5.4 My Work and computing

My new job was working for the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) in Leeds. In terms of computer power, this was an advance! While programming used punched cards and magnetic tape, hard disks arrived during my time in Leeds. This was the CEGB (North) computing team, and there were two teams – commercial and technical, each with a quota of one Senior Analyst (Ed Bull in commercial and myself in technical), Analysts, programmers and Assistants. And the computer was only a short walk from the office!

The main problem at the time I joined (how nice it is to be able to be allowed to describe the work I was doing!) in terms of power generation, was that turbine cases were cracking; new large turbines had been installed, capable of several times more power than the earlier models, but were failing due to mysterious cracking of the turbine cases. The scientists suspected mechanical (vibration) or thermal stress, and proposed to cover the things with data loggers to record stress; my job was to convert the recorded numbers to real values, and then analyse the data to see at which places and under which conditions the stresses became excessive. Each type of instrument had its own conversion characteristics, and the instruments were moved round the turbines at regular intervals.

After getting the basic programs working, it struck me that the whole process could be simplified. If instead of writing a new program for every change of instruments, I wrote a generalised one, the scientists could put in a “instrument configuration” and then the data, it would work without extra effort by me. This I did. It was what nowadays is called “table-driven (or data-driven) programming”, but such terms were years away – perhaps mine was one of the first such programs in the UK?

There were a few other projects I did, but doing that suite of data analysis programs was my main job; the scientists at Kirkstall were in their element, and the problems were eliminated fairly speedily after that. I managed to get a tour of Ferrybridge power station, to see the turbines at first hand, which was very interesting – apart from the noise and power of the coal-fired borders, the power of the turbines was almost overwhelming, and I was glad to get away from them; despite being set in many feet of solid concrete, the vibration was tangible – I seemed to sense them through the air as well as through the concrete, and (however safe I knew it was) there was a compulsion to move away from the machinery – perhaps because I knew how heavy the turbine blades were, how fast they were spinning round, and what happened to a turbine casing if anything went disastrously wrong.

At this point I need to mention Paul Roper, who was at school with me … one day the engineer I was working with told me that there was someone in the office who knew me; that was Paul. So I told him that at School Paul had been renowned in the radio club for testing TV EHT voltages (up to 8,000 volts at the time) by “rule of thumb” – putting his thumb on the wire and guessing how high the voltage was .. an action that would have probably killed most of us. I was told that he was still in the habit of doing that with inter-county power lines (then running between 12,000 and 32,000 volts). He must have had an incredibly high internal resistance.

But what I remember about CEGB life was the bureaucracy of it; it was a nationalised industry, and run on civil service lines – so we had a quota of staff grades, irrespective of need; and after my main project finished, I was twiddling my fingers a lot of the time. So I wanted a new challenge, and to find one I had to persuade Katie to consider leaving her belovèd Yorkshire.

5.5 Katie’s Work

Katie was working for Elida Gibbs in Leeds, based at Whitehall Road, where assorted toiletries were researched and developed. After a while she changed jobs and worked at the International Wool Secretariat at Ilkley, but then returned to Gibbs for the rest of our time in Yorkshire.

Gibbs was known to local old-timers as “Soapy Joe’s”, no doubt due to the smells of soap and lanoline that once emerged. Katie was in the development labs, working with a few colleagues, of whom Davina was her close friend; Davina married Andrew Jones while we were engaged, and we both went to the wedding, and her mother gave us a wedding present for ours. There were on the staff one or two people whom Katie described as “mad scientists”, but a number of breakthroughs took place there and some “household name” products emerged; Katie herself played a significant part in the development of the Sunsilk hair product family, and on the staff was “the man who put the stripes in Signal toothpaste”. Much of what she did was testing products to ensure they were fit for manufacture – sometimes I would hear of some product that had eaten through an aerosol container (heaven knows what it might have done to someone’s hair, so it was as well that all these tests were done before production). From time to time she would bring back samples to test at home, and I had to stifle my revulsion at the idea of cleaning my teeth with something called “G4” or “H5”; we were perhaps some of the first people in the country to use “red gel” toothpaste.

Katie then joined the International Wool Secretariat at Ilkley, which was the UK testing station for companies who wanted to use the “Woolmark” standard on their promotional material. From there, technical advisers would go to advise manufacturers about the standards, and how to meet them – from machine set-up to storage and shipping. Periodically, they were required to submit a sample of material for testing at the labs, so they would often run off a reel of fabric and send it in. From this would be cut a few 1-meter squares for testing, and the rest was disposed of; if it was dress material, the girls in the lab knew how to help the disposal process! Katie became quite adept at talking about washability, stretchability, flame retardedness, colour-fastness and so on. She has a “woolmark” brooch to this day as a reminder of her time there. One highlight was the visit of Princess Margaret to “open” the building (some time after it had been in use); for this visit, one of the staff toilets was specially fitted out and decorated, and Katie had the privilege of buying and pre-washing the “royal towel”. After the visit, the toilet was unfortunately not left for the staff to use, but un-built again.

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