Have you ever wondered whether or not there was some truth in the stories of monsters in Loch Ness? Here are all of the answers.
Loch Ness Monster Explained & Loch Ness Understood: The Co-Founder of the Loch Ness Centre Provides a Personal Perspecti...
The sixties marched on. My parents purchased a hotel in Bude, Cornwall (image above).
My interest in creepy crawlies led to a more general interest in science at school and a natural flair for mathematics encouraged my teachers to push me towards those subjects in school.
Today I feel that was a mistake as my love now is for understanding history and natural history. During subject selection in senior school, I wonder how many of us were choosing the subjects we thought we ought to select, rather than those which actually interested us.
When advanced level examinations approached I was also put in for "special level" physics to go with both maths subjects. Reasonable mock grades belied my lousy results in the proper examinations. I failed everything, mainly through hay fever but, to be honest, I hadn't done the work either. I had been offered a seven year sandwich course with IBM, but that was now not to be.
I was invited to stay on for another year but, as a bit of a rebel, the way the offer was presented was not acceptable. My headmaster, Mr Thomas Law, said, "Much as I don't want you in my school, Harmsworth, I'm prepared to let you stay on to re-sit your exams."
My reaction was to tell him, using some colourful language, what he could do with his school and his attitude and I stormed out into a future that could only be of my own making. This arrogant headmaster with his snide manner had changed the course of my life. Today I realise that he should have been cajoling and working with my parents to persuade me to stay on. Instead he forced me to react to him, took some sort of perverse satisfaction from it, saved me from a life of mathematics and himself from my presence in his school for another year. The image below shows me with my parents outside Greenacres about that time. By a strange irony I now run the school website BudeCountyGrammar.org and staged a large reunion in 2015.
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My wife to be, Wendy, had gained entry (from the same school) to Manchester University to study languages and one day, with ten pounds in my pocket, I jumped on my Honda Fifty motorcycle (a 50cc scooter which had a top speed of 45mph with a following wind) and followed her north.
My destination, Manchester was a journey of some 300 miles and I arrived in the small hours. Life was a real struggle. I had been offered a job at £5 per week, but my digs were £5 10s (£5 10s was five pounds ten shillings, a unit of currency abandoned in the 1970s worth £5.50 today). Result – misery. It was this which forced me into sales where wages were always much higher.
Firstly I joined a door to door selling company and very quickly progressed to team leader. I then moved laterally into stores, gradually establishing myself in retail, becoming a store manager at the age of 20.
1969 arrived and Neil Armstrong made his giant leap for mankind, but Nessie had dropped out of my life and I can't remember the Loch Ness Monster being part of my interests at all during this period.
I gradually built a reputation for myself as a skilful retailer and, after Wendy obtained her degree, we married (one of only two wedding photographs we have below) and moved to Basingstoke in Hampshire (central southern England) to be near my father who was now suffering from a rheumatic heart and was none too well.
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I had come to believe that while retail had taught me how to deal with people, there was going to be more to my life than managing department stores. Basingstoke was entering a phase of expansion with many firms moving out of London into the provinces.
Switching career tracks, in 1972 I joined Wella Hair Cosmetics in Stock Control and helped implement a computer stock system. A love of digits, statistics and computers grabbed me.
In today's technological age it is hard to appreciate how new the microchip was in the early seventies. On one occasion I remember my boss at Wella, Peter Nash, obtaining an electronic calculator. The news spread like wildfire through the company and people queued up to see its red LED display perform the magic of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division (no memories or square roots on that model). How much had it cost? £125 at a time when my annual salary was £1,200. Can you imagine paying the equivalent of £2,500 for a simple calculator today?
When the ZX1000 1kb RAM computer became available in the late seventies, at the cost of almost a month's wages, I jumped at it and I haven't been without a personal computer of some description since then.
In 1975 I was head-hunted by a division of British American Tobacco and our life became more relaxed and financially stable. I was in my late twenties and had time once again for hobbies and to think about the Loch Ness Monster.
Wendy had never been to Scotland. It was 1976, and we set off in our first brand new car – a Russian built Lada Estate which we nicknamed the KGB GT. Nessie was about to burst in upon our lives with a vengeance.
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