A Career in Construction - Part 14

January 3rd 1979, my first day back after the Christmas holiday and I was in for a shock. My boss, Ken Ottley, was our chief QS. He had moved down from Yorkshire Region with Peter Horth to run the new Southern operations. He wasn't in the office as I had expected. He had been moved to the Birmingham office where the whole of the management team there had been sacked that morning. In their absence, Ken was to manage the run down of that region's contracts, most of which were those housing disasters I previously described.

So where did that leave me? Made up to Regional Surveyor and made responsible for all commercial activities in the south. If there were two major breakthroughs in my career, one would be being made Area Surveyor for the four contracts in Peterborough and the other would be this. Both had a lot of luck attached. I didn't know when I moved to Peterborough that the company would win all those contracts, and the company having to move Ken to Birmingham left open another opportunity.

I mentioned those notebooks I started in June 1977. I have them all to when I retired. Unfortunately they are really just lists of things to do with the odd record of meetings, valuations etc. So as a record of anything of interest, they are a complete waste of time. Same with all my diaries. Just appointments so of very limited value now. So I have actually no idea exactly when I was made Regional Surveyor. But I do know I was meeting Peter Horth to discuss Regional Budget Reports, interviewing for new staff and attending Divisional Management Meetings. (With the demise of Birmingham Region, we had become the Southern Division).

I was still in touch with Ken Ottley, even travelling to Birmingham to see him. But he never visited High Wycombe again. It was great having my own office in High Wycombe, although it seems I was hardly there. A lot was happening in the first few months of 1979. Cheshunt and Brentford were still taking a lot of my time. We were winning new contracts. The most important of these was the refurbishment of Nuneham Park. Rothmans had acquired this lasted building in the village of Nuneham Courtney in Oxfordshire, and were prepared to spend a fortune making it their centre for training and functions. It was my first involvement with refurbishment works and definitely one of my favourite contracts.

But there were tensions within the organisation. The three operations managers, all ex- Bovis: Tony Whale, Mike Stafford and Brian Warren seemed to be forming a cabal whilst Colin Brooks and Peter Horth were becoming isolated. Things would come to a head in September.