Swallowing the anchor !

On resigning from Marconi's seagoing staff I was offered employment within the company as a shore based Technician. As an alternative to unemployment whilst looking for a  job it seemed to be a good option and I duly accepted this offer.

I was offered a choice of locations to work from and chose Southampton, on the south coast of England. At the time I was unaware that this was regarded as one of the best bases to work at so accidentally stumbled into a nice city, adjacent to the New Forest, and a very pleasant place to live.

By the timeI moved down to Southampton, Elena had flown in from Malaysia to join me. For her it was her first time to venture out of South East Asia so the culture shock was considerable as was the UK Autumn weather ! However she was nothing if not adaptable and soon settled in to the new environment without complaint. We moved in to a small one bedroomed flat and set up house together. In this we were aided greatly by the excellent group of colleagues at Marconi. As the only Asian wife she was regarded with some curiosity but also warmly welcomed.

On joining the Marconi shore staff the first duty assigned to me was to attend a 12 week advanced servicing course on the Company equipment. This was held at Southampton College of Technology and was an excellent course for the transition from seagoing to the shore based role. A whole range of marine electronics equipment was demonstrated to course attendees and one left there feeling confident in ones ability to maintain these items.

Southampton Marconi depot at this time had around 20 technical staff plus a number of office based administration employees. The Technical staff were divided into three distinct skill groups, each tasked with installing and maintaining specific types of equipment, The largest group looked after the general run of ship's radio room equipment, the second group were tasked solely with radar equipment and the final group concentrated exclusively on marine VHF radio equipment.In the 5 years that I worked at Southampton I was able to rotate through all three  groups, gaining valuable skills along the way.

Southampton depot covered the south coast of England between Portland and Weymouth in the west through to Southampton and Portsmouth and onwards to Littlehampton in the east. On arriving at work in the morning one might not know what the day would bring in terms of the problem to be resolved or the location one had to travel to. The bulk of the work was usually centred on Southampton docks or the naval dockyard in Portsmouth but the outports could always be counted on to crop up from time to time. One day one might be looking at a radar problem on a tanker at Fawley refinery near Southampton and the next day might be a visit to a cross channel ferry running out of Weymouth to sort out a defective radio transmitter.

The work was quite challenging in the variety of equipment and different ships types one visited. Occasionally one might get a call to look at a problem on equipment from other manufacturers on a foreign flag ship which could be difficult as our spares and logistics setup were geared to support of Marconi equipment.

An additional benefit of staying with Marconi after leaving the sea service was encouragement to pursue additional Engineering qualifications at the local College of Technology. The basic rule was that one could continue with ones studies as long as one kept passing. Failing an examination meant dropping out. In general it was the younger members of staff who availed themselves of this opportunity as it meant long hours of after work study and a long term commitment. I applied to continue with Engineering studies after my first year ashore and was given the ok to enrol at the local College of Technology to study Electronic Engineering. The one caveat was that one had to put Company duties first so any call to work took precedence over studies. In the event I never did get asked to do this and had few interruptions to the course syllabus.

Juggling work and studies took a certain amount of determination as after a day at work the prospect of buckling down to the mysteries of calculus boolean algebra. However after four years I emerged as a qualified engineer rather than a technician and started to look at what my options might be in the future. One suggestion was that I apply to become a lecturer at the local College of Technology and teach there. Another option was to relocate to company headquarters at Chelmsford in Essex and take up an unspecified engineering role. Neither option had much appeal. However, around this time I chanced upon a job advertisement in a technical magazine looking for radio engineers to join a company contracted to the Brunei government to support their armed forces. I had retained very happy memories of my time in the Far East so submitted an application for the post and ended undertaking a couple of interviews, the upshot of which was an offer of employment in Brunei with a company called World Wide Helicopters, which I duly accepted. The employers name was something of a misnomer. They had originally supported the Air Wing of the Royal Brunei Regiment by undertaking helicopter engineering but had diversified into support of other areas including the Regiment's Force Engineering Workshop where all radio equipment was maintained and had also taken on support of the naval element of the Regiment. The latter task involved supplying marine engineers, electricians, shipwrights, welders and marine electronics equipment.

My initial recruitment was to assist with the integration into service and support of a newly procured tactical vhf radio system called 'Clansman' which Brunei had agreed  to procure, as this equipment was also  being supplied to the UK military. However, shortly after joining the Force Engineering workshop ( FEW ) the military realised that I had a maritime background and I ended up being transferred to the naval base to support their small fleet of fast patrol boats.This I initially regarded as a backward step and made my displeasure known. However, it transpired that, in the longer term, they had done me a great favour.

The Brunei naval force was in the process of modernising the fitted  on board  radio and radar equipment on some of their craft and I was able to get involved with the trials and acceptance of these new items. This necessitated some time at sea and a couple of voyages  to Singapore to evaluate their performance.

My arrival at the naval base at Muara coincided with the decision to procure new patrol boats and these included 37m missile armed vessels, to be based on a UK Vosper Thorneycroft design  but built in Singapore. Part of the procurement plan included equipment training on the Aerospatiale Exocet guided missile system, the Sperry ( later BAE systems ) Sea Archer gunnery control system and the Marconi gyro stabiliser/compass system. As no local staff were deemed to be up to the required standard to undertake these courses I was nominated and did, in fact, spend close to 13 weeks in the UK and France training on these systems. Promotion within the company followed and I progressed from being a Category 'B' Engineer to Category 'A' Engineer and thence to Senior Engineer and onward to Engineering Supervisor and  finally Chief Engineer. I was lucky to join the naval unit at this opportune moment with promotions that followed.