A BRIEF FACTUAL DESCRIPTION OF THE LIFE OF PHILIP ARUNDELL…

( to the best of his knowledge..!! )

1. THE BEGINNING.

>>>

>>> The main  reason for writing a short factual account of things that have happened to me during my life is that for the last 30 years or so I have been thinking and writing down some simple philosophical thoughts about the sorry state of our world today. These thoughts started to come out in 1988 and eventually were self published in 2005 in book form under the title “Phil The Fluter’s Game of Life”. Thereafter, further thoughts have come out in Essay form under the name ‘philosophicalmouse’.  Now, in 2017, we are up to Essay No.14 and I think I have just about said everything I wanted to say.

>> Obviously, if these writings of mine catch fire and hit the headlines and cause debate then people might want to know something about the man who wrote them. And if I am not around, then at least there will be some written record to refer to.

>> So that is a good enough reason. Otherwise, typing in itself and writing thoughts down on a bit of paper is a therapeutic exercise, especially for someone who likes doing things rather than reading things. So why not start.

>>>

>>> My mother wrote two or three pages simply giving a few facts as to her life and who her parents and grandparents were which are always interesting for the children. I am afraid this will be a bit longer.

>>

>>> My first memories in life.

>>

>>> The unforgettable euphoria in the Santo Thomas prisoner of war camp in Manila, Philippines, when an advanced force of General McArthur’s tanks broke through the camp gates and all the American soldiers handing out chocolates. That was circa 1945. I was about four years old and that was my first memory. The second was my mother taking me for a walk outside the camp gates where I found myself absolutely terrified by the size of the tyres on all the American military transport trucks.

>>> I have no other bad memories of life in the camp or of the Japanese in particular. I was told that the Japanese guards, just like most other parents on earth, loved the children and spoilt them. And although all the allied prisoners were mere skin and bone by the end of the ordeal, I believe, that because ours was a civilian prisoner of war camp, things were not so brutal as other military Japanese camps in the rest of Asia. Regardless, there must have been a lot of fear and stress and anger for all those incarcerated and no doubt some of that has affected me if only in the subconscious. My parents have never spoken ill of the Japanese and had no worries buying a Japanese car later in life.

>>> I myself have even profited from the fact of being a prisoner of war, despite only being a 0-4 years old internee. In the 1990’s a golfing friend of mine, Brian Codd, noticed, while reading his usual Daily Telegraph, that the British Government were handing out £10,000 to anyone who had suffered under the hands of The Emperor of The Sun, no doubt part of some war reparation deal with Japan, who by then were probably wealthier than the nation that defeated them.!

>>> I got the money and my friend, who was a self confessed wine snob, got 24 bottles of the best French Macon wine which I packed in a couple of old cardboard boxes that had previously contained Australian wine. It was a long time before he spoke to me.

>>> Another comic horror story of the war involved my godfather David Cassells-Brown, an English man of Scottish descent. He was the English honorary consul in Legaspi, a province well south of Manila. He had a dry sense of humour and this is his description of the Japanese invasion of the Philippines. ” Felipe, I woke up one morning and opened the bedroom curtains and saw the whole Japanese fleet staring at me..and they had the temerity to invade the country via my back garden..” yes, he could afford to joke now but how terrifying it must have been. He immediately started burning all official papers, was quickly apprehended and put up in front of a firing squad. It was only after screaming about the Geneva Convention that the officer in charge of the firing squad told them to lower their guns. My godfather was subsequently put in the local jail with a lot of other allied prisoners where he remained for three months or so until local Filipino guerrillas blew a hole in the jail wall. Apparently all escaped into the mountains apart from one poor American who was too fat to fit through the hole.

>>> My godfather remained on the run in the country side for a couple of years until it became too dangerous. He then gave himself up to the Santo Thomas prison camp and the first person he saw was my Dad sweeping the Camp gate yard.

>>> When the camp was liberated my Dad acted as a guide for the American forces. Manila had been practically raised to the ground (shouldn’t it be lowered to the ground.?!) so finding your way around would have been difficult, especially for the newly arrived soldiers. On patrol one day they passed the street where my parents had lived, and through the half broken down wall my Dad, who was a keen amateur painter, saw his favourite painting of a Norwegian fiord. He asked the GI corporal to stop the jeep to pick up his painting but he wasn’t believed….” come on Limey, you must be kidding.. “

>>> My father, who was a man of habit and carried just about everything bar the kitchen sink in his wallet, produced a photo of the very same painting. The painting involved was rescued from a cargo ship (I believe the SS Silver Cloud) which went aground in The Straits of Mindanao. The ship was part of The Silver Line, which was a Norwegian owned shipping company. The artist of the painting was a well known Norwegian artist named Adelsteene Norman. My Dad was a shipping agent in Manila that represented this company and was with the salvaging company that were making the effort to save the ship. My father saw the painting floating around in the sea water in the captain’s cabin and gave firm instructions for it to be taken back to Manila where he had the damage restored by a well known local Filipino artist. The painting is still with the family to this day.

>>> I myself cannot remember much more about the camp than the night of handing out the chocolates and the next day’s sight of those giant wheels. I believe shortly after that most of the allied prisoners were put on board the “liberty ships” and taken back over the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco, where my mother had relatives. My only memory there was the sweet unnatural smells of my first hotel bedroom. I believe my brother, who would have been six years old, asked his parents “what type of grass is this” on seeing his first carpet. And shortly afterwards when we were moved out of the hotel and possibly staying with my mother’s sister, I was out playing on the streets with my brother when he asked me to sit behind a dump truck just before it was about to shed it’s load.!! Luckily the driver spotted me first. I have never brought this ‘attempted murder’ up with my brother in later life. I put it down to nature where I believe early siblings try to bump each other off to secure their own survival.!

>>> After a brief stay in SanFrancisco there was a train journey ( or something ) across America to New York where we were put on board the SS Queen Mary to finally return to England. I cannot remember any of that, although I still have with me a large bronze medal in it’s original box of the SS Queen Mary.

>>> My father, Philip Grenville Harris Arundell, was English, born in Birkenhead, Cheshire. He came from a large and well established family, the Arundells, who mainly came from Devon and Cornwall and who could trace their ancestry back for several centuries. My grandmother on this side of the family was named Evelina, who I believed had a little Portuguese in her. She died as a result of a car crash when my father was driving a large second hand Jaguar on one of his vacations from Calcutta, India. My grandfather, Ralph Arundell, with two of his brothers travelled to Canada in the gold rush days. They helped to build the first log cabin church on Vancouver Island, St. Anne’s, (1895) which still stands today. They also discovered what would turn out to be Canada’s richest silver mine, The Hedley Mine, but sold out far to early and returned back to England. My brother, who lived most of his life in Seattle USA, was invited back to the mines for some reunion occasion in the 1990’s…possibly their centenary.

>>> My mother was born in Baguio, Luzon, Philippines, the same place that I was born. Her mother, Suze, was born somewhere in the middle of Australia, possibly of Scottish and Australian parentage. She was a great lady who had to look after herself in Manila by opening up a clothes shop as her husband died early at the age of 52. Her husband, W.W. Lewis was an American with Welsh blood who fought in the Spanish American wars, the Boxer Rebellion in China and finally the Filipino War of Independence. He remained in the Philippines where he became a stevedore and on a trip to Australia he met his wife to be, Suze. Suze, after spending many post war years in a retirement home in America, eventually came back to spend her last few years with my parents, who by then were back in England. She was a good commonsensical person who had seen the beginnings of the railways and man landing on the moon. Her ashes are scattered in the rose garden of a little cottage in Denham Village.

>>> It must have been about 1945-6 that we reached England where we lodged briefly with ‘Auntie Joan’, who was my father’s sister who was married to Paul Chadwick, an engineer and intellectual. They had just moved south from Birmingham and had bought a small farm/manor in the village of St.Kew in Cornwall. The Chadwicks were always and still are to this day a little ‘left’ on the political clock and the Arundells have always been a little to the ‘right’.! We are still talking. Paul Chadwick, the intellectual, was far too scatterbrained to run the small farm successfully. It was largely due to his wife Joan, who ran the farm house “Skisdon”, as a guest house, that they managed to survive. She then had the foresight to buy up several small Cornish cottages for renting out to the summer tourists. I think she bought them for between £3-500 each. I guess they were sold in the 1970-1980s for considerable sums and would be worth a kings ransom in today’s market.

>>> Paul and Joan had two children, my cousins, Tom and Allison. Allison was one of England’s premier mountaineers and she died on an all female climbing expedition on Mt. Annapurna. Tom, a geologist, married Sandy and they have two children, Jeremy and Elizabeth.

>>> Tom and Sandy took over Skisdon from their parents and eventually sold it in the 1990s to Tim Honeywell who still runs it to this day. It is divided up into several self contained holiday flat rentals. I still go there.

>>> Skisdon and the Chadwicks have always been a big part of the previous and current Arundell’s lives, for refuge, argument, swimming and golf, even to this day.

2. RETURN TO THE PHILIPPINES.

>>> Going back to 1945/6 my Dad did not stay long in Cornwall. Within a few months he had to return for the rebuilding of Manila and all that was involved with post war activity. My mother, brother and myself followed soon afterwards.

> Probably because my Dad was in the shipping business, our return journey to the Philippines consisted of travelling by sea on a freighter out of Liverpool or Glasgow all the way to the west coast of America via The Panama Canal. We ended up in Oakland, California, where my young sister Nancy was born. She is 5 years younger than me so I must have been five years old at the time. I think it must have been at this juncture that my brother told me to sit behind the dump truck, not the earlier occasion mentioned.

> I have always harboured a guilty conscience about my sister…mainly because I never really got to know her until quite late in life. And this was probably caused naturally because we were never really in contact for any length of time when we were young. When I was 7-8 she must have been 2-3, and at this point I went off to boarding school in England and sister went to India with my parents. And so it continued until she left my parents ( who were then in Spain) at far too young an age (18-19) to forge a life in America. She has had quite a difficult life one way or another but has managed to fight through things and is now settled near Seattle.

> We continued West to the Philippines on another freighter and all I can remember is a very unpleasant memory of disembarking in Manila. For some reason ( I think we were now on a local tramp steamer) we had to go below decks where every square inch was taken up with livestock who may shortly have been due for a nasty ending. It sticks in my memory together with my mother’s temper at having to do this. I guess the old man got it in the neck at some stage.

>>> So from me being a five to seven years old, the family were back in the Philippines. We rented the bottom floor of a big house in Paranyaque, a few miles south of down town Manila. It was right on the sea front. I remember being ill at some stage and having to lie out in the sunshine, which may have been the initial cause of me suffering from ‘rodent ulcers’ in later life, as my skin is a bit too fair for too much tropical sunshine. I did a bit of schooling at La Salle College on Taft Avenue, and remembered a few shouting matches between mother and father…”not in front of the servants please”…!

3.     1950.  BACK TO ENGLAND FOR SCHOOLING.

>>> And then in 1950 my Dad was hired by a shipping agency in Calcutta, India. It was named Clegg, Cruickshank and Co., where my parents joined the expat high society, in the same way that they belonged to the relatively high society, certainly on the sporting front, in Manila. My Dad was President of The Manila Rowing Club both before and after the war. But the family were always one rung below the financial elite, namely those lucky people who worked for the big foreign based companies, such as Shell and the Hong kong Bank. These people could send their children back to England for schooling and have them back for holidays. When my brother and I went back to England for schooling in 1950, we did not see the parents for six years or so, apart from one half term in the middle of the spell.

>>> My mother put brother and me on the train at St.Kew, Cornwall, ( this was way before the days of Beeching ), and we were met in London by the ‘Charity Aunts’ who transferred us to another London Station that would take us to Buckingham where the ‘prep school’ Akeley Wood was located. We arrived in the evening and the following morning at roll call I can remember my name being called out and my brother shoving me forward into the front row which was obviously for the juniors.

>>> From there you do what every child/animal would do, which is try your best to survive within a group. Which I somehow managed to do. Partly because I enjoyed sport and also because, although very small for my age, I somehow knew I was reasonably strong. Because my parents were abroad I sometimes stayed at the school throughout the holidays. The other alternatives were to go back to Auntie Joan in Cornwall or else go to Auntie Mary and Uncle Simme in Okehampton, Devon. These two were related to one of my Dad’s close rowing friends in Manila, named Nick Linley.

>>> They were both super people. Uncle Simmie (I guess short for Simmons) was head of the Nat. West Bank in Okehampton, and a golfer with a very flat, old fashioned, horizontal swing. Thus my brother and me would cycle a short way up the side of the Devonshire Moors to where the golf course was located, and play the first and eighteenth hole several times in the morning and do the same thing in the afternoon. ( There was an old wooden structured swimming pool in the woods, very close to the golf club. It was fed by the streams coming off the moors, and it was always stone cold. But I guess good for the soul, although I was too young to think along those lines. All I could remember was cold.!)  The first hole sloped severely from left to right and I have always used this as an excuse for me being a habitual slicer when attempting to play the game. And I have spent a considerable chunk of my life trying just that.  Auntie Mary taught us Canasta, how to listen to ‘The Archers’ and how to ‘knit two, pearl two’ as well as growing the best raspberries I have ever eaten.

>>> The prep school Akeley Wood was for children between 7-13 years old, and I would have to say it had a pretty formative effect on my life. Mainly because of the Head master named Ian Stuart. Although this man took me under his wing to some extent, maybe because my parents were abroad and maybe because of sport, it was at this school that I was introduced to ‘fear’. And by and large, because I have survived, I cannot say it was a bad thing. Maybe it was because of it that I have survived. I know not. I don’t think it knocked confidence out of me. I don’t think I have ever had too much of that because of the ‘Victorian’ way I was brought up coupled with the hardships my parents must have faced in the prisoner of war camp when I was 0-4 years old, which may have rubbed off on my sub-conscience. But that fear of the Head master certainly made sure I worked hard and showed respect to my elders and betters. I do remember during one of the holidays when I was staying at the school, I was engrossed reading about a ” D “(Daring) Class naval destroyer, (I was obsessed about The Navy) when the Head came down in a good mood addressing me as “Pip”, as I was known, and I did not pay immediate attention to him. The next thing I knew he had me by the ear and I was whisked off for six of the best. I certainly remember having a good cry, not because of the pain, but because he was explaining in a very kind way that why he did it and that in the long run it was a good lesson for me. And to this day I cannot really say it wasn’t.

>>> (Although it did not deter me from stealing one spoon of sugar every breakfast and hiding it deep in the cellar. For what purpose I know not why. I was eventually caught and had another “six”.)  Maybe my natural animal instincts of hoarding were already beginning to show.!

>>> Otherwise, the six or so years of schooling in England went by in reasonably normal fashion according to the custom of boarding schools during those times. Little things that I remember must be similar to little things that most other children remember about their childhood.

>>> Once I sat stubbornly in the class room in total silence when the poor teacher was trying to get me to explain the word “fulfil”. I think I knew how to spell it and I think I roughly knew what it meant. But it just sounded so unnatural and awkward I found myself unable to cough anything out.

>>> I was introduced to carpentry, which I loved, because it was physical and creative, and I also learned that I was good at drawing. And it took me another 50 years or so before I remembered that and began my little bits of drawing and painting in later life, starting with a couple of hours of evening classes each week at Morley College, London.

