Having spent the last sixty years in global sales and marketing, I became accustomed to communicating with people at every level — from the shoe-shine boy outside a hotel to government ministers. My work took me across more than sixty countries, selling and promoting everything from plastic plumbing fittings to aero engines.
During that time I worked for small and medium-sized enterprises, large public companies, and for the British Government itself, serving as the Department of Trade and Industry’s Export Promoter for Korea during the 1990s.
Communication in those days was very different from today. Messages were often sent by telegram or teleprinter, both of which imposed strict limits on the number of words that could be used. There was no technology for sending photographs of documents or long attachments. Everything had to be typed and transmitted in the most concise way possible.
As a result, reports had to be ruthlessly brief. A thirty-day trip covering six countries in South East Asia might be summarised in a single page: a list of whom I had seen, followed by a line or two describing the outcome or the potential of each meeting.
After decades of working under those restrictions, I find that the habit of extreme brevity has become something of a handicap. The stories I now want to tell require context, atmosphere and background — exactly the things I trained myself to leave out.
I have begun writing memoirs about a remarkable period in British commercial history. During my working life the world moved from one-line telegrams to video conferencing. The United Kingdom moved from being an industrial power with global engineering exports to becoming largely a centre for finance and services.
It was a transformation I witnessed from the front line of international trade.
The question I now face is this: how does someone who spent a lifetime writing short reports learn to write a full narrative of that change? And how does one find a literary agent who might be interested in guiding the writing and publication of such a story?
Perhaps the first step is simply to begin telling it.