I went to see my cousin and godfather, L Graham Browne ‒ ‘Uncle Bill’ ‒ in the Birmingham office of his ad agency, to ask him to give me a job. I was nineteen, in awe of him, and fundamentally unemployable in the opinion of both me and my father.
‘You need to leave home,’ he told me. ‘Go to London. If you
really want to work in advertising, I’ll give you the addresses of the leading
agencies there. You’ll need to apply for the mailroom.’
A few weeks later I found myself in an interview with the
head of traffic control at J Walter Thompson in Berkeley Square, Harry Garnell.
It seemed to be going quite well.
‘Do you have any questions?’ he asked me.
‘What do you particularly have to have, to be successful in
advertising?’ I enquired.
‘Well, you need more than anything to have a butterfly
mind,’ he responded, ‘able to shift from one thing to another in an instant.’
How right he was.
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