Scrap Book Project – Newspapers and Paper Rounds

Inside the Scrap Book are some loose pages from old newspapers that Dad kept because they recorded big events – the Manchester United Munich air crash, Assassination of Kennedy and the death of Winston Churchill and looking at these reminded me of my first ever job as a paper boy!

As a young teenager I used to receive a little bit of pocket money every week from my dad but the only way to make more cash was to have a paper-round.  I had three, a morning round, an evening round and a Sunday round.  It taught me strength of character, resilience to weather conditions and I have memories of getting wet, miserable, cold and hungry.

In the late 1960s  I had my first paper round and earned fifteen shillings (.75p) a week in return for getting up at six o’clock, six days a week, whatever the weather to lug a bag of newspapers around the village before going to school.  The papers were carried in a big canvas bag and as I was only small the newsagent had to tie a knot in the strap so that it didn’t drag on the floor.

It was a dirty job because before modern computerised production the papers were printed using real ink and it used to rub off easily all over your hands and then transferred to anything you touched as well.  Thursday was a bad day because of the Radio and TV Times magazines but Friday was by far the worst because the addition of the Rugby Advertiser more than doubled the weight of the bag.  Saturday was pay day so after finishing the round it was back to the shop to pick up a ten shilling note and two half crowns and I felt really well off for a few hours at least.

Letter boxes were a real problem and I can remember wondering why they were all different inconvenient shapes and sizes.  My least favourite were the vertical ones with a sharp spring because getting newspapers through them was a real challenge.  The ones low down almost at ground level were also a pain and the high level ones presented a real problem for a little lad like me.  The best letter boxes were on the Featherbed Lane Council estate because they were exactly in the middle of the door where they should be and big enough to deliver a Sunday newspaper without having to split it up into sections.  I rather fancied delivering the newspapers in the way they did in American TV shows by cycling along and without stopping just launching the thing into the front garden but I guess whilst this might have been suitable in sunny Florida or California lobbing it onto a damp front lawn in the UK would not have been so acceptable.

Later I had a Sunday round as well and that paid fifteen shillings just for the one day but that stared an hour later so that thankfully meant a bit of a lie in.  Towards the end of the decade I needed more money so at one point I even had an evening round as well.  This meant delivering the Coventry Evening Telegraph and the Leicester Mercury and being a Leicester lad I always reserved my best service for those that took the Mercury.

One of the occupational hazards of being a paper boy was dogs, and as I have explained before I really don’t like dogs!  One I can remember used to scare me witless when it would jump at the letterbox and pull the newspaper through whilst I was delivering it.  One day, taking my dad’s advice,  I hung on to the other end and the dog shredded the outer pages.  I think it must have got a kick up the backside or half rations of Pedigree Chum for a fortnight because it didn’t do it again for a while.

I would be surprised if Sunday paper rounds exist anymore because to deliver to fifty houses or so would need a dumper truck to replace the old canvas bag on account of the size of the newspapers and the weight of all of the colour supplements.

The paper round was important because towards the end of my career I used to assist the newsagent, Mr Darlaston, to sort out the rounds and this taught me new skills that I was able to put to good use later in life when it was my job at the council to organise the refuse collection rounds.

Refuse Collection Vehicles

In February 1997 my boss Percy telephoned me to tell me that he had heard of a new type of refuse collection vehicle with impressive labour saving innovations that offered huge operational savings and that he was interested in finding out more.  He asked me if I would be prepared to visit the factory where they were manufactured and give him my opinion.  To be honest I had very little interest in bin carts or how they are made but fortunately, before I could decline, he happened to mention that the factory was in Phoenix, Arizona in the United States of America and as quick as a flash my lack of interest transformed into complete and total enthusiasm.  Did I want to visit Phoenix to see some dustcarts?  You bet I did!

I couldn’t believe my luck and enjoyed four days in the United States where as well as having to visit the Heil refuse collection truck factory, which quite frankly was a bit of a bore, I also got to visit the Grand Canyon and enjoy some top class hospitality.  This was a really good trip and on reflection I decided that refuse vehicle manufacture was actually rather interesting after all.  We posted the report of our visit (missing out the drinking bits of course) and offered our availability for any similar official trips in the future.

