I rode a 350cc KTT Velocette at the fabulous Cadwell Park and I did a lot of trials on the Norton. I even had a smattering of success, including a Gold Medal and Club Team Prize in the 1949 International Six Days Trial at Llandrindod Wells, a First Class award in the gruelling Scottish Six Days’ Trial and a one-off appearance in the Southern Experts Trial. But then came the thing that changed my life – that invitation to do the PA commentary at Shelsley Walsh, which started my broadcasting career and stopped my competitive riding.
I might have become a lot better had I persevered and practised more but I doubt it. It didn’t matter enough to me. I couldn’t ride well enough to satisfy myself and talking about it appealed a lot more once I had started. I didn’t stop riding competitively through lack of time – it’s easy to make time for the things you want to do. The brutal truth is that I wasn’t good enough to motivate myself to concentrate on it and hopefully progress onwards and upwards to my father’s level.
From then on I led a double life which became increasingly demanding as the years rolled by. My business life occupied the weekdays and very often the weekends, while my broadcasting hobby absorbed every other waking moment. Heady stuff you might think, but it wasn’t really, for although I had been promoted to Dunlop’s HQ at St James’s Street in London and was now hobnobbing with the directors and the divisional top bananas, the Dunlop job itself was too boring for words. I was responsible to the PR mastermind, an irascible Scot named John McColl who was a very nice chap but totally incapable of delegating. I had a very impressive office and a charming secretary but damn all to do so it wasn’t long before I was agitating for action elsewhere.
‘How about joining the Allied Group Advertising Department?’ said its boss, Stuart Janes, who was in the same building. Done! The Allied Group comprised everything except tyres and I became Advertising Manager for Dunlopillo Foam Cushioning, the General Rubber Goods Division and the Special Products Division. Much better, for now I had something involving and interesting to do, like supervising all the Company’s publicity for its Dunlopillo installations at the rebuilt House of Commons (I have sat in the Speaker’s chair!) and the 1951 Festival of Britain. In the days when a trip by train to Liverpool took 4.5 hours, the job entailed regular visits to the Dunlopillo factory at Speke as well as Manchester, Birmingham and other major cities in Britain. I loved it but, not before time, I realized that if I was going to make any money and achieve anything worthwhile I ought to be stirring myself to find a job with better long-term prospects. I had been with Dunlop for some seven years by then and I had itchy feet.
My friend Terry Thompson, formerly a colleague at Dunlop, was working as a copywriter at the aspiring London advertising agency Masius and Fergusson. ‘You can write,’ he said, ‘so why don’t I get you a job interview here?’ And he did, but to my surprise when I landed the job it was not with Masius but with Aspro, the headache pill company at Slough. Aspro were looking for a copywriter for their own creative department and had asked their three advertising agencies to help them find the right man. Masius had some minor Aspro Group products but not the lucrative analgesic business so were always looking for an opportunity to promote themselves, and their boss, Jack Wynne-Williams, reckoned that I could be the right man.
I resolved to give it a go, although it was going to be a totally different atmosphere than that which I’d been used to at Dunlop. Creating the demand for and selling, by the million, a fast-moving, low-cost product that called for aggressive and hard-hitting advertising – it seemed another world from those expensive mattresses, rubber buckets, conveyor belting and universal joints. But they offered me the job at £1000 a year. I’d made it!
The Aspro offices and factory in Buckingham Avenue on the Slough Trading Estate (next to the High Duty Alloys foundry, whose fine casting sand ruined my new Standard 10’s paintwork) could hardly have been a greater contrast to St James’s Street and not long after I had joined came a memorable meeting with Chairman John Jamieson that would lead to something even further removed.
One of the vast geographical areas I was responsible for was India, Pakistan and what was then Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. One day the Chairman called me in and said, ‘You’re responsible for India, Murray?’
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘Have you ever been there?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘How can you do the advertising if you’ve never been there?’
‘I don’t make the rules, Mr Jamieson. I just do the best I can.’
‘Well, you’d better go!’
‘Yes, Sir. When?’
‘Next week!’
Soon I was on the plane heading for some of the most memorable and stimulating weeks of my life.
Back in 1954, India to me meant lots of people, Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland in Lives of a Bengal Lancer, the British Raj, the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the Kama Sutra, great gallantry in World Wars One and Two … and curry. So I had a lot to learn. The 4700 miles to Bombay took over 30 hours on a lumbering BOAC propellor-driven Argonaut Speedbird with countless meals and stops at Rome, Beirut, Bahrain and Karachi. This was followed by more than 10,000 miles by train, plane and car criss-crossing India, Ceylon, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and West Pakistan (now Pakistan). I did it all at a leisurely pace and tried to do everything the Indian way: going to Indian films, eating Indian meals, reading books about India, especially John Masters’ riveting novels like Bhowani Junction and The Deceivers. I spent the majority of my time in the villages, because that was where the vast majority of India’s inhabitants lived and because Aspro was one of the few modern, all-purpose medicines they could afford. ‘Take Aspro for headaches, colds, flu, rheumatism and all your aches and pains. It is the wonder cure!’ we claimed – and it was true, for acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin), which is what Aspro was, is a vastly underrated product. (Sadly, it does not increase sexual power, which was what a lot of folks in India believed, although maybe if you believe it enough it actually does – I’ve never tried.)
All this was, perhaps, fairly ordinary stuff in today’s environment of effortless communications, jetplane travel and adventurous backpacking but for me, nearly 50 years ago, it was a fantastic trip that I wouldn’t have missed for all the tea in the plantations I saw. An incredible 14 weeks of different people with very different languages, different lifestyles, customs, beliefs and religions; different geography; different climate, and different food.
No sooner was I in my room in Bombay’s wonderful Taj Mahal Hotel than there was a knock at the door. Opening it I found four Indians of various descriptions all proffering bundles of documents which turned out to be testimonials endorsing their supreme competence as manservants. I’d been told I’d need one, so I chose one called John, who started immediately.
‘Would the Sahib like a bath?’
‘Yes, I would.’
So he ran one, elbow in the water to test the temperature. Most professional. Shortly after I had got in it he was kneeling beside me washing my back.
‘Just a minute, John. You do the bath. I’ll do the washing. OK?’
‘OK, Sahib,’ he said, looking rather crestfallen, but when I got out there he was again with an enormous towel, trying to dry me.
‘Oh, and another thing, John. I’ll do the drying too.’
It was when I went into the bedroom to find all my clothes unpacked and beautifully laid out and him wanting to powder my feet and help me put on my socks that I realized what he had been used to. If this was the way things were in the old days, I mused, they must have found it very hard going when they got back to England.
Bathed, dressed and powdered, I went to meet the Indian Account Director and the Aspro International Executive, Englishman Jimmy Turner, who was to accompany me on my tour with the local Director, moustachioed, white suited and swagger-stick-carrying Dickie Deeth