J-BEAM Antennas History and development...
BILL SYKES's BABY
NORTHAMPTON.
I've lived in the county since 1972 in that time I have been involved
with various projects in the radio and technology field, I became a member of the Northampton Radio club early on and followed the
going's on of members and some of the early founders.
One well known being Bill Sykes the originator and owner of the company that put Northamptonshire on the TV and Radio antenna map.
Bill had a personal amateur radio callsign G2HCG and a company
callsign G5JB for the "J-Beam" TV & Radio antenna business.
Bill wrote about the development of the company and it's problems
with developing an efficient range of TV antenna's to receive the
newly operating TV transmitters.
This document was originally added to a web site run by a radio ham
that lived in Milton Keynes, I was fortunate to grab a copy before the
site was closed, I am not sure about the copyright for these writings
could be it still lives with the original presenter, or Bill himself, I am
quite happy to delete this content if anyone has a serious objection
to me publishing it here, but I would say that the document provides
insight into the development of a local business and is worthy of
being preserved for it's historical interest.
Bill's writings:-
J BEAM 1945 - 1975
It all started after the war in the 1940s with the opening of the High definition Television service from Alexandra Palace in London.
I had a reasonably successful Radio and TV repair and sales business
in Northampton at the time, and in order to sell TV sets one obviously had to show a picture.
The only TV aerial available was the Belling and Lee wide spaced 2 element H type operating on 45 Mhz.. The inherent problem with this type of aerial was the vertical polarization, which meant that the mast
and the feeder were in the same plane as the aerial elements, with consequent degradation of performance, particularly the directive properties. There was no question of a balun to connect the balanced feed of the aerial to the unbalance of the coaxial feeder, which made matters worse. A quarter wave spaced 2 element dipole and reflector aerial as the Belling was, should have a heart shaped polar diagram with a sharp null at the rear.
In fact there was no null at the rear and the aerial would receive in almost any direction.
Northampton is only a few miles from the Daventry high power Empire short wave broadcast transmitters, the main emissions being on 15 Mhz together with a strong 3rd harmonic on 45 Mhz, nicely in the middle of the TV signal from London, with consequent heavy patterning of the picture.
I was marketing, quite successfully from my shop, a small box containing a sharply tuned circuit to reject the Daventry signal, but it would
obviously be better to have an aerial with a good enough polar diagram to reject the Daventry harmonic.
This the Belling H with its distorted polar diagram could not do.
The requirement was more gain to compensate for the 70 mile path with the Dunstable Downs in the way and above all some real nulls
in the pattern to reject that Daventry signal, which fortunately was on a different bearing to the wanted TV signal.
Aerials of this type are normally centre fed where the impedance is low and provides a reasonable match to the feeder. The problem is that with a large vertically polarised aerial there is no practical way of bringing the feeder away from the centre of a vertical element without it affecting the performance of the aerial as with the Belling H.
End feeding solves this problem but requires a means of transforming the high impedance at the end of the element to the low impedance of the feeder. A resonant circuit is necessary and this has the additional advantage of acting as a filter reducing the frequency bandwidth of the aerial, and helping the often inadequate front end of the receiver to improve the signal to noise ratio. An end fed aerial produces a DC short circuit on the feeder and this in itself provides some protection from local noise.
The problem was that end feeding would be complex and inevitably cost more. The question was would the improved performance pay for the extra cost?
I remember sitting at my bench working out the dimensions
for a three element end fed aerial that used a resonant J matching section that might do the job.
The first problem was how to make it. I had no particular engineering knowledge and no access to machinery and materials. Remember TV aerials were big on 45 Mhz - elements 3.5 meters long. A neighbouring Radio and Electrical shop was run by two brothers, Frank and Jim Robinson, Frank was the engineer and Jim a fellow ham, ran the electrical installation side of their business, which in those days used quantities of conduit, both steel and aluminium.
Talking to Jim and Frank one day I showed them my aerial design drawing, and they reckoned it could be made from aluminium conduit using existing electrical components. We duly made the thing and tested it in the garden of my home. To every ones surprise it really worked and a test comparison with the Belling and Lee aerial showed a worthwhile improvement, in fact the difference between a screen of snow and a viewable picture. Aerial tests, to be meaningful have to be a comparison with a known standard aerial, and the Belling H became our standard aerial.
Resulting from this, both businesses were able to sell a few TV sets and word got around among the local dealers who wanted to buy the new aerial.
