A wonderful trip down memory lane this week, care of my old mate Ewan Livingstone at e2v/EEV. EEV—English Electric Valve Company—started life in 1947 making magnetrons and other tubes—we called them ‘valves’ in those days—mostly for military applications. I joined the company in 1980, and managed to avoid getting fired, leaving with many regrets but of my own choosing, in 2008.
 
The products were world-beating in 1980, and still are. Star performers are CCDs for use in space imaging—I project-managed several. CCDs are light-sensitive computer chips. One of my favourite projects is on board The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite, still sending back spectacular colour images of the Martian surface. 
 
If you are fortunate/unfortunate (which one you choose depends on your perspective) enough to need radiotherapy, there is a very high probability that the machine that provides it will contain a magnetron and thyratron manufactured by EEV in Waterhouse Lane, Chelmsford. (Actually, the company was purchased by Teledyne a few years ago, and a previous MD—operating on the basis that if it ain’t broke, fix it, because it wasn’t his idea—changed the name to e2v; the ‘proper’ name is now “Teledyne e2v”. But it’s still EEV really...)
 
Two things always struck me about the company, and nothing has really changed; firstly, many of the products are at the same time, state-of-the-art while looking like 1940s technology. The thyratron used in the radiotherapy machine (linear accelerator, or linac), is a large bottle with a hot bit inside; it looks exactly like the myriads of valves/tubes that used to inhabit the insides of radio and television sets, albeit much larger. Tubes in radios and televisions are a thing of the past, but the thyratron in a medical linear accelerator continues to do the job efficiently, effectively, and economically.
 
The second thing is/are the people. There was, and continues to be, a wonderful feeling of comradeship, togetherness, generosity, being part of a team, pulling together (generally in the same direction) at the company. I came across very few exceptions to that rule at EEV, and the exceptions were nearly always senior people, parachuted in from outside of the company following the departure of the traditional directors who had, as it were, come up through the ranks. When I joined the company, with two notable exceptions, all of the directors were engineers who had joined the company from university. The exceptions were the finance director, and the managing director. The MD had been appointed by Arnold Weinstock, the boss of the parent company, GEC, because the ‘numbers’ were, in his opinion, in need of improving. Actually the new MD, Martin Jay, was one of the good guys and very quickly went native.
 
My main regret on retirement, was that I would miss—and did miss—my work colleagues. Fortunately, many of them are generous enough to invite me to come and drink with them on a regular basis.
 
EEV is that rare animal, a world-leading British manufacturer in a UK economy where, I am truly horrified to learn, manufacturing industry currently contributes less than 9% of GDP. I feel genuinely privileged to have worked there.

It will not have escaped the attention of anyone who takes more than the briefest notice of the contents of this website, that I spent my formative years playing guitar in a couple of rock ‘n’ roll bands in west London. Living in South Ealing, my local music shop—where I could buy anything from a plectrum or some spare strings to a Gibson guitar and Vox Twin amplifier—was Jim Marshall’s establishment in Hanwell. He started his business selling drums, and graduated to guitars and all the paraphernalia associated with them. I well recall one evening in 1961 walking to Hanwell just to look and marvel at the blue Fender Stratocaster he had on display in his window. For the uninitiated, the Stratocaster is the Ferrari or Aston Martin of guitars, as played by Hank Marvin and Jimmy Hendrix among many others.
 
In 1962 or thereabouts, Jim and his team developed his series of Marshall amplifiers, the loudspeaker stacks of which are frequent sights in TV, film, and rock concerts. They are familiar, not the least reason for which being that they have the name ‘Marshall’ emblazoned across their front. It all came about because local guitarists could not get the sound they wanted. Jim’s son Terry described what happened. The Fender Bassman amplifier—made by Fender in the USA for use with bass guitars, and fiendishly expensive—appeared to have the required characteristics. Terry discovered that it had not been patented, so they simply reverse engineered the circuit with some modifications, adding a separate box with four, twelve-inch loudspeakers. The amplifier itself was based on vacuum tubes and the sound was prodigious; I permanently damaged my hearing standing for hours twelve feet from Pete Townshend’s Marshall stack in the Ealing Club. It was said that Screaming Lord Sutch, the last person of any integrity ever to attempt to get himself elected to the UK Parliament, tested the power of Marshall amplifiers by using the particular position of the shop. He got his guitarist to play a riff through one of Jim’s amplifiers, went across the street, and determined whether he could still hear the sound when a double-decker bus went past.
 
