3. The Cavalier 1.3L (1987)

Description

My face-lifted MkII Cavalier 1.3L was a hatchback in navy blue. I could have chosen a saloon in red or white, but if I had to have this damn car then I’d have it as conservative and unobtrusive as possible. Besides I quite liked the lines of the thing and they were accentuated in a darker colour. The face-lift turned a few heads for a few weeks or so I liked to think! That all changed of course once they had become commonplace, ubiquitous amongst the sales rep fleets of Britain.

That was a phenomenon that just doesn’t exist today, well not to the extent it did in the mid-eighties: car fleets. You’ve heard of the cola wars; there was something similar going on in Britain for dominance of the roads. Ford and Vauxhall slugged it out with the Sierra and the Cavalier for the sales rep market and for more senior reps and managers it was the Granada and the Carlton (and later the Omega). Each of the American giants had to constantly upgrade the décor, entertainment systems and electronic novelties in an effort to keep pace with or outdo their competition. Volvo, VW and Renault had not got their acts together enough to challenge Ford and Vauxhall nor did they know how to schmooze the big fleet managers into signing them up. BMW and Mercedes were still in our dreams. British Leyland, or Rover Cars or whatever it was called week by week were trying their damnedest to get into the picture, but with the exception of the Honda tie-in cars they still lagged behind Ford and Vauxhall.

I always found it most illuminating to see what cars the fleet managers drove. I’m not suggesting that there was anything underhand going on or that there was any coercion with the car manufacturers, but given that fleet managers were pretty low in the management hierarchy why was it that they always drove cars that only the bosses drove like a Vauxhall Senator, or a Sierra XR4i? When I confronted one of them about this apparent anomaly he told me that the car he was driving was a demonstrator and he was assessing its capabilities and appropriateness for the company’s executives!

Another observation about Fleet Managers was that most of them looked like Charlie Drake, but they seemed to be able to pull girls who looked like Christine Brinkley.

Chuffing bastards!

My Cavalier had a five speed gear box, an automatic choke and nothing else out of the ordinary except, as I mentioned before, it had a digital FM radio and a pretty acceptable four speaker stereo cassette player. It was the first stereo that could do my tapes any sort of justice and that diminished the ignominy of the pathetic 1300 engine. It was the time of Peter Gabriel’s ‘So’ album and Sting’s first solo album ‘Dream of the Blue Turtles’.

Gabriel’s opening ‘Sledgehammer’ and ‘Red Rain’ deserve to be played at full volume with the driver screaming enthusiastically along trying to mimic every word and every phrase exactly as Gabriel did. Sting’s album served to remind me of distant political affiliations, briefly discerned through the fog of eighties hedonism. Who could fail to be touched by his heartfelt emotions in ‘Children’s Crusade’, ‘Russians’ and ‘We work the Black Seam Together’: “What might save me and you, is if the Russians’ love their children too.”

At the time it seemed the only thing to depend on, you couldn’t rely on any glimmer of rationality from the rhetoric of the cold war warriors. The Berlin Wall being ripped down was still a couple of scary years away yet! Living with the bomb was something so frightening that other than join CND there was very little that could be done. After a while, I, and many others, pushed it right back to the deep recesses of the mind. I had joined CND whilst at University and I had attended a clandestine meeting in a leafy Sheffield suburb which showed the banned BBC television documentary about what you should do in the event of a nuclear strike: The War Game. I remember being suitably traumatised not only by the naivety of the governmental advise in the film, but also by the persistent rumours that MI5 would be marking our cards as potential Trotskyist agitators by the very fact that we’d signed into a CND meeting to watch the film. Ironically, probably the very best film detailing the horrors of a nuclear war was made in 1984 in Sheffield: Threads. This was shown on national television because presumably, the government had by then accepted that the audience was not stupid and could not be placated from the very real threat of mass extinction. By the way, the best advice I ever heard for what to do in the event of a nuclear strike came from the XTC song ‘Living through another Cuba’.

“Adopt the brace position and when you’re down there, kiss your arse goodbye!”

One last comment on the nuclear threat. I’d been on business trip in the West Country with a work colleague who driven to our house in Hampshire. We shared my car and he left his on my drive. It was a warm early summer’s evening, so I invited him in for a drink before he set off home. We sat in the garden listening to the birds in the trees as we chewed the cud.