We commenced production in the cellar of the Robinson's shop still using standard electrical conduit components. I shudder to think of that original design, it was made from heavy gauge threaded 3/4 inch aluminium conduit screwed into black steel junction boxes it weighed a "ton" and took at least an hour to assemble from a multitude
of screws, nuts and self starts. Writing the assembly instructions was a mammoth task in itself. There was no weather proofing of the feed connections, we used 72 ohm flat twin feeder which was OK exposed to the elements, but was a problem to fit to the coaxial aerial socket on the TV receiver. Flat twin was wrong, the feed was unbalanced and the TV input was unbalanced, we should have used coax, but that would have involved water proofing.
Nevertheless the aerial worked and we were selling quite a number, in fact exceeding the capacity of the Robinson's cellar.
Larger premises had to be found and again mutual friends came into the picture, in this case the Gunn brothers who were manufacturers and installers of sun blinds and had a small factory in Cleveland Road nearby with a workshop used for making sunblinds and the refurbishing of the vans they used for installations. I remember using a lathe for the first time in this workshop which totally fascinated me and I resolved to learn a great deal more about engineering in the future. The two Gunn brothers joined the partnership and we were now 5.
The aerial to say the least was not a commercial proposition for production or sales. The first major improvement came from using decent thin wall duralumin tube instead of the heavy soft tubing used for conduit. There were problems of supply here, remember it was just after the war and believe it or not we were rationed in the supply of aluminium tubing, and I had to do a lot of pleading with British Aluminium. Thin wall tube meant we could not thread it to fit into junction boxes and we developed a new method of mounting the elements using short stubs of thick walled tubing which were swaged into holes in the crossboom.
The main requirement in the manufacture of almost any aerial is to join two tubes of differing diameters, at right angles to each other, and to be able to drill holes in line along a tube.
The cost of tooling to do this was always foremost in our minds. Never did we use outside tooling, it was far too inflexible for my outlook on life. A new idea had to happen and not wait for a drawing office to produce
drawings and an engineering firm to convert them to steel at high cost in 6 months time.
I would have improved upon the design by then! Something had to be done about that original design with the long J shaped matching section which incidentally was of course the origin of the name J Beam, thought
of by my wife at an evening with the Robinson's.
The thought came that it ought to be possible to replace the open matching section with a coaxial system using a resonant length of coaxial cable which with carefully designed connection point could feed
a coaxial feeder. A suitable length of cable (16 yards) could be supplied
with each aerial, eliminating the need for a user connection to a connector box with its associated tooling costs.
The problem of weather proofing was solved by the use of RF welding of PVC tubing to provide a sealed joint between the matching section and the PVC outer of the feeder. No professional expensive RF heaters for us, we made our own. A pair of 805 type transmitting valves as a self oscillator on 27 Mhz(approx) and 1.5KV on the anodes provided plenty of RF which was fed to suitably shaped electrodes on a foot operated jig. The operator held the joint to be sealed between the electrodes and trod on the pedal to bring them together, which at the same time switched on the HT. Burnt fingers didn't happen very often ! and the RF field alone
would have caused a present day factory inspector to have given birth to kittens.
Research and development at that time was a problem and aerial testing was done on the roof of the factory using the on air signal from London.
I was able to modify a war time vhf receiver which had a motor driven commutator system on the input and output, switching between the reference aerial and the test aerial. The difference in signal strength
being displayed on a meter. This eliminated the inevitable signal variation over the path to London. Using these facilities I was able to develop a 4 element aerial to give even better performance than the original 3 element.
The question of patent cover for my coaxial cable end feeding system then came up and I applied for a patent through a patent agent. Everything was of course wrong, we were already in production and
the question of prior art was unanswered. However to our intense surprise we obtained the patent pending and eventually the full patent. It seemed to deter would be copiers but I doubt if it would have stood up if someone was really serious. No patent is any good until proved in the courts. The main point was that end feeding was difficult and cost more and we knew how to do it. This provided enough deterrent in a stupidly
cut throat industry.
Having moved into the factory, we began to employ people. The first of the hurdles was now with us - choosing the right people and we found a genius of an engineer named Eldred. His first task was speeding
up our production. One item, of which 4 were used on every Aerial was our short element mounting stubs consisting of a 6 inch length of ¾" aluminium tube with 6 holes in it. Eldred designed and built a beautiful
machine which from a hopper feed of tube produced the finished article totally automatically.