>>> The sporting scene was good for me. I played most of my cricket during my prep school years and to this day remember the smell of the first newly cut grass in early summer and the smell of the linseed oil on the cricket bat. These smells immediately lead me back to those very early years and that particular location. One of my closest friends at school was a mad keen cricketer called Mike Blumberg. We actually ended up in bed together some early mornings listening to the wireless cricket commentaries when the England team were out playing the Ashes Series in Australia. As I was a wicket keeper the only name I was interested in was Godfrey Evans, one of the best all time keepers that ever played for England. Coincidentally, the next time I bumped into Michael was after I had returned to England after my early adult years spent in the Philippines. I must have been in my early thirties and was in a steamy shower after a squash game, nearly blind without my glasses, when I heard this posh voice..”Excuse me, but aren’t you Pip Arundell from Akeley Wood?.” And so began another happy happening, for Micheal and his gang of friends had the habit of getting pink tickets from their wives to allow them to play, drink and eat every Tuesday night at this particular squash/gentleman’s club location. Fifty years on, and were are still trying to do the same things.!!

>>> In football, I was a very small but speedy right wing. The trouble was, that in those days the ball was made of leather and when it became wet it was too heavy to kick. I remember pulling a muscle on the top of my right thigh a couple of times in an effort to convert the corner kick.

>>> I suppose I have to mention the little things that I was aware of or not aware of on the sexual front, for when you reach your teens certain things happen to the body. To begin with girls did not actually exist in my life. I knew nothing of them,  I did not think about them, they were not talked about by my friends, and we were never given any formal guidance about them or any other related matter. Towards the end, I did notice a couple of feelings stirring inside me. When we were sleeping outside in tents I had the urge to reach out and squeeze a friend’s chest, and I do remember going to the school matron and asking her why I had wet my pants in bed, when I knew it was not pee pee. My first sightings of women folk also surfaced when two young female members of the staff, who were Norwegian, were fired for sleeping ( I guess ) with a couple of the senior boys of the school. I do remember feeling a bit jealous over this happening, which I guess must have been my first encounter with the very powerful instinct of sex, which none of us can escape from.

>> So much for my memories of ‘ prep school.’

4.  MORE SCHOOLING AND UNIVERSITY.

Let us continue with the schooling. Between 13-14 years old I moved from my prep school, Akeley Wood, to my Public School, called Cheltenham College. ( Not quite so well known as “Cheltenham Ladies College.”)  Although called ‘Public Schools’ in England, they in fact comprise mainly of expensive private boarding schools. So I was lucky to go to one. I think at the time my parents were still in Calcutta so boarding school was the best option and the normal option, even if your parents lived in England.
I remember my first term being a bit of a shock to the system. Mainly because during my last summer term at prep (junior) school I had become a bit of a big fish in a small pool, mainly due to sport, for I had won the ‘Victor Ludorum’ cup as the best all round sports person. So suddenly to be thrust into a much bigger school as a ‘nothing’ was a bit hard to take, especially as the stars from the Cheltenham College Junior school went straight in taking all the star roles. In my year it was a very nice chap called John Brown who was both good at sports and a scholar to boot. I can’t remember if they had ‘fags’ at Cheltenham (a system where the first termers became servants to the senior year prefects), but if they did then I would have been one. I also cannot recall if there was any ‘caining’ ( being beaten on the backside with a cane or a cricket bat) but if there was I think I got away without having one, maybe thanks to the earlier punishment I had experienced at my own junior school.
The four years between 14-18 passed in normal fashion. I cannot recall anything exceptional happening at this school and I did not think it had any where near the formative effect on me as my prep school had. In fact, I think I emerged from my senior school with a lot less confidence than I had on leaving my prep school. ( It may have had a little to do with the fact that I was already beginning to loose a bit of my hair at the ripe old age of 17.!  Whether that is good or bad I cannot tell. I did make it to the school’s rugby team, and I remembered scoring a hat trick of tries against our local rivals, called Dean Close. As a result I was clapped into the main dining room that particular Saturday night as a hero, only to be rapidly brought down to earth because at my dinner table of 11 boys, it was my turn to clear up all the dirty dishes. My close friend Mike Wheeler was sitting at the head of the table as a ‘prefect’ and he really enjoyed watching me do the chores. I never did make it to being a prefect. Obviously no leadership material. Which, in hind sight, may have been correct.
The only other pleasant little thing that occurred in my last year was me doing a sculpture or bust of the head of another good chum called Charlie Parselle. It sent the art master into raptures of delight, telling me I had found my ‘metier’ (the first time I had heard that word) and being doubly amazed that some one on the rugby team had any artistic talent.! I had a picture of this piece of sculpture until just recently, when it, and quite a few other things went amiss when I had major work carried out on my house in 2016. Sayang.
So my years at Cheltenham were now coming to an end, and as I write I am able to recall that during most of this time my parents were still in India, and I had absolutely no idea as to what to do next. Go to university or find some kind of a job. On second thoughts I believe my parents had returned when I was still at Cheltenham, because I remember meeting a good golfing mate of mine for the first time on the twelfth hole of Hoylake (Royal Liverpool) Golf Club when I was playing with my Dad. And I was about 16 years old at the time. What I cannot remember is any advice whatsoever as to whether I should go to a university or not. So in the end I sought the advice of two boys at Cheltenham (my senior school) who were a couple of years senior to me, who had both gone to Trinity College, Dublin. Of course their experiences were good, so of course off I went on a 4 year BA (Honors) course on Economics and Political Science. It sounded grand, but there were only three terms of 7 weeks each per year (which didn’t give you a lot of time to be taught) and I have to say that at the end of the four years I had really learned nothing that was to be any particular help to me in later life. I don’t think I ever put the fact that I ended as a BA on any of my business cards. It would have been a travesty. I do remember that at the end of the first year I was second out of 110 pupils ( mainly because I managed to learn by rote some statistical equations without really understanding them) but by the end of the fourth and final year I was 25 out of the remaining 26 pupils. I came out with the lowest possible class of degree and I think I only got that because I found myself as captain of the golf team.
For the next 15 years I had recurring nightmares about sitting in that great university library (that houses the famous Book of Keols) and staring at text books with absolutely nothing positive entering my brain. I am a very bad reader and found it very hard to assimilate anything from the written word. It took a while to find that out. It also took a lot longer to realise that I am a little more observant than most. And also that, while I was not bright in the academic sense, I did have a little bit of peasant cunning or survival ability which eventually helped me to keep my head above water when a few years later I was pitched into the full game of life.
Some, who knew of Trinity Dublin’s reputation, might blame my poor academic record due to partaking of four years of wine, women and song, because TCD did indeed have a reputation for exactly that, for Dublin University was where all the sons of the rich and famous from England came to, those whose academic grades precluded them from going to Oxford or Cambridge. But I cannot claim that as an excuse, because I was and always have been a relatively shy and introverted animal, and it is very hard to break out of that mould and be something different..without being a fake. Sure, I did learn to drink about the age of 20, and of course with my sporting mates the drink helped to conquer the inhibitions and allow the gregarious/aggressive side to show on occasions, so there were many occasions that we enjoyed what the Irish call ‘the crack’ although they spell crack in a different way.
Overall, I would have to say that the four years at university were enjoyable and helped to fill me out as a person and maybe allowed me to be a touch more confident, having a degree after my name, however lowly it was..no one ever asked..and I certainly liked Ireland and the Irish with their rather soft and laid back approach to life.
But Trinity never did turn me into a glittering career animal or a party animal and in hindsight I am very happy that I was strong enough to remain true to who I was, however lowly that was. Because there were many who went to university, which is the place you first escape from parental and church control, and pretend you are a  grown man, and dive straight into the deep end with disastrous short and long term consequences. I was too much of a scaredicat for all of that.

5.   AFTER UNIVERSITY.

So, my four year stay at Trinity College, Dublin was over.
Help.! The big bad world was waiting. Like everyone else in my situation, I needed a job to survive. But what kind of a job. I had absolutely no clear idea as to what I wanted, apart from the thought of a job somewhere overseas. And that took a knock when I attended an interview with a big English company called GKN, who were visiting the universities to recruit students. I asked if I could join their overseas department. They told me they did not have one and that was the end of interest from both parties.!
As reported earlier, I was never full of confidence, I had no glittering upwardly mobile career ambitions like a lot of my mates had, and I did not have a good class of degree, so no company was going to readily offer me a job. And so, after possibly attending no more than three or four interviews, if that, the ‘Old Man’ came up with the idea of a job back in the Philippines where he still knew a couple of people who would be in a position to help.
( My Dad by this time had left England and had moved to Spain. His time as a Director of Elder Dempster Lines in Liverpool was over and had never been happy. My Dad was an excellent shipping man and a very good and strong person who had spent all his working life abroad, as well as surviving with his family for 5 years in a Japanese POW camp. He spoke to everyone on an equal footing. When he landed the Directors job in England he was faced with 5 other fellow directors who had never been out of the country and who tended to show some of the bad sides of the English ‘class system’.
Hence they had the habit of isolating him and making things pretty unpleasant. So either he left or was pushed. I never found out.
I can now work backwards and deduce that I lived at home with my parents only between the age of 16-22, when on school or university holidays. That is the last two years at Cheltenham and most of the 4 years of university. I remember my Dad putting me on the night British and Irish Ferry (to take me back to Dublin) late one night on October 23 and remarking as an afterthought..” Oh, isn’t tonight you 21.st. birthday?” But maybe he had other things on his mind.)
I also remember that during my last year at University, as my parents had left for Spain, I took on the family car, a lovely old Ford Consul, with a front bench seat and steering wheel (3) gear change,  number plate SKF 996. This blessed car carried me and many of my mates around Dublin and the provinces safely when on several occasions I was certainly in no fit state to take the wheel.

And so, on to the Philippines. Back to the country where both my mother and myself were born. The route back was made possible by a job offer from an old English trading company named Theo. H. Davies, that operated in both Hawaii and the Philippines. It had been started some 100 years previously by missionaries. The company was also heavily involved with sugar, both production and export. And the head of this company was an Englishman called Milton Pickup, who, together with his German wife Hedda, were friends of my parents during their earlier stay in the Philippines. I believe Milton Pickup was also interned in the Japanese prisoner camp  although his wife, Hedda, because she was German, was exempted.
It was thanks to the kind invitation of Mr. Pickup that I attended two interviews prior to being offered the job. The first one was in Ipswich, England, where I met a member of the owning family, Geoffrey (I think) Davies, and one of the few things I can remember him saying in the interview was that if I were to last the course in the Philippines I would have to be able to handle ‘the drink’.! And I can report that although I have never been a big drinker, that was not a problem. I do know that my father in those earlier days could handle large amounts of both food and drink, both at lunch and dinner, because as a shipping agent he had to look after a succession of Norwegian Sea Captains who I was told, never knew when to stop. The other thing I remember about Mr. Davies and the owning family (of Theo H. Davies and Co.) was my sympathy for them, some 10 years later, (circa 1974) when they sold this rock solid, long established company to that HongKong based giant of a company called Jardine Mattheson, who at that time were looking for a foothold in the Philippines. Because the very next year the Cuban Crisis occurred which sent sugar prices sky rocketing to such an extent that Jardine Mattheson recovered their purchase price in a matter of months.! That must have been hard to take for a family that had decent ownership of a well run company for well over a century.
My second interview was in Spain, with a Spanish gentleman who was a part owner of one of the sugar mills in the Philippines that Theo. H. Davies ran. I managed to do this on a trip, by road, from England to The Costa Del Sol, where my parents were then living. I was driven down by a lady friend of my parents, accompanied by her niece. My main memory going down was my intense embarrassment at not knowing one word of Spanish. But this was soon to change, because when I arrived in Torremolinos, where my parents were living, the first thing I did was sign up for a Berlitz Course to learn the language. And this turned out to be one of the most pleasant experiences of my life. My teacher, a blonde youngish ‘Castilian’ lady came in for one hour a day..my first word was ‘la caja’ (the box) and within that three month period I experienced my first ‘eureka moment’ when it suddenly came upon me one evening that I was just about fluent in both speaking and understanding the language. One of the real happy moments in my life. The only sadness was, having learnt it so quickly,  it did not take too long before I lost my confidence in speaking it. I was hoping that it was going to be a ‘necessary’ language in the Philippines, only to find that English was used just about everywhere. I still, even in my dotage, believe that if I were to go back to live in Spain, it would not take too long to learn it over again. Because I love the sound of the Spanish language.

(My parents remained in Spain for about 2-3 years. They went there after loosing the job with Elder Dempsters in Liverpool and as a result of previous connections in the Philippines. Because it was in the early 1960’s that the very large and powerful Ayala Group, belonging to the Spanish/Filipino Ayala family in the Philippines, began to reinvest in Spain. This family owned the long established San Miguel brewery in Manila (it was about the only beer you could buy when I arrived in 1965) and were huge landowners. Thanks to an American, named Joe McMekin, who had married into the family, The Ayala Group had already begun to develop a huge area of swamp land near Manila, which was very shortly to be in all but name, the new City of Manila, called Makati. It was this man who took similar land development ideas into Spain where he pioneered the Soto Grande development near the Southern tip of Spain. It was and is a huge up market residential complex built around sporting facilities in the same way that Forbes Park in Makati, Philippines had been built and still exists with its Golf Course and Polo Fields. Not only did they develop land in Spain, they also, if I am not mistaken, started up the San Miguel beer production in Spain. Few today would suspect that this famous Spanish brew emanated from the Philippines.!
It was this move of reinvestment back into Spain by Philippine based money that benefited my parents, as a related Spanish/Filipino group were starting up a middle grade residential development near Malaga, and were able to help my Dad in offering him a job in some kind of marketing/ liaison capacity. I think that this development was started as a place of retirement for the large Spanish related community that resided in Manila.
This job, like many that were to follow, did not last too long.
My Dad was used to working within honest companies, with honest men within a basically honest industry, which the shipping industry by and large was. He was a little naive and believed a little too much of what he was told in the later years of his life which is when he lost his way.)

6.  OUT TO THE PHILIPPINES AGAIN.

    

When the 3 months in Spain were finished, I took the flight out to Manila for my first job. I stopped in London for a few days staying with my godfather ‘Uncle Bruin’ or David Cassells-Brown, mentioned at the beginning. The time was February 1965, the end of the cool, dry season in the Philippines. But when the plane landed in Manila, and the doors opened, all I can remember was being knocked over by a blast of very hot and humid air. I guess it would be the same for any European visiting the tropics for the first time.
My parent’s friends, Milton and Hedda Pickup were there to meet me and to take me to my first place of residence about which I could not complain at all. It was The Army and Navy Club, near the old Port area and City of Manila and opposite the famous Manila Hotel, which was situated on the opposite side of Luneta Park, where I was staying. Both these buildings, although badly damaged and fought over during the war, had basically survived. The Club was a lovely old Spanish style building, built with steel and heavy concrete but with huge high ceilings filled with slow, lazy fans, plenty of archways and terraces, polished stone floors and in the main open to the the outside air. It had a swimming pool with terrace which was adjacent to and looked directly out to sea. Altogether, not a bad first base for someone with a low level degree who needed a helping hand from family and friends to land his first job. And for someone who still had no idea what an ‘invoice’ meant or what a credit or debit balance entailed.!
I will always remember the view out of the window on the first morning. Not a cloud in the sky, with Manila Bay as calm and flat as a mirror, with the odd few Filipino children swimming around not far from the Club. Cargo ships moored in Manila South Harbour. A truly lovely sight. I learnt it was common for the seas to be calm in the early mornings, before the on shore breezes began to blow.