“Um, this is pleasant,” he said looking around him, “but you’re only 15 miles from Greenham Common, aren’t you?”

Nice chap.

The Peter Gabriel and Sting albums reflected new directions for their composers and both albums had a fair smattering of political polemic. It was a very political time. Gabriel’s ‘Don’t Give Up’ reflected the chronic employment problem in the UK at the time and Sting’s ‘We work the black seam together’ touched on the miner’s strike, the music set to a rhythmical beat reminiscent of miners striking at the coalface. This wasn’t Billy Bragg’s smack-you-in-the-face ‘Up Yours Thatcher’ approach, this was rather more subtle – but both messages were the same. There was an underlining darkness beneath the high production values of Gabriel’s and Sting’s work and, because of that in my view, these songs are a more lasting testament to the times.

Musically, it was not all doom and gloom though, Steve Winwood re-appeared on the scene with the joyous ‘Back in the High Life Again’ which was a great sing-along album and included the massive hit ‘Higher Love’ with a supporting vocals from the effervescent Chaka Khan. This was much more aligned to what became standard mid-eighties fair of danceable soul and disco crossover. The quality of sound reproduction then was streets ahead of the modern mp3 reproduction. What we’ve gained in convenience and miniaturisation, having a full library of music on an ipod, we’ve lost on the quality of the sound produced from the players – it’s often worse than a transistor radio was. And you actually owned your records and cassette tapes then – it remains to be accepted that you own your mp3 downloads today!

So the Cavalier’s sound system was a step in the right direction. The stereo was integrated into the dash. The rest of the interior was coordinated reasonably well within the ubiquitous dark-grey plastic facia. This design was streets ahead of the Rover cabin and demonstrated that interior car design had stepped over the watershed that divided my grandfather’s A35 van from the luxuriously equipped ergonomic wonders of today! It may have been plasticky and relatively cheap looking, but there were no wires showing, the switchgear seemed to be logical and uniform and it was easy to use. Around this time manufacturers seemed to have got together and decided on certain standards of approach for switches and levers and for symbols too. This allowed you to hop from one car to another and expect to be able to work it effectively from the off, whether it was snowing, pouring with rain or it was an unusually hot English summer’s day.

My memory has faded but I’m sure that this was one of the first cars that had to run on 4-star petrol and it was not recommended to fill it with 2-star even though this was cheaper. Fuel technology was on the march matching the technological development of engines and electronics. This car was not fuel injected, but the carburettors were tuned to the octane mix of 4-star which would deliver the best performance.

5-star fuel, which was traditionally only for performance cars such as Jaguars and the like, was scarce and realistically there were only 3 fuels available: 2-star, 4-star and unleaded 4-star which was just starting to make an appearance. These stars were indicators of the octane numbers or more precisely the Research Octane Number or RON. Petrols with low octane numbers (RON) often caused engine knocking which is when the fuel/air mixture ignites outside the normal compression and ignition process. This is also known as pinking and was a common problem with my father’s cars probably due to bad maintenance of spark plugs, or carburettors or the use of cheap 2-star fuel. By the time I was driving company cars these problems had largely been confined to the past and thank God because even though I’ve tried to explain this to you here…and I hope you understand it – because I don’t.

The success of the software upgrades at work had got me noticed beyond the small business systems team I worked in. I was asked to attend a mysterious meeting held offsite in the George Inn at Stamford run by the Chief Operating Officer. There was no satellite navigation in those days and judging arrival times was an art rather than a science so I set off early in the morning and got there with an hour to spare. As I waited in my car, it was obvious that there was a big opportunity here for me amongst senior management attendees judging by the cars that started to fill the car-park. It turned out that now the regional directors could trust the stock control output data they found that they wanted additional data dashboards and analytical information in order to make immediate business decisions and, crucially, they wanted the information in real-time. The secret squirrel meeting was to develop a high level business specification of a new stock control system that would introduce terminals into the managed houses (pubs) to gather the data in a timely manner. I was happy to contribute and discuss operational capabilities in the regions and to explain the fundamentals of the data analysis requirements. I was blissfully unaware that there was another reason for my attendance and that was to assess my potential capabilities as a Project Manager for the new system.