With hindsight I wonder about the economics of it because it produced far more articles than we were able to use - that's one of the penalties of employing geniuses.
Even though the coaxial cable design was a vast improvement on the original monstrosity, it still required a wooden mast which was expensive and not very practical, and we were using a very crude locally made sandcasting with 4 U bolts to join the mast to the aerial.
Another idea came along, we were using a matching section made from coaxial cable. A metal mast with a wire inside is a coaxial cable, why not combine the mast with the matching section? This involved a lot of testing on the roof of our small factory but the design was eventually finalised and became the Jmast4 which was a beautifully elegant aerial and was the main stay of our production for some time, and with
good patent protection.
The question of tooling for the Jmast4 was the next problem. Commercial suppliers required drawings which in turn required a draughtsman, and then required thousands of pounds in die costs and six months before we even handled the product. All of this was totally beyond our means. Now we found another genius by the name
of Sanders. Sanders had a small workshop in Rushden where he produced high quality aluminium sand castings.
He came along one day to see our problem. We required to join the vertical 1 1/2 inch mast tube to the horizontal 1 1/4 inch crossboom and at the same time continue in the same plane as the mast with a 1/2 inch tube. The best we had been able to do was a drilled steel plate with 8 u bolts - most inelegant.
Sanders looked at the job, collected a sample of the tubes and rocketed off in his 3 wheel van - I do not know the make, he probably made it himself. It had a motor cycle front end and a van rear end, and his driving was horrendous. Next day Sanders turned up with a beautifully crafted wooden pattern which could be used to produce two identical aluminium castings that bolted together to provide a perfect joint between our 3 lengths of tube. He said how many do you want in aluminium and quoted 1s/4d per pair, and this included threading the holes for the 1/4 inch screws required to hold the castings together. We were able to find a standard length of heavy duty paxolin tubing to provide the vital insulator between the two halves of the mast and the aerial was complete. The miracle had happened, we had a beautifully engineered aerial with no tooling costs. The JMast4 was born.
We were now employing some 10 people and producing about 200
aerials per week, and rapidly outgrowing our small premises. A factory on the Weedon Road industrial estate came on the market leasehold and although it was too big at the time we took it on.
Accountants were by now getting in on the act and our firm of auditors shook their heads gloomily and asked how we were going to pay
for this expansion. I deliberately overruled their fears, relying entirely on cash flow to finance the expansion.
We were at the time selling the Jmast4 at £8 each ex factory and clearing some £2 net profit on each one with very low overheads and no commitments. In addition to this the advent of Band 3 commercial television was round the corner and I had some ideas about aerials for that. The future looked good.
Marketing and sales were now of the utmost importance and here Jim Robinson and I used to go out with a specially prepared van using
a folding aluminium "A" frame on the roof which with fitting 10ft sections of tubing enabled us to run our beloved Jmast4 up to a reasonable height. The van was interesting, it consisted of a pre-war Jaguar Mk.3 car, with lovely big chrome headlamps, which had been in a prang and had a van body built on to it. The registration number was appropriately JB3333 and it cost £40 the first car I personally owned, and my soft spot for Jags stems from it.
The procedure was to go to the fringe areas for TV reception, by this time the Birmingham TV station was operating and there was an area of poor reception down through the Cotswolds between London and
Birmingham where we used to operate.
We would stop outside a TV dealer's premises and push our aerial up
to as high as we dare on the van and then simply walk into the shop with the end of the feeder and say try this ! It always worked, the difference in picture quality sold the aerial, and to this day J Beam's strongest areas are in that corridor between London and Birmingham where we first did our demonstrations.
The other more difficult method of selling was to borrow one of the sunblind vans of the Gunn brothers and drive it down to London loaded with aerials and call on all the big wholesalers. This was much more difficult and lack of salesmanship on my part in particular was a distinct handicap.
We soon decided to employ a true sales force with specialist reps to cover the country in designated areas. One of our best reps was Mike Wilkins and he became Sales Manager eventually specialising in the professional aerial side and he is with J Beam to this day holding down the job of MD.
My first love was always the design department, although driving a desk was still necessary for part of the day. There was always a drawing board in my office ( later when I had an office) and most of the designs for mouldings, castings, and production machines came from there. Design of dies for moulding machines was always interesting, one had to develop a mirror image outlook as of course the die had to be the inverse of the product.