This was a good move because the following year I was sent to La Rochelle in France to look at Semat refuse trucks and later in the same year I went to Milan to see the Brivio factory.  It’s amazing how interesting refuse trucks can suddenly become when there is an all expenses overseas trip involved.  Later the Company set up a centralised purchasing unit under a greedy procurement manager who saved the best gigs for themselves and that was the end of the factory visits and the overseas travel but believe me I enjoyed it while it lasted.

The company never did buy a Heil sideloading refuse vehicle, they were absolutely useless for use in the United Kingdom, but I have to say that they were brilliant at hospitality.  Jack Allen folded and went out of business just a short while afterwards, which was a shame and the Heil Engineering Plant in Phoenix that had opened in 1990 was closed down in August 2003 and production was switched to Fort Payne in Alabama.

In June 1991 the company (Cory Environmental) made arrangements for all the managers to attend the conference and exhibition and we stayed at the Maycliffe Hotel in St Luke’s Road in Torquay.  I had already started to become accustomed to uncontrolled drinking bouts at the expense of the company whilst staying in hotels but the annual IWM conference was the equivalent of the FA Cup Final or the Eurovision Song Contest because at this event everyone went crazy.

Every June everyone in the waste management industry used to travel down to Paignton in Devon for the annual waste management conference and there were three nights of unlimited hospitality because all of the big supply companies were there and wanted to impress and sell and were prepared to pay for it.  The big event and the one everyone lusted to get a ticket for was the Dennis Eagle banquet because this promised good food and high class entertainment but there was also plenty of food and drink from their competitors Jack Allen and the street sweeping vehicle manufacturers Johnson and Scarab.  As well as the big events there were lots of fringe companies trying to impress, wheelie bin, plastic sacks, protective clothing and tyres and they all hospitality budgets that we were eager to help them spend.

All of that extravagance must have been a financial burden because as well as Jack Allen and Heil, Dennis Eagle went out of business on 11^th December 2006.

Dustcarts in Phoenix Arizona

Before I moved to Lincolnshire I used to work for a French waste management company called Onyx UK that was attempting to take over refuse collection services in the UK and I worked at a depot in Maidenhead in Berkshire and managed the Windsor contract.

One day in October 1997 the Managing Director, a man called Percy Powell, telephoned me to tell me that he had heard of a new type of refuse collection vehicle with impressive labour saving innovations that offered potentially huge operational efficiencies and that he was interested in finding out more.  He asked me if I would be prepared to visit the factory where they were manufactured and give him my opinion.

To be honest I had very little interest in dustcarts, how they worked or how they are made but fortunately, before I could prematurely decline, he happened to mention that the factory was in Phoenix, Arizona in the United States of America and almost instantaneously my lack of interest transformed into complete and total enthusiasm.  Did I want to visit Phoenix to see some dustcarts?  You bet I did!

And so a couple of weeks later on a miserable wet autumn day I drove to Heathrow Airport and met my travelling companions in the departure lounge; Dave who worked for the company and who, despite having no real technical background or training, had managed to convince everyone that he was an expert on vehicles and procurement, Keith who was a contract manager from Norwich and who was just as mystified as I was why he had the good fortune to be selected for this task, but like me wasn’t complaining, and then there was Allan and Ben who worked for the vehicle manufactures Jack Allen and who hoped to interest us in their exciting new dustcart range.

It was a long flight with North West Airlines but there was free drink and hot food and we made each other laugh while we misbehaved like excitable little boys going to summer camp and the first leg of the journey passed surprisingly quickly and after eight hours we landed in Dallas, Texas to make our connecting flight to Phoenix.  This involved a tedious four hour wait hanging around the shopping malls and the book shops which was excruciatingly dull, but we also spent some time, well, most of it actually, in the airport bar which was a much better alternative and it gave Dave the opportunity to begin his quest to spend Allan’s entire years hospitality budget in just three days.  Dave it seemed had a gluttonous appetite for beer and burgers and it started right here in Dallas.