A few days later, it was announced confidentially to a restricted audience that a new stock control system would be developed. It would be piloted in Sheffield’s 120 managed houses, developed by the company’s in-house software development team and the business input and functionality design would be managed by the Business Project Manager, namely: yours truly!

Now if this wasn’t a prime opportunity to ascend to a Manager B and the delights of the Escort XR3i in sexy black, then I don’t know what was. Also, it would put me in Sheffield rather more than frequently than had been the case and that would allow me to see my beloved Wednesday more often.

Up the Owls!

This sudden responsibility changed me a little, I started to mix with different people within the company and I started to develop different tastes and preferences. Although I still listened to tapes in the car, I also started listening to radio 4 news in the evenings and that led me inevitably to the Archers and Front Row. I also loved a long drive on a warm summer’s evening listening to Test Match Special, or on a dark winter’s night listening to a Radio Five Live football match especially if it was a hoof-ball affair that missed out the midfield so it was all goal mouth action. I loved it when Wimbledon played because it guaranteed excitable commentary with lots of shots at goal action and plenty of meaty tackles! Radio Five was only available on medium-wave and the quality of the signal was appalling. In order to follow any game you had to rely on excitable shrieks from the commentary team otherwise you hadn’t a clue what was going on. This situation didn’t really change until Radio Five went onto DAB radio and that only took the BBC another twenty-five years, bless ‘em!

I also had to work very closely with real technical people who were to build the new stock control system. They were locked away in Reading well away from the business and were seen as ivory tower techies who developed system solutions for which there were no apparent business requirements. I had to ensure that they built what we, the business, wanted. Or to put it another way to ensure that the dog wagged the tail and not vice versa. At first, this task was somewhat daunting. They were a law unto themselves, spoke an unintelligible pidgin richly endowed with jargon. They knew best! Some of these chaps had drifted so far from the business I feared for their personal safety if I took them out with me to visit the regions. They couldn’t help, but put their feet in it over and over again. This earned them the reputation of being self-indulgent, arrogant and probably, worse of all, of not listening to the demands of the business. After a couple of run-ins with the regions, I called a meeting with their management responsible for the development of the system and lambasted them on their lack of business acumen and interpersonal skills. They were deeply offended, but a couple of days later offered me a new account manager to act as a liaison between me, the business and their technical teams. The person they offered me was an American with the unlikely name: Kenneth Kingsley. He was an oddity in the techie departments, he drew their criticism for being too business focused and not technical enough. Once I got to know him, I was able to confirm that he was exactly the right man for the job. He had found his calling and the techies scheme to get rid of him rather back-fired on them because he was later promoted into the business proper and they were later outsourced.

Kenneth Kingsley was an unusual character, very articulate and erudite, not techie at all, he was well-read and cultured. I always thought he should have been on the radio doing a round midnight jazz programme interspersed with witticisms and wry comments. The archetypal Nightfly, just liked Donald Fagan’s persona on the superlative album of the same name. He and I were big fans of Steely Dan and Donald Fagan’s solo work and we would wile away the hours journeying up and down England critiquing and analysing each of their songs in turn. He was a Bostonian, vegetarian, real ale loving, real cheese loving anglophile. It wasn’t long before we were known as the dynamic duo. The project began to get some traction and we were confident enough to seek sign-off on a pilot demonstration system.

Kenneth hated hotels and he would convince me that we should stay in ‘proper’ pubs that had rooms, often in obscure but interesting locations, offering interesting vittles: beers from tiny independent breweries with selections of unpasteurised cheeses. It wasn’t long before I was sold on his approach to life. He introduced me to some wonderful places such as the Falkland Arms at Great Tew, The Pub With No Name (the White Horse), at East Tisted, Petersfield and The Pot Kiln at Frilsham to name, but three. I would reciprocate by taking him to pubs such as The Fat Cat in Sheffield, The Harrow at Steep, Petersfield (before the A3 went through its garden) and the Royal Oak at Langstone Harbour.