J Beam always specialised in long range aerials although we eventually produced a set top and a flexible aerial which could be hung up in a corner which we called the J Flex which was eventually copied for amateur use and given the name of the "Slim Jim".
A new design of aerial was necessary for Band 3 and here our double 6 skeleton slot aerial was the best on the market for performance. The inevitable problem of tooling had to be solved, and in this case we
needed a connector box for the coaxial feed system. Fortunately Band 3 aerials were considerably smaller than Band 1 and we were able to buy a small bench polythene moulding machine, hand operated with a
capacity of 2 ozs. The dies were made from brass blocks which we managed to fabricate with our limited tool room capacity. The most useful machine was a Pantograph with a small milling attachment. This would copy at reduced size, a wooden pattern into metal. I was very keen on Gliding at the time and we made a mould on the pantograph and presented everyone at the gliding club Xmas dinner with a miniature model of a glider.
The time at the Weedon road factory was when J Beam really made money and expanded. Overheads were low and with the advent of new TV stations throughout the country and the opening of Commercial television on Band 3 our only problem was making enough aerials.
The motto "Anything sold will somehow or another be made but the converse is seldom true" became our watchword. Easier said than done however.
This was perhaps the happiest time with lots of pranks and practical jokes, and no problems of responsibility.
The question of patent cover continued to arise for such designs as the skeleton slot, which was one of my pet aerials. The normal slot aerial consists of a slot cut in a sheet of metal with the feed point to the centre of the long sides of the slot. It is particularly useful in aircraft where nothing need protrude into the slipstream. I wondered now much of the metal round a slot could be cut away without losing performance, The only way was try it and see - I am a great believer in the empirical approach with the theory coming later when one needs to know just how something apparently wrong does in fact work.
Anyway I found to my surprise that the surrounding metal could be cut away until only a skeleton remained - a simple oblong of tubing fed at the centre of the long sides. Sizes were of course different to the true slot but the performance of the skeleton slot was identical to that of the true slot giving some 2 dB more gain than a dipole. We did get worth while patent cover on that one and its developments in the shape of the
Parabeam method of feeding a Yagi.
A mini crisis happened when one of our competitors produced a range
of aerials which were packed in folded form and all the erector had to do was open them out and tighten a few wing nuts - a far cry from that original monstrosity that started it all. This meant a complete redesign
of our range. I had always insisted that the elements should be mounted through the crossboom and the
mast be mounted in line with the centre of the crossboom. This produced a very elegant aerial but obviously did not lend itself to folding techniques.
We considered copying the competition by using aluminium pressings
but this would spoil our quality image and the cost of pressing machines and their associated tooling costs would be prohibitive.
We did however manage to produce a range of folding aerials that used specially made castings, again with no capital expenditure on tooling, Sanders came up trumps again. The skeleton slot did not lend itself to the folding techniques and was gradually replaced by the more conventional folded dipole type Yagi.
Another fundamental was the use of a Balun. The coaxial end feed principle provides an unbalanced feed which is correctly connected to the unbalance of a coaxial cable. The folded dipole type aerial feed is
inherently balanced and is incorrectly connected to an unbalanced coaxial feeder. This requires the use of a Balun and I have always insisted that all J Beam aerials should have one regardless of the fact that we were unique in the TV aerial field and it inevitably cost more.
We were able to reduce the cost of using a Balun by another idea which resulted in the "Inverse Balun", a means of simulating a half wavelength of coaxial cable by non inductively winding a coil onto a metal former. This was the subject of another patent and a good one too.
Expansion at Weedon road continued until we eventually ran out of space and another move was inevitable. We found Westonia garage, a Singer car dealer at the time, with room at the back for building a factory, and
decided to buy it - regardless of the gloomy accountants who inevitably said we could not afford it.
Jim Robinson was to run the garage side which just missed becoming a Ford Main Dealer but still sold a lot of Ford cars.
Production equipment was now requiring some big decisions on capital expenditure. Our 2 oz polythene injection moulding machine was now hopelessly inadequate, and a much larger machine was purchased.
The dies for this required a well equipped tool room with lathes, milling machines, pantograph etc. all requiring capital and personnel and here I found another genius called Mason. We needed small precision die castings and the thought of a full blown casting shop with expensive die casting machines was beyond us at the time. My genius Mason designed and made a centrifugal casting machine which produced some beautiful zinc castings with very little capital expenditure. However it wasn't long before a full blown casting shop seemed to happen with pressure die casting machines and large furnaces for the molten metal.
