Time and Chance

By Richard F. Challis

The Author has written 3 books based of his life and experiences. "The Old Firm" is the story of how his father's company survived during the great depression. Time and Chance follows on after this, starting when the author was 15. When Angels Travel is the story of the author's international business travels in the 1960's.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steve Challis
• Release date: Jun 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9780987158512

Richard F. Challis

Richard Frederick Challis was born on April the 7th 1924 in Stafordshire, England, the 5th child of 10. His father was a master painter, and his efforts to feed his large family during the great depression of the 1930's is the basis of the novel "The Old Firm".Richard was apprenticed at 15 and gradually rose to become the area sales manager for his company for the North of England. This is told in Richard's business autobiography "Time and Chance"Richard migrated to Australia in 1964 and was his company's regional Manager for the Far East and Oceania. His international travels are related in the novel "When Angels Travel".After leaving his company, Richard became a lecturer at the Elton Mayo School of Management (Now part of the University of South Australia) specialising in international marketing.

Book preview

Time and Chance

By Richard F. Challis

Time and Chance

By Richard F. Challis

Copyright Richard F. Challis 1988

Published at Smashwords

Published by Steve Challis

Copyright: Richard F. Challis 1988

ISBN 978-0-9871585-1-2

The publisher has the permission and approval of the copyright owners of this work to publish it.

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be resold or given away to other people. If you enjoyed this book, please recommend it to other people so they can purchase their own copy, or purchase another copy for them as a gift.

Thank you for respecting the author’s hard work in writing this book.

Cover picture: Fragley Canal Junction near Walsall

Also published by Steve Challis on Smashwords:

When Angels Travel by Richard F. Challis

The Old Firm by Richard F. Challis

A Bad Boy by Steve Challis

Ali the Peacemaker by Steve Challis

TIME AND CHANCE

By R. F. Challis.

(I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill, but time and chance happeneth to them all. Ecclesiastes.)

FOREWORD

My first job, at the age of nine, was footing the ladder. My father was a painter and decorator - or desecrator as he preferred to say - and when he was working up a ladder it was often necessary to have someone standing on the lowest rung, both to stop the foot of the ladder kicking outwards and to prevent traffic from running into it. This was a useful job, but boring and not well paid. I do not recall that I ever made more than sixpence at it.

My father's position, at the top of the ladder, was literally and metaphorically superior. There was more responsibility, more interest and more pay, for the man at the top. Of course, it was more dangerous, but I found that I have a good head for heights.

This then, is an account of a career which may be said to have started one cold Saturday morning in the High Street of Brownhills Staffordshire, when I decided that the bottom rung of the ladder was not very attractive.

There was never any clear idea in my youthful mind about the sort of job I would like when I grew up, though I can recall an impression that teaching would be worth doing.

This perhaps stemmed from an admiration for my first headmasters, Mr. Cooper at Brownhills Central School, where I was a mixed infant and Mr. Thompson at Ogley Hay Junior Boys' School. The transfer from the one school to the other followed a reorganisation, and created a conflict of loyalties. I had just learned to chant the traditional war cry:

Ogley bulldogs, fastened in a pen,

Can't get out for Central men! –

When I became an Ogley bulldog.

At home, the phrase Mr. Thompson says so was heard from me, as the final authority on every topic, with a regularity which amused older members of the family. Another factor which may have influenced me was that Mrs. Wilson, a family friend, used to call me the professor not from any manifestation of infant genius, but because I had acquired spectacles before I was two, and used to sit around looking owlishly wise.

From the age of nine, until I left school at fifteen, I helped my father during holidays, at weekends, and sometimes in the evenings after school. He was a master-painter, and during the wretched years of the Thirties, was glad of the free help he could get from any of his five sons, old enough to push a handcart or wield a brush. I say free help though at times we got an hourly rate. I started at a halfpenny an hour and by the time I had graduated to three ha'pence an hour, I could paint, brush-grain and paperhang competently. My father and I made a good team. Normally the wallpaper would have been edged the previous night by scissors or trimmer and often the paste was mixed overnight, though the advent of cold-water pastes made this unnecessary.