Kenneth did not care about cars, nor did he have any sort of emotions towards them, so when he chose a car he chose one with the most gismos he could find. In his case, that was the Renault 11 TXE Electronique. It had a space-age electronic digital instrument cluster that shone out bright yellows, reds and oranges and it had a graphic equaliser with a myriad of levers and buttons like the flight-deck of Concorde. However, this was really mutton done up as mutton because it was an awful little car in reality which I would never tire of remaining him.

My new enhanced role evolved and very quickly. Rather than developing and seeking approval for functional business specifications, I found myself presenting to the boards of regional breweries on the capabilities of the proposed system and their involvement in the training and implementation process. I was completely unprepared for the resistance in the regions to such a new system implementation sponsored, as they saw it, from an autocratic central authority trying to dictate the way and manner in which they should run their businesses.

What did the cosy centre know about running a city centre managed house in rowdy Liverpool or Leeds or Newcastle on a Saturday night?

Publicans in rough city centre pubs were not chosen for their ability to operate a view-data terminal, they were recruited for their social skills, for their ability to forcibly chuck-out disorderly patrons or spot drug deals developing on the premises. Some of them kept baseball bats under the bar, just in case. Fundamentally, the company wanted to sell more beer, but any profits in the pub from other innovations would go to the publicans. The whole concept of the managed house was to give the publicans the ability to run their own business supported by the brewery and implement their own innovative ideas on pub concepts, food offered and in-pub entertainment whether live acts, pool tables or slot machines. This was the centre’s view. In the regions it was mostly the case too, but in some less than salubrious pubs in rough inner-city areas it was still business as usual with the managed house concept seen as a long term goal at best. A prissy be-suited ivory-tower business analyst strolling in and offering the huge tattooed publican a view-data terminal to record his stock on would have been like offering a prawn sandwich to Roy Keane!

The relationship between the stock-taker and the publican was a strange one. They were in the same business, but had different priorities and objectives, like a footballer and a referee. Conscientious publicans (house managers) in theory should have nothing to hide or worry about the stock-take, but then again they couldn’t always vouch for the probity of their staff and, even if everyone behaved lawfully, innocent mistakes could still be made. Therefore, the stock-take was a bit of a trial by ordeal and it often took hours of counting and re-counting until the stock-taker was happy. He would then leave, return to the regional office and have the stock-take data entered into the old system and a few days later phone up the house manager to declare a surplus or deficit and by how much. Only then could the publican relax or otherwise. For the unscrupulous publican, the stock-take was the opportunity to demonstrate that the brewery could be outsmarted. His personal illicit increase in wealth was the reward for his cunning and wit. However, publicans with the degree of intelligence and foresight required to pull off the perfect scam were few and far between, most unscrupulous publicans were lazy and careless and therefore, the stock-take was awaited with fear and trepidation. They concerned themselves with knowing when the stock-take would be happening. Some of them were in cahoots with accomplices in the offices that scheduled the stock-take so that they could get advanced notice of the stock-take visits to give them the chance of ‘tidying up’ the stock and the till. The brewery tended to recruit upstanding citizens to the role of stock-takers. Ex-policemen and ex-soldiers as stock-takers were common and this helped because these chaps were not easier intimidated or fobbed off. Now I would not like anyone to get the impression that the majority of publicans were dodgy characters, but there was an element that were, perhaps, no more than five percentage of the total, but it was enough to cause the brewery significant lost profits and therefore they gave it serious attention.

One of the big benefits of the new stocktaking system deployment envisaged by the centre was to cut down on this potential ‘grey’ economy endemic in certain parts of the regional managed house estate.