Finally we made the second leg of our journey to Phoenix, or to be strictly accurate, Scottsdale, and once successfully through passport control and the typically unfriendly US customs we picked up the people carrier hire vehicle and made the short journey to the motel where we had reservations courtesy of Jack Allen.  We had been travelling for sixteen hours and Allan, Ben and Keith all declared themselves weary and ready for bed but Dave wasn’t finished just yet and he coerced me into going to the bar for last drinks and a final burger.

The term ‘last drinks’ usually implies a quick twenty minute round up but once Dave had got the taste for the beer, Allan’s room number for charging it to and fallen in love with the attractive woman behind the bar we stayed for a good long session until, way past reasonable closing time, she  finally ran out of patience and decided to call time!

My travelling companions…

__________________________________________________

These are the full Waste Management chronicles:

Cory Environmental, Blunders and Bodger

The Tendering process

Disorganising the Work

Cory Environmental at Southend on Sea

Onyx UK

An Inappropriate Visit to The Moulin Rouge

The Royal Ascot Clear Up Fiasco

An Unexpected Travel Opportunity

_________________________________________________

Onyx UK and the Royal Ascot Clear Up Fiasco

When I worked for Onyx UK in the waste management industry I was contract manager at the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead and that meant collecting rubbish and picking up litter at posh places like Eton, Windsor town centre and Ascot.

Ascot of course has a race course and hosts one of the premier events of the racing calendar and with over three hundred thousand people turning up for the Royal meeting in June, mostly getting slaughtered and thoroughly misbehaving then although picking a winner might be down to chance the one thing for absolute certain was there would be an awful lot of clearing up to do afterwards.

In 1996, because public sector waste contracts were such a financial disaster, Onyx, to try and compensate, began an aggressive expansionist campaign in respect of commercial waste collections with a division of the company called Ipodec and a salesman called Richard was parachuted into Maidenhead to try and win lots of lovely new profitable business.

Richard did quite well at first as he took on the existing companies and slashed prices and pretty soon the money was rolling in but then the competitors who had been caught off guard by this new assault got their acts together and started to take the business back by further slashing prices to the bone and undercutting the new intruders.  The business model started to fail as revenues dropped and fixed costs remained stubbornly high and Richard needed new business.

At the Ascot racecourse there was a new manager called John Holdsworth who wanted to make changes and cut costs and one fateful day in the spring of 1996 Richard gave him a call and was invited along to talk about commercial waste collections.  At the subsequent meeting the issue was raised of clearing up after the race meetings and Richard sniffing more high profile business was soon hooked.

This is quite similar to what happened with compulsory competitive tendering actually and it turned out that John Holdsworth wasn’t too popular with the grounds staff who considered the overtime perk of clearing up as something quite important to their personal budgets and they didn’t want to see the job transferred to anyone else.  They completely misled John about the scale of the work and the resources required and he passed this duff information on to Richard.

Richard offered to collect all of the waste after every meeting and dispose of it, which wasn’t really a problem, but he also made an offer to clear up all of the grandstands, the paddock, the hospitality areas and the racetrack every night and that was to become a serious problem indeed.

Richard proposed to do this work with twelve men!

17^th June 1996 was much like any other day at the contract, it was the first week back after the annual Institute of Waste Management Conference piss-up in Torquay and everything was going pretty much to plan, the crews were finished for the day, the workshop was shutting up and I was thinking about going home when I received a phone call from Richard who was in complete mental melt down.  He was screaming down the phone and was almost incomprehensible as he tried to explain that there was so much litter and rubbish and that he was completely unable to cope.  I remember being a bit flippant and dismissively told him to give it another half an hour or so to see if things might improve. Five minutes later he phoned me back and now he was even worse so I thought I had better abandon plans for going home and drive over and see what all the fuss was about.