7.  MY FIRST JOB.

    

Then it was off to the office for my first day’s work…or should I say learning.! For my first teacher was an over large and happy Chinese/Filipino named Johnny Lim, who was manager of the hardware department, dealing in such things as valves and pumps and many other things mechanical and electrical. As with many other less developed countries around the world, these items were not manufactured locally and therefore had to be imported from the developed world. Theo. H. Davies acted as an import agent and because it was an English company, a lot of supplies came from England. We therefore had to compete with a lot of other local trading companies who received their supplies from other, sometimes better, sources, such as America, Germany and Japan. In 1965 the Japanese were just beginning to re enter the Philippines on an economic rather than military basis. And, despite the not too distant memories of the war, they would prove to be mighty successful at it.
The first few days was a bit of a mixed up jumble for me. In the main it was caused by language problems because Chinese Johnny got his bees and vees mixed up so every time he mentioned valves I was sure he was saying bulbs and so on and then there were all the new words I was learning of everyday business practice. During the early days I spent time with various other trading departments of Theo. Davies. I think there were about 5 in all. One was involved with selling paint, because we represented the US company Sherwin Williams, and we were actually producing the paint locally. This department was managed by an American called Filipowicz who was in the US army, but had stayed on after the war, marrying a local girl. And another department was involved with selling oil, as used and sold in petrol stations. There was an insurance department…we represented Sun Life and my very good friend to be, Tony Borromeo was manager, and we had an aircraft department as we were agents of the Dutch company Fokker as well as Rolls Royce Aero engines and Cessna.  Sadly, during my stay, a Fokker plane, while on a demonstration flight, crashed with the loss of several lives, one of whom was also called Borromeo, who was a great friend of our General Manager.
I spent time with all these various sections of the company because,  overall, I believe my job was meant to be assistant General Sales Manager. I cannot remember ever being told that formerly. But most days I would end up sitting in the office of the General Sales Manager and what a character he was.
He was Norwegian and his name was Eric Lief Westly. He had come over to England to fly Spitfires for us in the war and he had lost all the hair on his head and body when landing his Spitfire at night in particularly trying circumstances. So he wore a bright red wig which went well with his bright red face and quite a big temper that was hidden just under the surface. He was the kind that would never back off from a bar room brawl, as he recalled when he told me he had to sort out a bunch of Germans who were making too much noise in a drinking den in Manila one night. His memory of fighting Germans was fresh in his mind.
He was married to his second wife, a very intelligent and calm Dutch lady called Anna- Maria, who was the only one who could keep him under control.
So I did spend quite a bit of time sitting in his office, basically doing nothing. And Eric, a bit like me, was not a professional business man. How he got the job in the first place I do not know, but he certainly had no proper background in sales and marketing and had no idea as to giving me guidance as to what, where and how I should be doing things. And underneath it all maybe there was a feeling that I might pose a threat to him in the long term.
Part of his job, which he was very good at, was entertaining the marketing reps of our various supply companies, some of whom were fine characters. One was the formidable American called Dick Smith, who had been a US Naval sea captain during the war. A great big boned, kind hearted man with a crew cut. He had made friends with the Japanese who he had fought in the war and had bought a small Japanese boat from war surplus and installed his own Japanese sea captain, Mori-San, to run it. This little boat took me one night from Manila down the coast to Batangas, where he, Dick Smith, had bought a few hectares for future development. Another prominent visitor to Manila was the Asian Rolls Royce representative who also happened to be the head of the Jockey Club in HongKong,  which I believe, in itself, means you are a ‘somebody’ in the Far East. So part of my education in Manila, even if I learnt nothing at marketing, was gained sitting at the feet of these successful grown ups listening to their many and varied experiences of life. On many occasion I felt like a typical, wet behind the ears greenhorn.
One of the company’s main clients was the National Air Line, or PAL (Philippine Air Line) whose head of purchasing was a ferocious and much feared American named Dick Brown. I had to have a meeting with him once, I cannot remember the exact reason. I certainly knew absolutely nothing about the workings of a Rolls Royce aero engine so I was never in a position of any confidence at the best of times. What made this meeting stick in my mind was that as I stood before this important individual, I could feel that my underpants, which had been stretched out of shape during a rugby game the Saturday before, making them loose, were gradually working their way down my legs. Whether I made a sale, lost a sale or maybe there never was a sale I do not recall. I was so concentrated on getting out of his office before anything really noteworthy occurred.
So after a year or so of this wandering ‘nothingness’…how it lasted a year i do not know…I was shunted sideways to be Assistant Head of the Purchasing Department. And in this job I knew even less than all and everything I had learnt about marketing in the previous twelve months. What actually brought this move on was that I had refused credit terms to a prominent Spanish/Filipino citizen called Mike Campos when he was looking to buy a new Cessena light aircraft, for which Theo. Davies were the local distributors. I had been told I had to do this by my boss Eric, who conveniently left the office that afternoon. (Eric was a flying friend of Mike Campos and he knew the finance department had vetoed the sale/credit terms.) So it was left for me to pass on the bad news.
Several weeks later, at a reasonably prominent company cocktail party, of which there were very few, this subject came up. Eric Lief Westly denied he had given me any such instruction, blew a gasket and publicly gave me a huge spit in the face, which landed dead centre, as only an irate Norwegian fighter pilot could manage to do. This was witnessed by one of the company’s Vice Presidents, a very diminutive and kindly man called Johnny d’Authreu. So to keep the peace Eric, my boss, who I basically liked and respected because of his ebullience and love for life, and because he had risked his life for our side during the war, quite rightly remained and I was moved. ( Had I been working for an American company I am sure that I would have been long gone.!)
Coincidently, about 10 years after this, I met Johnny d’Authreu’s brother, in England. Exactly like his brother, very quiet and kind, but a different experience of life. For the brother who had never left England was working as a cloak attendant at one of the top gentlemen’s clubs in London’s West End.
Back to The Purchasing Department. My new life.
This department was all to do with the three sugar mills that Theo. Davies managed. This is where the big money came from. Sugar milling and sugar selling had started up in Hawaii and was the mainstay of the company when it opened up in the Philippines. The main sugar mill was called Hawaiian Philippines, which we owned, and the two other mills, San Carlos and Bogo Meddalin, the company managed.
And keeping these mills going and running properly during the milling season was the main and very important job of the Purchasing Department. Because when machinery ran out or broke down spares had to get to site in double quick time. Otherwise the mill came to a stand still. And the logistics of getting the goods to site was a lot trickier then, as  this was way before the days of the telex machine and more latterly, Amazon.!
The one and only thing I managed to do for the 13 or so staff in this office was to get them a salary increase, which gained me their undying friendship. Within my first week in charge I wrote an impassioned hand written three pages to the big bosses arguing fiercely that they all, in Purchasing, although not involved with selling or marketing, were vital to the overall profitability of Theo. H. Davies. Each and every one got a rise.
The man who most deserved that rise was my assistant manager, Joe del Rosario, who did everything and knew everything including knowing what a ‘gasket’ was, which in itself was an awful lot more than I knew. So for the next year or so of my life I was nothing more than a glorified rubber stamp. Because day after day my assistant and his staff would produce pile after pile of “purchase orders” that I had to sign, in order to buy goods that I had not one iota of knowledge about as to how they worked or what was their true cost or where even they came from.
The other reason I was looked after by my department was because every Christmas the manager received loads of goodies (presents) from the suppliers, and all of these went straight to the staff, and in a poor country like the Philippines all presents, however lowly, counted a lot, especially something like a Spanish cured ham.
One of the few enjoyable aspects of this job were my few visits to the sugar mills, which were located in the provinces on different islands away from the main Philippine island of Luzon. I did learn a little more about how things worked in general and about the lives of the mill managers, who tended to be foreigners like me. Their lives tended to be lonely and they had to be self contained, because, apart from running the mills there was not much else to do and social life was practically non existent. The manager of the big mill, Hawaiian/Philippines, George Gordon, was to become a friend of mine, because when he visited Manila he would show up at The Nomads sports ground where we played rugby in the rainy season and did a fair amount of drinking. George would always referee the games when he was in town. He told me that when at the mill, his overall director, an elderly American called Ned Herkes  was in the habit of checking the contents of his dustbins, to count the gin bottles.! Both George and his wife certainly enjoyed a bit of drink.
Apart from the outings to the sugar mills, those couple of years represented the lowest period of my life in terms of actually doing any thing useful. I liked my staff and they looked after me, but I was completely and utterly frustrated, tied down and suffering from job claustrophobia, if there ever is such a word. Because I was bursting with positive energy that wanted to move mountains, and that energy had nowhere to go.

8.  THE EARLY SOCIAL LIFE.

    

Let us assume that the above brief description of my working life in Manila covered a period of four years, 1965 until just before my first ‘home leave’ in 1969. What happened on the social or other side of life during those years.
The first significant act was me moving out of The Army and Navy Club after my first couple of months in Manila. I did become a member of that club because it was very close to our office in the Port Area and I took just about every lunch break there. And lunch breaks in those early days were two hours long, following Spanish tradition.
So a good swim every day was quite normal, usually followed by a delightful baby hamburger in ‘pan de sal’, a tasty, sweet salted Filipino bun.
My move took me to The Casa Pension, exactly as it sounds, a lovely old wooden Spanish style boardinghouse, and run by a delightful old fashioned and church going Spanish/Filipino lady called Conchita de la Hoz,  who had a niece called Carmen. This place was a clean, spartan and quiet boarding house for young foreigners and locals who did not have too much money. It was well run with breakfast, lunch and dinner provided and most of all it helped us make our first friendships in a new and foreign land. And quite a cross section of characters turned up. One of my first friends there turned out to be one of my oldest friends, a lovely soft hearted Italian giant called Maurizio Tommassini, who was one of the fasted and most ferocious second row rugby forwards I ever played with. He was attached to the Italian Trade delegation which he worked for stoically all his life, at various other locations around the world, eventually retiring back to Rome. I visited him there a couple of years ago when our lifelong friendship was to be severely tested when I dared to chop up an onion in his  kitchen…”Phil…please….I cannot stand the smell….” I should have known that Italians are hugely house proud. Don’t worry, we are still friends. Another character was an English aristocrat on the run, with the lovely name of Giles Tennyson d’Eigncourt. There is a special name for well born young English gents who are paid to leave home because of gambling debts…(a remittance man!.)  He was one, and a very  flamboyant and amusing person to boot. There was no guilt or remorse showing about his past life and he mixed with all of us on an absolutely equal and friendly basis. Never once trying to show off his class. He was basically a good man who later married a Filipina lass and the latest I heard was he was back in England running a pub. He would make an excellent Landlord.
The funny thing about this monastically run boarding house was that it was bang in the middle of Manila’s prime red light area. The street was named M.H. del Pilar and in the main it was full of small and friendly hostess bars where the girls were not pushy in the slightest. ( About 10 years later, a lot of Australians came into Manila to run some of these establishments and they brought in drugs and tended to make all things to do with night clubs more noisy, aggressive and expensive.) Apart from the bars, there were a few small restaurants and one ‘straight’ old fashioned Spanish drinking and tapas bar called Guernica’s, where a lot of us would gather for drinking and singing after some of our rugby games in the rainy season. Despite the proximity of this type of entertainment it took well over a year before I managed to loose my virginity and when I did I could not remember too much about it. I know it happened in some low class den in the back streets of Pasay on the way home ( I had moved out of the Casa Pension by then, and was ‘messing’ or sharing a house with another English man) after drinking far too much on a Saturday night after a game of either soccer or rugby. And I remember the kindly Mama San of the establishment taking great motherly care of me. I managed to wake up in my own bed alive and kicking the next morning. What you get away with when you are young.!!
( I would have to say that despite all reports in the English press about gun toting Manila, I always felt perfectly safe where ever I was. Basically because the Filipinos were so unbelievably friendly and helpful and they generally liked  “Joes” or foreigners. So if you showed 10% of friendliness, you would always be met with 90% from whoever you were talking with. If, however, you wanted to play the big foreign bully, then you asked for whatever came your way. Especially if you were drinking in The Swiss Inn, one of the top and long established restaurant/bars located in the old Port Area. For that is were a well known gun man would normally drink, named Del Querto. You certainly did not want to look him in the eye. This poor man was eventually conned into a ‘meeting’ with a newly installed Mayor of Manila who had him gunned down in the most cowardly fashion. A shame…I thought he, Del Querto, added to the atmosphere.)

The other part of the ‘non working’ life generally centred around the sporting scene, and this could be split into two parts. First, there was golf. And here, as a poor green horn newly arrived in Manila, I was incredibly lucky, again through friends known to my parents. Because as soon as I arrived, there was an invitation for me to be ‘assigned’ a share and thus have playing privileges to The Manila Golf and Country Club, which was the most exclusive course in the Philippines and located bang in the centre of Makati. And this area, Makati, as mentioned before, was the new and up coming area that was being developed by the Ayala family and it was soon to become the commercial and social epicentre of Manila. It was a private club and it cost an awful lot of money to be able to buy a share and join. Thus all the big bosses and owners and anyone who was was anyone all belonged there. One reason that this may have happened was that I ended up as captain of my university golf team which may have given the idea that I was a better golfer than I really was, for I don’t think I ever got below a 7 handicap. The man who assigned me the share was a very kind old Spaniard, gnarled and guttural, who had married into the very wealthy land owning Ortigas family. His name was Gerrado Lanuza. He owned three shares of Manila Golf and one was free at the time I arrived. They always played ‘fourballs’ at this club and his playing partner included a man named Mike Proulx who himself was the nephew of my father’s best rowing mate, Nick Linley. The other two members of the four ball were two great old timers, Jack Grieves who used to fall asleep each and every dinnertime, and Barny Wall, a tough and crusty Irishman who had suffered the war years as a Japanese prisoner in Shanghai. Both these two worked for another old English trading company named Warner Barnes, headed up by “Bunny” Harrison who is the only person to have beaten me on a golf course ‘ten and eight’.  He is now in his nineties living in England and we are still in touch.
These people formed the kernel of those I played with, and pairings hardly ever changed. It was unlike most English clubs where you turn up on spec and play with who ever is drawn out of the hat. The other thing that was different was the mandatory dice game known as “balut” (which is the Filipino term for an egg that has been buried in the ground for some time so that the embryo is half formed) which was played at each and every rest point or drinking spot during the game. In a tropical country there are usually 3 stopping points during the course of the round where dice are rolled to see who buys the drinks, and then at the nineteenth hole the dice come out again and continued on into the night…at which point young old me had to be careful, as I did not have too much financial wherewithal.! One of the best golfers there was a big American, Don ‘Conde’ Moore, who was also a big dice player. By chance I met up with him one night at the afore mentioned Swiss Inn, and sure enough he suggested a few games. I knew I was way out of my depth, but by some stroke of luck my dice kept turning up trumps, and very late in the night, rather full of San Miguel beer and having given Don many chances to recoup his losses, I walked away with more than my month’s salary in winnings..not a lot I know, but enough to frighten me. So to preclude any future encounters, I used all the winnings to buy my senior friend copious amounts of fine spirits, which I knew he liked, with the hope that he would not challenge me again.