Another major step was to go into aluminium die casting, finally replacing Sanders' sand castings which had served us so well.
Surprisingly aluminium die casting is a very different kettle of fish with much higher temperatures and the need for tough, hardened dies.
More large injection moulding machines came along as money permitted and we now had to think of another major step into compression type plastic moulding. This we knew nothing about and I had to get the books from the library and learn how it was done and what sort of machines were required. It turned out we needed a giant hydraulic press with heated platens which we could not afford. However we found a second hand press and managed to produce the even more sophisticated dies that were required. We learnt about induction heating of the dies on the way. The first moulding that came off that press was quite a cause
for celebration.
We were using considerable amounts of printed paper by now, particularly for brochures and catalogues. The unions were rampant in the printing industry at this time and the general price structure and
failure to maintain delivery promises caused considerable aggravation and indeed financial loss.
Vertical integration was again the answer and we set up our own print room with a litho machine and employed a non union girl, named Elaine to run it.
Talking of unions, although they made many attempts to infiltrate the factory floor, they never succeeded. I knew all my employees, indeed I could and occasionally did, operate any of the machines in the factory, particularly when we were commissioning a new process. Conversely I did delegate - completely - if I employed a man to do a job I expected him to do it without me being at his coat tails.
None of our geniuses stayed long, by their very nature they were always seeking fresh fields to conquer, and I found a good dedicated engineer named Don Bannard who was in charge of the tool room and stayed with J Beam until retirement and was one of our stalwarts.
Around this time PTFE was first produced and became a very useful material on professional aerials where cost was less important. I always remember the strict instructions for machining PTFE (it cannot be moulded). It must not be allowed to get hot with a blunt tool as it would
produce phosgene gas. Now it is used as a non stick coating on frying pans !!
Production methods were becoming ever more sophisticated with the toolroom making quite complicated hydraulic drilling and bending
machines, the fundamentals of aerial production. One particular design which merited another patent was the Hornbeam which I had dreamed up to cover both band 1 and Band 3. This was another good patent and
was unique. We actually had a fully automated flow production line on the Hornbeam running at some 200 per day. There was a horse called Hornbeam running in the Derby at the time and of course we backed it and of course it lost,
The space age began to happen now and as part of this we built a giant aerial array on the roof of the factory and succeeded in getting reflected signals from the moon, with resultant useful publicity.
It became evident that there were two distinct sides to the manufacture of aerials. The domestic side where all was cut throat competition and the professional or Telecomm side where quality counted regardless of price, and government contracts were the thing to get. The government budgeting system always produced some good orders as the end of the financial year came up and buyers realised that they had not spent all of their budget.
A new company named J Beam Engineering was formed operating in a neighbouring factory,and specialising in the Telecomm aerial market. I promoted one of the engineers John Neale to run it with another
engineer Vic Hartop in charge of R&D. TV aerials did not mix in this field, and the separate company was necessary.
The professional R&D resources were however very useful in the design of TV aerials and Amateur radio aerials. We had a full blown aerial test lab. and test range, employing a number of highly paid people with some very expensive test gear. Professional signal generators cost as much as a car and although we made some of our own equipment there are no short cuts in the professional market.
It is a sobering thought that I can now do everything that the expensive lab. and technicians did, in my own home at a fraction of the cost and time, with an aerial modeling program on my own computer.
The Yagi aerial forms the basis of almost all VHF aerials and I always thought what a wonderful patent that would have been. The Yagi was I believe exploited in the USA during the war, and no patent cover existed. There is however a Yagi Aerial Company in Japan.
There is actually a Mr.Yagi and I used to swap xmas presents with him. Japanese silks for me and some Wedgwood pottery for him.
One interesting requirement came up in the shape of a design of VHF vertical aerial which would stand up to use on a fishing trawler. Apparently the derricks swinging about landing cases of fish were apt to
knock off the VHF aerials which had a very short life indeed.
We conceived the idea of encasing the aerial in a fibre glass tube which was virtually indestructible and almost all marine aerials are now encased in fibre glass.
The professional market penetration continued with contracts from the BBC for the design and manufacture of TV transmitting aerials. The specification for these was very tight indeed and I well remember one
Christmas eve when we were on a dead line to meet the spec. on a new TV aerial for the Oxford transmitter. Vic Hartop, my chief technical engineer and myself worked till midnight and eventually got it right. Father Xmas was a little late that year.
