicolor on the negotiating committee in town. You're to meet this man Middleton on Hays 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 Technicolor 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. Topping

Alan Lawson  29:47  
you were saying, do you, I'm wondering if the hiccup on your membership was anything to do with the fact that you perhaps should have been a EU was that it,

Speaker 1  29:58  
oh, no. Yeah, we had some au 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 Technicolor 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,

Unknown Speaker  31:08  
no, no, it wasn't probation. No,

Speaker 3  31:10  
no, no, the one you're talking about now, no,

Speaker 1  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,

Speaker 1  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?

Unknown Speaker  31:37  
I know that was about 1948 I suppose. But

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

Speaker 1  31:45  
should think it was about 1949 I got on to the General Counsel. 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 realize, 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

Unknown Speaker  32:30  
vote for you, yeah,

Speaker 1  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

Speaker 1  33:20  
persuasion position, 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 recognized from listening to a local labor 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.

Speaker 1  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 talked 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 Counsel and executive.

Unknown Speaker  35:51  
When did you go on to the executive

Speaker 1  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 Technicolor, 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.

Speaker 1  37:18  
Yes, I think you know, quite frankly, that's what's moving 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

Speaker 1  38:07  
yes, I was never involved in it, but the Technicolor organization as a whole, and I was told this by more than one person, for instance, who was working at Technicolor limited England, going to Hollywood, to the Technicolor 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 Bron for the night, all on expenses. Oh yeah, well, don't do that sort of thing here. But then I found that Technicolor 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 Technicolor, 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 German 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, petio Goon, 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 our technicals 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 Technicolor 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. Technicolor were offered case 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 denim 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, technical and 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 Technicolor 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.

Speaker 1  43:05  
Well, if I tell you that my second son is one of the print managers at Technicolor 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 technicolors 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 coward 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 Ask 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 center, I wouldn't even say it was a liberal. I think I told you before that his wife ran for as a labor candidate for stoke pogers, 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 Cobra process, and then joined calmness in Hollywood. Nothing

Unknown Speaker  45:21  
gonna stop you, right?

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

Speaker 1  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 Elli, 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 both were, of course, that you know that really shows you that managements don't deserve good, dedicated workers who will put in all the Ask 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.

Speaker 1  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 recognized that time and motion study are anathema to any trade union organization, 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. Go, 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 Technicolor 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 Technicolor 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 egg 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 color. Technicolor was the only people who could deal with them in the early 50s, you know. So, so they the net 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 egg cutter. I ought to better come a leg cutter. In a year, you won't even become an assembler. In a year, if you're an egg 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?

Speaker 1  56:27  
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 Crake or a George Alfred, 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

Speaker 1  57:57  
and became professionals. Very professional. Wasn't saying that he was very professional. George, of course, was, was

Speaker 1  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 Organized Individual, beautifully organized. 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 remains so sharp. I'll never know. It was fantastic. He'd got hollow legs, hadn't he,

Speaker 1  59:47  
anyway, but they were great Bessie. Bessie was very good at organizing laboratories because the laboratories were in many ways easy to organize anyway. Okay, their wage rates were set down. They were responsive to industrial action, which both she, when she was laboratory organizer, 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 organizer 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. You

Alan Lawson  1:01:44  
see, I think the the lame put it, I think, is if you like one of the strengths of or it was one of the strengths of

Speaker 1  1:01:51  
Act, 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 shock 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. Can

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

Speaker 1  1:03:10  
yes, certainly at Technicolor, 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 technical but he he manipulated. He manipulated the committee at Technicolor 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 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 parts 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, Technicolor, Technicolor, 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 Ray sharp, 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 a 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 next 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 egg 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

Speaker 3  1:07:48  
cave chin was one? Hascom has come, Haskin, the still man, yes,

Speaker 1  1:07:55  
hascomm and on the left, you'd got Ralph bond, super co 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 staring, 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 act?

Speaker 1  1:09:15  
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 court. 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? Well, yes,

Speaker 1  1:14:24  
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.

Speaker 1  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 halsham 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 halsham 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. Let's hope,

Alan Lawson  1:19:10  
from the point of view of satisfaction, what's been your greatest satisfaction? Oh, I think,

Speaker 1  1:19:19  
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 counsel 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

Unknown Speaker  1:20:40  
burner. Oh, yes, to incorporate it. Yeah, I wanted

Speaker 1  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,

Unknown Speaker  1:21:28  
personal life as well, well,

Unknown Speaker  1:21:30  
well, professionally,

Speaker 1  1:21:35  
I could have stayed in the army. This I remember the CEO coming to me when I was about to 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 Getty X, 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 DVD, come out, you know, so I came out. So to some extent I regret that.