The other half of my sporting life revolved around The Manila Nomads club. This is where the younger and poorer expat community gathered, for a mixture of rugby (in the rainy season), football, hockey and cricket. When I arrived in 1965 this club was still located in the up and coming Makati area, with land values that were soon to skyrocket.
I gather attempts had already been made and failed in trying to get bank loans to enable us to secure our tenancy for the future.  Had we been successful, the Manila Nomads ground would have become similar to the famous HongKong Cricket Club ground, surrounded by the most expensive skyscrapers and hotels you could imagine. As it was, after my first three years there, we had to move a few miles away into a mid level housing community where the club still exists, although to find it now you would need grey matter similar to that belonging to Einstein, because there has been so much unplanned development in the area. However, every time I return to Manila and visit the club, I am proud to see the main drains that keep the pitch playable are still working as well as the day they were laid, for I was the one who had to lay them out. I think I was captain of the rugby team at the time, and being on the committee, this was one of the chores assigned to me. I remember getting most of the know how on how to do this from The Manila Polo Club.
As is common nearly all around the world, the social lives of young people who are interested in sport, generally revolves around the sporting clubs they belong to. And in Manila this was especially so, because the Nomads club was the one and only ground where these basically English sports were played. There were a few other soccer pitches including the National Stadium, but for me and most other foreigners the Nomads Club was the epicentre of our lives.
I was also lucky to be able to make friends at the golf club, but these friends were a little older and a little richer than my natural age group.

9.   A CHANGE OF JOBS.

And it was at the Nomads, during or just after a rugby game, that I was approached by a man much bigger than me, with huge bushy eyebrows, who wanted me to join a small fledgling investment company that he was involved in. His name was Tony Madigan. He was the ex heavyweight boxing champion of Australia who had won a bronze medal at the Rome Olympics, the same year that Cassius Clay had won the gold medal. And as he was bigger and certainly more persuasive than me, I agreed. Also remember, for a year or so I had been a pretty useless ‘rubber stamp’ at dear old Theo H Davies, so there was an awful lot of energy that had built up inside me and needed somewhere to go. And it did not take too long for that energy to be put to use. It needed to be put to good use because I no longer had a salary. I was now a salesman earning on commission only. Having never sold anything in my life I was naturally a bit worried, but I was sold on the idea of the product I was to sell, which was all to do with investment into the Australian mineral industry which was just in it’s infancy.
The name of the new company was Fund of Australia which was also in it’s infancy, having been started by another Australian called Mike Hickey who was a close friend of my boss Tony Madigan. Both these men had previously been working for Bernie Cornfeld and his originally very successful company called Fund of Funds. Fund of Australia was virtually a much smaller copy of that company with the similar idea of investing your money into a ‘fund’ comprising of many different individual Australian mining companies. Because of the ‘spread’ your money would be a little safer than if you had put all your eggs into one basket. It seemed very sensible to me with exciting prospects and because I believed in it I had no problems in putting my heart and soul into selling it.
And sell I did. I can imagine how I must have looked. Short sleeved white shirt, dark trousers and hat with brief case. Something similar to a Mormon or Jehovah’s Witness out on the streets looking to save a few souls, except I was trying to extract money. Sometimes sitting in plush air conditioned offices in the new Makati Commercial area facing European or American bosses. Sometimes in the seedy back streets of Manila where the Chinese had their hardware businesses. You would never know who the boss was sometimes, as they all were dressed in the same sweaty shorts and vests.
I have to say that belonging to The Manila Golf Club was a big help, because of all the top people belonged there. One of my first and biggest sales came from one of my older golfing buddies, an American who worked in a small office of the big US company International Harvester Mcloud. His name was Dick Bownass and I later found out that his real job was with US Intelligence. After a couple of years, just before I left the Philippines, he wanted his money back, which was quickly arranged. Something that I would think a fledgling investment company would not have liked doing. But you didn’t mess around with people like Dick. Another small sale was made to an American/Arab, called Joe Lubus, with a huge nose and an even bigger mouth with voice to match. I remember several years later on a trip back to Manila, well after I had left The Fund, I was playing cricket or Rounders at The Manila Polo Club, when this huge voice cartwheeled across 200 yards of lush green turf…”Arundell, where’s my money…?” Only to see Joe at the end of it with a huge grin on his face. But my heart did miss a beat or two.
Another selling excursion took me to a Chinese/Filipino involved in finance. Although I failed to make the sale, I did meet his secretary Rhona, which was a great deal better, because she would be a big part of my fledgling romantic life over the next couple of years. Philip Arundell actually had a girlfriend.

10.    RHONA, THE FUND OF AUSTRALIA AND THE NEXT THREE YEARS IN MANILA.

I met Rhona (Ganabang) reasonably soon after I started selling the Australian mutual fund, which must  have been around 1968-9. And that would have been shortly before I took my first proper vacation which was a 3 month return visit to the U.K. These were normal terms if you, as a foreigner, went out and worked in the Philippines for a company such as Theo. Davies. Three years work followed by 3 months holiday.
After making a sale or two with Fund of Australia  I felt a bit more secure on the money side of things and one of the first things I did was to take the lovely Rhona down to a new resort hotel on the large southern Philippine island of Mindanao. We flew down on the brand new BAC 1-11 jet and I have to say that that week end was a very big one in the mainly loveless life of PLHA. Here was I with a delightfully pretty, intelligent and statuesque young lady in a decent hotel in lovely surroundings. I could not ask for more. And I shall never forget it.
Shortly after that I took my 3 month ‘home leave’. Because of my FOA sales I was offered a free trip down to Australia, but instead I decided to return to England as part of a ’round the world’ east to west airline ticket I had formerly planned when still working for my old company Theo Davies.  My parents were back in England by then and my Dad was involved in some large shadowy schemes to do with cement sales to West Africa or the sale of Sugar Mills to the Philippines, as well as a scheme to turn Falmouth into the main U.K. Container port. At least the latter idea did make sense, and this was the brain child of one of the people my Dad was hooked up with. His name was Jack Koster. He was married to the sister of the film actor Burl Ives and he lived in ‘The Albany’, a very posh London address just off Piccadilly. Unfortunately he had also been thrown out of the Baltic Exchange, the centre of all things to do with shipping. So his reputation was on the decline.
I remember handing over ( at my Dad’s suggestion ) a big chunk of my holiday savings to another member of this shady group named Jimmy Demetriou so he could supposedly fly to Geneva to raise the necessary millions to fund one or another of these schemes. Nothing of course came of this. All that happened was my father received a very thick ear from my mother for allowing this to happen. My mother did have a lot of ‘nouse’ and suspected all along that the people, the scenario and the projects that my Dad was getting involved with were a little bit in dreamland.
I myself shared a London flat with 4 other old golfing chums from the Liverpool area who were just starting out in life. The flat was in Roland Gardens and their local pub was The Angelsea. We were all very much on a tight budget so there was a great deal less boozing and eating out than is happening now with the current set of young people.
I continued my journey West via Bermuda, for a bit of golf, ( although the Fund of Australia bankers were based there, called The Bank of N.T. Butterfield). Then onto New York, Edmonton Canada, were I had a University chum, and then on to San Francisco where my brother Chris was living. He was a very good tennis player and a member of the Olympic Club. I played golf there and travelled south in my brother’s car with a very old set of hickory shafted clubs, and a tent, to play more golf on the fabled Monterray Peninsular. Somehow I managed to play at Cypress Point, one of the most exclusive golf clubs in the world, which didn’t balance too well with somebody who was sleeping in a tent and who had such an old set of clubs. I still boast about it with my golfing chums today, although I had my nose put out of joint lately when I discovered that someone else at my golf club had also managed a game there, probably with more legitimate reasons than I ever had, as he is also a member of The R and A.
I then played the more famous golf course of Pebble Beach, where the US Open is sometimes played. This is a much larger public course but not as beautiful as Cypress Point. I remember somewhere on the homeward holes, where the course gets close to the beach, I stripped off to my underpants and had a good swim in the Pacific Ocean. You could do it in those days. The were so  very  few people playing and the green fees were very low.
And so back to the Philippines. I had put on quite a bit of weight in the three months holiday which I was quickly reminded of by Rhona, who brought me straight down to earth by telling me I smelt like rotten meat !! I guess I was sweating a little too much with the unaccustomed hot weather. So I got straight back into the sporting life at The Nomads Sports Club whether it was cricket, soccer, hockey or rugby and, as usual with sport, where ever you are living, you soon acclimatise yourself with the local weather and return to your ‘fit’ weight. Rhona would be with me at the Nomads and stay over at the weekends, but she was a working girl and spent most weekdays with her family in Pasay, one of the older suburbs of Manila.
Life for the next 2-3 years was reasonably good. I was not working set office hours as I would have been with Theo. Davies. There was quite a bit of stress making my ‘selling’ appointments. Although I had plenty of energy inside me and believed in the product I was selling, it was still hard work for a basically shy person to get on the phone ‘cold calling’ people I had never met before. If the person I was trying to contact was out, Tony, my boss told me never to leave my name, just tell the secretary you were ‘Joe Rocks’ and would call again.!? There must have been quite a number of Joe Rocks’s leaving messages all over Manila in those days.
The other thing  Tony made me do was to buy a reasonably decent car and have a driver. As a salesman you always have to look successful, so I bought myself a very old but still working Mercedes Benz and hired an elderly driver named Eduardo. Both were with me until I left the Philippines in 1972. I do remember how an old golfing friend, Peter Kelly, who visited me in Manila, was completely bowled over leaving the Army and Navy Club after having lunch with me, when reception called out over the loudspeaker for Eduardo to bring Mr. Arundell’s car to the front door. I have to say, in this regard, success came early in life and it has been downhill ever since. I could never even dream of having a driver now.
For the majority of my time in Manila I shared a house with another Englishman named Brian Phillips who was about 10 years older than me. He had graduated from either Oxford or Cambridge with first class honours and was one of the top insurance men in Manila, working for another old English/Scottish company called Kerr and Co. He was also unbelievably shy and probably even more naive with women than I was. So both of us had frequent visits to the house from the plentiful supply of lovely ladies from the night bars we both frequented. Sometimes we managed to be at the gate of the house at the same time, welcoming in our respective guests. That would have been normal bachelor life in Manila, certainly for me until I met Rhona. Brian ended up marrying his No.1 lady friend, a fairly ferocious character named Remi, who even ordered Brian’s mother about when she came out for a visit as well as accompanying Brian to his bowling sessions at the very English “Manila Club” which caused a few raised eyebrows. She even hired the man who drove Brian around who would act as his body guard and make sure he got up to no mischief.!
Brian looked after all the accounts of the house. He was far wealthier than me and a really good and honest person. He looked after the two ladies of the house who looked after us on the cooking, housekeeping and laundry side of things. The senior lady was Josephine the cook, quite a strong person, who was not afraid to let us know if she approved or disapproved of any of our lady friends. She was helped by Marcella, who was tiny in size but a lovely person. I think Brian set up a pension for both of them when eventually he left the Philippines which was way over and above normal practice. As I said, he was and hopefully is still, a good person.
This couple of years were in the main good years for me. I could really get my teeth stuck into my new job and spend all my pent up energy. The sporting scene at the Nomads and the friends I made there were a lot of fun and of course having Rhona around was the icing on the cake. There would be occasional trips down to some of the newer beach resorts for the weekends and my golfing life continued, although not at The Manila Golf Club. My sponsor, Gerry Lanuza, had to pass my share on to a business acquaintance of his who was a stockbroker. So I continued to play with my old golfing chums but at new courses. One in particular was a stand out for design and character, called Holiday Hills, quite a few miles south of Manila. We were told that during the war the land was used as a snake farm, so rather than venture into the rough we were all a lot more ready to unwrap a new golf ball rather than risk a poisonous snake bite, even if it was a bit more expensive.

11.     THE WIND OF CHANGE.

     

By 1972 however, I was beginning to have doubts about what I was doing. Several things started to happen which pointed me towards a change from selling Australian investments in the Philippines. A fellow called Gough Whitlam became head man ‘down under’ and began discouraging foreign investments into the country. That was quite serious for starters, although there would be ways of getting around this. Then the world known ‘Fund of Funds’,  headed up by Bernie Cornfeld, began to get into difficulties. This company was the prototype that our own Fund of Australia had copied. Then the Australian Stock Market itself, especially stocks relating to the mineral market, began fluctuating wildly and losing credibility. (Remember Poseidon.?)  Finally, in the Philippines itself, it looked like Ferdinand Marcos was coming to power. The thought was that he was going to be a ‘strong arm’ President which could make life unpredictable. ( as it transpired he turned out as disappointing as all his predecessors. It would have been far better for the country if he had jailed all his corrupt cronies who had helped get him into power and done a ‘Lee Kwan Yu’.!  Ferdinand Marcos and his wife were very capable people, and had they chosen a different course they could have had a very positive effect on the long term health of the Philippines.)
So my thoughts began to gravitate as to what else I could possibly do for a living. One thing I began to realise was that I was certainly not a ‘Company Man’. I would always be a square peg in a round hole. I did have a couple of job offers by this time in Manila but they were for local companies and the salaries would not be attractive. Such a job would have tied me to the Philippines for life, and I was too young for that. So the age old and most common idea known to man of setting up as ‘a trader’ came to mind. The simple idea of buying something cheap and selling it for profit was within my capability. I knew a little of what was made in the Philippines and I had an idea that some of these things could be sold at a profit in a much higher cost country such as England, which was where I had originally come from and where I had family.
My first idea was to set up a small trading company in Manila itself, so I could control all the purchases and check on product quality, and then build up suitable ‘buying’ contacts in Europe and the U.K. I soon realised that this idea would take too long and therefore cost too much to come to fruition. So what happened in the end was that I simply filled quite a large wooden crate full of a range of things that were made locally and were selling well to the foreign tourists in Manila. Such as hand crafted wooden bowls made from delightful local hardwoods such as camagong, as well as capiz shell lamps and place matts, traditionally woven tapestries made by the mountain tribes in the north of Luzon and silver jewellery.  And these items I was hoping I could sell, at a profit, into the retail shops of London Town. In addition to those items I included two or three samples of  something called a “hand tufted” carpet.  These samples were given to me by two people who would turn out to be life long friends. I met them both while playing soccer at the Nomads. Raffy Esteva and Raffy Villarreal both played for the Philippine National soccer team as well as their local club Meralco (Manila Electric Co.) and they both worked for a newly set up company called The Philippine Carpet Company. This company was part owned by a major Hong Kong company called Taiping. And this company specialised in making hand tufted carpets.
This ‘tufting’ process was, at that time, a completely new happening in the carpet industry as a whole, the world over. In simple terms the process of hand tufting was a cheaper way of achieving what traditionally was done by the laborious and time consuming “hand knotting” process. Each woollen stitch was simply pushed into the cotton canvas backing and held in place with glue, rather than each stitch being inserted by hand and knotted so that it did not fall out. ‘Tufting’ took much, much less time and therefore was a much cheaper way of achieving the same effect. Especially when hand tufting became semi mechanised by using something similar to a hand held Black and Decker drill to bang all the stitches in.
The main advantage of any hand made carpet over the common machine made carpets such as an Axeminster or Wilton was that the carpet could be made to any shape, size or design. Carpets could now be ‘custom made’.
Now when you cheapen the hand made process by using the semi mechanised hand tufting process, and when you further cheapen that process by using a far eastern labour force, you end up with a product that would prove to be very competitive in any high cost country such as England, which at that time knew very little about this new product.
Therefore, from my possible point of view, on the supply side I had an excellent if not perfect imitation of what was traditionally a very very expensive item. So you could say I was already in a very competitive position if I was trying to compete in the carpet market of a high cost country such as the U.K. with  a product produced in the relatively low cost Far East.
What about the demand side. Well, it just so happened that in the 1970’s a lot of new oil money was ending up in a lot of Arab pockets, and a lot of Arabs were beginning to compete with each other as to who could build the biggest Palace. And palaces would normally have very large rooms which sometimes needed very large carpets. And to design those palaces and carpets a lot of the Arabs went to the best known interior designers in Paris and London.
So, if you wanted to fast forward and find out how an average Joe with very little money but with quite a bit of energy and courage managed to survive, you already have the answer. Totally unbeknown to me at the time, I was about to move to London with a product that, due to the coming together of various circumstances, would be very difficult NOT to sell.
Luck, or destiny or that new word ‘serendipity’ was on my side.

