came to Enfield in 1947 when he was four. He scraped through his 11 plus and was able to go to the Enfield Grammar School and left with 3 A levels, Chemistry, Physics and Zoology. He worked for one year in the operating theatre in Highlands Hospital before going to University College London to study medicine. He soon realised that he just did not have the memory for this and left after a year. In October 1964 he joined Amel (Chemicals) Ltd as a laboratory assistant and enrolled at the Enfield Technical College in Ponders End to study Chemistry as a day realise student and went through, ONC, HNC and LRIC )including ONC maths which he was surprised to pass). He is now a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. The company made industrial cleaning chemicals. In February 1988 he formed his own company and is now Chairman of Fisher Darville Holdings Ltd whose group companies still research, develop and manufacture industrial cleaning products. The company occupies the same building where Anthony began his career in industry. In the feature image above it is the second building from the right though the roof today is much changed and boasts solar panels.
Anthony Fisher interviewed by Valerie Darville on 26th May, 2023 Transcribed by Valerie Fisher
Valerie
So Anthony, when and where were you born?
Anthony
I was born January 1943, in Rochester, Kent, during the War and my father was at sea, he was in the Royal Navy so I lived with my grandparents, my mother’s parents, in their house in Rochester.
Valerie
Had your mother had any occupation before you were born?
Anthony
Yes, during the War she was an ambulance driver; I don’t know if she worked before then but she was only about 18 or 19 so she and her sister, Margaret, drove ambulances. Margaret told me how jealous she was because my mother had a proper ambulance and she had to make do with a removals van and they were bombed in the depot on two separate occasions but they just went back to work. They both survived and my father survived also.
Valerie
So how long did you stay in Rochester?
Anthony
I think we left Rochester in about March 1946, and we went to Newgate Street Village – I’m never sure whether it is in Essex or Hertfordshire – and we went to a bungalow with no water, no gas and no electricity during the worst winter we had known for a long time. My father had to put chains on his tyres to get to work as the roads were blocked with snow. We used well water and I got a tapeworm from drinking the water because during the War pigs were kept in that area.
Valerie
So when did you come to Enfield?
Anthony
1947, when I was 4. I think my grandfather had bought the house in Newgate Street and my mother and father sort of house sat whilst they were looking for somewhere to live in Enfield and when my grandfather retired he was able to occupy the house in Newgate Street. He worked as a bank manager at that time in Ilford in Essex and he couldn’t commute as he didn’t drive.
Valerie
So why did your Father want to move to Enfield?
Anthony
When he was demobbed in 1946, he got a job in a company – I think at that time it was called International Corrodeless Ltd. They were an electro plating company in Brimsdown who had been doing essential war work for the military and the bank had lent them a lot of money, I think it was about £35,000 or £40,000 which is several million pounds by todays standards and it turns out that they weren’t as honest as they might have been and the money went into their pockets instead of into the company. As they were doing valuable war work – electro plating, for instance, the stub axles of army lorries so they didn’t rust – the bank allowed them to continue. In fact, one of the stories my father told me was that the government organised a supply of cadmium anodes which are like small cannon balls, to come over by submarine from Canada because of the blockages by the Germans. Supplies just weren’t getting through and this really the only way they could get a supply of anodes for the plating process. My father got the job with International Corrodeless Ltd because my grandfather, who by that time was manager in Gants Hill I think it was, said to the company that he wouldn’t withdraw the loan as long as he could have – in his words – “his man” in the company. So he got my father the job to keep an eye on things to try and get things back on the straight and narrow but in truth that loan never went away until almost the end of the company. It crippled the company, that loan, in many respects.
Valerie
So, your father was working in Brimsdown, you’d moved to Enfield, so where did you go to school?
Anthony
When we moved to Enfield we moved to 206 Willow Road at the end where the Savoy cinema was just a hundred yards away and I went to George Spicer Primary School which is in Southbury Road. Miss Tuck was the head mistress. I stayed in the same building until I went to secondary school so I don’t know whether there was a differentiation between Infants and Juniors then.
Valerie
And presumably you took the eleven plus?