The amplifiers were brilliant but insanely expensive. I remember Jim Marshall explaining to me that they produced three different systems; there was an amplifier for a lead guitar at 120 guineas, one for a bass guitar at 106 guineas, and one for a rhythm guitar for I forget how much. For anyone under the age of sixty, a guinea was twenty-one shillings, or in modern parlance £1.05. At the time, the average weekly take-home pay was £12 - £14. You could buy a decent car for less than the cost of a Marshall amplifier.
 
Jim Marshall has passed into legend, and is up there with Fender and Gibson as one of the all-time greats of the music equipment business. His shop was a meeting place for musicians, and was the centre of gravity of the West London music scene. It was there that I became acquainted with Mitch Mitchell, who played for my band for a brief period and then joined Jimmy Hendrix. Later on I met Speedy Keen, who was also with the band for a while before he joined Thunderclap Newman and wrote and sang Something in the Air.
 
Jim Marshall’s shop loomed large in my personal legend, and I spent many hours just hanging about there, hoping that some of the glitz would wear off on me. And it was during those times that I became infected with the Marshall Parp. It is difficult to explain exactly what it was but I shall try. One of the assistants, a musician, would put his lips together and make a ‘parp’ sound. Not for any particular reason; it was like a verbal tic. It caught on and the cognoscenti coming into the shop on hearing a ‘parp’ would reply with the same. Musicians at large, on exchanging a parp, would know that each belonged to the Marshall 'guild'. I started parping and still do. Very few people have remarked the habit, although one friend, Paul—he knows who he is—embraced it with enthusiasm, being as taken by it as I was.
 
I often wonder whether anyone else remembers the Marshall Parp. It’s ironic that Jim Marshall made millions with his amplifiers and received an OBE for his trouble. But that rather childish, ubiquitous, and amusing—well it amuses me— idiocy is entirely unrecorded. Well, I have recorded it now, and it remains for me the most enduring memory of Jim Marshall’s music shop in Hanwell.

For the first time this week, I travelled on the Elizabeth Line; a completely magnificent experience. The London Underground celebrates its 160th year this year, and there is still plenty of evidence on some lines of the original mid-Victorian infrastructure. In my youth I used to explore the network at weekends, the iconic Underground map making navigation very easy. Parts of the system in Central London are very deep, and some of the linking pedestrian tunnels were and are still quite claustrophobic—narrow, with low ceilings. Not infrequently, I used to find myself quite alone for minutes at a time. I would sometimes wonder if I had taken a wrong turning and ended up in the dungeons of some magic castle inhabited by the Nibelungs or some other race from the underworld.
 
The Elizabeth Line is the absolute antithesis of the early system, positively cathedral like in the scale of the stations and pedestrian access tunnels; in fact the tunnels are so wide and high that the word ‘tunnel’ hardly seems appropriate. For all that the Crossrail price tag was nearly £20 billion, the design drips premium quality and attention to detail. Of course it will irritate other parts of the country struggling to get any sort of train service. But despite the concerted efforts of successive recent governments to make visitors to this country quite unwelcome, London remains an enormous pull for tourists. The Underground network was operating at saturation point; the Elizabeth Line has increased the capacity of the London railway system by 10%. Even so, it was standing room only yesterday.
 
But they still can’t get the escalators right! I remember the early escalators with their wooden steps, each one having multiple strips of wood, all individually screwed on. The parallel strips provided the grooves in which ran the prongs of metal forks at the top of the stairway designed to prevents shoes etc. becoming caught up in the mechanism. The new escalators are all metal; the grooves are smaller and greater in number and the forks are also quite small. The handrail moves at the same rate as the stairs, or is supposed to do so. In fact, even on the brand new and very long escalators at Liverpool Street and Tottenham Court Road, the handrails move slightly faster than the stairs—as they do on every escalator on the network that I have encountered. It is possible that the issue is one of gear ratios; gears do not yield to the decimal system. They are digital, or perhaps one ought to say dental, in that they must have an integral number of teeth... This means that only specific ratios can be achieved, thus making it impossible to match rotational speeds exactly; I presume this is the root of the problem. I have contacted an escalator manufacturer for an answer to this conundrum, but I am not holding my breath.