But, as you could imagine, at the time involved, all was not plain sailing. I had absolutely no idea, just like most other people on earth, as to what was around the corner and how things would eventually pan out. All you have is youth, energy and hope in your heart.

The hardest thing was saying goodbye to Rhona. Not only did I miss her an awful lot, but I also felt guilty about leaving her after she had been kind enough to spend so much of her time with me. Most girls in the Philippines would sacrifice an awful lot for the chance to spend their life in a first world country. Maybe that was one reason why she put up with me. But I half way knew then, and I am a bit more certain now, that I find it very hard to make a commitment, of any kind. Then you add the uncertainty of the future and the lack of any long term funds myself and my parents going through a tough time and I think, in hindsight, that things turned out the right way. I always knew Rhona had connections with the US Navy…she told me that she used to go to dances at The Manila Hotel, before she met me, when  the ships hit Manila, and in the end that connection did in fact lead her to the USA. She married a navy man and ended up with a family in San Diego, the main Pacific base for the US fleet.
I knew I could not compete with a sailor and I knew that Filipinas were always much happier in America then anywhere else. So, in the end, I think Rhona found her happiness and little old me eventually, after quite a bit of heartache, ended up with what was best for me. A bachelor’s life, which enabled me to develop a few of the little talents I had in me as well as setting up a new little company of my own in London.

12. SO, BACK TO ENGLAND.

>> I arrived mid way through 1972, just over 7 years since I first took off to Manila in 1965. The big advantage was that I had somewhere to stay.  My parents could not afford to stay in London and had moved out to the very pretty village of Denham, about 20 miles west of London on the way to Oxford. Their landlady was Mrs. Archer, the wife of the last genuine blacksmith in the area. Hence the cottage they rented (for £10 per week) was called Forge Cottage. It would be worth many millions today. It had 3 bedrooms and a pretty garden and was connected to the main forge where old Mrs. Archer and her daughter Mavis lived with two daughters, one of whom was called Libby.

>> The husband of Mavis, Brian, ran the only little petrol station in the village, the modern equivalent, I guess, of forging horseshoes.

>> I believe my parents moved there in 1971, which was lucky timing for me. The village had three pubs. I think my local was The Falcon, about 3-4 doors away. There were plenty of fields and public pathways where I could do some running and keep up my exercising. And it was reasonably easy to get into London where hopefully I was going to sell my wares.

>> Although, in most ways, I was glad to be home, things were not altogether easy for me. The main thing was the culture shock. Having spent the first 7 years of my adult life, which are very formative, in a hot sunny climate teeming with vibrant, positive people, usually with a happy smile on their faces, I found England, however pretty my little village of Denham was, somewhat depressing. Every thing was seemingly grey and cold, and there appeared to be hardly anyone about. And when people did appear on the scene, there were very few smiles and less welcoming openness compared with the genuine friendliness that always seemed to envelope you where ever you went in the Philippines. I certainly missed girlfriend Rhona and then there was the usual worry over finances and how and if I would survive.

>> But youth was on my side, and talking of survival means you have to talk about selling.

>> Well, how do you start selling.? Answer. With the help of a telephone, to try and make an appointment, just like selling mutual funds. In fact I think I introduced the ubiquitous Mr.Joe Rocks to a few unsuspecting secretaries in London when their boss’s could not see me. Certainly three years of selling mutual funds had managed to toughen me up a little as to the matter of getting your foot into somebody’s door. The other thing that helped was the intrigue attached to the Philippines, because in 1972 very few people knew anything about that part of the world. Things are hugely globalised now. Things were very different then. So when you said you had examples of exotic far eastern products people were interested.

>> There was one telephone in the house which was shared by my Dad and me. My Dad was still in the business of hoping one of his multi million pound projects would come to fruition while I was always hoping for a little success at the other end of the spectrum. It made one thing happen for sure. When the phone rang it was picked up mightily quickly.!! Usually with disappointing results. But bit by bit, I was beginning to get a few small bites.

>> The earliest bites, and in fact what later transpired to be the only bites, were to do with the carpets. That is except for one very large project that was to do with wood, which I will mention later on.

>> The first three carpets I sold were what are known as ‘stock items’. Two were destined for The Army and Navy Store and one was for Liberties in Tottenham Court Road. The stores had bought these carpets outright on the basis of designs the factory had produced and my sales pitch and it was the store’s responsibility to sell them on to the public.The only problem was that the factory had packed the three of them in only one very heavy bale. I had to go to the bonded warehouse, separate the carpets and repack. Bearing in mind the floor was greasy and I had only 2 hours to do this under the watchful but very unhelpful eye of a unionised employee, I considered my self very lucky to come out in one piece without a broken back.

>> My next sale was a far bigger one to The John Lewis Group. The Purchasing Manager had agreed to buy 40 or more of these quite sizeable rugs, each in the region of 10′ # 12′.

>> These rugs had a modern ‘textured’ look about them which only hand made or handtufted carpets could achieve, involving velvet and looped pile, level variations with carving and embossing. This was definitely new to the market which I guess was the main reason the Purchasing manager took the gamble. It transpired he got things wrong.  They were not selling. John Lewis paid me for everything and they took the losses. But I was also beginning to get the message, over the first year plus of my selling trips into London, that things were not going too well.

>> The smaller decorative items were not selling at all. In fact most of the samples that were in the original crate ended up decorating my own home, (which I bought for £11,000 eight years after arriving back in England.) and some of them, especially the ‘tinkling’ capiz shell mini chandeliers are still giving me great pleasure today. As are two of the beautiful hardwood wooden bowls which are now housing all my onions, apples and bananas etc in my kitchen. And as I look around, I see a few of the Philippine crafted tapestries adorning a couple of my 40 year old glass tables. (As a bachelor, few things change in this house despite the years.!) And the money was running out. So a small change in marketing attack was called for. Carpets still remained the best option. They were bigger items involving bigger chunks of money than the small decorative items. But the emphasis now had to be towards special design ‘custom made’ carpets to ‘up market’ individuals and their interior decorators rather than ‘stock’ orders sold to shopping chains. Because this latter option had been tried and was failing.

>> My advantage was that the Philippines was an English speaking country and the telex machine had come on stream. Because, when dealing with individual ‘special design’ carpets, speedy communications were vital. So the fact that most of the factory staff were fluent in English and the fact that I could have cheap and immediate written communication with them put me in a strong position, because don’t forget, the source that I would be talking to could produce things at a fraction of the cost compared with local high cost British or European sources.

>> At the time the telex system was the latest device, so I and every other business man was happy to use it. We couldn’t ask for more, because we did not know what would be coming a few years on, which was the fax machine, which would be a quantum leap forward in terms of transferring design and dimensional information. Imagine how hard it was to describe a change in design or dimension just with the written word.?!? I remember once writing three full pages of foolscap to my project co-ordinator at the factory, trying to describe a change to the dimensions of the main staircase for a palace in Athens to make sure the carpet did not run short…!…all to no avail.!!  Luckily, we organised our own team of installers from the factory to do the installation. And these Filipino installers are brain surgeons when it comes to cutting and piecing bits of carpet together. They do things so well that no joins are visible to the naked eye.

>> In fact over the last 40 years or so I owe my life to them nine times over or more. Just imagine some of the special design wall to wall carpets, weighing a quarter of a ton, costing £30,000 and having to fit in the most complex shaped rooms. The carpets are like a tailor made suit. They stretch and shrink in different parts and in different ways. So they have to be pushed about an awful lot during installation, and the Filipino boys from the factory were experts at doing this. Sometimes I have been caught in situations where the client has brought in his own installers, who have never seen a hand tufted carpet before, and if it did not fit perfectly the first time, the finger was always pointed at me, the supplier.! The cost of having your carpets rejected and having to remake, re ship and reinstall would have been the end of the company and the end of the house that backed up the company finance. That certainly could be described as stress.

>> I still wake up in a cold sweat thinking of some of the impossible situations you get into, but luckily, in most cases, get out of.

13. THE FIRST SALE OF A SPECIALLY DESIGNED CARPET.

>> However, I am getting ahead of my self. Let’s go back my  first sale of a specially designed carpet, made specially for one particular area, for one particular client and designed by his own decorator. This sale was made about one and a half years after starting up the little company in mid 1972. And I have to say that my mutual fund selling techniques and pure persistence eventually paid off. The decorator involved eventually threw his arms up in the air in total despair, threw me a bit of paper with a design on it and told to go and make it, get out of his office and leave him in peace. Well, the decorator was none other than Oliver Ford, Decorator to The Queen Mother and Decorator to the Dorchester Hotel, amongst others. And my contract was to make three specially designed and shaped rugs for the main entrance foyer of the Dorchester Hotel, certainly one of the top five Hotels in London.

>> That definitely had to be one of the seminal (whatever that word means!?) moments of my business career, because, as a result, you can imagine how many other doors I was then able to knock down. But hold on. I still had to make them, and make them well, because no second rate carpet would be good enough for the main entrance of a top hotel. And this was my first attempt. Success would make me and failure would break me. On the knife edge for the first of many times in this up and down carpet career that I was beginning  to make for myself.

>> First the rough design I had been given had to be double checked and detailed up according to the existing carpet that was lying in the hotel foyer, and this work had to be done at night when there were few people about. Then all the design, colour and dimensional notes had to be taken out to the airport for sending to Manila…this was before the days of DHL and FedEx, at least as far as I was aware of at the time. The factory then had to make up their own working drawings together with a sample showing the actual colours and wool quality, which again I would have to go out to the airport to collect. This was taken to Oliver Ford for approval and only when this was obtained could work commence at the factory.

>> As you can imagine, quite a bit of work goes into the making of any custom made carpet, and even at this stage you are only half way home. The first thing is that the factory have got to make the carpet as per specification. You think this should be easy but you have to realise that they (the factory) may be making a hundred other carpets at the same time, each involving different designs and thousands of different colours. So there is an understandable element of human error. Even if the carpet is made as perfectly as possible ( no carpet ever made is 100% perfect) you then can have everything destroyed by damage in transit. Don’t forget, carpets can be big, the bales can be heavy and dragged along the floor which can burn away the backing, or the carpets can be bent causing severe creasing. Once the carpets are with the airlines you loose all control. I am mentioning this now because throughout my whole carpeting life, the possibility of damage in transport, when you are hopefully crossing your last hurdle, has kept me awake more nights than I want to remember.

>> Going back to my first contract.

>> The Dorchester Foyer Rugs.

>> These were delivered to the Hotel’s carpet contractors, a company based in Clerkenwell called DGK. (The K stood for Kolios, for the owner was Greek.) I went with great excitement and great fear to inspect. The carpet was laid out and looked beautiful. No damage, no creasing and the designs and colours looked fine. Then I got on my knees to feel the quality and nearly had a heart attack, because I was sure that the factory had short changed me on the weight and density of wool that should have been in the carpet. This was something that would happen quite often over the many years that I dealt with The Philippine Carpet Company. Because the raw wool was an imported item, paid for in Dollars, they always did their best to get away with using as little wool as possible, which was very short sighted of them. It would rebound on both myself as well as them. Many years later I lost the confidence of another very prestigious hotel, The Ritz in Paris, into which we had put a lot of work and quite a lot of carpeting, including their Dining room in which Lady Di must eaten at some point. We also made their main entrance corridor carpets, and it was this area that the factory did not put sufficient wool, causing our relations to go down hill.

>> Luckily, with my first order for the Dorchester, to be safe, I had over specified the the weight of wool that should have been in the carpet. As it transpired, Oliver Ford was very happy and I am sure the hotel were happy to get their carpets at about one third of the usual cost.

14. THE FIRST BIG KILL.

>> And so began a 35 year relationship between our little company and the Dorchester Hotel. Because the following year Oliver Ford asked us to quote for the fifth and sixth floor corridor carpets, which was a huge order for a tiny one man fledgling company, for this involved some 10,000 square feet of carpeting. These special design corridor carpets were a ‘signature’ item of the hotel. The corridors were wide, they twisted and turned all over the place and yet the borders and designs had to fit (jel) perfectly within the area involved.  Only hand made carpets could achieve this effect. And in order to make sure this hugely complex contract was done correctly, I had the measurements taken by three parties, the carpet contractors DGK who worked with the hotel, a professional surveying company called J. A. Story and myself. I then took myself back to Manila for three full months to watch the carpets being made and to get to know and make friends with a lot of the people who worked in the factory.

>> This would have been late 1974 and possibly into the beginning of 1975. It was a very useful and happy three months. I slipped back into my old life with great ease, spending my time between the Nomads Sports Club,  various golf courses and the factory. And yes, I tracked down Rhona, and again she was happy to spend time with me and again I let her down and again I missed her badly when back in the UK. In truth, I was hoping she did not miss me as much. And as mentioned before, she did marry into the US Navy and as I now remember became Mrs Rhona Marker. And I would imagine that by this time she is a satisfied and happy grandmother having brought up a couple of very well behaved children, in true Filipina tradition.

>> My time at the factory was very important and pivotal for the next 40 years of our business relationship. Not only did I make many life long friends but I learned an awful lot about the business of making this type of carpet..and am still learning. Also, after this major contract..because it was a big order even for this rather large factory, I believe I was recognised as being the factory’s main distributor in the U.K. Up until then, because I had no record of being a known carpet entity in England, they did not want to give me any recognition. Which was understandable.

>> The other pivotal thing that happened was that during one of my usual walks around the factory floor, inspecting the progress of my carpets which were in the process of weaving, I was approached by two young factory weavers, Isabel Lim and her sister Fe. This I imagine took quite a lot of courage in itself, because I was the big foreign customer who normally had the factory manager walking around with him. But as I was to learn over the next 40 years or so, courage was what made Isabel tick. The next thing she did was point a finger at me saying..” when I pass my exams, I want you to find me a job in England.!!” Of course, all I could do was to be polite, have a little chat and say yes. And then continue with my inspection. But destiny was already pointing it’s finger. A few years on, sitting with my parents after breakfast at Forge Cottage, a little letter was pushed through the door with a Philippine stamp, and sure enough it was from Isabel telling me she had passed her exams and would I please find her a job.