Anthony
Yes, and I managed to scrape through somehow. I know one of my school reports said, “Anthony’s an intelligent boy. He would do much better if he applied himself.” and I think that is something that has stayed with me all my life but I did manage to get through and I went to the Grammar School, which was a grammar school in those day, now it’s a comprehensive even though it is still called Enfield Grammar. I went into form 1C and after one term I went down to 1D so I was in the lowest stream of the school. But by the time I got to my O levels I’d worked my way up into the top stream. I took three A levels: Physics, Chemistry and Zoology and to my chagrin I failed Zoology so I had to do a re-sit in January and I worked as a technician in the Biology laboratory helping the teacher, Miss Hacklin to run the Biology lab or actually Biology and Zoology lab. So normally I would have left at the beginning of the summer, at the end of the school term, but I had to go back to re-sit the exams and they obviously thought I could pass them without any more tuition so I had to go to school but I was a lab technician, which was actually quite interesting.
Valerie
Was that paid employment?
Anthony
No.
Valerie
So you just helped out basically in return for being allowed to go back to school and do your re-sits?
Anthony
In January. Which I passed.
Valerie
Then what did you do?
Anthony
Well my mother all my life had said every day I was to be a doctor because she was frightened that I would work for my father, so I applied for medical school and I was accepted at University College Medical School. The interview was quite interesting for some reason I was interviewed out of the normal interview season, I can’t remember why, but I was interviewed by J. Z. Young who wrote the anatomy book we used at school and he was one of my heroes so I was very pleased to have met him in person when he was dealing with UCH medical facility at that time. I spent a year, that would have been 1962 through 63, working in an operating theatre in Highlands Hospital as I needed to do something before I went to medical school and there was a years wait – presumably because I had applied late – and my mother, who knew the matron at Highlands Hospital, marched me there one day and said, “My son needs a job,” and she said, “Right, you can work in the operating theatre”, which was a fantastic experience, for a year. It was extraordinary, I went in there – no training – I was shown where my boots were, what scrubs to wear and a hat and everything, and told to get on with it and I remember the first day saying to a nurse, pointing to the operating theatre, “Am I allowed to go in there?” and she laughed and said, “That’s your job.” I had no training whatsoever. Interestingly enough, I had a prostate procedure a year or two ago and as I was in the anaesthetic room, the technician was talking to me – that’s part of their job, what I used to do – and I said, “I used to do your job,” and told him the story and he said, “Well, you were one of the pioneers,” because, at that time, it wasn’t a profession and I was, unknowingly, pioneering the profession of theatre technician. A bit of history.
Valerie
What were you duties in the theatre?
Anthony
Cleaning, I used to greet the patient in the anaesthetic room, the patient came in and waited for the anaesthetist to come and that was in a little room annexed to the operating theatre, my job was to keep them company, calm and relaxed. Also my job was to sharpen the hypodermic needles used to inject the phenol barbitone or pentothal I think they called it and it must have been agony because they are quite large needles. Disposable needles were just beginning to come in. Then my job was to push the patient on the trolley, when they had been anaesthetised, into the theatre and then, with another technician, lift the patient on to the operating table. During the operation it was just standing around, adjusting the light, just generally hovering until the end when I had to push the patient out into the recovery room where the nurse stayed with the patient while they recovered. Then I had to clean up the theatre ready for the next operation.
Valerie
Did you have to scrub up?
Anthony
Not in my usual job but once there was a shortage of nurses and I helped with an inguinal hernia operation. I had to scrub up for that which was quite exciting.
Valerie
But normally you wouldn’t touch the surgeon or anything like that?
Anthony
No. And the surgeons used to throw the swabs on to the floor and my job was to pick the swabs up with a cheetle, which was like a tong with a hooked beak, pick the swabs up and stuff them in a steel panel which had holes in it so that then at the end of the day the nurses could count up the swabs and make sure it tallied with the unused swabs so they would know the number matched so they would know that there were none left inside the patient.
Valerie
And were any ever left inside the patient?
Anthony
No. Although once there was an excision of a gangrenous colon, which was quite common, and the sister thrust me this plastic bowl full of blood and a colon which was wriggling and said, “We can’t find a pair of forceps, it’s either in the patient or in the bowl so I had to put a pair of gloves on search through the bowl with this thing wriggling like a snake to find the
forceps.
Valerie
And did you find them?
Anthony
Yes, they were in there.
Valerie
You then went to medical school after a year?
Anthony
In September/October 1963, I went to University College Hospital Medical School, or University College Pre-med. It was interesting because Andrew Huxley was awarded the Nobel Prize for work on the squid neuron, which is the longest nerve there is, I think, the squid one, and he was the Physiology lecturer and I remember him walking through the quadrangle after the announcement and all us students standing there cheering away and he looked so pleased.