OMG! I had never seen anything like it!  I swear I have never ever seen so much rubbish in my life except on a landfill site.  I had no idea that the people who attend race meetings are such complete and utter pigs and who clearly thought that creating vast amounts of litter was just part of the day out!  They may consider themselves to be the cream of society but I have never witnessed such contempt for the environment or for the people who have to clear up after them. I really had seen nothing like it before and the whole of the site was ankle deep in rubbish!  I could immediately see why Richard and his twelve men would certainly not be able to get this place cleared up before the Queen was due back the next day.

John Holdsworth was going crazy, Richard was having a nervous breakdown, the litter pickers didn’t know where to start and the Ascot groundsmen were all falling about and laughing fit to burst!

It was about five o’clock so I had to make some urgent phone calls to the depot to get some more men and machines down to the site regardless of the cost and even this wasn’t enough so there were more urgent phone calls to other Onyx depots as far away as Brent in London and luckily everyone rallied around and by eight o’clock there were more men and machines than I thought it possible to mobilise at such short notice.  And not just Onyx personnel either because we had to use all of the recruitment staff companies in the surrounding area as they responded to the revenue earning opportunity and flooded the place with resources.

We didn’t get finished until well after midnight and at one o’clock we completed a final inspection and then sat down, completely worn out and enjoyed one of the best beers ever under the stars.

Onyx were good at cock-ups and this was one of the worst, it was going to be a financial disaster and poor old Richard never really recovered from the shock of it all.  He left the company soon after following another tendering disaster when Ipodec won a contract with Qatar Airways at Heathrow Airport to dispose of their commercial waste.  Richard and his boss gave them a good price with plenty of profit for the Company but unfortunately they hadn’t realised that food waste from the Middle East was considered special waste in the UK and it cost more to dispose of it than they had negotiated in collection charges. Whoops!

Back to Ascot and the real problem was of course that the Royal meeting goes on for five days so we couldn’t relax for long because sometime between now and five o’clock the next day we had to make some plans to make sure the same thing didn’t happen again tomorrow…

More tales to come!

Cory Environmental, Blunders and Bodger

The Tendering process

First Weekend as a Refuse Collection Contract Manager

Disorganising the Work

Cory Environmental at Southend on Sea

Onyx UK

An Inappropriate Visit to The Moulin Rouge

Onyx UK and the Dog Poo Solution

An Unexpected Travel Opportunity

The Privatisation of Public Services

On 11^th February 1975 the Conservative Party choose Margaret Thatcher as their new leader and when she eventually became the first woman Prime Minister the country was engulfed in a wave of right wing extremism that as usual picked on local government for a real good kicking.

In the 1980s and 1990s because Margaret Thatcher thought that the private sector was, by definition, much more competent and efficient in these matters than the public sector and local authorities were required to offer certain services for open competition under what was called ‘Compulsory Competitive Tendering’.  If only she had known the truth – ‘Compusory Competitive Thieving’ would have been a more appropriate project title!

Rubbish collection was one of these services and so that the waste management companies could cope with all the new work and local authorities couldn’t cheat, the Government set out a phased three year programme and one by one local authority services were thrown into a private sector pond full of hungry piranha ready to strip the flesh off of public services, cynically reduce service standards and hopefully get fat at the council tax payer’s expense. As soon as the waste management companies spotted a contract they took a liking to they would express an interest, obtain the tender documents and specifications and go to work sharpening their pencils.

This was never a scientific process and the first thing the tendering manager did was to get up early one Monday morning and sit outside the council depot and count the dustcarts and the number of men in them as they left to go to work.  And that was about all there was to it and half an hour later over a bacon butty and a cup of tea he would write this down on the back of a fag packet and by mid morning he would have a price in his head.  Nothing else in his head, just the price!  Sometimes, if he was being especially thorough, he would go back on Tuesday morning just to check his calculations but this would be quite unusual.

The tendering manager at Cory Environmental was a man called Tony Palmer and for Tony arriving at the tender price was gloriously simple.  If the Council had ten refuse collection rounds, the company would do it with nine, and just in case the Council could do it for nine then they would do it with eight so that would immediately undercut the Council price by 20%.  Just to make absolutely certain they would find out how much a refuse collector was paid each week and then they would reduce that by 20% as well.  If the Council had three mechanics to keep the fleet running they would do it with two and so on and so on. There was no way these boys could fail to win tenders!

