My First Job – Assistant Research Officer, UK Department of Economic Affairs
My interest in Economic Geography was sustained by the belief that it could contribute to society through the processes of economic and physical (town) planning.
I was fascinated by the ideas that promised to reduce costs and increase human interaction and wellbeing.
I thoroughly subscribed to the views of one of the early German theorists, August Losch, the developer of ‘Central Place Theory’ when he said ‘Our task is not to understand sorry reality but to improve it’.
However, I soon realized that if I wanted to work in the planning field, Geography was not going to give me all the hard skills that I needed. I therefore asked to switch to Economics at the end of my first year but was talked out of this by my tutor – to my permanent subsequent regret.
On the other hand, Geography was an exciting subject at the time, with Cambridge being the centre of a ‘quantitative revolution’, with advanced statistical methods being applied to exploring variations in human and natural phenomena over space and to validating or disproving theories about land-use. David Chorley, Peter Haggett and David Stoddart were the big figures in this movement and provided plenty of intellectual stimulus.
My tutor A.A.L. (Augustus Livy) Caesar was a larger than life character – who lived up to his name (the family always punned on the name and as I write his niece Julia Caesar is the financial presenter on BBC World News). He was an avuncular pipe smoker who saved liqueur miniatures – of which he had hundreds.
He always presented as a Mr Chipps type, who surrounded himself with acolytes. More interestingly, as I realized later, he was one of the Cambridge dons who had identified with Communism before WW1, when many young people regarded Russia as the only reliable bulwark against German fascism.
This Cambridge Connection led more famously to people like Maclean and Burgess, who defected, and the hidden ‘third’ and ‘fourth’ men Blunt and Philby who betrayed the UK after the War.
‘Gus’ had a very incisive mind and practised the Cambridge adage that ‘you have not come here to learn, but to learn how to learn’. His ability to critique and deconstruct arguments was a great grounding for my later life. Having said that, his lectures in the third year were pretty appalling, being mainly catalogues of the amounts of pig iron and coke produced under various Russian and Polish 5-Year Plans.
Towards the end of my time at Cambridge, I applied for entrance to the Department of Town Planning at Manchester University to undertake a 2-year diploma in Town Planning. However, I also applied, at Gus’ suggestion for a post as Assistant Research Officer in the comparatively new Department of Economic Affairs.
When I was offered a post by DEA for the Northern Region based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, I could not resist the idea of being involved in something practical and earning some money of my own (GBP 895 per year!).
I started work at Wellbar Tower, Gallowgate in the autumn of 1965. The Wilson Government appeared to offer a new start, though our minister George Brown was a notorious drunk who was often reported in the press as being ‘tired and emotional’.
Britain had just embarked on its only serious attempt at indicative planning. However, the one and only National 5-Year Plan was eventually a bit of a fiasco – it forecast a shortfall in the national labour force of 400,000 by 1970 – but when that day dawned, there were 1 million unemployed.
At the regional level, DEA was trying to bring together the local representatives of the government departments and enlist the commitment of the Private Sector. However, political pressures and bureaucratic timidity soon led to the Regional Plan be retitled from ‘Challenge to the Changing North’ to ‘Challenge of the Changing North’.
The Northern Region (Northumberland and Durham plus Cumbria) was very depressed at this time, following the collapse of the coal-mining and shipbuilding industries, and the Government was trying subsidize development and push jobs north from the overheated South-East England economy.
This led to lots of opportunities for the unscrupulous and resulted in a famous corruption case that involved T. Dan Smith, the Mayor of Newcastle and the Head of our Northern Economic Planning Council. The power plays behind the betrayal of Labour Party principles and the loss of integrity and idealism to money were dealt with in a BBC drama series called ‘Our Friends from the North’.
In a sense, I was a very minor player in this drama (somewhere in the background doing ‘A Survey of the Small Ports of the Northern Region’!). I remember that Smith got an honorarium of GBP 750 (not so different from my salary) and that we asked him for GBP 35 for a Xmas Party as he had not drawn any of the money.
At that time he had already made his money and turned straight – as he later said when he came out of gaol “If I had known that I was going to rise so far, I would not have been dishonest’ (a revealing comment but hardly an excuse).
From the Newcastle of that time sprang the rock group The Animals and I totally understood the sentiments of their big hit ‘We gotta get out of this place’. Although I had started making serious if late progress with the ladies at this point, I was poor, cold and so unimportant as to be inconspicuous.
At that time, the best things about Newcastle was the Saveloy Dips (a kind of local Hot Dog) and Newcassel Broon Ale . Finding reasonable accommodation was a nightmare and driving back to Cheshire across the moors in my Austin A35 (a kind of large gray broad bean) wasn’t much fun either.
I began to feel that I had indeed been brought in as a trainee District Officer for British West Hartlepools – and I was deeply suspicious of the British Establishment turning the trappings of Imperialism on its own people.
More personally and less worthily, although I was all for social development in theory, I hungered for the Warm South and a break from working class culture and the 4-Minute Warnings of a Nuclear Holocaust threatened by the Cold War.
I therefore applied for a Commonwealth of Australia Ph.D. Scholarship at the Australian National University (ANU) and, to my considerable amazement, found myself travelling First Class from Southampton to Sydney for a month on the Italian ship ‘Achille Lauro’.
CONSULTING /RESEARCH ASSIGNMENTS DURING THIS PERIOD
United Kingdom UK Government 1966 Development Economist Contributor to development plan for Northern England 'Challenge of the Changing North'
United Kingdom UK Government 1965 Development Economist Evaluated the viability and future role of the small ports of the Northern Region of England
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