Murray Walker: Unless I’m Very Much Mistaken

It was while I was in Birmingham that my own short-lived motor-cycle competition career began. Fired up by all the glamour and excitement of my surroundings, I got myself a 500T trials Norton and, with some advice from Geoff Duke about how to prepare it, set out to show my father how a motor cycle should really be ridden, and amaze one and all with my uncanny natural skill. Except that it didn’t quite work out like that: despite my father’s genes I was no more than a fairly competent club-standard rider and I singularly failed to hit the big time.

At Brands Hatch, then an anti-clockwise grass track, I raced a 250cc dope-engined AJS, which belonged to the famous Arter Brothers, Tom and Edge. Among my fellow competitors were the great Eric Oliver, later to become a quadruple sidecar World Champion, and John Surtees, who went on to win seven motor-cycle World Championships and become the only person in history also to win the Formula 1 World Drivers’ Championship. Needless to say I never saw anything of them on the track other than their rapidly disappearing backs. To maximize his prize money, Eric rode in and invariably won both sidecar and solo races. He would arrive with one bike and two engines, 350cc and 500cc, and switch them around in the frame. It was tedious but very effective.

I rode a 350cc KTT Velocette at the fabulous Cadwell Park and I did a lot of trials on the Norton. I even had a smattering of success, including a Gold Medal and Club Team Prize in the 1949 International Six Days Trial at Llandrindod Wells, a First Class award in the gruelling Scottish Six Days’ Trial and a one-off appearance in the Southern Experts Trial. But then came the thing that changed my life – that invitation to do the PA commentary at Shelsley Walsh, which started my broadcasting career and stopped my competitive riding.

I might have become a lot better had I persevered and practised more but I doubt it. It didn’t matter enough to me. I couldn’t ride well enough to satisfy myself and talking about it appealed a lot more once I had started. I didn’t stop riding competitively through lack of time – it’s easy to make time for the things you want to do. The brutal truth is that I wasn’t good enough to motivate myself to concentrate on it and hopefully progress onwards and upwards to my father’s level.

From then on I led a double life which became increasingly demanding as the years rolled by. My business life occupied the weekdays and very often the weekends, while my broadcasting hobby absorbed every other waking moment. Heady stuff you might think, but it wasn’t really, for although I had been promoted to Dunlop’s HQ at St James’s Street in London and was now hobnobbing with the directors and the divisional top bananas, the Dunlop job itself was too boring for words. I was responsible to the PR mastermind, an irascible Scot named John McColl who was a very nice chap but totally incapable of delegating. I had a very impressive office and a charming secretary but damn all to do so it wasn’t long before I was agitating for action elsewhere.

‘How about joining the Allied Group Advertising Department?’ said its boss, Stuart Janes, who was in the same building. Done! The Allied Group comprised everything except tyres and I became Advertising Manager for Dunlopillo Foam Cushioning, the General Rubber Goods Division and the Special Products Division. Much better, for now I had something involving and interesting to do, like supervising all the Company’s publicity for its Dunlopillo installations at the rebuilt House of Commons (I have sat in the Speaker’s chair!) and the 1951 Festival of Britain. In the days when a trip by train to Liverpool took 4.5 hours, the job entailed regular visits to the Dunlopillo factory at Speke as well as Manchester, Birmingham and other major cities in Britain. I loved it but, not before time, I realized that if I was going to make any money and achieve anything worthwhile I ought to be stirring myself to find a job with better long-term prospects. I had been with Dunlop for some seven years by then and I had itchy feet.

My friend Terry Thompson, formerly a colleague at Dunlop, was working as a copywriter at the aspiring London advertising agency Masius and Fergusson. ‘You can write,’ he said, ‘so why don’t I get you a job interview here?’ And he did, but to my surprise when I landed the job it was not with Masius but with Aspro, the headache pill company at Slough. Aspro were looking for a copywriter for their own creative department and had asked their three advertising agencies to help them find the right man. Masius had some minor Aspro Group products but not the lucrative analgesic business so were always looking for an opportunity to promote themselves, and their boss, Jack Wynne-Williams, reckoned that I could be the right man.