I worked for the private sector waste management companies for ten years between 1990 and 2000 and then thankfully was able to return to local government where services are provided properly through direct delivery so imagine my horror when ‘son of Thatcher’ David Cameron became Conservative Prime Minister in 2010 and has embarked on a similar dismantling of public services and twenty years after my first painful experience in the incompetent world of the private sector I find myself facing the same prospect all over again.

Paper Rounds

As a young teenager I used to receive a little bit of pocket money from my dad every week but the only way to make more cash was to have a paper-round.  I had three, a morning round, an evening round and a Sunday round.  It taught me strength of character, resilience to weather conditions and I have memories of getting wet, miserable, cold and hungry.

In the late 1960s  I had my first paper round and earned fifteen shillings (.75p) a week in return for getting up at six o’clock, six days a week, whatever the weather to lug a bag of newspapers around the village before going to school.  The papers were carried in a big canvas bag and as I was only small the newsagent had to tie a knot in the strap so that it didn’t drag on the floor.  It was a dirty job because before modern computerised production the papers were printed using real ink and it used to rub off easily all over your hands and then transferred to anything you touched as well.  Thursday was a bad day because of the Radio and TV Times magazines but Friday was by far the worst because the addition of the Rugby Advertiser more than doubled the weight of the bag.  Saturday was pay day so after finishing the round it was back to the shop to pick up a ten shilling note and two half crowns and I felt really well off for a few hours at least.

Letter boxes were a real problem and I can remember wondering why they were all different inconvenient shapes and sizes.  My least favourite were the vertical ones with a sharp spring because getting newspapers through them was a real challenge.  The ones low down almost at ground level were also a pain and the high level ones presented a real problem for a little lad like me.  The best letter boxes were on the Featherbed Lane Council estate because they were exactly in the middle of the door where they should be and big enough to deliver a Sunday newspaper without having to split it up into sections.  I rather fancied delivering the newspapers in the way they did in American TV shows by cycling along and without stopping just launching the thing into the front garden but I guess whilst this might have been suitable in sunny Florida or California lobbing it onto a damp front lawn in the UK would not have been so acceptable.

Later I had a Sunday round as well and that paid fifteen shillings for the one day but that stared an hour later so that thankfully meant a bit of a lie in.  Towards the end of the decade I needed more money so at one point I even had an evening round as well.  This meant delivering the Coventry Evening Telegraph and the Leicester Mercury and being a Leicester lad I always reserved my best service for those that took the Mercury.

One of the occupational hazards of being a paper boy was dogs, and as I have explained before I really don’t like dogs!  One I can remember used to scare me witless when it would jump at the letterbox and pull the newspaper through whilst I was delivering it.  One day, taking my dad’d advice,  I hung on to the other end and the dog shredded the outer pages.  I think it must have got a kick up the backside or something because it didn’t do it again for a while. 

I would be surprised if Sunday paper rounds exist anymore because to deliver to fifty houses or so would need a dumper truck to replace the old canvas bag on account of the size of the newspapers and the weight of all of the colour supplements.

The paper round was important because towards the end of my career I used to assist the newsagent, Mr Darlaston, to sort out the rounds and this taught me new skills that I was able to put to good use later in life when it was my job at the council to organise the refuse collection rounds.

A Year in a Life – 13th October, Dustcarts in Phoenix Arizona

Before I moved to Lincolnshire I used to work for a French waste management company called Onyx UK that was attempting to take over refuse collection services in the UK and I worked at a depot in Maidenhead in Berkshire and managed the Windsor contract.   One day in October 1997 the Managing Director, a man called Percy Powell, telephoned me to tell me that he had heard of a new type of refuse collection vehicle with impressive labour saving innovations that offered potentially huge operational efficiencies and that he was interested in finding out more.  He asked me if I would be prepared to visit the factory where they were manufactured and give him my opinion.  To be honest I had very little interest in bincarts or how they are made but fortunately, before I could prematurely decline, he happened to mention that the factory was in Phoenix, Arizona in the United States of America and almost instantaneously my lack of interest transformed into complete and total enthusiasm.  Did I want to visit Phoenix to see some dustcarts?  You bet I did!