Valerie
Did you like it at medical school?
Anthony
Parts of it. I quickly realised I didn’t have the memory for it and so I left at the end of the year. But it was a fantastic experience and I really enjoyed physiology. I didn’t like bio-chemistry – again it’s a memory thing, it really is a memory thing and if you can’t remember things you can’t do it but I liked anatomy and just generally liked the lectures. I clearly remember the Dean saying we were sixty out of two thousand applicants and he said that after a year just one of you will leave and I said to myself at the time, “That’s going to be me,” and, of course, it was. But in the first lecture we had the lecturer came in, or Reader I think he was, and said human beings have to die because the human race is what is called a metastable system and if the units don’t die the whole race will die out so that humans have to die and although the age that people could stay alive was going up, no-one in records at that time had lived more than 120 years so although the mortality rate was dropping and people were getting older no-one was going to live beyond 120.
Valerie
I don’t think they have now, have they?
Anthony
I don’t think they have, no.
Valerie
So you decided that medicine wasn’t for you and you left at the end of the first year.
Anthony
Yes, fortunately for me, my father needed a chemist, a quality control chemist, and that is how I came to work in Brimsdown. The electro-plating company had started making chemicals for a cleaning group, Office Cleaning Services Ltd, and my father started a company to make, first of all, floor seal called Glitza which was an original one-pack formaldehyde seal, and it is still a good one. It penetrates the wood so the wood looks alive just as it does with oil, it is a remarkable product. That led to him making simple chemicals for OCS because they were being – in their words – “ripped off” by their suppliers and he was able to make more competitive products.
I can remember working in our kitchen with him developing the products with mixers, getting it right for them, so somehow or other, OCS and their contacts were able to arrange for my father’s company, which was called AMEL Chemicals Ltd, to distribute aviation products made in California by an American company which specialised in aviation chemicals. The job of the company was just to receive the chemicals from America, stock them and then deliver them around the world because Americans don’t really like exporting generally speaking. They were happy dealing with North and South America but they weren’t happy dealing with anywhere else so my father’s job was to get the orders delivered to around the world. He ended up going to Pakistan, Europe, Iceland, Africa – not to Australia, I don’t think; Australia was out of it, but then at some stages in a remarkable act of faith on the Americans’ part, the company was asked to manufacture some of the simpler products and for that they needed a quality control chemist.
Originally they were using the electro-plating works chemist but he was really not interested and probably didn’t have the time, although he didn’t seem to do very much when I was there, so my father took the opportunity to give me a job, which was great, and he didn’t have to pay me much, which was great from his point of view. I started at Enfield Technical College on an ONC Chemistry course; then I went to HNC, LRIC and now I’m an FRSC – Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, which suited my brain because I’m not an academic and working one day a week at college, 9 in the morning until 10 at night studying, and working the rest of the week suited me. It suited my brain.
Valerie
But before you started working down there – did you go down there with your father when you were a child?
Anthony
Yes, this project has caused me to think about that. I must have started going down there when I was 6ish – down to Brimsdown – and the original plant was in Lockfield Avenue in the old wartime fire station which, interestingly enough, your father, who was a wartime fireman, must have been in there at some time. I think he was based in Green Street, mainly, wasn’t he? But I’m sure he would have gone to the Brimsdown one as well.
Valerie
Probably, yes. He was moved about.
Anthony
The company was based there when my father went there in 1946, in fact, they had premises there – one in Bilton Way where the current factory is and I haven’t been able to find out exactly where that is but I would like to. They also had premises on the platform in Turkey Street station. During the War the trains stopped running and presumably because they were doing war-work they were able to rent the platform from British Rail for their business and I recently read the Minutes and the Board were getting very angry because after the War the railway refused to renew the lease but, of course, they wanted to start the trains running again. One of my father’s stories was of an employee called Bill Barnard – a remarkable man – when moving a roll of lead from the platform, down to the lorry, he dropped it and it rolled down the stairs which made it unusable, it was very expensive, and even when I joined the company in 1964, to work, they were still talking about it.
Valerie
It must have been incredibly heavy.
