At the beginning of 1980 one could feel the whole social fabric of Britain beginning to change in a deep fundamental way. From the end of the war until then there had been a general consensus that a socialistic solution to the country,s problem was the only way forward regardless of whether or not the Labour Party was in power. By 1978 things had come to such a state with incessant strikes, rampant inflation, rubbish not collected, and even the dead could not be buried that everyone felt that there must be some alternative to this chaos. Even the genial avuncular Labour PM James Callaghan who was a decent man had come to the same conclusion. The brains behind Margaret Thatcher was Sir Keith Joseph a firm exponent of ‘monetarism’ based on the theories of Milton Friedman of Chicago and Hayek of Austria. . He came to Horsham one evening and I was most impressed but realised that things were going to be very tough as the drastic changes were put into place.. Luckily we had stabilized our business, and with interest rates suddenly raised and the whole panapoly of controls such as ‘Prices & Incomes Boards’ and Exchange Controls swept away the country was in for a very rocky time. Unemployment suddenly quadrupled to over 3,000,000 and old established manufacturing firms who did not quickly adapt went bust in ever increasing numbers, particularly up in the North.
Paul had got reasonable A levels and went off to the USA for a year working with friends of Brenda, first in Denver and later in San Francisco until he was held up at gunpoint trying to hitch a lift which must have been a terrifying experience for a sheltered youth from a quiet English country home. He came back the following summer and enrolled for a business course at the South Bank Polytechnic. Unfortunately he was not academically inclined and lacked the stamina and determination to see the course through and learn the theory of business, but instead left after a term and a half to become a motorbike Despatch Rider. This was a great mistake on his part, but it was no use saying so, he just had to find out for himself. Later he tried to start up a garden maintenance business, and again he found the going tough. With no qualifications, and trying to compete in a labour market with three million unemployed and awash with highly qualified people just trying to get any sort of a job, he was in an absolute quandary and was in a state of complete drift. Jill and I were both terrified that he would in his desperation get involved with the drug scene and so in the autumn of 1981 I offered him a small job in our hardware store, and suggested that he concentrated on Power Tools. This solution to his young dilemma was the very last and worst thing that I had wanted, as all along I had been conscious of the problems and tensions that Hugh had with Father. As a result of that Father/son relationship Hugh had drifted off to Africa to spend his first 20 years rudderless until he was taken in hand by his sensible wife Anne in the mid sixties. Anyway at least with Paul the solution worked initially, he liked the job and threw himself into it wholeheartedly. As I will show later.he created for himself through the stable framework of our established business a very successful career.
In the summer of 1980 I persuaded Janet and her Paul to join us for a summer sailing holiday in Turkey. It was now 7 years since Jill and I had been for a holiday out there with our ‘Fireball’ and I was determined to have another final go as the weather conditions of the hot sun and steady Imbat winds of a force 5 at midday were unequalled anywhere else. To be a bit different though instead of taking the boat at Venice, we thought that for a change we would drive the whole way there through communist Eastern Europe ,a journey of about 2,300 miles towing our boat. Instead of taking a car we would use a Toyota Hiace van from the shop which we fitted out with a double bed on the floor, a small gas cooker and fridge at the rear. Janet and Paul would fly and meet us out there a few days after we were due to arrive. Earlier that year Janie’s husband Tom had died tragically from pancreatic cancer after a long illness, and so we invited her 16 year old son, Jill’s nephew Charlie who was fatherless to join us on this major expedition and so open his world and his horizons a bit more. It would also give him a chance to sail and learn windsurfing the newest fad that had taken the world recently by storm.