We took a share in two newly formed Telecomm companies one named RT Masts run by Dennis Lee which specialised in the production and installation of 100 ft masts and another named RT Aerials run by John Theakston which specialised in the sale of telecom aerials made by J Beam Engineering. Both companies occupied neighbouring factories.
Entry into the professional market brought a new set of competitors
and one in particular a firm called GSV resented our inroads into their market. They made a range of VHF Telecommunication aerials which were heavily over engineered and very expensive. The J Beam range offered all their quality, equal performance at half the weight and half the price.
One day to my surprise I received a phone call from Mr Smith the MD of GSV suggesting that we should meet to talk things over. The proposition
was to join forces as equal partners and form a new company called Associated Aerials, which we eventually decided to do. This was the worst decision I have ever made and things began to go wrong from that moment. It was as if a hoodoo was suddenly present over the companies.
GSV was based in Strood Kent at quite a small factory. Their turnover was low and previous profitability high because they had never had any competition. I spent a lot of time commuting between Northampton and Strood, liaising between the two arms of the company. The Smiths wanted us to move to Kent and we wanted them to move to Northampton where everything was happening.
Things began to go wrong generally, we had diversified into making small fibre glass boats and this was definitely unprofitable, although a lot of fun. My first time at the controls of a fast boat gave me tremendous
pleasure and was the beginning of a long line of boat ownership.
The test range was on the roof of the factory at Westonia and involved the use of a 100ft. tower. During a board meeting in Strood I heard to my horror that one of our best engineers the brother of John Theakston had fallen from the tower to his death. He had developed a habit, much against strong advice of descending the tower by sliding down the ladder with his feet
gripping the outside of the ladder for control. Unfortunately a ladder mounting strut dislodged his feet and he fell the full 100ft.
It had become the practice to hold a factory party at Christmas and here another tragedy occurred when the wife of my manager of J Beam Engineering John Neale suffered a medical problem and died on the
dance floor. Poor John never really recovered from that and eventually drove his car into a tree at 70mph with the inevitable consequence.
Further problems arose with a company we had started in Southern Ireland called J Beam Ireland. Not only did they make aerials but they had diversified into the marketing of "Maruman" lighters which were made in Japan. The design of the lighter was quite attractive and was after my own heart, requiring minimum tooling. I noted when we visited Japan to set the deal up that production was spread out around Tokio to small firms operating in virtual garden sheds each manufacturing one or
two components, and all with simple circular lathe turned tooling, and small hand operated machines.
The Japanese always insisted on money before delivery and this involved finance from Irish banks. The project was not successful, largely due to the Irish mentality, which basically is live for today and don't worry about tomorrow.
I used to commute to Dublin every Monday from Birmingham airport, do the cash flow, sort the bank out, leave that night with all well , only to be back the next Monday to do it all over again. To cut a long story short this resulted in an Irish bank commitment of some £80000. As if we hadn't enough problems.
It was not a happy time, to say the least, Incompatibilities in outlook with the Smiths at GSV proved to be impossible to resolve, they did not know the meaning of the word competition and I had been brought up to it the hard way. In addition their chief engineer Burgess was a dedicated theoretical man whereas I was an equally dedicated practical man. We did not see eye to eye on any aerial subject. J.Beam was going down hill fast as a result.
During a particularly acrimonious Board meeting in Strood I decided that I had had enough and announced my intention of pulling J Beam out, and walked out of the meeting. I well remember the ride home from Strood that night, it was dark, wet, and windy.
This resulted in the complete breakup of the partnerships also and the money had to be found to buy out the Gunn brothers and Jim Robinson, his brother Frank had pulled out long ago, preferring to run his Radio & TV business.
I was now on my own with considerable debts and commitments, but above all a loyal staff. I remember calling the department heads
together in my office on crunch day and telling them all about it including the black financial position. The response brings a lump to my throat even now, they were quite wonderful. We had to sell our lovely purpose
built factory at Westonia and move to smaller premises at Rothersthorpe Road and in effect start again.
Money rather than R&D became uppermost in my mind. I had never really known how the companies were doing until the auditors produced their figures each year, being able to pay the bills was enough. This had to change and I dragged up my school lessons on accounting, read a few books and instituted a strict system of Budgetary control. Ken Tibbetts my accountant, another J Beam stalwart had to produce details each month of bank balances, turnover, stock changes, wages, overheads etc of all the companies. These I entered into a fat red book which I personally kept and was able to know each month exactly how we were doing.