Anthony
It was, Bill was strong as an ox. You know, the company used to make plating equipment as well and I was told on one occasion he was up in the roof of the factory hanging on to a pipe with one hand and tightening the joints with a Stilson with the other; no safety net, nothing, and he was tough as old boots. He and his brother, Albert, used to go to the fair that used to come to Chingford, I think it was, and go up and challenge the professional boxers in the boxing booth and they always won their fights, they were really tough. One time Bill got some cyanide in his mouth in the plating shop, he walked about thirty or forty yards to a tap, spat it out, rinsed his mouth, spat it out and went back to work as if it were a routine thing. But he had a cruel sense of humour, one of his tricks was to heat a bolt up in an oxyacetylene flame until it was not hot but not red and hold it out in his hands which were like leather and say to someone, “What do you think of this?” and, of course, they would pick it up and burn their fingers but I was warned so I never did that. His hands were tough because he used to at the end of the day dip them in the hot caustic cleaning fluid, scrub them with a wire brush and rinse them off in hydrochloride acid to neutralise the caustic and then rinse them in water so his hands were like leather.
Valerie
That was a very cruel trick.
Anthony
A very cruel trick. He was actually very loyal – very grumpy, but a companiable sort of person. Of the three brothers he was the most straight forward but he did have this streak which was very cruel.
Valerie
How long did it take you to work your way into the new job as a trainee chemist?
Anthony
Well, it was strange because it was a new job, there was no-one in the company doing it and there wasn’t much work but I used to say to myself, ”Well, if I go to the toilet by this route that will take up fifteen minutes and then I’ll go over here and do this which will take … “. It was boring but the work needed to be done but in the beginning there wasn’t much of it. As things went well the company started making more and more products and the job became fuller and more interesting and from my personal point of view it was brilliant training because, at that time we are talking mid to late 60s, the chemical speciality market/industry win Britain was not developed. Cleaning products were very crude; very crude and basic, whereas in America they were highly advanced. They had very exotic raw materials, they had a history of intelligent formulation and, of course, for the aviation industry they had to be so the more we made, I ended up by making everything. When I left in 1984, the sales company was a separate company and everything they sold, we made. So we expanded the range considerably by a hundred or so products and during that time I was exposed to more and more exotic and more and more raw materials and so I was taught the importance of intelligent formulating, I was taught the importance of good customer service and I was taught the importance and the systems for good quality control and I was taught what you need to do for a technical service in a laboratory equipped to carry out cleaning tests etc. So it was an immensely helpful education which I still use today. In the English company – the company which was under our control – for the ordinary market I was able to develop a huge range of products which were quite novel in the English market at that time. And also I ended up the top, I think it was twelve maybe fifteen, products that were sold by the sales company to the aviation market; the top twelve were ones I had developed myself.
However, the deal was that the sales company did not pay royalties to America on the products which we developed over here. And that was a mistake because the Americans were losing revenue and they thought, “Well, this isn’t good enough and what can we do about it?” and the group I worked for was beginning to act like a group which is the right thing to do but it meant that the enormous amount of independence I had as the M.D. of the company was going and I didn’t like it so I left, I was head hunted, in fact, by one of my customers, Concorde, but I just moved across the road. He bought the old Coco Cola factory and wanted to set up a manufacturing and laboratory services which I did.
Valerie
So what happened to the plating shop.
Anthony
That’s got a chequered history. In 1984 it went bankrupt because – two reasons: one, this loan hanging over its head and two, my father just took the money out. I mean, one time I remember it had a net profit of £50,000 out of the paint shop and he and his partner took out half each – I think it was £56,000 – I know Dad ended up with £28,000 which is about a quarter of a million pounds now. Instead of investing it in the business, every penny that appeared in the box was taken out. So it always struggled and in 1984, it went bankrupt but it was reformed as Roval (1984) Ltd and I was given shares so it was then owned by someone who was the works director and we were able to continue. We still had the bank loan and we paid all the debts off, I was out of pocket because of it, but the share holding became simpler and we did try to make it work but it was always difficult because of this under investment and the loan was a millstone. But it was a shame because the people – as I describe in my poem “The Reek of Alchemy” – I loved the industry almost more than the chemical industry because you get all thes things coming into the factory – dirty, rusty, greasy – and they go out looking beautiful and there is an atmosphere in a plating shop. We had vats of cyanide next to vats of acid and together they form a lethal gas, with water running over the floor. The platers, like Bill, had hard hands and they had to be nimble enough to twist copper wire round the anode cathode bars to dangle small bits, which were tied on to bits of wire, into the solution. So they had to be nimble, they had to be accurate, and it was really quite an interesting combination of people but they were odd, they really were odd. One of them was a woman named Flo and I never heard her speak. She was enormously strong, she used to carry jigs with two stub axles on which must have weighed 50lb each, to lift them all day in and out of a zinc vat, trudging around in her wellingtons, cigarette in her mouth, and David Prior with his nickel bath, I really liked them as people and I admired what they did.