Unknown Speaker  1:23:19  
Would the army life have suited you to think,

Speaker 1  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 ein housing 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?

Speaker 1  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,

Speaker 1  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 in red, yes, yes.

Speaker 1  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.

Unknown Speaker  1:27:28  
Well, that's, that's worth something. Yeah, that is worth something.

Speaker 1  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 Technicolor. Oh, yeah, I never realized this before there was always

Speaker 1  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 color on. Now, those track printers, which were built at Technicolor, were of a fantastically high quality. They were a Model D Bell. How? 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 sell side emulsion. Delight, yes. Then you put a piece of clear, absolutely clear, clean leader up, cell to cell, attention 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 emotion to emotion, 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.

Unknown Speaker  1:32:01  
I'm going to stop here again.

Alan Lawson  1:32:12  
Len Ron calls side six

Speaker 1  1:32:17  
now you asked me if I had any really big disappointments. Well, when Technicolor had their their big reduction, 1978 we went from three strip to color pass, and we put in, we put in a Technicolor designed color pause machine designed to do 330 feet a minute, release. And the tall room was sacked. About half a maintenance department was sacked. But they retained the tour 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 Technicolor were building lots of optical printers at Technicolor, 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 during 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 with 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 burners 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 gunning 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.

Speaker 1  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  1:36:59  
What? What would you like to be remembered for as far as act is concerned.

Speaker 1  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.

Speaker 1  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 Counsel 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 labor 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 counsel 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 Crom 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 shutter 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 act well, t1

Speaker 1  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, pull this 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 Counsel 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 right 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 Counsel, I'm talking myself into the ground about this. And eventually, eventually they agreed that there was a case. Well, Sidney Cowell, 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 recognize 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,

Unknown Speaker  1:44:00  
I'm glad I

Unknown Speaker  1:44:02  
remembered it. Now,

Unknown Speaker  1:44:06  
was there anything else you wanted to say?

Speaker 1  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 recognized 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. Color printers for the Model C behall, I put it to him that that I should 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 quad rank 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 Technicolor use now I built, personally on

Alan Lawson  1:46:41  
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.

Speaker 1  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 towel 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 towel 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?

Speaker 3  1:48:25  
So you really went back to being a proper went back to being a proper engineer.

Speaker 1  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

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

Speaker 1  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, John. 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 hull 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 chapter 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 tap we 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 Runkle 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 gage 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 uncle would insist on having an un Doctor Tom Cat who felt that the schwarf under the lathe was the proper place for him to do it all.

Unknown Speaker  1:56:05  
Yes, it did smell. Yes, oh god, yeah.

Speaker 1  1:56:08  
And it had never been cleared out all the water Leslie and I cleared underneath all the benches and all that, sacked up all the swarf and put it out for the Desmond 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 triples, yes, yes.

Unknown Speaker  1:56:55  
Very nice. Tripos. Anyway,

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

Unknown Speaker  1:57:03  
seen him. Haven't seen him.

Speaker 1  1:57:07  
I saw a piece of documentary film about newsreels, I think, a few weeks ago, and I thought that was a run called 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

Speaker 1  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 Vinton. Was it a Vint? It was a Vinton? Yes, it was the original. It was the original one. Put him by the It had

Speaker 1  1:58:08  
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 Chateau mounting. Yeah, and I remember that that that new Mitchell that came out just after the wall with the spring loaded gate to which, which everybody cried about. Only saw one. We had one. We didn't

Speaker 3  1:58:49  
have it. We didn't have one. We had, I think we had that. We

Unknown Speaker  1:58:54  
had the gates were

Unknown Speaker  1:58:57  
like the old Bell, how? Clapping in the way, yeah,

Unknown Speaker  1:58:59  
but, but it was, was

Unknown Speaker  1:59:01  
a peculiar

Unknown Speaker  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.

Speaker 1  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.