Perhaps, before we get into the details of little scams and frauds I should explain a little about the stocktaking process. Let’s take a very simple example. At the beginning of the month a pub has fifteen barrels of lager in the pub, during the month another ten are delivered and at the end of the month when the stock-taker does his count, there are sixteen full barrels and nine empty barrels to be returned to the brewery at the next delivery day. Therefore, nine barrels have been consumed. Let’s say that each barrel was a Kilderkin containing eighteen gallons of lager. Each barrel contains 144 pints and nine have been consumed, that’s 1296 pints in total. If each pint cost £2, the publican should have taken £2592 in total for lager that month. The stock-taker would check the till receipts. If there was more than £2592 in till receipts then the stock-taker would record a surplus, if less than £2592 then he would record a deficit. Small surpluses or deficits could be easier explained and there were often wholly legitimate reasons for them. Large differences however were often as a result of major fraud or major failings at the pub or brewery – for example, barrels of stale beer or barrels that leaked having to be returned without sale. If you’ve ever seen a draymen drop a Kilderkin down the slides into the pub cellar and watched the barrels bounce then you’d know that these barrels were expected to take some bashing about. Occasional they burst or would develop a leak like a slow puncture. In these circumstances, the stock-take would record the amount of takings was less than that expected from the consumed beer, this was a deficit. However, in this case the consumed beer included beer wasted from leakage and if this was accepted and could account for the deficit then all was well. Let’s look at an example of a legitimate reason for a surplus. Every so often, when a barrel is changed over because it’s empty, the landlord will clean the pipes that go from the cellar all the way up to the bar. This is necessary to ensure good hygiene and maintain public health and it is a legal requirement of the landlord. The brewery give an allowance for this cleaning process of typically four to five pints of beer, dependent on the length of the lines, to run through the pipes to clean out the special chemical detergent used. Once the chemicals have been flushed out with water, the new barrel of beer is attached and further pints are drawn until all the cleaning fluid has been flushed and pure beer is being dispensed. Experienced bar staff can often perform this task without using the full five pints allowed. Over the course of a month, this often results in a small surplus because the pub has sold slightly more beer than the brewery has recorded as consumed (once it has subtracted the cleaning allowance). Everyone’s happy! Also, bar-staff being human will slightly over-fill or under-fill glasses and this was especially true for half-pint amounts which at the time I’m referring to here could be poured into pint glasses if requested. As pint glasses are all tapered, judgement was required.

“Just a quick half in ‘ere, if you would love!”

It was common practise, when you were in a hurry and had nearly drunk down your pint and you just wanted another half in your pint glass, to get the glass filled back up to the top. It felt like another pint even though it wasn’t. These half-pints were drawn on the hand-pull and again were a matter of judgement for bar staff. Regulars would probably be overfilled and non-regulars probably under-filled. Over the course of a month, this could also result in a slight deficit or more commonly, strangely, a slight surplus. These too were deemed acceptable and were quite normal, but there were other activities which were not acceptable.

The centre was trying to stop publicans buying beer, wines and spirits in from the local ‘Cash and Carry’ rather than from the brewery or transferring surpluses and deficits to managed houses nearby who were working in cahoots to outfox the company stock controllers and make significant profits for themselves. Some of these operations were extremely sophisticated and managed with criminal efficiency. On a smaller scale, there were other scams as well. Stock-takers would look out for tell-tale signs of petty theft, these included looking out for piles of matches, or pennies close to the tills – counting items. This might indicate that a member of the bar staff was over-charging the customers by short-changing them by ten or twenty pence – nothing that would be noticed. The matches indicated the number of times they had overcharged – save the pennies and let the pounds look after themselves! Then at a convenient time the swindler would take the equivalent number of pounds (in some cases) from the till. When the stock controller did the stock take everything would be honky-dory. The amount in the till would exactly equate to the sum of the amount of stock used multiplied by the unit price of the beer or spirits dispensed. That was because the money had been stolen from the public not the brewery, but from the weights and measures’ point of view the company were accountable for the swindle.

A similar scam was occasionally used to defraud the brewery. The publican might buy cheap spirits from the ‘Cash and Carry’ and put it up against the brewery’s spirits on the optics, maybe they sold it slightly cheaper – maybe they sold it as a generic whisky, rum, gin or vodka. Every time a shot was purchased, it was noted by placing a match or something else equally innocuous and unobtrusive in a certain place. Before the stock-taker arrived the spirit came down from the optic and was replaced by the brewery‘s branded generic spirit, the number of matches counted and then thrown away. Then that number multiplied by the unit price of the spirit from the ‘Cash and Carry’ was calculated and the equivalent amount of cash was removed from the till. As a stock-taker you needed historical data from the system to see variances in the products sold month by month to have any hope of spotting these scams and it was envisaged that the new system would provide such data.