Then in 2003, by that time the original shareholder wanted out so I bought him out and a colleague helped so the share holding changed but we just couldn’t make it work. The plating shop was shut down, we tried to make the paint shop work but in 2003, we had to shut it. It was really struggling a lot of new environmental and Health & Safety rules came into effect and, of course, after the 1980s, Mrs Thatcher. What was a thriving engineering industry in Enfield just went, so our customers went. Middlesex University shut down, Enfield Tech changed into Middlesex Polytechnic and then Middlesex University. I think when it was Middlesex Polytechnic it shut the Engineering Department and that meant local companies didn’t have access to trained engineers, local trained engineers, and so 28,000 jobs went out of Enfield and a huge number of them were Roval’s customers. So, the customers went and in 2003, we had to shut it.
Valerie
So Mrs Thatcher’s policies and the Health & Safety regulations made it an impossible task to keep a place like that going.
Anthony
It was, it was just impossible. It needed several hundred thousand pounds of investment and all sorts of things and the market just wasn’t there. A lot of the engineering companies decided to have their own metal treatment plants added on to the business so the bigger ones started doing it themselves and the market just changed and a lot of imports were coming into the country. It was a shame, we used to gold plate Dennis Wick mouthpieces, the famous wind instrument performer, very famous, and he designed this beautiful range of mouth pieces for trumpets, trombones, everything, and in themselves the shapes were beautiful. They were made in heavily leaded brass so they were very satisfyingly heavy in their hand and we used to silver plate or gold plate them. they were just beautiful, absolutely beautiful.
Valerie
They were craftsmen.
Anthony
Absolutely, yes. Real craftsmen, to gauge just how many to put on a jig and everything, it’s a black art.
Valerie
So when you left AMEL, you went across the road to Concorde?
Anthony
Yes, and I set up there what they wanted and again here I learnt my value, what I did, because I hadn’t fully appreciated it before, and I learnt confidence and I also learnt not to be reliant on a big system because when I was at AMEL I had a lot of support staff but in Concorde I didn’t have that, I had to rely on myself, so I learnt confidence, I learnt how to be independent and I learnt my value and respect for what I did; what my knowledge was, my experience was and my skills were which I hadn’t appreciated before.
Valerie
How long were you at Concorde?
Anthony
Four years, I actually left in 1988, I started the business in February 1988. Interestingly enough, I just crossed back over the road. After I left AMEL it shut down very quickly because no-one knew how to run it or deal with it so it just shut down and as Roval had the lease the factory was still there so when I went back across to start my own business with the original Roval works director I had an office. I decided I only wanted to sell eight products and I was never going to manufacture again which meant I had to find people to make it for me which I did. It was interesting in the office; I had a desk but it was a computer desk so when the women in the office needed to use the computer we had to swop over. My first laboratory was the top of an oil drum and I had a few beakers and a spatula and I bought a digital kitchen scale so I could do mixing and things like that.
Valerie
How did you do the actual mixing?
Anthony
Although I had sworn never to manufacture again, a friend of mine who worked as a consultant for a very large company wanted a new manufacturer because the company they were using them was tricking them; sending products out that weren’t to spec. and the volume in the drums was going up and down so he wanted a reliable manufacturer. He knew from my previous days that I was reliable so he asked could I do it? I must admit I tend to say yes to things without thinking it through so I said, yes, I could do it without having a mixing vat for instance. But I started with an all-purpose cleaner, degreaser and traffic film remover – just three products so it was limited products and limited raw materials. We bought a 1,000 litre mixing tank and I remember one memorable day, one Sunday, I mixed ten tons by myself. I used to do it all by myself.
Valerie
But before you had the mixing tank how did you mix things?