I resolved to give it a go, although it was going to be a totally different atmosphere than that which I’d been used to at Dunlop. Creating the demand for and selling, by the million, a fast-moving, low-cost product that called for aggressive and hard-hitting advertising – it seemed another world from those expensive mattresses, rubber buckets, conveyor belting and universal joints. But they offered me the job at £1000 a year. I’d made it!

The Aspro offices and factory in Buckingham Avenue on the Slough Trading Estate (next to the High Duty Alloys foundry, whose fine casting sand ruined my new Standard 10’s paintwork) could hardly have been a greater contrast to St James’s Street and not long after I had joined came a memorable meeting with Chairman John Jamieson that would lead to something even further removed.

One of the vast geographical areas I was responsible for was India, Pakistan and what was then Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. One day the Chairman called me in and said, ‘You’re responsible for India, Murray?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘Have you ever been there?’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘How can you do the advertising if you’ve never been there?’

‘I don’t make the rules, Mr Jamieson. I just do the best I can.’

‘Well, you’d better go!’

‘Yes, Sir. When?’

‘Next week!’

Soon I was on the plane heading for some of the most memorable and stimulating weeks of my life.

Back in 1954, India to me meant lots of people, Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland in Lives of a Bengal Lancer, the British Raj, the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the Kama Sutra, great gallantry in World Wars One and Two … and curry. So I had a lot to learn. The 4700 miles to Bombay took over 30 hours on a lumbering BOAC propellor-driven Argonaut Speedbird with countless meals and stops at Rome, Beirut, Bahrain and Karachi. This was followed by more than 10,000 miles by train, plane and car criss-crossing India, Ceylon, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and West Pakistan (now Pakistan). I did it all at a leisurely pace and tried to do everything the Indian way: going to Indian films, eating Indian meals, reading books about India, especially John Masters’ riveting novels like Bhowani Junction and The Deceivers. I spent the majority of my time in the villages, because that was where the vast majority of India’s inhabitants lived and because Aspro was one of the few modern, all-purpose medicines they could afford. ‘Take Aspro for headaches, colds, flu, rheumatism and all your aches and pains. It is the wonder cure!’ we claimed – and it was true, for acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin), which is what Aspro was, is a vastly underrated product. (Sadly, it does not increase sexual power, which was what a lot of folks in India believed, although maybe if you believe it enough it actually does – I’ve never tried.)

All this was, perhaps, fairly ordinary stuff in today’s environment of effortless communications, jetplane travel and adventurous backpacking but for me, nearly 50 years ago, it was a fantastic trip that I wouldn’t have missed for all the tea in the plantations I saw. An incredible 14 weeks of different people with very different languages, different lifestyles, customs, beliefs and religions; different geography; different climate, and different food.

No sooner was I in my room in Bombay’s wonderful Taj Mahal Hotel than there was a knock at the door. Opening it I found four Indians of various descriptions all proffering bundles of documents which turned out to be testimonials endorsing their supreme competence as manservants. I’d been told I’d need one, so I chose one called John, who started immediately.

‘Would the Sahib like a bath?’

‘Yes, I would.’

So he ran one, elbow in the water to test the temperature. Most professional. Shortly after I had got in it he was kneeling beside me washing my back.

‘Just a minute, John. You do the bath. I’ll do the washing. OK?’

‘OK, Sahib,’ he said, looking rather crestfallen, but when I got out there he was again with an enormous towel, trying to dry me.

‘Oh, and another thing, John. I’ll do the drying too.’

It was when I went into the bedroom to find all my clothes unpacked and beautifully laid out and him wanting to powder my feet and help me put on my socks that I realized what he had been used to. If this was the way things were in the old days, I mused, they must have found it very hard going when they got back to England.

Bathed, dressed and powdered, I went to meet the Indian Account Director and the Aspro International Executive, Englishman Jimmy Turner, who was to accompany me on my tour with the local Director, moustachioed, white suited and swagger-stick-carrying Dickie Deeth – a very pukka sahib. I had another indication that things were a bit different in India when I went to the Deeths’ superb apartment for dinner. We were having an aperitif on the verandah, with the drinks trolley between me and Dickie’s wife Betty, when she asked whether I’d like another drink. When I said I would, she clapped her hands and shouted ‘RAJI!’. About 30 seconds later a servant appeared, having padded his way from some remote part of the apartment, and Betty said, ‘A gin and tonic for Mr Walker, Raji’ – which he served from the drinks trolley between us.