>> In hindsight I can say that never have I come across anybody who has actually forged her own destiny in the way that little Isabel has done, showing raw courage, cheerfulness and energy all along the way. And I believe that that her coming over here was also a big part of my own destiny, as over the years she proved to be my huge ‘right hand man’, or as she calls it, my ‘invisible wealth’, enabling  me to do all the other things that I eventually was able to do in my life, apart from making a minor success of my company.

>> The two Dorchester Hotel corridor carpets, (for the fifth and sixth floors ) weighed over 4 tons, and were made in about 40 separate pieces. They were shipped by sea container with each piece packed in a separate bale. Everything was delivered to The Hotel’s carpet contractors who had the not inconsiderable task of humping each and every bale up the narrow ‘back of house’ alleyways of the hotel, laying the carpets out in their correct position and then stitching each piece together. Not only did every carpet piece have to fit exactly into each odd shaped area, each border line and each and every floral pattern had to jel exactly with that of its neighbouring piece. Otherwise the whole thing could have been thrown back in my face.

>> Some pressure. Even writing about it now gives me stress. But thank heavens that youth is youth. Back in those days I was full of energy and aggression and I was making my first big kill. My thoughts were all positive and I was confident having checked each and every dimension my self at the factory. And sure enough, each piece fitted like a glove and I could be found walking above the stars for some months afterwards.

15. OIL IN THE CARPETS…..??

>> ( Although on this first occasion, after six months or so, I was brought down to earth with a big bump.

>> I was hauled back to the Hotel and told that my carpets were full of  oil because a lot of dark and light patches were appearing all over the carpet surfaces. They wanted the carpets replaced.!! Well, after not being able to eat for several days, I called in The International  Wool Secretariat whose technical department confirmed my original  assessment, that the marks concerned were nothing more than ‘water  marks’ that result from the deep wool pile lying in different  directions, causing the pile to either absorb the light and look dark  or reflect the light and look light. That was the first of many  occasions that we were hauled back by an angry client. And as anyone  in the carpet industry knows, carpets ‘are a woolly subject’. Nothing  is scientifically exact. You can argue about colour, wool pile, texture and dimensions till the cows come home. Everything is hand  made using natural pliable materials and nothing is perfect. It is part of the business, but it certainly causes many sleepless nights.)

>> But let’s go back to 1975. Those first two Dorchester Hotel  orders are the main reason for for me being here, the little company surviving until now, and being able to look after Isabel and her family (she arrived in England in 1979), Richard Farish (1975-1990) and our main designer Philip Frost (Heston) who joined us in the early 1980’s. Plus a few others along the way.

>> With the success of The Dorchester I was able to get involved with David Hicks, probably the best known designer of that era, who had married into the English Royal Family, and was introducing his strong colours and modern geometric designs. And he (David Hicks) in turn led me to another of of my main ‘private’ clients, which was a Greek owned organisation with connections to the then Saudi Arabian King Saud. The King was having a private Royal Yacht built named MY Abdul Aziz, which was nearly 500 feet long.!! David Hicks was the designer and we supplied all the carpets. And all the samples for those carpets were hand tufted by Isabel in the basement/office situated in my one and only house in south London. (Where I had previously told myself I would never ever buy a house.! Because I always got lost south of the river, like most people.) Other prominent designers were the Charles Hammond group, on Sloane Avenue, also, as a private client, the family who were later going to own The Ritz Hotel and Jon Bannenberg who was one of the first and certainly the most prominent of the Yacht designers in the U.K. For this was the beginning of the new era of super luxury yachts built for the growing number of multi millionaires who twenty years down the line would end up as billionaires. We did carpets for the super yacht of Alan Bond, who famously won the America’s Cup for Australia, as well as carpeting The Lady Ghislane for Robert Maxwell.

>> Those first 15 years after the company started were without doubt the most exciting years of my own ‘game of life’. I was living on the knife edge most of the time. The very fact that I was able to survive as an unknown ‘outsider’ selling something that I knew absolutely nothing about (carpets) at the outset was remarkable. But when you are in the business of survival and you have youth on your side I guess anything is possible. Don’t forget, I had a lot of years of built up energy with no where to go (as Purchasing manager at Theo. Davies) and three years experience of being a mutual fund salesman. So, putting the two together, I had a huge reserve of youthful energy and a bit of practice at knocking doors down. And now I was in control of my destiny. I was selling something I had control of. If I could make the sales and then make sure the factory made a good job of what I had sold and promised the client, then I had a good chance of survival and a little bit more than that. Making some money and gaining a bit of security which is most people’s goal in life, for both man and animal. It is naturally what you fight for.

>> And one of those promises I had made, and ended up by just escaping with my life, was to do with a colossal contract for specially designed wooden screens for one of the many palaces for a Middle Eastern Head of State.

16. THE WOOD CONTRACT.

>> The main contractor involved in building this Middle Eastern palace was the well known U.K. company Taylor Woodrow. My own order came through an interior decorating company that I knew well, having sold them specially designed carpets for other palaces or similar prestigious projects. I think it was on this contract for wooden screens that I actually bought the client lunch, which I remember consisted of a sausage roll and half a pint of beer. I mention this purely because over the 40 years or more of doing business I only entertained a client on 4 occasions. That must get me into the record books as the most miserly company proprietor in England.

>> The only reason the decorating company felt safe in giving me the order for the wooden screens was because I had performed well on the carpet side. And of course, my connections with the Philippines, known for its availability of attractive hardwoods. Another reason of course must have been my positive sales pitch, because even if I did not know much about wood, I knew someone in Manila who I thought did. And further, my first company brochure mentioned that I could supply wooden screens together with a myriad of other items that were made in the Philippines. So, why not give it a go.

>> So, back out the the Philippines for another extended stay of just over a month, which happened to be the Christmas/ New Year time when the climate in Manila was at its best. The cool, dry season. I chose the company to make the screens and watched them start off the production. I did have to admit to myself at the time that I had my doubts. The clover leafs, which formed the main repeat pattern involved in the screens, were not dowelled together but pinned with small nails. The construction appeared fragile. But time was running out and it was too late to change. I went back to England and waited for the sea container to arrive with a degree of trepidation.

>> Just before the container arrived, I received a telephone call from Taylor Woodrow telling me that the architect had built the palace in the wrong place and that the current contract was terminated. The screens would not be needed but would be fully paid for. To say that was a relief would be the understatement of the year. I think that piece of luck was a big part of my life’s destiny, had I been aware of it at the time. Because if those badly made screens had arrived and failed, me and my little company would have disappeared off the scene.

>> That was not the end of the story. Another palace would be built for the same client and would need more screens. Again I was given the order but this time I knew I had to find a much more reliable source. And for this I had to thank my very good ex Manila chum Brian Henry, a cockney boy who had risen up the ranks in The Ford Motor Company and  at the time was based in Thailand, successfully running his own company. Brian found a capable source in Thailand.

>> The screens this time were a beauty to behold. Polished light brown Burmese teak, each piece dowelled together with not a nail to be seen. Solid construction, properly air dried and beautifully packed.

>> The screens were installed with no problems and were very well liked by all parties involved. Again, I was walking over the moon.

>> But again, three months later, the telephone rang at 5 in the morning with an angry voice at the end of it telling me my screens were  cracking up and to get the next plane out to the Middle East and work  out a way of fixing things. Definitely persona non grata. Another week of not being able to eat my food (an excess of fear!) while I brushed up upon my knowledge of all things to do with wood, with a visit to the International Wood Institute. I also bought myself an hydrometer in order to test the moisture content in my beautiful screens. At least that made me look a bit more knowledgable.! ( I have always imagined myself, when trying to look intelligent sticking this instrument into my wooden screens, as depicted in one of those typical Matt type cartoons which kept on coming out in those days, with the caption..”new technology defeats pissed old farts..”!  I certainly was no expert.) When I did get to site I could not believe my eyes. My screens looked spectacular and were standing as installed. The naked eye could not detect any kind of defect. On closer inspection hair line cracks had appeared, and what I guessed caused all the frenzy was the loud sharp bang that occurs when the wood shrinkage causes this to happen. I can just imagine the local Royalty with full entourage slowly and ceremoniously walking down this great palatial concourse when something like a rifle shot occurred.  An attempted coup d’etat.!  Panic. A lot of the other contractors must have got it in the neck, including probably The Minister of the Interior but I was at the end of the line.  So I got everything thrown at me.  Just another day in the life of a small business man. ( No NHS counselling available.!!) ( I don’t say this lightly. Every other small business man in England who has his house mortgaged to support his business must go through similar hair raising situations time and time again. And simply have to pick themselves up and get on with things.) I flew back to Thailand, picked up 3 of the carpenters who had made the screens and, with wood filler and the correct staining polish, we made good. The whole problem had been caused by the wood picking up moisture in transit and storage and then being put into a dry air conditioned environment. Naturally the wood shrinks, the hairline cracks appear and the rifle shots are heard. Once the wood settled in to its new surroundings and climate there should be no more movement….which I am sure is what has happened because I have (so far) not had any more 5am telephone calls.!

>> Needless to say, I never touched any other contract involving wood. Dealing with the ‘wooly’ subject of hand tufted carpets was bad enough. I also heard in later years that even the best and most expensive carpenter in England suffered the same fate, when a large wooden wall cabinet his company had made cracked up shortly after being installed in a New York dining room. Again, I was told, due to different moisture levels in the atmosphere.

17. OTHER HAIR RAISING SITUATIONS.

ANOTHER AWKWARD MOMENT involved a very heavy carpet bale, containing the main entrance corridor rug of the Ritz Hotel on Piccadilly. It weighed over one ton because it was made in one piece. My carpet layer, a good friend of mine called Andy, had been warned that he needed at least 20 strong men on site to take the bale out of the container, which was due to arrive outside the Hotel’s main entrance at midnight.

>> When I arrived, the truck and the container were there together with Andy and 8 others, some of whom were the Hotel’s employees. They wanted to send the truck away, because of the weight of the bale which they did not think they could budge. But, as they had already cut up and removed the old existing carpet this was not an option. All I can remember was finding some street cones to block off the Arlington Street entrance and doing my best to stop taxis getting in and driving their cabs over my brand new carpet. Some got through my defences, and drove straight over the carpet which by then was half unrolled on the road, waiting to be dragged up the main entrance stairs and into the Hotel foyer.  In the end, I counted my blessings for the one thing that saved the day..or night..it did not rain. By 6am I crawled away totally beaten up but happy inside. The carpet fitted perfectly and looked great. I am still waiting for Andy to buy me a drink.

>>

>> I have mentioned just two incidences where my commercial life was left hanging on the thinnest of threads. But this type of situation was endemic in the business I was in. Not all jobs were as traumatic as the two described above, but by and large, each contract, large or small, was subject to many pressure or stress points. Arguing over colour, damage in transit or putting your life in the hands of cowboy installers were just some of the things that kept you awake at night. And I wasn’t the only one suffering, because the few competitors of mine that were around (we generally got on pretty well) were also going through the mill themselves with similar sorts of problems. We could have a laugh over our problems and funny situations, but at the time a lot of cold sweating was done.

>> Overall, I was lucky in the fact that I found myself involved in an occupation that suited my make up. I had a bit of hidden away aggression, which I guess helped me on the selling side (knocking down new doors) and in occasionally bullying the factory to get orders delivered on time. I was also a very practical and commonsensical person, so I enjoyed doing all the measurement taking, which was of vital importance, as well as all the logistics and writing up all the technical and colour specifications that were necessary in transmitting information from the customer to the factory. I also had a bit of artistic ability which helped when discussing carpet designs. This artistic ability was to come out in later (after I turned 55 years old) life when I started my watercolour painting.

18. DEALING WITH BANKS.

>> Then there was all the business of dealing with the banks.   Just about everyone has stories to tell about their treatment from the banks, so I will try and keep it short and factual.

>> Our first bank was The Chartered Bank, (now The Standard Chartered Bank) because this name was well known to me as it was one of the big two foreign banks operating in the Philippines. The other was the HKSB. In my first interview with the bank, after I had made my presentation mentioning all the positive things that I was hoping I could make happen, the elderly man interviewing me suddenly blurted out…”yes, I hear all that, but what happens if you die..where does that leave the bank.?”   Well, as a half way fit 32 year old I had never prepared an answer for a question like that. We lasted 19 years with the bank, never putting a foot wrong. Two little incidences remain in my memory. In the early 1980’s I had a call saying a couple of the managers were going to pass by our offices, which was in fact my house. They would not be spending long. We were after all small time. Well, it so happened that at the time the Manager of The Philippine Carpet Company, Ben Abarca, a very good good man in every aspect, and his assistant Pablo Moral were staying with me. They were in England for a month or so buying and learning how to work an Axeminster carpet machine to take back to the  factory in Manila. And Pablo was a seriously good cook. And Filipino cooking smells and tastes fantastic. Needless to say, after their first couple of gin and tonics, the two bank managers were there to stay. We put them both in a taxi before 5pm. One of the bankers was a lovely man named Gordon Ottway, who was “the letter of credits” man. And of course our company needed to open one of those every time we ordered a carpet from Manila.

>> The other incident I remember was when they called up and said they were closing our account because we were too small, and it took too much of their time to ‘computer monitor’ our performance. They wanted to concentrate on their bigger accounts. So, after 19 years of not putting a foot wrong, we were shown the door and the following year The Chartered Bank lost £200 million when The Brent Walker Group, one of their big accounts, hit the dust.

>> We then moved to The National Bank of Greece who we had already experienced when they helped our company to handle the huge order involved in making the carpets for the Saudi Royal Yacht. We lasted quite happily with them for a number of years. My bank manager was a certain Mr. Charalambous, a name which rolled very nicely off the tongue, and he himself was most apologetic when he informed me that the Head Office in Athens had instructed them to get rid of all small accounts. Again, we had done nothing wrong. Annual turnovers of £200-400,000 were obviously not attractive to banks, so all I could imagine was that there must have been many other small business’s suffering the same fate. And banks should have been there to help trade, not hinder.

>> So now our bank is The Bank of Scotland, 500 miles away, totally distant and totally impersonal. But they do store our cash, (mainly for their own benefit), and they do transfer the money around the world, which is what all trading companies require. Life is too short to complain.

19. THE COMPANY LIVES ON…

>> The above gives a brief idea of the sort of things that occurred in the line of business or trading that kept me and the little company going. I will now try and put a brief time frame on how things transpired after first arriving back from the Philippines in 1972.

>>

>> 1972-79.  

>> When I was approx 31-38 years old. I was mainly living in Denham Village in the cottage rented by my parents. So the office address would have been Forge Cottage. I was working on my own and occasionally getting design help from Bill Cox and Richard Farish who were based in Bromley, Kent. (That is one of the reasons I bought my one and only house in S.E. London.) In fact Richard joined me in the early 1980’s, on a self employed basis, shortly after the house was in a liveable state. It was quite an easy commute from Bromley.

>> So during those years the company was definitely getting off the ground. The number of orders and clients may still have been very small, but the size of some of the orders was considerable. The Dorchester corridor carpeting and a couple of big orders from David Hicks to mention just two.

>> The telephone was always answered promptly, as mentioned before, and my Dad would do the typing. His written English and construction of letters was a lot better than I could manage. My Dad also helped by taking very detailed information of the designs and dimensions of  the carpets in The Penthouse and The Pavillion, two of the main function rooms of The Dorchester Hotel, for by then we were making just about every area in The Hotel where hand made carpets were involved.