Anthony
Before we started manufacturing ourselves I had to find other people to do it so I did that and, of course, one product in particular I couldn’t mix in the tank because it was very sensitive to water so what I used to do, fortunately there were only two ingredients, a solvent and a surfactant and a catalyst, I used to put the catalyst in the drum, fill it up with solvent fortunately it was hydrocarbon based so it wasn’t too heavy – no, at that time it was heavy so a 200 litre drum weighted 270 kilos – I then had to tip them over and roll them up and down the yard to mix them and then I had to stand them upright again and roll them on to a pallet. There were orders of between sixteen and twenty four drums at a time so it was quite hard work but, even now, one of the guys in the factory reminds me of the time I used to have to roll the drums up and down the yard. We still have the customer, we still make the product but we now have mixing tanks. But I wonder how could I have manhandled 275 kilo drums, it’s a lot of weight!
Valerie
Indeed. So how did the business develop?
Anthony
One of the first customers was some people who had been dealing with us over the years and who trusted me and somehow I was able to deal with it. I had bought an Amstrad hard drive, it had a floppy disc and a hard drive. I think it was the first retail computer –
Valerie
I remember them well; wretched things.
Anthony
(laughs) Well, I bought one before I started the company, not planning to use it for the company but it’s a good job I did as it enabled me to do all sorts of things. I had a dot matrix printer so I was able to print labels and data sheets very crudely but in those days that was o.k. and I was able to do the sums to calculate the safety sheets and print them out which, again, in those days you could. I did a lot of work at home in the evenings. It was difficult, it was seven days a week, twelve hours a day at the factory. In those days I would come home, write the data sheets, write the labels and do things at home but one of the first customers I got, their fourth or fifth order Nelson rang me up from Dubai. Now I had met him in 1985 – this was in 1988, late 88, I had met him in Dubai, we had done a joint sales visit together and we got on and then suddenly three years later he rings me up from Dubai and says, “Anthony, I need some concentrates” which were paint and carbon remover, which was cresyllic acid and methylene chloride. There was an air conditioning cleaner which used hydrofluoric acid, there was a hard surface degreaser and emulsion degreaser concentrate, water emulsifier cleaning solvent but there were four products so anyway he said, “This is what I want them to do,” and I said, “OK.” He said, “Can you do it?” and I said, “Yes,” so I developed the products, rang him up and said, “Nelson, I’ve got them,” and he said, “OK, here’s an order,” so he gave me an order for, I think, £11,000 in those days and he trusted me that they would work and I trusted him that he would pay. And they are still customers all these years later. They are going through a different phase now but it just felt the right thing to do.
Valerie
Is there anything else you want to add?
Anthony
Well, I remember from Brimsdown particularly talking with my father when I was growing up, at school still, that owners of businesses seemed to know each other, there were a lot of people working and they all knew each other, the families knew each other, there was a lot of social interaction which doesn’t really happen now. The owners of the businesses are all over the place and don’t know each other and there aren’t so many people working there. Twenty eight thousand jobs, as I said earlier, went out of Enfield and on Bilton Way where we are now – we own two factories, 68 and 78, in 78 Bilton Way there were three companies: Fisher Segal Ltd, the paint shop, Roval Ltd Electro Plating and AMEL, a chemical company with the factory divided into thirds and on that site there were seventy five people which is a huge amount. There were so many jobs that people used to leave for a halfpenny an hour more, so someone would give their notice in and a couple of weeks later you’d put the rates up and they were back again. There was all this churn all the time, there was no ill will, it was just happening.
In those days the wages, for small companies like us, was calculated manually so Friday the wages office had to shut the door, count everyone’s wages, ring up the bank and tell them the total amount of cash wanted: how many halfpennies, how many pennies, how many sixpences, threepenny pieces etc and pound notes and everything because dividing the money up into individual wage packets the dominations were important. My Dad, usually, and Jack Segal used to go to the bank with a brief case, come back with it stuffed full of money – later on we got Securicor to do it – and then it would be the two women in the office used to have the right money in the pay packets with a pay slip which was hand calculated, manually calculated rather from the clocking-in card. So the whole Friday was taken up. When the drive came in for people to have bank accounts, I think it was government policy and also we wanted to do it because it made life simpler. I think we went straight into paying monthly but we used to lend people money, but it was paid in the middle of the month so it was two weeks in advance, two weeks in arrears to get people used to being paid by bank transfer. But then I think someone had to take the calculations to the bank and there was no e-mail in those days and no internet so that was quite a major change but people did eventually accept it and now it’s the norm to be paid by credit transfer.
