The 1980s were, for me, a period of almost continuous travel. By then I had already spent many years in international trade, but the next phase of my career took that experience to a quite different level.
I had joined Bartol Plastics, part of the Hepworth Ceramic Holdings Group, almost by accident. Their Export Manager had left suddenly to join a competitor, and at the time I was working for another company in the plastic soil, waste and drainage building products market. That company had just made a number of my colleagues redundant, and the future there looked uncertain.
By then I had nine years’ experience in the export department of Yorkshire Imperial Metals, followed by a further eight years as a self-employed export merchant and broker, supplying building materials to contractors working in the Middle East. I had also spent a year with Marley, which was my only real departure from international trade. I soon discovered that I missed dealing with overseas suppliers, customers, contractors and agents. I was keen to get back into the world I understood best.
An ex-Marley colleague, who had applied for a role at Bartol, told me they were looking for an Export Manager. The salary was almost twice that of a home sales representative, although the job was office-based or involved travel by rail and air, so there was no company car. Even so, the salary increase more than covered the cost of buying a second household vehicle.
My boss at Bartol proved to be the best manager I ever worked for. He recognised that I was a salesman at heart, but also that I understood international trade from almost every angle. I had first-hand knowledge of buying, selling, documentation, packing, shipping, and the particular nightmare that many domestic managers dreaded: documentary payments. Letters of credit, bills of exchange, bank collections and shipping documents were not mysteries to me; they were part of my daily working life.
It was this manager who fought to get me a company car, a battle that took six months. Then, almost as soon as that was settled, he asked me to exhibit at the Baghdad International Fair in October 1982.
Iraq at that time, under Saddam Hussein, was in a period of frantic development. The Iran–Iraq War had begun in September 1980 and was already causing enormous damage, yet Baghdad was still being reshaped as though it were preparing to present itself to the world. The city was being modernised, and Iraq had hoped to host the Seventh Non-Aligned Movement Summit. Major projects were under way, including prestigious hotels and civic improvements. The Al-Rashid Hotel was one of the grand symbols of that ambition. In the end, because of the continuing war and the danger to Baghdad, the summit was moved to New Delhi in 1983.
It was in Iraq that I negotiated my largest single order, and the one with the largest margin. As part of the redevelopment of Baghdad, the Baghdad Sewerage Board was extending foul sewers into the outlying townships. In some districts, because of the existing drainage arrangements, they had to combine rainwater and foul sewers. That created a serious problem: foul odours would escape through the road gullies.
I designed a solution and had a mock-up made. It solved the problem, and the authorities were delighted. They ordered 50,000 units. The profit on that order was £300,000.
The Baghdad visit also opened another door. In 1982 I discovered that many Korean, Indian, British, German and French contractors were working in Iraq. That led me to visit their head offices in their own countries. India alone had around forty contractors involved, most of them based in Delhi or Bombay, now Mumbai. I visited India on a British Overseas Trade Board mission and managed to call on thirty-eight of them in a two-week period.
The Korean connection became even more important. It led to us exhibiting at the World Trade Centre in Seoul in 1983, where we were approached by a local company interested in transferring the technology behind our plastic push-fit plumbing system, then known as Acorn and later as H2O.
The Acorn fittings were simple to assemble and became extremely popular. Before long, we had further approaches from Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand, all interested in transferring the technology. It was the first time licensing had really been considered by the Hepworth group, and the task of investigating the opportunities and reporting back was given to me.
That was the beginning of a new phase of travel. I visited Malaysia, Korea, Australia and New Zealand many times. The Malaysian project moved forward first, and I was sent to Kuala Lumpur to oversee the technology transfer and keep everyone in the United Kingdom informed. Some of the export markets I had already developed, particularly in the Caribbean and Europe, were transferred to a new manager, but I retained responsibility for Africa, Australasia, the Middle East and the Far East.
This was when the scale of my travel became almost invisible, even to my own family and colleagues. For two years I was based in Kuala Lumpur, but I was rarely still. Each month I would normally visit Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China, with additional trips to Thailand, Indonesia, Baghdad, Cairo and West Africa whenever business required it. Later, when the Korean licence agreement was signed, I transferred to Seoul, but continued the monthly circuit of markets.
So when relatives asked where I was, the answer they usually received was a simple, “He’s in Korea,” or “He’s in Malaysia.” That was true, but only in the broadest possible sense. In reality, I might have been in Seoul on Monday, Hong Kong on Wednesday, Taipei on Friday and back in Kuala Lumpur or Bangkok the following week.
My passports tell the story better than memory can. I travelled so frequently that the Passport Office issued me with two simultaneous passports: one with ninety pages and another with thirty pages, to which a further ninety pages were later added by the British Embassy in Cairo. This was essential because one passport was often away at a foreign embassy being stamped with visas while I travelled on the other.
Even my family had little idea how much travelling I was doing while I was supposedly based in Malaysia or Korea. Over the years I visited more than sixty countries on business, some of them many times. Malaysia, Korea and Hong Kong alone became almost routine destinations, but the work also took me across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Australasia, the Caribbean and North America.
Looking back, it was an extraordinary period. The travel was demanding, often lonely and sometimes exhausting, but it also gave me a working knowledge of the world that could never have been learned from a desk. I saw countries in the middle of industrial change, cities being rebuilt, economies opening up, and companies trying to find their place in international markets. Much of it happened before email, mobile phones and instant communication. You travelled because there was no substitute for being there.