ANNIVERSARY


PAST REFLECTIONS Ӏ NOVEMBER 2022


j an interview at this magazine. I had the core skills, liked what Ian said, and took the job. This’ll tide me over until something faster- paced presents itself, I thought. Cranes Today, gone tomorrow. A bloke from the sales team, altogether more gregarious than me, saw it similarly. He was passing through too, as was apparent during our first conversation at the coffee machine. I was writing a piece that concluded, ‘that a time when mobile cranes are operated entirely by remote control could be closer than you think’. ‘Head up displays, while more commonly associated with fighter jet cockpits than crane cabs, could become commonplace,’ I wrote in the following issue. I recall being surprised just how passionate everyone was about their wares and services. There was scope for a young, keen writer too. In sport, the teams I covered won, lost, or drew. Cranes could do so much more. The travel was (nearly) always fun. My first trip was to Milan, then Paris, and next Bologna. That was within the first few months of joining. After a while, these jaunts started to serve as moments by which to mark time. I interviewed for the editorship of sister title, Hoist, around the staging of my first Intermat, which took place in Paris in the spring of 2006, and eventually took group editorship of the lifting magazines early in 2009. We had founded another industrial crane magazine for the North American market in the meantime. It was a thrilling ride and everyone in the team bought a ticket.


UPS AND DOWNS Like the industry, all this travel didn’t come without its ups and downs. During the ’09 Intermat, we had to dive into a side-street launderette near Gare du Nord when a demonstration turned ugly. It was that or get taken out by a


Richard Howes: Breaking convention


I can see why publishing houses want their magazines to run conferences. It’s a great way to raise the profi le of a brand; align a title with continued improvement of industry best practices; and, crudely, the margins, if successful, are good — much better than print. But, goodness, it’s a tough job for editors. It’s one thing to fi nd speakers, often without offering payment, but another to deliver keynote speeches, compère sessions, and moderate panel discussions. There’s a reason why people become journalists and then editors, and it’s not usually because we make great orators. I was crippled with nerves when I had to deliver my fi rst opening remarks—and second, third, and fourth. The microphone never felt as comfortable as the pen, and still doesn’t, but it did get easier over


time. I’m proud of the conferences we organised at this magazine and, as editor, I was even invited by an American publisher to chair an afternoon of sessions at a similar event in Houston, Texas. I’ve always found it easier to address an overseas audience. As I said then and repeat at the start of every event I’m involved with, ‘Even if you only took one


nugget of information from each of the presentations…’ If you know, you know...


charging mob sending wheelie-bins (poubelles à roulettes) flying. I was only a few hours east of


there, in Verdun, the following spring when a member of the sales team and I broke down en route to Munich having been forced to drive to Bauma from London, as the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland grounded flights. It turns out we (the sales guy) put petrol in a diesel car or vice versa. Either way, the vehicle shuddered to a halt on an unlit road in rural France. Nice one, Alex. I was exhausted by the time


we eventually arrived at Messe München. I was especially excited to make it because the show represented the unveiling of the magazine’s redesign that I’d spent months overseeing. I thought it was a good idea to keep it a secret, given the commercial draw of advertising in a Bauma edition, regardless, but at least one advertiser disagreed, somewhat vociferously. With most of the team still grounded in the UK, I had to explain my thinking behind the move, bleary-eyed. It was on another business trip, this time a Liebherr-Werk Ehingen press junket, that I was looking up at a hulking crawler crane, dwarfed even by its tracks, when it struck me how obsessed the industry


was with size. And true enough the metrics were, and continue to be, mind boggling. But what about the components without which it wouldn’t all be possible? I’m glad I wrote an editorial along those lines, just as much as I regret a prior one when I transitioned back to Cranes Today from Hoist, in which I wrote something like, ‘…I’ve been covering lifting of a slightly less glamorous kind…’ How wrong I was.. and one contact gave me both barrels (didn’t you, Paul?!). I think I’ve made up for it since. Mark Bridger (as it turned out the guy at the coffee machine was called) and I went on to have many other chats beyond that first one, less over non-alcoholic drinks. In fact, with Cranes Today, we travelled the world together. Fast-forward to 2014 and we


founded a PR company with a client base in an industry we didn’t want to leave. We called it Bridger Howes. And to this day we mostly promote components. In the same week I started


at Cranes Today, in July 2005, I also met my life partner, Laura, and shortly afterwards my stepdaughter, Talia, who was only 18 months old at the time. What an uplifting journey it’s been. And what an honour to have played a small part in 50 years of this magazine.


f CRANES TODAY 31


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