Crumbs, I thought. Someone else washes them here and they don’t serve their own drinks. I’ve got a lot to learn.

On 2 November 1954 my magical mystery tour began at Bombay Central Station, starting with the long haul to Delhi in a twin-berth compartment with shower, basin, loo and our own food in vast tuck boxes which would be prepared and served by the resourceful John. It wasn’t long after Partition, when the old India had been split into Hindu India and Muslim East and West Pakistan: thousands of Hindus in Pakistan had tried to get to India by rail, while similar numbers of Muslims in India had tried to get to Pakistan the same way, only for the trains to be stopped on the way and everyone on them massacred for being of the wrong faith. Just another example of man’s inhumanity to man. But my journey was fascinating and the trips to the villages even more so.

Communication was the problem when it came to promoting Aspro. Newspapers were limited, there were no cinemas in the villages and no television, while commercial radio was booked solid. So we had Aspro Information Units – loudspeaker vans that toured the villages literally broadcasting the advantages and benefits of Aspro and distributing samples. We even contemplated reviving the Aspro Pipers. Bagpipes are popular in India and Aspro had used them to great effect on a pilot scheme which involved Indians in pink and purple Aspro uniforms going to the villages and playing their bagpipes whilst a merchandiser chatted up the bazaar merchants: ‘There’s going to be a big demand for Aspro here. Not next week, not tomorrow but today. So stock up!’ Now if you, in your sophisticated way of life, looked out of your living room window and saw pink-and-purple-uniformed, bagpipe-playing Indians marching about I dare say you’d go outside to see what the hell was going on. In an Indian village where not much happens from one century to the next it was very big time and when everyone had assembled to see the fun a seventh man carrying a folding stand, who had been marching with his chums, climbed on to it and said, Indian huckster-style, ‘I’m not here today and gone tomorrow. I’m here to tell you about Aspro the wonder cure!’ It worked very well, but it was mighty expensive.

Visiting India is an assault on the senses: the heat, wall-to-wall people thrusting, jostling and shouting, vibrant colours, bright sunshine, non-stop deafening music, sacred cows wandering along in the streets, horns blowing, spice-laden smells and a terrific sense of vitality and overcrowding. Hot, noisy, smelly and congested chaos. And then there was the curry: real curry, and very different from that I’d had at school. Our first stop was at Jaipur, a place that impressed me. The pièce de resistance was the Maharajah’s personal white temple to the god Vishnu, with its solid silver doors and panels of awe-inspiring mythological scenes. Then to Delhi, and on to Cawnpore on the holy River Ganges and an incredible religious festival, with thousands of people completely immersing themselves in the holy waters of the river, drinking them, washing in them and bottling them to take away; fakirs lying on barbed wire or with pins through their noses and flesh; dying and horribly diseased people: all human life was there to pay homage. It may seem hard to believe but I was actually working whilst all this spellbinding tourism was going on, finding out what people thought about Aspro, talking to the merchants, evolving media schedules, booking radio time and newspaper space, writing advertisement copy and radio commercials, getting layouts done, commissioning artwork, producing brochures and touring local shops and bazaars.

Constantly on the move as we were, it was a very tiring trip and by the time we got to Calcutta I was ready for a bit of a rest, but it was not to be. On to Nagpur, nearly slap bang in the middle of India, to Bangalore, an ex-British Army military centre, and then to Mysore. Its Durbar Halls were staggering, with a solid gold ceremonial elephant that weighed 3200lb and was more valuable than the economies of many of the countries around it, no doubt. But although I was seeing sights I had never seen before and enjoying every second of it, I was now learning nothing new. From my round-India trip I had found what I needed to know. The reactions I was getting were exactly the same wherever I was. So on to Ceylon.

