Class

In 1979 I went to work at J. Walter Thompson, then the World's biggest Advertising agency. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine that I would outlive it.

On May 3rd 1979 Margret Thatcher led her Conservative And Unionist Party into government in Britain with a majority of forty-four. Scotland returned twenty-two Conservative MPs and the Scottish National Party lost nine of its eleven seats. 

It would be eighteen years before Britain voted Labour again.

Four weeks later I graduated in Law from Aberdeen University and moved to London to start my working life at Lexington International Public Relations, part of J. Walter Thompson, the largest advertising agency in Britain and part of the largest advertising agency network in the world. 

It was a consolation prize. I had not been selected for the graduate training programme of the agency itself. I had not been to the right university or the right school. Nor had my father, or his father, who you will remember was a motor mechanic in Troon.

It would be absurd to say that Scotland did not have its own rigidly enforced class system. I was brought up in a comfortable middle-class family. But I was educated in the same school as everyone else. At university, there were plenty of us who were the first generation of their families to be there. And there were mature students from all walks of life: policemen studying law for their Inspectors exams; and trade unionists like Alex, the communist shop steward from a Glasgow shipyard, studying English and History.

Many years later I took a Belgian Lawyer that I was then dating to meet Alex, now a retired English teacher and a nationalist, for a drink in a Glasgow pub. It was like taking a child for an afternoon out at the zoo. She being firmly of the belief that whatever you achieve in life is entirely down to how hard you work and nothing else. A perfectly understandable point of view if you have been raised in a country which has few if any, private schools and where university admission is based entirely on academic merit.

Lexington was at 38 Berkeley Square and JWT next door at 40. We shared a canteen in the form of wine bar, The Commodore, or The Posers Elbow as I liked to call it, and we often worked together for the same clients. Already the Scotsman on the make, it did not take me long to infiltrate the agency proper and be hired as a junior ‘rep’  alongside those who had survived the graduate training programme that I had been found unsuitable for.

40 Berkley Square was a wonderful place to work. Life Begins at 40 they said and it was there that my working life did. It had once been an apartment block and the office of my Director In Charge had once been Frank Sinatra’s living room and still had his fireplace. 

His secretary shared her bay overlooking the square with another who worked for the man who brought Campari to the masses. At eleven-thirty each day or a little earlier on Fridays, the rattle of the ice machine signalled the preparation of his first aperitif.

She and her colleagues were mostly young women from the home counties and the products of secretarial colleges and finishing schools where they had learned deportment by walking a straight line with a book on their head. It was the last time many of them would ever see a book, but they were people who could get you cash advances and make restaurant bills disappear. People that people like me needed to cultivate.

Cultivation sometimes became friendship and friendship occasionally something more. I had a brief and scandalous liaison with the fiancee of an Army Officer serving Queen and Country in Northern Ireland. The behaviour of a bounder and a cad, and further proof, if such was needed, that I was not a person of the right background to be somebody that you should run the risk of associating with, far less sleeping with. 

One, at least, a beautiful blonde Austrian woman with the slim build of the champion hurdler that she had been, knew better. She swept me off my feet on the dance floor at a Christmas Party vogueing to Haircut 100 and we dated for two years.

In management, a fair number of ex-military types remained on active service. I worked for one former Guards Officer whose only professional advice was: “Don’t let the troops see the officers running”.

Before industrialisation, working in an advertising agency was like your parents had gone on holiday forever and left you the keys to everything. 

Especially so at 40 Berkeley Square where parents were always an important topic of conversation. We were young and without families of our own, but it always struck me as odd that what your parents did they did and where they lived seemed to be so important.

Few of my colleagues or their parents lived in London. They had a place there during the week but they lived in Surrey or Norfolk where they went every weekend to host or to attend each others house parties. It was some time before I learned that the correct answer to the question: “Where are you going at the weekend” was not: “The Hope And Anchor” or “Camden Market”.

Eventually, I picked up enough of it to almost be able to pass myself off as one of them. Perhaps I had inherited some of my father’s tradecraft from his days in military intelligence or else a little of his gift for mimicry. A good education didn’t do any harm and Marr College sounded as if it could have been a minor public school somewhere in Dorset. 

