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and to hold both offices simultaneously would have been a marvellous finish to my life in Industry. Unfortunately for me Heath’s Conservative Government, which had abolished the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation early in 1971, was busy unloading as many of its industrial holdings as possible, and as Brown Bayley was more than 50% owned by the government we found ourselves sold off to one of our bitterest competitors. Before the take-over I was told I would be supported in the offices to which I was looking forward, but the new company changed its mind and I was Obliged to resign from both membership of the Cutlers’ Company and the Presidency-Elect of BISPA. Apart from some real sadness that Margaret would miss a wonderful year as Mistress Cutler, I don’t remember nurturing any feelings of great bitterness. This might be, in industrial life, the equivalent of being shot down in flames, but we were both going to survive without a chip on the shoulder. Even when the same people concerned with this episode were themselves seen to leave their company when it, in turn, was taken over by Lonrho a year or so later, the nearest we got to any feelings about that development was the quiet enjoyment of listening to the first dozen bars of the fourth movement of Mozart’s 39th Symphony. The story did not quite end there, for I found myself, on the insistence of the Government, appointed to the board of the take-over company and I remained a not-too-popular member for some fifteen months until I ‘retired’, happily and profitably. It was at this juncture that Frazer Wright, the Industrial Correspondent of the Sheffield ‘Morning Telegraph’, wrote a flattering article about my career which occupied a half-page spread and carried the banner headline ‘End of a Legend.’ There were two things wrong with that headline – I scarcely deserved to be described as a legend and it was my good fortune that in the year 1975 saw the beginning of another ten years of involvement in industry which were to be fascinating and more rewarding than ever. Being shot down in flames is not always a tragedy.


The other abiding influence of those wartime exploits which never left me was my simple love of flying. I missed the thrills which the sheer handling of an aeroplane had provided, and I missed the beauty of flight and the delight of what it could do for you and show to you. It was partly for such a personal and selfish reason that I badgered my United Steels bosses, in the early 1950s when I was becoming senior enough to be able to badger them, to investigate the advantages of executive flying in our Group by buying me a little Auster aircraft even if only, as they were sure, it would prove to be a failure and stop me worrying them. I bought an Auster Mk.V with a Lycoming flat-four 130 h.p. air-cooled engine which I had delivered in April 1955, having renewed my old Private Pilot’s Licence at Newcastle aerodrome during the previous month, and its arrival coincided with a rail strike and with the best summer weather for years. Far from being a failure, the experiment was a great success. My top boss, Mr


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