Speaker 3  1:59:54  
And then later we did have a Mitchell. Then later we had a never. Is,

Speaker 1  2:00:02  
yeah, I had two Everest at technical. Is that running? Yes, yes, yes, we had two. Everest there. Do you remember when technical 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 technical 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 chat 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,

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

Speaker 1  2:02:12  
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 way 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 technical 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 Technicolor

Speaker 3  2:04:11  
use monopack, yes the first time, yes, yeah, yeah,

Speaker 1  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 Technicolor 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, Color Developer for the for this Olympic Games,

Alan Lawson  2:04:58  
the economics of. Own business faster than they think.

Speaker 1  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.

Unknown Speaker  2:05:21  
After you'd bought all you wanted.

Unknown Speaker  2:05:26  
Oh, probably,

Speaker 1  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

Speaker 1  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.

Unknown Speaker  2:07:00  
Well, it's only a small amount.

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

Speaker 1  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.

Unknown Speaker  2:07:30  
Remind me where Endel Street,

Speaker 1  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 Camden street ended and another street started, and I can't remember its name now that that was, you went past good 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,

Unknown Speaker  2:08:13  
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 coward, I don't know a black and white television

Speaker 1  2:08:41  
set up because recording setup of some sort. Don't tell a recording, yeah. And then my cousin's husband, Harry lock, who was a stage manager at BBC, was presentation bloke at BBC, Ali Powell. He left there and went to

Unknown Speaker  2:09:08  
Rediffusion, yes, yes. And

Speaker 1  2:09:15  
he said, they're, they're looking, looking for a television engineer at Red effusion, and I rang up Jim and said, they're looking for blood like you. I think James at Red effusion, you interested.

Unknown Speaker  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,

Speaker 1  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?

Speaker 1  2:10:48  
No, I know. I say I've got two sons still at Technicolor. 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 in 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.

Unknown Speaker  2:11:21  
Anyway, then, thank you very much. Lovely. Thank.

 

Notes from audio interview by Phil Windeatt 15/12/17

Disk 1

TAPE ONE SIDE ONE

Born Wood Green 1922. Grammar school and matriculated. Went into insurance office for a few weeks. His Uncle Ernie “Pop” Runkel said “come in with me” to be an apprentice camera mechanic. Father clerk of the chapel in Fleet St at time of 1926 General Strike. Newspaper wholesalers. Outbreak of 2WW. Joined up early. Tank regiment at Catterick in 1940. Driver/mechanic and then fitter. Wireless and gunnery courses. Applied for a commission. “Officers were thick” Went to Sandhurst military college. Played clarinet (Benny Goodman fan) and got an MU ticket. Played jazz professionally. “Had a good war”. After war back to ED Runkel & Sons Cinematographic Engineers. 1944 severely wounded at Anzio. 15 mths in Queen Marys, Roehampton. Lieutenant by then.

Maintenance of cameras – from Movietone and GB newsreels dried up. Work for BBC newsreel – fixed Mitchell cameras. Studios bought new equipment so Uncle went into manufacture. A lightweight tripod for lightweight 35mm and 16mm cameras. “Made the base for the friction head”.

TAPE ONE SIDE TWO

Made editing equipment, a counter… synchronisation”. Made a stack of studio shutters…”. Stayed until Dec 1947. Industry was booming but little work, practically out of business… more or less out of work, the old man very ill, “cant afford to pay you…” Saw ad for Maintenance Engineer at Technicolor. 2 and 7 halfpenny an hour for a 45 hr week. Not a union member but wanted to be one. “Bert Craik and George Elvin came down and I told them I wanted to join and also the Labour Party. 8 mths before I joined! Lab workers were second-class citizens, short of money, short of staff…”

Full-time union officials should get the same wage as those on the job. 1948 became a shop steward.

Long and detailed explanation of a pinbelt by Alf Cooper.

Exacting standard – built 22 optical printer. But Dry Maintenance set them up “ a piece of film is the governor”. Role of the toolroom and maintenance. Complications in cameras. “Problems were overcome through experience”.

Problems with the Americans – Formerly independent Technicolor was taken over again in 1960’s. Elvin told Len to attend the Negotiating Committee in London 1948 or 9.

TAPE TWO SIDE ONE

Disk 1- 1:29:43

Alf says “Some of the employers we respected, Elvin had respect…” “You could wine and dine George but you couldn’t buy him…”

Len – “in the main easier negotiating in town than locally… I didn’t like Hendersons or Humphries… we were grossly underpaid”.