I remember one thing I did for the company of all the things I had to do, I was given a small Sinclair computer and using Basic, which is a computer code, I put in the raw materials stock, packing in stock and formulations and the prices of the raw materials. I then once a month because life was simpler in those days, used to put in the orders for the next month and I pressed a button and the answer came out printed on a till roll telling me everything I had to order. That’s how I was able to keep things in order because I can’t cope with paper very well so the computer was very helpful to me and I was able to see what it was I wanted and place the orders so we didn’t actually run out of stock. As I said, in those days life was much simpler in that suppliers were reliable, if you said you wanted it on Tuesday, it came on Tuesday; nowadays it is different. I couldn’t have done today what I did then. The regulations would have made it impossible, the sophisticated demands of customers who want proper labels, proper information, properly printed data sheets and suppliers are so unreliable, I just could not have coped. I was lucky that I started the business when I did, I don’t think you could do it today.
There is more – there is one story in the seal I mentioned, Glitza, some of the ingredients came from Germany and one of them came from a company called BASF and used to leave on a barge to go to the port to go across the Channel on a boat, then it was put on another barge which came up to Ponders End Columbia Wharf where it was unloaded from the barge using a Scotch Derrick crane, which isn’t there any more though it should be because it is a listed bit of equipment, put on a lorry and delivered to our factory. Coincidentally, one of the drivers who did that it is now working for us. Gary used to do that, he used to be one of the drivers bringing things from Columbia Wharf to us. My father was able to make Glitza because he – it was invented in Sweden by a company called Jungdahl who were bought up by International Paints and may not exist now – but they exchanged the right to make Glitza with the right to make Roval Cold Galvanising which was a first zinc rich paint ever developed by Dr Mayne in the 1940s. It was a polystyrene binder with zinc dust in it and its virtue was it had 95% zinc in the dried film which means it was as good as galvanising to prevent corrosion. It became world famous and somehow or other, I really don’t know how, my father got the licence to make it.
I remember going down in the 1960s, no it was before then, when I was about 14 I suppose I must have been, I remember going down to the company when it was still in Lockfield Avenue, and working on the triple roll mill. It was made by having pug mixes, that’s a heavy metal container about, I don’t know, fifty litres, with a mixer in it rather like a Kenwood Chef mixer, very heavy duty. Ingredients were dispersed in that, it was lifted up on a chain hoist, taken up to this triple roll mill, which is three big steel rollers, very close to each other and the paint goes in between the first two and it’s caught round in the underside of the middle one and delivered on to the top side of the bottom one which is then scraped off into a shute which then goes into the drum. And bearing in mind it was very, very heavy, it was over two kilos a litre, the large spatula at the end would spatule the paste off into a keg and originally they were 28lb kegs. I used to do that and I was only 14 and I used to love it, scooping it all off and if you do it wrong you get zinc paint all over the floor and as it was very, very expensive you weren’t very popular. I never did and I used to time it so I’d fill one, put the empty pot underneath and put the lid on the one I’d just filled, add an e-clip to hold the lid on and then go back. It was quite interesting really.
Unfortunately, at some stage one of the ingredients became unavailable, it was made by Vinyl Products and they stopped making one of the ingredients so I had to reformulate the product. Fortunately I was able to do it, and at the same time I got it made by a local paint company which made it differently with a high speed disperser so it was much better and it’s why I went to Japan. I went to Japan but that’s a very long story. But it was interesting. I’d like to have some, I’ve got a can of Glitza in the garage but I haven’t got any cold galvanising paint. But no matter.
Valerie
Would you be interesting in remaking either of them?
Anthony
No, there are now urea formaldehyde seals which are almost as good. They have good wear but the thing about Glitza was you could patch it in so if it got worn you could just patch it in on that area and the adhesion was perfect and it penetrated the wood so it looked as though it was oiled and the modern products don’t do that. I think there might be a market for it but the main thing is you need a flammable mixing area for it and it is expensive and it is not an area we actually sell into now. I think you need to specialise in it.
One thing I’ve learned is you don’t have to make everything although I think now we have fifteen hundred formulations in the computer after me saying I never want to make anything and only sell eight products though we only regularly make two or three hundred of them, I would say.
Valerie
Thank you, Anthony.