Marr and my English mother had also left me without any particularly recognisable accent, I spoke BBC English and I had studied a little anthropology at university which also came in useful. The friendship of fellow outsiders was helpful too. As well as the Austrian there was a Norwegian woman who was a fellow escapee from Lexington International. 

She was ten years older and lived with an American Art Director who worked at another London agency They were a worldly and glamorous couple. The walls of their mansion flat in Earls Court were lined with art books. We drank Schnapps there and compared anthropological notes on the rites and rituals of the strange tribes that inhabited the jungle around us. Maybe I knew already then that London life was not the answer, but it would take me a lot longer before I finally knew that in my heart it wasn’t even the question.  

Account Representatives, who were known as Account Managers at every other agency in London, were either graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, or Durham, or St. Andrews, or Warwick or Exeter at a pinch. Or else the ex-military types that they were now replacing. Copywriters were often also graduates, Fay Weldon and Salmon Rushdie were both once copywriters. 

Art directors, unsurprisingly, came from art schools. David Bowie was briefly an art director at the unfortunately named Grey Advertising and Ray Davies was a contemporary of John Hegarty at Hornsey Art School.  

In his autobiography: ‘Life’, Keith Richards describes the well-trodden path from sixties art school to either work in an advertising agency or else to start a rock’n’ roll band. He is especially acidic about the types that would come down from London agencies to interview him and his contemporaries and I guess that in some ways he was always the Stones’ Creative Director to Mick’s LSE educated account man.

London as the eighties dawned was a wonderful place to live too. The music scene was at its post-punk high water mark and I made the most of it and then some. From The Clash at The Lyceum and Bob Marley at Crystal Palace to Roxy Music at Wembley Arena and The Kinks at The New Palace Theatre in Victoria. All via Commander Cody and The Lost Planet Airmen at the Venue, the last ever Rockpile show at Hammersmith Palais on a Sunday afternoon, and every show Elvis Costello ever played anywhere. 

Comedy, and what was known as alternative comedy, was booming. At the Comic Strip in Raymond’s Revue Bar in Soho you could see Alexi Sayle compare the likes of French and Saunders and Ade Edmonson and Rick Mayle as The Dangerous Brothers, banging metal trays on their heads and setting fire to each other long before they found fame as The Young Ones.

But it was always Arnold Brown, the odd man out among them, who never graduated to television, but whose act as the only man ever to be brought up Jewish in Glasgow: “No football team to support” of a teetotal father: “The shame as every night he was thrown into pubs and came home sober” who was always the night’s standout standup as far as I was concerned. 

I saw him several times in later years and once even tried to persuade him to record a radio commercial for The Independent. We exchanged some ideas but nothing ever came of it. He wasn’t interested in advertising, or television.

Food was getting better and not only in the restaurants where bills could be made to disappear. It was sometimes possible to eat well in music and comedy venues and even in pubs. And good food was no longer now always the same as expensive food.

Before it was finally brewed and bottled as Thatcherism, the Thatcher revolution seemed to have loosened some of the bonds of class while tightening others.

Meritocracy was the word on everyone’s lips even if to me it was still yet a faint whisper. I cannot put it any better than David Harrison, a Rowntree Macintosh Client and aristocratic Yorkshireman who I had the pleasure of working with on After Eight Wafer Thin Mints, Dairy Box and Seasonal Novelties. Over lunch at the Caprice just before I made the move from one to the other he told me: “At J. Walter Thompson, innocence is the opposite of experience, but at Saatchi & Saatchi, it is the absence of guilt”. In the event, Saatchi turned out to be much more my cup of tea. Being more Thatcherite it was more in tune with more meritocratic times and it was there that I was soon encouraged to hang up my Account Director suit and become a copywriter. 

Three years later Saatchi’s then Finance Director, Martin Sorrell, would found WPP and buy J. Walter Thomson, which he would then merge into another agency. Last week WPP announced it would be merged agin and that its name would disappear.

Had you told me in the summer of 1979 that my name would survive longer than the one over the door of 40 Berekely Square I would, of course, have thought you insane.