And so a couple of weeks later on a miserable wet autumn day I drove to Heathrow Airport and met my travelling companions in the departure lounge; Dave who worked for the company and who, despite having no real technical background or training, had managed to convince everyone that he was an expert on vehicles and procurement, Keith who was a contract manager from Norwich and who was just as mystified as I was why he had the good fortune to be selected for this task, but like me wasn’t complaining, and then there was Allan and Ben who worked for the vehicle manufactures Jack Allen and who hoped to interest us in their exciting new dustcart range.

It was a long flight with North West Airlines but there was free drink and hot food and we made each other laugh while we misbehaved like excitable little boys going to summer camp and the first leg of the journey passed surprisingly quickly and after eight hours we landed in Dallas, Texas to make our connecting flight to Phoenix.  This involved a tedious four hour wait hanging around the shopping malls and the book shops which was excruciatingly dull, but we also spent some time, well, most of it actually, in the airport bar which was a much better alternative and it gave Dave the opportunity to begin his quest to spend Allan’s entire years hospitality budget in just three days.  Dave it seemed had a gluttonous appetite for beer and burgers and it started right here in Dallas.

Finally we made the second leg of our journey to Phoenix, or to be strictly accurate, Scottsdale, and once successfully through passport control and the typically unfriendly US customs we picked up the people carrier hire vehicle and made the short journey to the motel where we had reservations courtesy of Jack Allen.  We had been travelling for sixteen hours and Allan, Ben and Keith all declared themselves weary and ready for bed but Dave wasn’t finished just yet and he coerced me into going to the bar for last drinks and a final burger.  The term ‘last drinks’ usually implies a quick twenty minute round up but once Dave had got the taste for the beer, Allan’s room number for charging it to and fallen in love with the attractive girl behind the bar we stayed for a good long session until, way past reasonable closing time, she  finally ran out of patience and decided to call time!

My travelling companions…

 

These are the full Waste Management chronicles:

Cory Environmental, Blunders and Bodger

The Tendering process

Disorganising the Work

Cory Environmental at Southend on Sea

Onyx UK

An Inappropriate Visit to The Moulin Rouge

The Royal Ascot Clear Up Fiasco

An Unexpected Travel Opportunity

A Life in a Year – 17th June, Onyx UK and the Royal Ascot Clear Up Fiasco

When I worked for Onyx UK in the waste management industry I was contract manager at the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead and that meant collecting rubbish and picking up litter at posh places like Eton, Windsor town centre and Ascot.

Ascot of course has a race course and hosts one of the premier events of the racing calendar and with over three hundred thousand people turning up for the Royal meeting in June, mostly getting slaughtered and thoroughly misbehaving then although picking a winner might be down to chance the one thing for absolute certain was there would be an awful lot of clearing up to do afterwards.

In 1996, because public sector waste contracts were such a financial disaster, Onyx, to try and compensate, began an aggressive expansionist campaign in respect of commercial waste collections with a division of the company called Ipodec and a salesman called Richard was parachuted into Maidenhead to try and win lots of lovely new profitable business.

Richard did quite well at first as he took on the existing companies and slashed prices and pretty soon the money was rolling in but then the competitors who had been caught off guard by this new assault got their acts together and started to take the business back by further slashing prices to the bone and undercutting the new intruders.  The business model started to fail as revenues dropped and fixed costs remained stubbornly high and Richard needed new business.

At the Ascot racecourse there was a new manager called John who wanted to make changes and cut costs and one fateful day in the spring of 1996 Richard gave him a call and was invited along to talk about commercial waste collections.  At the subsequent meeting the issue was raised of clearing up after the race meetings and Richard sniffing more high profile business was soon hooked.

This is quite similar to what happened with compulsory competitive tendering actually and it turned out that John wasn’t too popular with the grounds staff who considered the overtime perk of clearing up as something quite important to their personal budgets and they didn’t want to see the job transferred to anyone else.  They completely misled John about the scale of the work and the resources required and he passed this duff information on to Richard.