1:33:10

Alf – “sick and tired of the wages we were getting … I tell you I used to look at all these flash names of cameraman, the way they were treated and they got credits and everything else God Dammit, the guys in the labs saved everyone as big as they were at the time… yet the labs always got the blame for everything…”

“Labs always seemed subservient. Just because we were not credited doesn’t mean we didn’t contribute anything…”

Len “.., the labs undervalued themselves…more industrially-based then any others… we were working in film factories…”

Alf disagrees with film factory “you can’t turn film out like sausages…”

Len “…treated us and paid us as factory hands”.

Alan Lawson “tucked away in the dark…”

Len “Elvin told him “profits are undistributed wages … still true that the producer doesn’t get his share of the cake. 94% of wealth is owned by 6%... not a democracy…”

Strike threat opening day of ITV. Agreement reached at 4pm. TV people “got outlandish pay compared to Labs. Same at Visnews “3 days on, 3days off”. Alf compares wages there with wages at Technicolor. “robbed me ever since”.

01:48:56:13

Len “What changed Technicolor was the lock-out. Sent scabs to Coventry, Lasted for months and upset them. “We were v.angry” (Alf).

Technicolor went into the doldrums… Rank got into colour quicker. Technicolor had a poor attitude to its customers, they went to competitors. Decline in quality. Competition of television “suicidal”. 65mm and 70mm made money for the labs but cost the labs a lot.

Amateur union officers at Technicolor better than full-timers who on an invite-basis only. “We could screw more out of management… (Len)”. Praise for Bert Craik who was from the labs “a lovely fella”. Alf “he knew what it is was like to work in the ”. Bert Craik “one of the best optical printers in the business” – the other person speaking not AC or LR; or the other person.

02:10:57:22

Len “Most people in our industry don’t have a piece of film in their hand … no idea of the stress a piece of negative causes when it comes into the lab, its more importance than life itself…”

Discussion of two legal cases brought against the union.

TAPE TWO SIDE TWO

Legal case one – a Producer left a crew abandoned in Spain. Producer’s union ticket was withdrawn. He took union to court but lost case.

Boulting Brothers had lost their union tickets because they allowed their dues to lapse. They withdrew their legal case.

Discussion about “a fat little slug in the sound dept” (Ernie Cousins). Leaked union details. He libelled Alf Cooper accusing him of stealing union funds, Cousins was manipulated by Charlie Wheeler (Chair of sound committee). The allegation connected to ACT Films – Heavily in debt changed its title to Soho Films and was bought by a company as a tax loss. ACT Films then re-started without debt. Couldn’t get a distributor for ACT Films – exhibitors hostile to a trade union making films. ACT Films primarily a vehicle for unemployed technicians.

Len – was a member of Council, EC, Neg Committee. Refers to father. Only left-winger in Pop’s workshop but was paid the toolmakers rate of £6 pw after the 2WW. Went to Dry Maintenance at Technicolor, Went to Alf Cooper. Got a form after 3 mths of badgering. 8 mths to get a ticket. Outspoken so became shop steward for Dry Maintenance. When Alf lost his place on the committee joined national negotiating committee around 1948. 1949 General Council. Had to make speeches at annual conference but nervous about public speaking. On EC.

00:40:59:09

John Allen, accountant and MD of Technicolor took Len and Alf Cooper to a club in Jermyn Street. Red carpet was rolled out, bottle of everything. Paddy O’Gorman was present. Allen offered one of the topless dancers “Do you want her?”

Other labs – Kays and Humphries did the same

“Printing film was a license to print money… nightshift on treble time, the whole plant shows there’s money about. We never did as well by our members at local or national level with hindsight. Could have paid printer developers more… labs always poorly off”.

TAPE THREE SIDE ONE

Len - In early 1950’s spent took much time talking about differentials in a department. Percentages should have been set. Didn’t know what foremen and supervisors were getting. Some weren’t doing well. “Shows you management don’t deserve committed staff members”.

Job evaluation – time and study anathema to trade unionists. How do you set a rate for a job? Discuss and assess scientifically. A good thing for LR. Go through the whole plant. No-one will have their rate cut. Started with Optical Printing Dept. 8% rise from job evaluation. Ray Sharpe Communist Party member made a fuss on the Executive and it was stopped. Done properly and openly and agreeing, much more sensible way…”

Highlights of career? Getting onto the Executive and Labs Negotiating Committee. ACTT largely dependent on its lay members. Discussion of union full-timers Elvin and Bessie Bond (labs organiser). Role of the professional trade unionist. Craik had worked in the Labs then become a union official. Local autonomy criticised. Criticism of Sharpe (on branch committee) and strike of neg developers at Technicolor. Bad time to strike. Alf Cooper opposed the calling of a strike. No work at the lab (date?).