The principle objection from the pragmatic regions was that living with an ‘acceptable’ level of fraud was preferable to a range of other behaviours that might develop once the view data terminals were implemented in the managed houses. These behaviours ranged from key managers walking out of their jobs and starting up themselves or going to competitors, managers smashing the terminals or accidentally dropping coffee into the terminal or managers and their staff developing yet more sophisticated swindles to augment their wages. The regions felt that the cost benefit to the centre would be outweighed by the incremental cost of recruitment and the salary increases they’d have to hand out to placate their best managers or those managers who had the appropriate characteristics to run their most ‘difficult’ pubs. In essence, they could live with the devil they knew.

I walked straight into the middle of this shit-storm as I was often the only representative of the ‘Ivory Tower’ centre standing before an irate regional executive team. I had to avoid the ‘college boy’ preaching to the ‘university of life’ men. I’m ashamed to say that this wasn’t then an environment with a fair representation of woman. I had to quickly develop a more conciliatory style that would endear me to the audience by declaring an acceptance that these difficulties, with their support, would have to be overcome in a constructive manner without losing the opportunity to modernise. I had to stand my ground too, showing weakness was not an option. I concentrated on the benefits to their ‘in programme’ house managers who were behaving in the prescribed manner and would be encouraged by the implementation of technology to help them to manage their own businesses effectively. They relented on this point, but only after I’d agreed to ‘train’ with a house manager for four weeks in order to understand the ‘real world’ and help me design a better system because of this understanding. I did two weeks on the drays and two weeks in a managed house in Sheffield. It was extremely hard work, but brilliant experience and I learnt several important lessons that later effected the design of the functionality and the roll-out training.

During the course of trying to coerce, cajole and persuade each of the regional boards to adopt the centre’s system and philosophy I realised that I was performing a very different role to the one I’d been employed to perform 18 months earlier. I wasn’t complaining, it was clearly elevating me in the eyes of senior management, but there was no indication that this would be rewarded with a compensation and grade increase and hence, a Ford XR3i. The gall I felt about this was further exasperated by a good friend of mine who was a ‘tin’ salesmen working for a large US computer corporate. He had not been to University, admitted that he was ‘a bit thick’, but that he had the ‘gift of the gab’ and was an expert ‘closer’. That means he could get contract signatures that his competitors couldn’t. He drove a Vauxhall Cavalier SRi. This was a dream car for someone driving the 1.3L version. It had stripes, a spoiler, electric front windows, a sunshine roof, and the magic of the nomenclature with the inclusion of an ‘i’: fuel injection. It was the sporty model in the Vauxhall range, it was quick and looked the part. I would complain bitterly to him about my troubles, eyeing the SRi enviously, and he would invariably respond by saying.

“It sounds to me like you are selling. Why don’t you become a salesman?”

The implication being that salespeople earned more money and received better cars in order to create the impression of success with their clients, also salespeople often took customers out for lunch in their cars, so they had to drive cars of a certain quality. Six months earlier, for me to become a salesperson would have been anathema, but somehow I couldn’t get the thought out of my head. I started thinking more and more about it and eventually decided to try my luck with a company who were looking for business analysts and project managers who could be coached into being successful outsourcing sales people. The process of selling outsourcing services tended to be a more business orientated sales cycle and required more consultative people who took the time to understand the customer’s issues and build a services solution that addressed the business needs. This was very different from ‘features and benefits’ selling which was a more traditional approach of ‘tin’ salespeople, that is sales people who sold hardware, in those days that meant big ugly and very expensive mainframe computers.

It was a big step into the unknown to leave the big national brewery where I had attained a reasonable reputation and frankly, I’d had a great experience and enjoyed myself, to then take a huge risk to move into an outsourcing sales role especially when I didn’t even know if I could sell or even whether I’d take to it, but the rewards in terms of remuneration and of course, the car were a huge draw.

 

SUMMARY (6/10): The Cavalier was under-powered although at the time it was a proper five seater and only really noticeably underpowered with four up. It did herald a new age and the integrated dash was a first for me and possibly for others too. This car had been designed as a junior rep’s car and in many ways it more than justified its moniker. It was comfortable, handled long distance travel adequately and looked good. The stereo radio, let’s call it electronically tuned, had a decent and dependable FM band which was also a first for me and this helped to make my time spent in the car enjoyable.

 

Next time, it’s the Cavalier 2.0 CDi (1988).