Once at the job my father would do some quick measuring while I set up the pasteboard and trestles. I digress here, to say that occasionally we transported these on bicycles. Anyone who has cycled with a trestle slung around his neck, with a six-foot pasteboard resting on the handlebar and tucked under one arm, and with a bucket swinging from the other side of the handlebar, has lived dangerously. Then my father would match and tear off the full lengths, turning them over with a quick flip so that they were ready for pasting. I pasted, my father hung the lengths and I brushed out air bubbles, cut the tops and bottoms of the lengths and brushed them down firmly. On a straight wall I had difficulty in keeping up with him, but once he reached windows or corners and had to start intricate cutting, I could relax.

There is far more art in pasting than might be supposed. If the paper is thin and is pasted too long before hanging, dreadful things will happen. The length of paper, which is always folded after being pasted, so that it can be carried, will start to dry and may not unfold when being hung. A paperhanger slides and pushes the length into position. An over-soaked paper may disintegrate on the wall under these operations. A thick paper, over-pasted and left too long will stretch, and then shrink on drying, leaving gaps between the lengths.

Frequently we would work late to finish a room, and towards ten o'clock (closing time at the pubs), my father would achieve an inspired frenzy. There would seem three -of him, frantically flinging paper in all directions. With luck, the difficult part would be completed in time for him to dash off for his drink, while I finished off, reversed any lengths he had hung upside down in his desperate haste, and tidied the room.

My father never pretended that he liked being a painter, and although he was the third generation of a Bury St. Edmunds family business, it died with him and his brother. Inevitably, painters find themselves working in cellars on glorious summer days, and on exposed gable-ends in the depths of winter. It is a messy, smelly, uncertain way of earning a living, and my father never made any attempt to persuade me to join him.

CHAPTER ONE

In 1939 Green Lane, Walsall, was a slum area. There were rows of grubby, neglected houses, one or two of which had been turned into shops, a few pubs, and a doss-house, The Working Man's Home, outside which the residents would sit when they were not allowed inside; spitting copiously.

The nearest shop to the factory was known as Dirty Gertie's, or just Gertie's. Often anyone called Slim is a fat man, and Curly is bald, but Dirty Gertie was dirty, by any standards. She was probably in her late fifties. She seemed to be wearing all the cardigans she had ever owned, topped by a few rotting shawls. She was torpid and had a bloated, expressionless face. Her complexion was sallow, under the dirt of ages, grimed in, for ever. Since I never saw her outside the shop, it must remain a matter for conjecture whether it was the shop that smelt so bad, or Gertie, or both.

The general effect was of very rancid cheese, but with strong overtones of bugs, mice, and cats living, dying and decomposing.

Gertie sold cigarettes, tobacco, sweets, and a range of foodstuffs including cold meats, bacon and bread. There is something seriously wrong with the germ theory of food-poisoning; her customers appeared to thrive, and came back for more. During the war, popular brands of cigarettes were informally rationed. As I was not a smoker, my immediate boss, George Freeman, got me to buy a daily packet for him, to supplement his own, so I was a regular customer, but only for cigarettes.

Dirty Gertie had an equally dirty daughter - equally that is, in the sense that each washed neither herself nor her clothes, but since she was a generation younger than her mother, Ella did not look quite so bad. She was almost a midget and thick-rather than fat, like a diminutive female weight-lifter. Her eyes were large, dark and outlined in dirt. She may have been about thirty but had the child-look of the midget, so it was difficult to tell. Her teeth were white and good, though overlarge, and she used to flash them and her eyes at me in bewitching smiles. Of course, since I was just a teenager, she was merely keeping in practice, or exercising a simple reflex. There was never any risk of Dirty Gertie as my mother-in-law and her dirty daughter as a wife.

A few yards from Gertie’s was the entrance to the offices, marked by a brass plate, polished almost to illegibility by the office-cleaners, who never missed the plate, whatever else might be omitted. It read:

JOB WHEWAY & SON,LTD.

Hame & Chain Works

Established 1790

Registered Office

I entered the main doors one bright November morning in 1939 as the new blood that the Managing Director, W.R. Wheway, had said they needed. Eventually I would be a Department Manager, like Mr. Powell here, who joined us at your age, he had said at the interview, indicating an ancient, rubicund gnome at his side. I was certain that I didn't want to be like Mr.Powell, but I needed a job, and there were still over a million on the dole despite the fact that World War 2 had started a couple of months previously. I was fifteen and now had the School Certificate. The scholarship I held required me to remain at Lichfield Grammar School until sixteen, but because of the war, this clause was not being enforced. As the fifth in a family of ten I was lucky to have had the chance to stay at school past the normal age of fourteen. Another Departmental Manager had been called in to the interview, for my