1953 - Vacancy for Foreman. Wouldn’t make me up (I was the convenor). Chose someone unsuitable. “It cost me and my family”. “Too soft to be a convenor”. Became Foreman. Became Production Engineer.

Involved in solutions, dyes, hot film, wet film.. work your way through those bloody machines until you get it right… not so sure about taking the job on I wasn’t sure… was glad I had… went back to run Dry Maintenance, clean, quiet, with a job to do…”

Feelings of despair? Greatest moment of let down in trade union terms was in the 60’s, 18 yrs of trying to get a 40 hr week, endless struggle. Eventually got it, absolutely tremendous. At conference someone stood up and said when do we get a 35 hr week? It was the straw that broke the camel’s back… I can’t face it again… so frustrating… attacks now on closed shops and trade unionists”.

Greatest satisfaction? “signed agreements, got them through the members… explaining at mass meetings…”

What would have changed looking back? Could have stayed in the Army. CO offered a 7 and 5. Bring your family out to Germany. £24 pw. “a fortune then”. Living like a gentleman. To some extent I regret that. Beautiful home and servants. Horse and groom. Own office. Got on fine, all tank men, had been through the War with them. His uncle pressured him to leave.

Morton Lewis offered him a job – regretted I didn’t. Wanted a Contracts Negotiator but I said no. Has 3 young children and my job was damn too easy. The spectre of the 30’s, keep a steady job. Didn’t make enough of my assets.

Fantastic standards at Technicolor.

TAPE THREE SIDE TWO

01:32:10:00

Big disappointment? Technicolor big reduction in 1978. Switched from 3 Strip to colour pos. Toolroom sacked. Half of the maintenance dept sacked., Wet and Dry Maintenance amalgamated; retained toolroom supervisor and I was his assistant. Disappointment.

Building lots of optical printers in the tool dept in the 1950 and 60s

Like to be remembered for? “One highlight at annual conference in 1953. General Council asked me to move a resolution on house property prices, jacking up of the cost of living by the Tory government. Pleased about that, heckled by a Tory … and I shut up her up a treat.”

Engineers not treated well, bottom of the heap. Very badly dealt with. Never argued my own case v.well. Engineer does 5 years, then 2 to 3 years as a film man, but gets less than others less qualified. Mid-1950’s – I went on and on about plight of engineers. Eventually Syd Cole agreed with me. New grade:

Cinematograph Engineers and Super Cinematograph Engineers was down to me.

01:38:04:02

Winifred Crumb-Ewing a Tory in ACTT in the 1970s [director, script]

Campaigns for engineers in ACTT in the 1950s; better rates; to be called cinematograph engineer

Personally making machines account of a wet printer machine which took 18 mths. “Interesting entertaining life, I wouldn’t have missed the film business for the world, I love it. I wouldn’t want to have been an engineer doing anything else… no way”. Something special about film machinery. “Ive enjoyed this, recollections Alan, yes”. Long description of the Technicolor process.

Biographical

Born Wood Green 1922. Grammar school and matriculated. Went into insurance office for a few weeks. His Uncle Ernie “Pop” Runkel said “come in with me” to be an apprentice camera mechanic. Father clerk of the chapel in Fleet St at time of 1926 General Strike. Newspaper wholesalers. Outbreak of 2WW. Joined up early. Tank regiment at Catterick in 1940. Driver/mechanic and then fitter. Wireless and gunnery courses. Applied for a commission. “Officers were thick” Went to Sandhurst military college. Played clarinet (Benny Goodman fan) and got an MU ticket. Played jazz professionally. “Had a good war”. After war back to ED Runkel & Sons Cinematographic Engineers. 1944 severely wounded at Anzio. 15 mths in Queen Marys, Roehampton. Lieutenant by then.

 

Maintenance of cameras – from Movietone and GB newsreels dried up. Work for BBC newsreel – fixed Mitchell cameras. Studios bought new equipment so Uncle went into manufacture. A lightweight tripod for lightweight 35mm and 16mm cameras. “Made the base for the friction head”.