>> On the social side I was making a few friends from my sporting connections. On the squash and chess side I had joined a club in The West End, although a lot of my squash was played on the courts belonging to The Department of Employment (?) situated in a basement near St.James’s Square. One of my old pre Manila chums used to play with a remarkable character called Arthur Remedios, who was half Portuguese and half Chinese, originally from Macao. Arthur was small and tubby and always wore a heavily embossed white cricketing sweater making him look exactly like the cartoon character Sporting Sam. And he was “on the juice” most of the day and night. When I first walked on the court with him I was feeling a bit sorry for him and vowed to try and take things easy. I very quickly found myself racing around all four corners of the court in a huge lather while Arthur calmly controlled things from centre court. And when I had my first house warming party it was Arthur who provided the star culinary delight. He made a hole in a crusty bun, took out a lot of the bread from the inside and replaced it with a delicious Chinese “dim sum” concoction. He must have made about 50 of these things which must have taken him a day and a night. A big thanks for everything young Arthur.

>> I had also joined my first golf club, just west of London, where my godfather, at that time, was a member. I am now, at point of writing, close to sitting on the seat reserved for the club’s oldest, and according to my friends, most selfish member.! I will keep trying, although there are a few others that might beat me that particular chair.

>> As I was a single male, I did feel I needed a bit of breathing space from my parents, so I rented a room in a large Victorian terraced house near Brixton belonging to a very strong willed and good looking Irish lady called Eileen Healy. She was some character. She had had 19 proposals of marriage and her latest liaison had been with an old Etonian who had spent a couple of years in Brixton prison for some kind of financial embezzlement. I had met Eileen as a result of meeting and taking a liking to The Guest Liaison Officer of The London Intercontinental Hotel, who was a good looking Filipino lass called Ara who, in the end, turned out to be a good and long term friend of mine. She is now living in Manila surviving a long and happy marriage with a very lovely French husband.

>> Eileen, whose health was always fragile, sold her house and ended up being a tenant of mine in the mid 1980’s. She died a few years later, when she was still very young, I think when she was 38 years old, in 1988. It was very sad for such a strong person and brilliant teacher (of children) to go so young. Her mother, from Ireland, was with her in the last few weeks.

>> As far as I can recall, I was mainly residing with Eileen in Brixton on the weekends. My habit was to have a couple of pints of Guinness at The Atlantic Pub on the Friday night, just to “get away from” Denham and feel I had arrived in London. This pub was situated on the corner of Atlantic Road and Railton Road, which in 1981 turned out to be the exact epicentre of the Brixton riots. I must admit I did get a few funny glances when I was seen drinking on my own there, and my friends, to this day, have always wondered how I managed to survive.

>>

>> 1980-88.

>> Isabel arrived in England late in 1979, at about the same time as I purchased my derelict house (it had been empty for 3-4 years) in the Brixton Camberwell area. The house was a small 4 storied Victorian terraced house. It cost around £10,000. The front of house faced NE (where I made the kitchen/dining room) and the back of the house and garden faced SW.  The house had a basement which was where I had planned to make the office. Because of the bad condition of the house, and the fact that I wanted a couple of additions made, it took a full year of gutting and rebuilding before it was deemed half way habitable.

>> So, for a whole year Isabel had to survive living with a landlady in Denham Village with very little to do. Now, this may not seem a difficult ordeal to most, but when you consider the culture shock she must have experienced, it was remarkable that she managed to keep her marbles in tack. She was still very young and in Manila had shared a small maybe one or two roomed dwelling with a family of seven people. Life was constantly on the go, constantly elbow to elbow with the positive hustle and bustle of life in the working lanes of the The Far East. And that is tough. Probably a 12 hour day when transport by bus or “jeepney” to and from the factory is taken into account. Deep friendship and hard work at the factory and a lot of love in a very close knit family. And all the sunshine, the heat and all the happy smiles that usually are part and parcel of the Philippines. Contrast that with life in England. However pretty the village, however nice the people, the shock of quietness and empty spaces must have been huge. My Dad did his best by spending an hour a day with her, reading and making her read The Daily Telegraph in an effort to improve her English…alas, even to this day to no avail. I think also she went to a bookkeeping course to take up the time. I think the only reason she kept her sanity was the ability to have some communications to friends and family via the telex machine, or second hand via me and my constant communications with the factory. I can remember that first Christmas, when I had to make a trip to Manila, I was mainly loaded down with ‘pasalubongs’ (presents) for all Isabel’s family and friends at the factory. That is common with most Filipinos travelling to foreign parts. First and foremost comes help in monetary or gift form towards their family back home. Family ties are very much stronger than in the more materialistic West.

>> The main thing was that she survived. And roughly a year after arriving into the U.K. her next big step was to move into the just liveable house cum office which was at long last was a place in which she could begin to use all that pent up energy of the previous year.

>> The first thing was that this very proper English Public School boy had to show Isabel to her quarters, which was one of the two bedrooms at the top of the house, together with a large bathroom. Firm instructions were laid down that this was her space and that my quarters were below, where my bedroom and newly added ensuite bathroom was located. This lasted only a couple of months. One evening I heard Isabel coming down the stairs and with her high pitched, still very much pigeon English, to demand ” that we must live like man and wife”…..!!! I said at the beginning that this lady had courage…well, it was definitely her call and a big call at that. And needless to say that with a couple of youngish people living in the same house, nature followed its normal course.

>> This situation carried on for a year or so until I convinced Isabel that she had to develop her own life in England to a fuller extent than what she was experiencing while remaining in my house/office. Things were too much centred on me, the company and her friends and family in the Philippines. She needed to begin to make her own friends and her own life in London. So she bought her own small house not to far away and soon after that found some friends of her own, one of whom, a Spaniard called Jose, she would eventually marry.

20. THE ORIGINAL “WORKING FAMILY.”

>> On the business side of things, once we could occupy the house the little ‘working family’ began to take shape. Richard Farish, the designer/draughtsman who had helped me on the carpet design side while I was still residing in Denham, moved into the basement office. So we began with a compact little group of three. Myself as the main initiator of all things on the business side as well as being responsible for transferring the technical and design information to the factory in Manila. Richard helped with the making of the designs and dimensional layout drawings which were vital for the clients information as well as giving the factory understandable plans to follow. Richard was more than ‘all round’ useful. He was a really nice person who had already helped me a lot in preparing all the architectural plans that were needed when making the original additions to the house. He had dealt with the necessary planning authorities. He had a great sense of humour and could mimic all our clients in the most hilarious way. Specifically the lugubrious and negative syllables of the Greek Mr. Constantine who worked with the Ritz, who was always saying no to our best designs.! He, Richard, and his wife Maureen were very keen athletes who ran most weekends with others from the Bromley Athletics Club which was near to where they lived. Richard is one of my life long friends despite me nearly ‘throwing up’ in his face a year or two ago when he visited me in hospital just after having a hip replacement. It was of course a surfeit of drugs, rather than “Reeechaard” (as one of our clients used to call him) that caused this to happen.!

>> Isabel now had her very own desk, and was in charge of all the secretarial work and book keeping as well as her most important job, that of weaving. Yes, this was the fun part. We got the factory to send us thousands of scanes of wool from their surplus yarns, and these we stuffed into shelving that covered 3 of the 4 walls, floor to ceiling, in the big basement room on the front side of the house. We made a little wooden frame with a lot of protruding nails onto which we could stretch the canvas backing. Richard drew the required design on the canvas and then Isabel, who had been a weaver at the factory, banged the wool yarn in with her hand operated tufting gun. We also had some electric shears to enable us to carve and bevel these ‘home made’ carpet samples as required. We could make a sample in a day !…..instead of the 3-4 weeks or more it takes to get one from the factory. (In hindsight, I should have kept this practice up and invested in developing it with better technology and up to date weaving skills, because the ability of quick sampling is crucial to getting new orders.) As it was, this ‘mini factory’ was a huge help when starting up a fledgling business and a lot of the decorators would love visiting the house just to see all the thousands of wool colours displayed before their eyes even if they did not want a sample. Michael Lewis was one of those who revelled in all the colours, as was Paul Hull, who worked with David Hicks at the time that company was involved with the interior design of The Royal Yacht for the King of Saudi Arabia. All the carpet samples were woven by Isabel in our tiny little workshop, with colours hand picked by Paul.

>> So the working family for the first few years in our new office consisted of Isabel, whose cheerfulness and energy would bolster every one up in the bad moments, the very even keeled and calm Richard, and myself.

>> I then managed to pull in a huge order to make all the carpeting for a new palace in Doha, where 11,000 square metres of hand made carpeting would be involved. This would be 15 times more than two of the large Dorchester Hotel corridors in size. The designer for this project was an Italian genius called Bruno Fiorentino. I think he ended up having a nervous breakdown because he insisted in involving himself in all the tiniest details of what ever designs were in question, door handles, chandeliers, carpets or anything else. For our part, we had to work with him in producing the carpet designs, and as you can imagine for that amount of carpeting, a lot of different designs were required. So we advertised in our local area for some design assistance on a temporary basis to help us with this design overload. One of the six or seven designers that came forward was a very shy but extremely talented artist, recently graduated from The Camberwell College of Art, name Philip Frost. He helped us on this project and I then kept bringing him back on a temporary basis for other jobs where traditional designs were involved. He was brilliant with florals and fronds and wreaths and all things classical. It was his ability with ‘shading’ these designs that was able to make our ‘gun tufted’ carpets look like the proper old fashioned ‘hand knotted’ carpets. Good design is a necessary fundamental in producing a good carpet.

>> So, I think it was that by the late 1980’s Philip (or Heston Cody, as he had renamed himself) became a permanent member of our little company, which in the early days was known as Xebec Eastern Trading Company or Xebec Decor Limited.

>> That was our very close working family. Together with, and I will never forget them, Mutt and Jeff. Or, more precisely Matthew, a little black cat who came as a kitten from our next door neighbour in Denham. The poor little fellow was never too healthy, suffering from epilepsy. Jeffry the dog came from our new neighbours in London. He was so tiny as a puppy he could fit on the palm of Isabel’s very small hand. Back to the human working family. Whenever there was a bit of extra money, it was shared around. We were together until  approximately the millennium when Richard  retired. Those early formative years were the most exciting. They were the ground breaking years when a huge amount of energy,  especially by me, was poured into making the company stronger. And towards the end came the icing on the cake when little Michelle, Isabel’s daughter, arrived. She grew up amongst the working family, walked the dog with me and had any awkward questions answered by our own walking encyclopaedia, designer Heston, who had more brains than the rest of us combined.

>>

>> 1989-2012.

>> Well, what can I say…as one of my art tutors always comes out with, when he has nothing good to say about any of our paintings…! I really don’t think there is too much more to add from the descriptions of the sort work we were involved in in the earlier years. Suffice to say that things carried on as before. There was however one more happy addition to the working family, when Isabel’s No.2 child Rafael came on the scene in 1991, and, just like Michelle, spent his very early years in the office under the watchful eye of his mother, Heston and our Richard.

Afterwards there was however just one significant change, which happened to me, and as a result, did have an impact on the company. I began to loose my focus and therefore my energy levels for all things to do with business. This began to happen in the late 1980’s. Yes, things carried on, and I got excited about big juicy orders, but it wasn’t as if I was breaking down doors to get new clients. The company had quite a few big clients, and repeat orders from them did a lot to keep us afloat. We had our good years and we had our bad years, particularly in the mid 1990’s, when many architectural companies (a related business to ours) hit the dust. But hang on we did. The company changed it’s name a couple of times, (Xebec Eastern Trading Co., Xebec Decor Ltd., and eventually Arundell Carpets Ltd.,) but it never went bankrupt or closed down, and never left a supplier’s bill unpaid. And we are now nearly 45 years old. And considering all the hairy times we have been through, with some of our clients letting us down on payments, we cannot complain too much. ( One such client was the most delightful, easy going, and likeable Irish man, Patrick O’Shea, from Cork. He turned up on our doorstep with quite a large order for specially designed carpets for the Oberoi Hotel Chain in America. He came from nowhere. He had, he said, been involved with fashion designer clothes in New York. He also said he had to leave  three small tramp cargo vessels in the Middle East due to unpaid bills.!! But he had the dough and he knew what kind of designs we had to make for the Hotel chain. So we took the deposit and started making the designs. He came back in a couple of weeks sporting a huge black eye…well, if ever I should have spotted (or smelt) a rat it was then, but the charm of the man defeated my designer Richard ( maybe not quite!?) and myself. “Just sorting out a fight between friends.” And of course he promised to pay the 60% when shipment was made. Well, needless to say, the $19,000 never did appear. By this time I believe he was back in Cork poaching salmon, because that was another of his activities. I did write a letter to his supposed home address, feeling more sorry for his wife than I did for myself.! But I should have known all along, for I was at Trinity College, Dublin, in my university years, and one of the sayings I learnt on my golfing journeys was that “you could never con a man from Cork.” But a man from Cork could certainly con me.! My designer Richard kept us all, half laughing, half crying, for several months mimicking his soft Irish blarney. Some character.) Despite similar, but not so colourful stories, we have never been near a court case. You can just imagine the huge legal fees mounting up when discussing such a woolly subject as hand made carpets using a natural, movable material such as wool.

>> So, as mentioned earlier, on the business front, things continued roughly as before, but there was no more real drive or push coming from the main man, that was me, the person that had started the whole thing up. I guess my situation was no different to other small to medium size companies. They are normally the brain child of one person who makes all the moves and takes all the responsibilities. Usually, if successful, they grow and grow. In our case, the start up was more than successful but having got to take off speed, things stalled a bit and we continued running along the runway at ground level. We were surviving. And the reason was that my focus had switched to what I can only describe as a physical urge to get out of my system a simple philosophy or message that had been building up inside me for a few years. It was very vague. Just a feeling that the Western World and the philosophies they were following was not suited to the real make up of man. Because, what I wanted to get out of my head and on to an understandable piece of paper, was how close our supposed intelligent and civilised ‘human kind’ were to all their animal cousins. And how wrong the modern world was in making laws for the civilised outer clothing of man while completely ignoring the 99% animal body that was hidden within that thin layer of outer clothing.

>> Having never been a reader or a writer it was difficult to know where to start. My first serious effort was when I had a mini holiday on a business trip to Manila, l believe circa 1988.  I was staying up in Baguio, in the cool mountain province in North Luzon, where I was born. So thoughts went down on bits of paper with accompanying cartoons, just to make my simple thoughts even more simple to understand. In between golf and swims, because obviously this amateur writer always had to have his ‘fix’ of exercise each day. I remember that during that stay in the mountains I was joined by Isabel, her husband Jose, and little Michelle, who was one year old and learning to walk. Also, during that holiday I learnt that my Dad had passed away in Cornwall.

>> That was the first real beginning point of me getting ‘this stuff’ out of my system. And the main reason I had to do this was because I was not very articulate and found it very difficult to explain what I was trying to say to friends. For certain, I knew that within a couple of minutes of speaking, their eyelids would close over or they would tell me I was speaking rubbish. At least a piece of paper was more polite and would not answer me back.! So bit by bit, things trickled out and started to formulate. I never did one bit of research. All my writings and cartoons were, I suppose, as a result of my observations of life in the East and in the West and thinking about those observations. The only book I did refer to was Nigel Calder’s book Timescale, which gave the basic breakdown of life on Earth and when ‘man’ first came along. This information shows up in the first chapter of the little book that eventually was self published in 2005, with the title “Phil The Fluter’s Game of Life”.