Richard offered to collect all of the waste after every meeting and dispose of it, which wasn’t really a problem, but he also made an offer to clear up all of the grandstands, the paddock, the hospitality areas and the racetrack every night and that was to become a serious problem indeed.

Richard proposed to do this work with twelve men!

17^th June 1996 was much like any other day at the contract, it was the first week back after the annual Institute of Waste Management Conference piss-up in Torquay and everything was going pretty much to plan, the crews were finished for the day, the workshop was shutting up and I was thinking about going home when I received a phone call from Richard who was in complete mental melt down.  He was screaming down the phone and was almost incomprehensible as he tried to explain that there was so much litter and rubbish and that he was completely unable to cope.  I remember being a bit flippant and dismissively told him to give it another half an hour or so to see if things might improve. Five minutes later he phoned me back and now he was even worse so I thought I had better abandon plans for going home and drive over and see what all the fuss was about.

OMG! I had never seen anything like it!  I swear I have never ever seen so much rubbish in my life except on a landfill site.  I had no idea that the people who attend race meetings are such complete and utter litter louts and pigs! They may consider themselves to be the cream of society but I have never witnessed such contempt for the environment or for the people who have to clear up after them. I really had seen nothing like it before and the whole of the site was ankle deep in rubbish!  I could immediately see why Richard and his twelve men would certainly not be able to get this place cleared up before the Queen was due back the next day.

John was going crazy, Richard was having a nervous breakdown, the litter pickers didn’t know where to start and the Ascot groundsmen were all falling about and laughing fit to burst!

It was about five o’clock so I had to make some urgent phone calls to the depot to get some more men and machines down to the site regardless of the cost and even this wasn’t enough so there were more urgent phone calls to other Onyx depots as far away as Brent in London and luckily everyone rallied around and by eight o’clock there were more men and machines than I thought it possible to mobilise at such short notice.  And not just Onyx personnel either because we had to use all of the recruitment staff companies in the surrounding area as they responded to the revenue earning opportunity and flooded the place with resources.

We didn’t get finished until well after midnight and at one o’clock we completed a final inspection and then sat down, completely worn out and enjoyed one of the best beers ever under the stars.

Onyx were good at cock-ups and this was one of the worst, it was going to be a financial disaster and poor old Richard never really recovered from the shock of it all.  He left the company soon after following another tendering disaster when Ipodec won a contract with Qatar Airways at Heathrow Airport to dispose of their commercial waste.  Richard and his boss gave them a good price with plenty of profit for the Company but unfortunately they hadn’t realised that food waste from the Middle East was considered special waste in the UK and it cost more to dispose of it than they had negotiated in collection charges. Whoops!

Back to Ascot and the real problem was of course that the Royal meeting goes on for five days so we couldn’t relax for long because sometime between now and five o’clock the next day we had to make some plans to make sure the same thing didn’t happen again tomorrow…

More tales to come!

Cory Environmental, Blunders and Bodger

The Tendering process

First Weekend as a Refuse Collection Contract Manager

Disorganising the Work

Cory Environmental at Southend on Sea

Onyx UK

An Inappropriate Visit to The Moulin Rouge

Onyx UK and the Dog Poo Solution

An Unexpected Travel Opportunity

A Life in a Year – 11th February, Thatcher becomes Leader of the Tory Party and I become a Dustman

On 11^th February 1975 the Conservative Party choose Margaret Thatcher as their new leader and when she eventually became the first woman Prime Minister the country was engulfed in a wave of neo-Nazism that as usual picked on local government for a real good kicking.

In the 1980s and 1990s because Margaret Thatcher thought that the private sector was, by definition, much more competent and efficient in these matters than the public sector and local authorities were required to offer certain services for open competition under what was called ‘Compulsory Competitive Tendering’.  If only she had known the truth!

Rubbish collection was one of these services and so that the waste management companies could cope with all the new work and local authorities couldn’t cheat, the Government set out a phased three year programme and one by one local authority services were thrown into a private sector pond full of hungry piranha ready to strip the flesh off of public services, cynically reduce service standards and hopefully get fat at the council tax payer’s expense. As soon as the waste management companies spotted a contract they took a liking to they would express an interest, obtain the tender documents and specifications and go to work sharpening their pencils.

