The top prize of a house or £30,000 (which would buy an extremely nice place in those days) was won by a Croydon housewife and I went to see her with a giant dummy cheque and a photographer to record her surprise and delight when she opened her front door and got the good news. But I might as well have told her she’d won a bag of jelly babies for all the emotion she showed.
‘Will you tell me who you bought your winning bottle of Lifeguard Disinfectant from?’
‘Why?’
‘Because, great news, whoever sold it to you has won a superb Ford Popular car!’
‘Well, it was the chap down the road and if I’d known I was going to win I wouldn’t have bought it there because I don’t like him.’
Charming!
Tom Peters got a message one day to go and see the boss, Bill Lloyd. A few minutes later he was out the door – fired – and was last seen walking down Buckingham Avenue. I wasn’t very far behind him, but not for the same reason. McCann Erickson, the world’s largest advertising agency, had made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Apart from my work with Aspro, I was now some eight years into my broadcasting career and becoming well known for my motor sport activities. Peter Laufer, then boss of McCanns, reckoned I would fit in well on an automotive account and doubled my salary to £2000 a year.
Aspro had got me up to speed in the proprietaries business – selling to chemists, newsagents, filling stations and every other conceivable type of outlet – but now I was back in the motor world in which I had started with Dunlop, but this time trying to generate demand for motor oil, a product with as little interest for motorists as tyres. McCann handled the mighty Standard Oil business worldwide, with Esso Extra petrol being the lead product. This alone made a lot of the agency’s money and Jack Taylor and I, the account executives, would stagger down to Bernard Allen, the Esso Advertising Manager, with not one but 15 campaign approaches in the hope that one of them would ring the bell. ‘Why don’t you show me the one at the bottom?’ he would say. ‘That’s the one you want to sell me, isn’t it?’
This was before the days of motorist incentives at filling stations and catchy, memorable advertising was the name of the day. For petrol the ‘Esso sign means happy motoring’ television commercials, with their singing cartoon petrol pump globes and bouncy jingle, worked a treat but Esso Extra Motor Oil was something else. Oil, like tyres, is a necessary evil. No one says, ‘Hey, come and see the stunning new Dunlop tyres on my car,’ or ‘Wow, I feel like a million dollars now my car’s filled with Esso Extra Motor Oil.’ Or if they do, they need their brain testing. It was hard going.
It was at this time that things came to a head with a girl named Paddy Shaw. I was now 34 years old and still not married. I was certainly interested in girls and I’d had my share over the years, in the army at home and abroad, at Dunlop and at Aspro, but it has to be someone very special indeed if you are to spend the rest of your life with her and it just hadn’t happened. Except, maybe, with Paddy.
I often wonder if my parents, and especially my mother, had more of an influence on my life than other people’s do. I was certainly very close to and affected by my mother and father and what they thought. When my father had been a member of the Norton racing team in the 1920s one of his team-mates was a genial Ulsterman named Jimmy Shaw and they formed a very close friendship, as did my mother and Jimmy’s wife Ethel. The Shaws ran a garage and motor business in Upper Queen Street, Belfast, were the Ulster distributors for Triumph and Lea Francis Cars (for whom Jim used to race) and made a lot of money. Jimmy got the customers: Ethel did the rest. They had a son, Wesley, and five daughters, Maureen, Joan, Paddy, Fay and Barbara. My parents and I used to go and stay with them, and they with us, and as I grew up I progressively fell for first Maureen, who married an American army Captain and went there to live, and then Joan, who married Terry Bulloch, a BOAC Captain. So then it was Paddy and this time I felt it was for real – so much so that when Jimmy and Ethel sold the business and the whole family went to live in the States I felt I had to pursue Paddy there and resolve things.
This happened between my leaving Aspro and joining McCann. Paddy was working at Yellowstone National Park and when the snows came and the park closed down for the winter I flew to Billings, Montana, to drive with her to her winter apartment in La Jolla, California. It was a four-week trip in a Chevrolet Bel Air, by way of Yellowstone’s Grand Canyon and its world-famous geyser ‘Old Faithful’, the wonderful sights of Salt Lake City, across the Utah Salt Flats to Virginia City and its extinct silver mines to Reno, over the Sierra Nevada to Lake Tahoe (just a few log cabins there in those days), across the Oakland Bay Bridge to San Francisco and on to Monterey and La Jolla, which, like Lake Tahoe, was totally undeveloped and an idyllic spot. It was a great trip and long enough for me to find out that it wasn’t going to work out between Paddy and I and that it was better to return to Europe and start my new job.
With all the wisdom of hindsight I truly think that a lot of my feelings for Paddy were brought about by huge unspoken pressure from the Shaw family and my parents who felt that their long-standing friendship should, naturally, result in a marriage between one of the girls and myself. There were regrets at the time, of course, but I was later to find in Elizabeth a woman I fell for with no reservations and now, after more than 40 very happy married years together, I know it was all for the best.
I was at McCanns for two years but I have to say that it made very little impression on me. The people were fine and so was the client. The broadcasting was going well and I was still living at home with my parents, contented and seeing no reason why I should do anything else but I felt once again, as I had at Aspro, that I had to move on. Part of the problem was that there seemed to be no connection between the advertising work I was doing and the sales of the product. I had kept in touch with all the friends I had made at Masius, which, as an agency, was booming, and on impulse I phoned Jack Wynne-Williams. He invited me over to come and talk and, sitting in his cosy office overlooking St James’s Square, we did the deal that was to take me to the end of my business life.
CHAPTER FOUR Starting at Masius
The move to Masius wasn’t easy. Aspro and Esso had been as different as chalk and cheese and now things were as different again with my new clients at Masius – the Mars Confectionery and Petfoods companies. These were wholly owned by Forrest Mars, an American with a complex personality and an unusual business philosophy. Forrest didn’t think or act like other people; he was a one-off maverick and even his own father, Frank Mars, who owned a hugely successful confectionery business in America, found him too much to stomach. Legend has it that he gave his son $30,000 (a massive amount of money in those days) plus the rights to use the recipe for Mars Bars (named after the owner, not the planet) anywhere outside America, and told him to ‘germinate your arse to the other side of the Atlantic.’ Forrest set up shop in Slough in 1932 and started his business with the Mars Bar which is still, of course, very much one of Britain’s leading brands.
In those tough early days Mike Masius would go down to Slough every Saturday for Mr Mars to tell him how much money he could have for advertising the next week. ‘Mars are marvellous!’ was the rather plonking claim but great things start small and under Forrest’s distinctive and forceful leadership the business became one of the