>> In a nutshell, from 1988 up until the present (2017) the main focus of my thinking life has been thinking about and writing down everything and anything relating to this basic idea that the Western world is driving the car in the wrong direction because it is disregarding or downgrading the main natural (animal) make up of man. And within and around all that, the catastrophic impact we humans have had on our own environment.

>> So, continuing after the book, came the Essays. These began in 2006, and have continued to come out at the rate of just over one per year. ( Which was, I guess, the natural speed for an amateur who was also running a business and trying to play golf, both in a very amateur fashion.!)  I am now up to Essay 14, and hopefully, I have got out of my system most of what I want to say. To which all my friends will breathe a huge sigh of relief….  But watch this space.!

21. WHAT ELSE WAS GOING ON.

>> So what else happened in mid-life and into old-life. The business was still going on in the basement, so I was always part and parcel of everything that happened. That was up until 2012, when I really had had enough and the business, and the newer staff moving in and out of my house each day. So our company took up new office space in a lovely old building not too far away. Ostensibly Isabel was going to run the office under my basic direction. I soon found out that Isabel wanted to run things on her own and more and more I found that I was not warmly welcomed into my own office. Even talking about the business and giving suggestions would click something in Isabel’s mind and send her into screaming rages, on the basis that I thought she was incapable. Things were petty tense on occasions. Isabel was very good and courageous in looking after and disciplining those in the office and making things happen when they should happen. But she had very little knowledge or experience in basic commercial or marketing practice. So her pricing strategy was sometimes erratic and her diplomacy with clients was certainly not as deferential as it should have been. This caused me quite a bit of stress, because if anything went wrong, then I not only had to contend with the client but my own Isabel herself, and we of course should have been on the same side and not shouting at each other.!!!  When she got into this state she closed her ears to any reasonable suggestions from me. Difficult.

>> (These ‘rages’ only came on over ‘business’ matters. In all other matters she was her usual cheerful, positive and helpful ball of energy.) But the carpets were still being well made and we are still surviving.  And now, at long last, I am getting used to the feeling of retirement and being divorced from all things business. And that, quite naturally, has been a difficult thing to do for someone who started the business and was used all his life to be at the heart of everything that moved on the business front.

>> I still travelled once or twice a year on business to the Philippines in the 1980’s and 1990’s and would usually stay with friends. One of whom, in the earlier days, was a Californian American named Paul Bono. He was 10 years older than me and a perfectionist with a dry sense of humour. One of his best mates was an Australian called Neville Creany. They were both highly paid management consultants.  And both of them enjoyed their nights out in the red light areas of Manila and Makati. In which I joined, although I was soon given the nick name of “inflation” because I was always paying my hostess a little over the odds, and with the usual bamboo telegraph working away, from girl friend to girl friend, this eventually got back to my friends whose favourite lady companions were now asking for more money.! One of the bars we went to was The American Eagle. It was one of the oldest in town and was operating in my father’s days before the war. There were some seriously pretty women there, one of whom I will call Rosie. She was a super person as well as being a good looker, and I believe and hope that she ended up happily married in Australia. She would have been the making of even the toughest Aussie. But just to mention a coincidence, many a year later I was playing golf on the green fields of England with a very pukka middle class chum of mine named Willie Wise, who had visited the Philippines while working for the paper producing company Wiggins Teape. Quite naturally, the conversation came around to girls, and low and behold we both found out that the lovely Rosie had been kind to both of us. Willie even showed me a picture of Rosie and I quickly pointed out that she looked far happier at the time when she went out with me.

>> I think it was at that same American Eagle that I got to in my early poverty stricken days in Manila, when I was in need of the usual therapy, but had no money. I looked in the boot of the car and found a set of golf clubs belonging to a football playing friend of mine called Jim Howard, mainly known as the Rat Catcher, because he worked for Rentokil. The golf clubs went into hock before I could take my girl friend away. And it was not much fun going back the next day, at sweltering high noon, with a hangover and handing over the two hundred pesos to retrieve the set of golf clubs. But that had nothing on a very stupid thing that happened to me in the mid nineties, again during a business trip back to Manila. I had borrowed an old car from a friend and was aimlessly driving very slowly through one of the fabulously wealthy ‘gated villages’, in the height of the mid day sun, and stone cold sober, when I was flagged down by one of the prettiest ladies I had ever seen. I am afraid I immediately got over excited in every part of my body and before I realised what was going on the deed had been done. What is termed a ‘blow job’ had happened to me.  But what I hadn’t bargained for was that she was by a transvestite. And I am still reminded of my stupidity every now and then when a few herpes spots appear.

>> In case you are thinking this ‘girlie bar’ activity is very unusual behaviour, let me tell you that it is not. Certainly not in the Philippines, certainly not if you are a bachelor and certainly not if you are a sportsman. Such activity would be considered absolutely normal. The other thing that is normal, but you occasionally forget, is something that the wise old philosopher Confucius mentioned many centuries ago, …..to beware “that when your cock is in the air, your brains are in your arse.”!  Unfortunately my body was quicker than my mind on that occasion. But I am only human. My animal instincts had overcome the thin civilised outer clothing that all we humans wear. Nobody is perfect, and this time I got caught out.

>> Another sensible but silly thing that my Philippine connections helped me to do was to design and have made my own set of golf clubs. Because someone in the Philippine Carpet Company had connections in Taiwan, where most of the world’s golf sets were manufactured.

>> Golf club fashions are always changing, and around about the millennium there was a craze for ‘over size’ irons, which I hated, as the sole of the clubs were too straight and the heel of the club kept catching the ground, certainly in my case, because I was shorter in height than most. So I set about designing a smaller and much more ’rounded’ golf club head. I took this design out to Taiwan and found one of the smaller manufacturers who was willing to do the necessary sampling. Which was lucky considering I was an unknown and a nothing as far the world golfing industry was concerned. My local professionals, including Philip Talbot, in England, were kind enough to test the clubs during the sampling stages, and eventually 10 sets were ordered. Most of those sets had been given away by 2012 so 20 more ‘club head only’ sets were ordered. Most of these are still in my attic, although a few more sets have found new homes. One to the chief designer of The Ulster Carpet Company, Anthony Hickman, who designed the very attractive club head logo, and one set even went to Rory McIlroy, c/o Hollywood golf club. However, I gather this man gets so many gifts sent to him that in all probability my lowly club heads fell by the wayside. This whole exercise of making my own golf clubs could certainly be described as ‘a folly’, because of the costs involved in sampling and patenting, but it has certainly been a happy folly, and I am still happy with my club head design and use them all the time. Had they come along earlier in life, when I had more energy, no doubt I would have had a go at marketing them. They work and are attractive to the eye.

22. THE PAINTING

>> Another very good thing that happened to me in ‘late mid life’ was taking up water colour painting. I must have been in my mid fifties when I remembered that I had the ability to draw reasonably well. I remembered this from prep school days. So I started by joining evening classes at Morley College, in central London, in the early 1990’s. This went on for a couple of years when the teacher, Sarah Christian, suggested I move on to learn from other professional artists who were teaching amateur artists all around the country. This activity was just one small part of the fledgling “leisure industry” which was just beginning to boom, looking after the growing number of reasonably fit and reasonably wealthy retirees, in  every activity under the sun, from walking to cycling to singing and so forth.  My first two week stint of watercolour painting was organised by Bob Kilvert . ‘Watercolours Weeks at Woebly’ was  the name of the course, which was situated in an attractive location on the English/Welsh border. Neil Meacher, an expert in ‘line and wash’ painting was our teacher for the second week.

>> That was it for the first year. The following year I spent three weeks away with different teachers and gradually built that up to five or six weeks each year when I would happily join other groups of budding young ( usually elderly retirees!!) artists to go to different locations in England or Europe to improve our painting techniques. I became, like most of the others, a dyed in the wool “art groupie”. We had all been to so many tutors that we could really ‘talk the talk’. But in water colour painting, just like in most other trades or sports, actually ‘walking the walk’ or doing what you are talking about, is a totally different thing  than ‘talking the talk’ which we were all very good at.!  Regardless, even if we didn’t manage the walk too well, we really enjoyed the talking, especially if it was after a hard day’s work and we were having our first drink on a Greek Island watching the setting sun go down on the harbour front.

>> Such a ‘eureka’ moment happened to me in the year 2000. I had been to a short art course with a well known teacher/artist called Ron Ranson. He had taken up painting late in life and was not too well liked by his fellow professionals, mainly because he was considered too commercial. He had written many books, which had actually helped the careers of those artists he had written about, as well as promoting the painting side of the leisure industry itself. And he marketed his own paint brushes, especially something known as a ‘hake’, which was a wide, flat brush which Ron himself used most of the time. Maybe, as happens across every field, anybody who is successful is viewed with a little suspicion by his fellow peers.

>> And one of Ron’s sensible ‘commercial’ acts was to send all his clients a newsletter about the following year’s activities. Thank heavens for that, because I received one and in it I was told about a repeat visit to the Greek island of Lipsi, situated not too far from the Turkish coast. And his comments about Lipsi had me signing up faster than the Lone Ranger could draw his pistol. There were no cars on the island. No newspapers or televisions. Nothing really to do except paint, swim and enjoy the ‘tavernas’ at night. Who else needs anything more.

>> I had never seen a Greek Island before and I can remember being absolutely bowled over on the ferry ride from Kos to Lipsi with the clarity and translucence of the water combined with the depth and richness of the deep blues and turquoise colours in the sea. Then seeing the evening sun cast shadows amongst the ruins of old buildings as we entered the harbour at Leros, a neighbouring Island. These sights would send anyone with any kind of artistic ambitions crazy with desire…darks against lights, to create strong and attractive form or shapes.

> You combine all that with the daytime challenge of painting, the swimming, the evening comerarderie in the tavernas and then that lovely Greek music seeping into your soul when your are sipping an after dinner liquor on the harbour front before going to bed. Half way to heaven.

> This particular art holiday was 2 weeks long, usually the last week in September and the first week of October…a perfect temperature for a fussy Northern European, who didn’t like too much heat.

> I enjoyed things so much I went back for the next two years with Ron’s group, and after he retired to America, I myself and a few other diehards continued going back for a further three years. With good effect as far as one’s painting ability is concerned. Because there is little else to do but paint, you certainly get your practice in, and if your listen and learn from teacher Ron, and his constant drumming in of the basic rules of watercolour painting and how to build up attractive compositions, then things are bound to improve. You are beginning to walk the walk. I did notice myself that after each of these visits to Lipsi there was a little step up in my ability and my confidence level. I certainly owe a lot to Ron. He was a good teacher and very generous with his time.

> Water colour painting certainly takes time, which is what most professionals have had, and that is why they all have what appears to be an easy ability to transfer onto paper their own interpretation of what they see. Each amateur and even each professional will always come up with different interpretations, because each scene or composition passes through a different filter and a different ability level. Some interpretations will be more attractive to the eye than others, and that again depends on each individual viewer. Thank heavens we are all different.

> You may gather from the above descriptions the fact that painting has formed a big chunk of my later life, and you would be right. Although I usually only spend about six weeks a year on painting holidays, I think about painting and how I want my painting marks to go down an awful lot, and even do a little painting at home when the mood hits me. I know I should do a lot more, but as most amateurs know, it is awful difficult to actually step over that wall and get going. Sayang. A pity.

> Other painting holidays and teachers.

> One of my early teachers and still a friend is John Christian. An ex Brigadier from ‘The Paras’, so a tough guy but a very kind and soft soul. A ‘dowser’ and a faith healer combined with his water colour teaching courses, which were run by John and his wife Teresa near Okehampton on the Devonshire moors. He was the one who taught me, amongst other things, “to case the joint” (my words) or to take at least half an hour wandering around whichever painting location you were at, to take in the atmosphere and find your “main ballerina” (John’s words) or main focal point, which attracted your eye and made you want to paint. His main ballerina would always be named Margot Fontaine and his supporting cast would be named Nureyev.!

> Then a years foundation course with Trevor Waugh, a top professional painter and highly theatrical and quite volatile teacher. After a day’s tuition with him you sometimes felt you had been on the psychiatrist’s couch, so much did he want to get into your soul. Four or five of us would meet with him one Saturday each month, over the year, to learn and to be set homework to be done and reviewed before the following meeting. Again, forced to actually paint and think about what we have been taught, which means long term progress in our quest to walk the walk. One of the best things I remember from this course was Trevor’s description of ‘fear’ and ‘freefall’. He described his total  fear, when on an outward bound course, of being dragged to a cliff edge and then being made do abseil down a couple of hundred feet. When eventually this happened, he discovered that half way down his total fear had given way to total euphoria, with fear and elation happening together on his sometimes uncontrolled but exciting decent to the ground. And this is exactly what can happen to us painters when we are outside at site or inside in our studios, trying to put a composition down on paper. We are always a little afraid. No one wants to mess up. And sometimes we loose control….our hand and the brush sometimes begin to move faster than the brain that is meant to control the hand. This is when you loose control and get into freefall. And this is when fear and excitement join hands and sometimes, just sometimes, you get a fresh and vibrant result and the resulting euphoria transfers you up into the stars…that is until the teacher points out an obvious compositional error.!! Once I found, when painting a church yard scene in Stoke by Nayland, that I had put a massive gravestone bang in the middle of the composition. I then moved it to the bottom right hand corner and put my signature on it, to be quickly assured by my friends that at least the signature was in the correct position.

> Another eureka moment was discovering The Lake District, which happened circa 2010, on a painting course organised by two well known professional artists, Jenny Wheatley, a ‘colourist’, and Mike Chaplin, who was very much a ‘tonal’ painter. The first sightings of Cumbria, when I was on the train, had me panting with excitement, and when the two slow bus rides deposited me into the front door of the Borrowdale Hotel I knew I had arrived at a place that was specially just for me. Especially when a lovely old dog wanted to shake me by the hand in welcome when I was mounting my first set of stairs to get to my room. For this was a most ‘liveable in’ 3 star hotel mainly used by walkers and their beloved hounds. Sometimes I wondered if the dogs got the double beds while their owners slept on the floors, so well were they looked after. This is another place where any aspiring painter should visit, with ‘painterly’ compositions hitting you near and far from every direction. We go back in the spring and the autumn each year… so the hard core know each other pretty well and we have fun with the teachers and amongst ourselves whether on or off the painting sites.

> And finally, a few words on another treasure house, Dedham Hall, my painting home from home.

> I discovered this around the millennium, and so good was the food, accommodation and teaching that I have spent about 4-5 weeks each year since, enjoying Wendy and Jim Sarton’s outstanding hospitality, together with friendships with some of the teachers and fellow amateur painters who, like me come on a regular basis. I owe a lot and learn a lot from all the teachers such as John Yardley, Andrew Pitt, Paul Banning, Colin Radcliffe, Steve Hall, Linda Appleby, Roger Dellar, and Alan Simpson who is no longer with us.

> And hopefully I will continue making these treks to Dedham while I still have a bit of breath left in my old body.