Flitting from flower to flower in adland

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.

 

Upstairs on the buses

A mailboy at J Walter Thompson in the mid-1960s, the biggest and poshest of advertising agents at that time, I was told about the occasion the chairman walked out of our Berkeley Square offices with a client. No taxis in sight.

“Perhaps we should walk up to Oxford Street and catch a bus,” said the Great Man. And they did. “Let’s go upstairs,” he suggested.

“Will that cost more?” enquired Nervous Client.

This was an era long before our current obsession with Consumer Insight.

Happy New Year!

The Swinging Sixties in Berkeley Square

Arriving from my provincial home town aged nineteen to take up a menial job at the biggest, most fashionable advertising agency in London, J Walter Thompson in Berkeley Square, in the Swinging Sixties was a rather daunting experience.

I’d never really encountered people like this before. Many of them seemed to be hiding the fact that they were Lord This, or the Honourable That, or Sir Somebody Other. And the ones who didn’t have that sort of pedigree carried themselves with a sense of entitlement that seemed to carry all before.

The boss of the little department that I was in was Jan. She would arrive at the office around 11am each morning, check that we, the boys, had done the morning’s rounds, and prepare herself for lunch. This was a major operation. Basically a very pretty girl, she transformed herself, with the aid of trowelfuls of make-up into a clone of Mary Quant.

And when this was done, she would pop off to Knightsbridge to lunch with some young Viscount or other.

Returning slightly before 3pm, she would go through the same ritual as in the morning – and launch herself a second time, this time upon the evening’s entertainment.

I remember it all so well. It was another world.