Paranoia?

The last post mentioned the Beethoven Symphonies received as a leaving present from my first job. There is a second story loosely associated with it. 

As mentioned, that job lasted five years. I worked mainly under a man called Len, one of the Seniors just below Partner level. I enjoyed his dry sense of humour, but he could never understand my obsession with Monty Python and Jethro Tull. He thought them subversive. That, of course, was their appeal. 

Otherwise, we got on well and had similar interests. Len walked the Yorkshire Dales before it became popular, and took stunning photographs. He got me interested in coin collecting. He was knowledgeable about classical music, and to him I owe much of my love of it. He liked to play the Beethoven symphonies on the Stereo Cartridge player (remember those?) in his car while we were travelling to clients. Another quirk was that he was the best whistler I ever knew, as good as professional entertainers. In parts of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, he had a trick of whistling both the main and counter melodies at the same time by means of a warbling action with his tongue. I tried for years to emulate it, but was never able to. 

We went to wool spinners and dyers in Yeadon and Guiseley, an Engineering works in Ossett, a company in Bradford that made television adverts, a large firm of solicitors, a chain of bookshops with branches in York and Sheffield, Joe Kagan’s clothing factory at Elland, clients at Selby; jobs where you followed trails through offices and factories and asked questions; jobs that took a month instead of a few days; jobs dealing with systems. Not only were they interesting, your lunch was provided, sometimes in an executive dining room, or pub lunches or the original Harry Ramsden’s fish restaurant at Guiseley. 

There were small clients too: grocers, hairdressers, little garages, a model agency, a man who refurbished and exported old metalwork machines, and so on. Another client was the first winner of Bruce Forsythe’s ‘Generation Game’ television show. He showed us the prizes he had won on the conveyor belt, and talked about how Brucie had been the perfect host, taking all the contestants out for a meal after the show, and then for drinks with his friend, the Scottish singer, Kenneth McKellar. 

Len handled some of the most interesting clients, so it was good to work with him. He trusted me to be thorough and accurate. Even when occasionally he wanted me to do something tiresome, he would say that only the good guys get the bum jobs. I think he liked me, but not all was well between us when I left. I suspect other Articled Clerks, two in particular who were always in league with each other, thought there was favouritism, and had it in for me. They enjoyed working for Len, too. Other Seniors were not so pleasant to work with, and some jobs were a chore. There was one warehouse just a short walk from the office where you could be stuck for months doing the most tedious work imaginable. 

I mentioned to Len I was going to London for the weekend, to a friend’s twenty-first birthday party. It was also the weekend the clocks changed, and the topic moved on to wondering what happened with the telephone speaking clock. I joked that I would still be awake, so could go in a phone box to check. Idle chat, quickly forgotten, but I later remembered one of the two Articled Clerks was also present in the room. 

On the Monday, Len seemed unusually quiet. I was at my desk when he appeared to try to telephone an Inspector Green, and asked “Did you manage to trace it?” Naturally, I asked whether anything was wrong. Len said he had received abusive telephone calls in the early hours of Sunday morning. The calls were drunken rants full of Monty Python references over a background of shouted insults and foul language. 

He asked about the trip to London. Was it a good party? Had there been a lot of drink? Had I been in a phone box to check the speaking clock? Had I been too drunk to remember? Then he said, “It was you who made that call, wasn’t it?” He was convinced. “It sounded just like you”. I was always going on and on about Monty Python. He accused me again two or three times before I left that job, and then twice more when I saw him later at staff reunions, lastly about twenty years ago. 

The accusation was deeply upsetting, but I probably handled it badly. I did not have the social skills to deal with it. Whoever made those calls, it was not me. I would never do such a thing. Actually, I think we had returned to where we were staying soon after midnight. I have searched my mind over and over, could it have been me? I can imagine the phone box and turning the dial, Except I didn’t. It may be paranoia, or simply coincidence, but I strongly suspect those two other Articled Clerks, privately educated to put competition before principle, were behind it, as if it was all a game. 

Sadly, the damage was done. I did not work so much for Len again, and there was a distance between us. I regard it as my first experience of underhand, bastard behaviour to gain advantage. There were other examples from the same individuals, such as taking all the credit for stock checking carried out by others on a Saturday morning in a silent factory, after spending most of the time playing with fork-lift trucks and electric overhead cranes. 

Len left the firm some years later. He was not eligible for Partnership because he was a Chartered Company Secretary rather than a Chartered Accountant (Chartered Secretaries handle the statutory duties of large companies - he liked to call it the Institute of “Secs”). When other Articled Clerks became qualified accountants, some in due course were offered Partnerships. Len found himself working for them, given more and more of the bum jobs, and fewer interesting ones. It was hard to take from those he had helped train.