This was never a scientific process and the first thing the tendering manager did was to get up early one Monday morning and sit outside the council depot and count the dustcarts and the number of men in them as they left to go to work.  And that was about all there was to it and half an hour later over a bacon butty and a cup of tea he would write this down on the back of a fag packet and by mid morning he would have a price in his head.  Nothing else in his head, just the price!  Sometimes, if he was being especially thorough, he would go back on Tuesday morning just to check his calculations but this would be quite unusual.

The tendering manager at Cory Environmental was called Tony Palmer and for Tony arriving at the tender price was gloriously simple.  If the Council had ten refuse collection rounds, the company would do it with nine, and just in case the Council could do it for nine then they would do it with eight so that would immediately undercut the Council price by 20%.  Just to make absolutely certain they would find out how much a refuse collector was paid each week and then they would reduce that by 20% as well.  If the Council had three mechanics to keep the fleet running they would do it with two and so on and so on. There was no way these boys could fail to win tenders!

I worked for the private sector waste management companies for ten years between 1990 and 2000 and then thankfully was able to return to local government where services are provided properly through direct delivery so imagine my horror when ‘son of Thatcher’ David Cameron became Conservative Prime Minister in 2010 and has embarked on a similar dismantling of public services and twenty years after my first painful experience in the incompetent world of the private sector I find myself facing the same prospect all over again.

Paper Rounds

The only way to make money when I was a young teenage boy was to have a paper-round.  I had three, a morning round, an evening round and a Sunday round.  It taught me strength of character, resilience to weather conditions and I have memories of getting wet, miserable, cold and hungry.

In the late 1960s  I had my first paper round and earned fifteen shillings (.75p) a week in return for getting up at six o’clock, six days a week, whatever the weather to lug a bag of newspapers around the village before going to school.  The papers were carried in a big canvas bag and as I was only small the newsagent had to tie a knot in the strap so that it didn’t drag on the floor.  It was a dirty job because before modern computerised printing the papers were printed using real ink and it used to rub off easily all over your hands and then anything you touched as well.  Thursday was a bad day because of the Radio and TV Times magazines but Friday was by far the worst because the addition of the Rugby Advertiser more than doubled the weight of the bag.  Saturday was pay day so after finishing the round it was back to the shop to pick up a ten shilling note and two half crowns and I felt really well off for a few hours at least.

Letter boxes were a real problem and I can remember wondering why they were all different inconvenient shapes and sizes.  My least favourite were the vertical ones with a sharp spring because getting newspapers through them was a real challenge.  The ones low down almost at ground level were also a pain and the high level ones presented a real problem for a little lad like me.  The best letter boxes were on the Featherbed Lane Council estate because they were exactly in the middle of the door where they should be and big enough to deliver a Sunday newspaper without having to split it up into sections.

Later I had a Sunday round as well and that paid fifteen shillings for the one day but that stared an hour later so that thankfully meant a bit of a lie in.  Towards the end of the decade I needed more money so at one point I even had an evening round as well.  This meant delivering the Coventry Evening Telegraph and the Leicester Mercury and I always reserved my best service for those that took the Mercury.

One of the occupational hazards of being a paper boy was dogs, and as I have explained I really don’t like dogs!  One I can remember used to scare me witless when it would jump at the letterbox and pull the newspaper through whilst I was delivering it.  One day I hung on to the other end and the dog shredded the outer pages.  I think it must have got a kick up the arse or something because it didn’t do it again for a while. 

I would be surprised if Sunday paper rounds exist anymore because to deliver to fifty houses or so would need a dumper truck to replace the old canvas bag on account of the size of the newspapers and the weight of all of the colour supplements.

The paper round was important because towards the end of my career I used to assist the newsagent, Mr Dalton, to sort out the rounds and this taught me new skills that I was able to put to good use later in life when it was my job at the council to organise the refuse collection rounds.