One celebration day much later was when the magic million pounds of turnover came up in the book. The comparison between my figures and the audited accounts at the end of the year was never very far different.
I still have that book and it makes interesting reading. The thought still arises as to how easy it would have been with a modern computer program.
We managed to turn the corner and J Beam became one of the big
four aerial manufacturers, Antiference, Belling Lee and Aerialite. I remember Hargreaves MD of Aerialite visiting me once in my office with a view to a take over. I was not interested but he called me an entrepreneur which I thought at the time was an insult until I looked up the meaning of the word. The 4 manufacturers used to send their highly confidential monthly sales figures to the trade association the RECMF who collated them and sent back to each of us the total figures for the industry. Individual figures were of course jealously guarded, particularly by Antiference with whom I was at daggers drawn.
I always smile that I had an arrangement with Hargreaves of Aerialite to swap our individual figures, but I also had a similar arrangement
with Eddie Lee of Belling Lee which neither of them knew about. Thus I knew Aerialite's figures and Belling Lee and my own, also the total. Hence I knew the Antiference figures. It was very satisfying to know that we were beating them, and were in fact the largest of the four.
Television was for the first time coming to South Africa and we formed a company in Johanesburg to manufacture TV aerials in partnership with a firm who were making TV sets. Unfortunately the other UK TV aerial manufacturers got in on the act and competition on price ruined
profitability there. The only advantage was some rather nice cruises on the Windsor Castle to S.Africa to look after the new company.
I became chairman of the TV aerial committee called Panel K in the RECMF (Radio & Electrical Component Manufacturers). UHF colour TV was now imminent and although the aerial manufacturers were bitterly fighting commercially we did manage to have sensible technical co-operation and the UHF band planning system was born. I had to convince them that you could cover 4 TV channels with one multi element Yagi at UHF, whereupon Belling Lee came up with the proposition to split the band into groups A,B,C, & D. This did put a little common sense into production of UHF TV aerials, but competition remained fierce. I was also on the technical panel of BREMA (British Radio and Electrical Manufacturers). This was interesting as our main task was planning the future of television in the UK, including the changeover to 625 line colour and the problems of multistandard TV sets during the transition. No transistors then, one multi standard set using valves was known as the "Hot Box" and was totally unreliable..
Price as always was the name of the game in the TV aerial field and pressure from my sales force challenged my policy of only the best for J Beam. We had always used stainless steel for all non aluminium fittings and looking at the costings I realised how much stainless was costing us. We changed to plated and sherardised steel to save money. That was a decision I always regretted and I would never do it again.
Quality was our watchword and I should have sacked the sales force and taken on people who could sell on quality not just on price.
To my surprise one day I received a call from Jimmy Woods the marketing director of Antiference one of my greatest competitors. They were apparently having problems as a result of a take over and he wanted out. After a few clandestine meetings at a cafe half way down the M1 I appointed him as my Marketing Director. Jimmy Woods or "Timber" as we used to call him, knew his job. I remember him
seizing onto the new design of aerial I had produced from a development of the skeleton slot which had 2dB more gain than a standard dipole type."What's that in percentage he said?" "about 68%" I said and that
became the advertising slogan -68% more gain. Looking at the prototype model on my desk he said, "when can I have it for sale". I said 6 weeks to full production. That really shook him coming from the drawing board driven environment of Antiference. He went home that night and came up with a full advertising campaign, together with the name for the aerial "The Parabeam". We had a system then of marketing which involved me writing a technical article on a new aerial in the trade papers and him producing the appropriate adverts in the same issue. The Parabeam was patented and also another design called the
Multibeam. We made those aerials too well, they are still on the chimneys to this day some 30 years later.
We had by this time a full drawing office and resulting from Timber joining us we also took on the chief draughtsman and designer of Antiference. This should have been an advantage in knowing their secrets but I still have a feeling that there was some two way traffic in the pub at night, and they knew some of ours.
Timber knew many people in industry and one of his contacts was a firm of brass tube makers. They had a surplus tube mill, which could make welded aluminium tube from strip. A giant machine necessitating a factory in its own right. Timber also knew an experienced man in this field called Forbes A'Brassard who not only knew all about operating the machine, but had useful contacts on the sales side. We visited the
company with the tube mill and arranged a leasing contract at £8000 per year, which was an absolute bargain for a machine costing hundreds of thousands of pounds new. The factory next door became vacant.