The reactions weren’t any different there, but it was a fabulous experience. Now alone, I landed in Colombo five days before Christmas 1954 where I spent the holiday at the Galle Face Hotel prior to a road trip to Kandy, high up in the centre of the island. It was quite a small place surrounded by beautiful wooded hills and mountains and on the edge of an artificial lake swarming with fish and tortoises, but my objective was Nuwara Eliya, almost the highest point of the island at some 6200 ft. I reached it by way of the stunning Peradinya Gardens, where Lord Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command HQ was located during the war. The views were superb and so was the timbered Grand Hotel where I was to stay. I saw virtually the whole of Ceylon because this was long before the current internal conflict began, and I thought it was delightful. Which is more than I can say for Chittagong in East Pakistan. Getting there was a bit of a shaker. I was driven out to the plane at Dum Dum airport and found, to my amazement, that my transport for the day was a World War Two Douglas Dakota which the American forces had left behind them. Worse, instead of the usual seats it had a continuous stretch of canvas running down each side of the plane, above which was the bar to which the airborne troops had clipped their parachute release gear before they jumped! When the distinctly scruffy pilot arrived I became quite queasy: he didn’t have a copy of How to Fly under his arm, but he looked as though he should have. If you’d any guts you’d get off this plane now, I said to myself, but I guess it was like being a conscientious objector during the war – you needed more guts to be one and take the resultant flak than to actually go to war. So I stayed on the plane and of course it was perfectly all right. But Chittagong was awful – with the possible exception of Mexico City, quite the worst place I’d ever visited – dirty, smelly, chaotic and generally repulsive. The Hotel Miksha was all right though and I had a thoroughly redeeming time in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, which included meeting the local head man’s wife, who not only wore the trousers but controlled 40,000 members of her tribe – a sort of native Margaret Thatcher, if you can imagine such a thing! Soon though it was time for another flight, but this time in an up-to-the-minute Lockheed Constellation, over the top of India to Karachi.

While I had been away from Slough I had been continually sending cables back to HQ asking for money to be sent to the local Barclays Bank. But when I got to Karachi I found instead a cable that read, ‘Enough is enough. Come home.’ After 14 weeks away I’d been rumbled. I got back to Slough at the end of January 1955, wrote a massive report on everything that had happened to me, made sweeping recommendations on how to improve things in the various places I had been and sat back to await developments. But to my extreme frustration there weren’t any. No one asked to hear my pearls of wisdom until about two weeks after I had got back. But then it was an invitation from the Chairman, John Jamieson himself.

‘Have a good trip, Murray?’

‘Yes indeed, Sir!’

‘Think you know all about India now?’

‘Well no, but I know a lot more than I did before I went.’

‘Enough to do the advertising?’

‘Oh yes, definitely.’

‘Well that’s too bad because now we are going to put you in charge of Home Market Media.’

All that work, all that travelling and now it was going totally to waste. But at least I was getting promoted, and after a wonderful trip which I would never have been able to make any other way. In fact that job didn’t last very long either, as I was soon promoted to Advertising Manager of the Aspro Home Products Division, responsible to the Marketing Director, Tom Peters, a tough and confident Australian who was great fun to work for. Aspro had bought several companies to diversify from the analgesic business, which coined money but was vulnerable to attack from rivals like Anadin. What a rag bag they were: Lifeguard Disinfectant (‘Kills all known household germs!’); DIP plastic starch, an easy-to-use stiffener for the voluminous knee-high skirts which were then so fashionable and so attractively made women look like women; DISPEL air freshener (‘Just lift the wick to fill your house with glorious fragrance!’), and Sherley’s Proprietary Pet Products. None of the products had much of an advertising budget but one of my three advertising agencies was Masius and Fergusson, who were after the Aspro account and who were ultimately responsible for me being there. It was at this time that I really took a shine to Masius, the company with which I was eventually to spend 23 very happy and successful years; their team was great and I loved working with them, even on this odd assortment of products. While Dispel and Sherley’s didn’t get me very far, DIP got me to a lot of fashion shoots of stunning women in great clothes, and Lifeguard Disinfectant got me into countless grocers doing the sort of checking I had done in India, but in rather more attractive premises. And I also learned, thanks to a ‘Win a House with Lifeguard’ competition, how unreasonable people can be.

The top prize of a house or £30,000 (which would buy an extremely nice place in those days) was won by a Croydon housewife and I went to see her with a giant dummy cheque and a photographer to record her surprise and delight when she opened her front door and got the good news. But I might as well have told her she’d won a bag of jelly babies for all the emotion she showed.

‘Will you tell me who you bought your winning bottle of Lifeguard Disinfectant from?’

‘Why?’

‘Because, great news, whoever sold it to you has won a superb Ford Popular car!’

‘Well, it was the chap down the road and if I’d known I was going to win I wouldn’t have bought it there because I don’t like him.’