We had the premises, the man to run things, and a good deal on the mill, everything appeared to be slotting into place. The major decision which was mine alone was yes or no. I agonised over that one, thinking of the past problems and finally said yes lets do it. So often in industry, a major decision that can make or break a company rests on one person, and the older one gets, the more difficult it becomes to make the right decision.
Beam Tubes was formed, the tube mill installed and we got it running. We went to Germany to view an operating mill and learnt some useful tips, in particular how to polish the tube at the same time as we produced it. This enabled us to produce very high quality tube with no sign of the welded join, either externally or internally.
The weld was accomplished by induction welding using a water cooled copper coil around the tube which induced a continuous arc at the point where the strip edges were brought together by the rollers to form the tube.
Later when the business was going well, It was somewhat satisfying to talk to British Aluminium as an equal in the tube business and I reminded them of the time when we first started and they rationed me to quite a small amount of tube. We actually came quite close to taking them over. The mill produced tube at the rate of some 300 ft. a minute with a flying shear to chop it into suitable lengths without stopping the machine. The thought of that shear failing with tube coming off at that speed worried me always, one thought of tube running down the gutters of Northampton streets before anyone could get to the Stop button.
Forbes a Brassard was another genius who did a wonderful job for us but eventually moved on to fresh fields. He did however appoint a successor before leaving named Langley a very competent man who is running a much enlarged Beam Tubes to this day.
A major problem with the TV aerial business was the seasonal nature of the trade. All the business was done in the winter, we always rubbed our hands with glee when we had a nice big gale. Nobody was interested in TV during the summer, and it was essential to diversify. This time we did it properly - no wild excursions into boats. We were making other products that used aluminium tube, such as folding tray tables
and clothes driers, in fact anything made of aluminium tube. A new company called J Beam Sales was formed to specialise in this side of the business.
Resulting from "Timber's" contacts we were into the mail order special
offer business with the large womens' magazines. This involved a commitment to have available an agreed number of items when the offer broke, so that they could guarantee delivery, in one case 20,000 tray tables.
This involved organising of temporary capital from the bank and delivery of stocks from suppliers, my buyer Jock Milne used to go scatty. The only trouble with this offer was that it went to 80,000 tables, not 20000.
That really did call on the loyalty of my employees, we had to go to a 3 shift system operating 24 hours a day and importing labour from Rugby by train. I remember a plaintive phone call from Euston one morning, -
they had got on the main line train that did not stop at Northampton. I did learn from this type of business the mysteries of cash flow tables and how to deal with bank managers, accepting of course that they are very
good at lending money when you don't really need it, and very uncooperative when you do need it. Another problem with large contracts was looking after the buyer, but I better not go into that.
Marketing was the essential here and I remember in particular a rather nice tray table we later produced which cost about £1 to make but cost nearly £2 for the box and illustrations.
We were now making money again in all departments, and once again planning a move to larger premises, another purpose built factory with space for a decent aerial range at Moulton Park a new industrial estate to the east of Northampton. The companies had never had any capital injection, all expansion was financed from cash flow. They had in fact generated capital which had been distributed to the erstwhile partners. At no time did any of the 5 partners put any capital into the business, but they eventually took a great deal out as I found to my cost when I bought them all out. This was now changing, things were getting really large, we were exporting aerials to all parts of the world and the name had to be changed to JAYBEAM as we could never get anyone abroad to understand our name and we were constantly being asked for Mr Beam.
Beam Tubes was very profitable but an immense user of capital in stocks of raw materials and finished product. The new factory had to be paid for and lack of capital was becoming a problem.
I investigated going public but the track record was not yet long enough to allow this. We were now employing some 200 people and I found I was driving a great juggernaut with very little opportunity to get into the toolroom and the lab, my real loves.
An offer arose from a Public Company Jones Stroud who were in the electrical insulation and weaving trade, to buy the companies and reluctantly I agreed. The contract involved me acting as consultant for a while but this of course did not work when I could see things needing to be done and was not in the position to get them done.
The question arises - Would I have done anything different with hindsight?
1. Marketing falls into two categories - Quality and Price.
It is very easy to fall between the two. I should never have sacrificed quality for price.
2. I should never have had any business dealings with the Irish. They are lovely people, but totally without a conscience in business. All is forgiven in the confessional !
3. I should have been a great deal more ruthless in business dealings, but then - would I have slept well at nights?
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