MY LIFE AT THE OPERA: An Autobiography
PART TWO : 1955 – 1989
By Peter M. Scott
MY LIFE AT THE OPERA: an Autobiography
PART TWO : 1955 - 1989
Chapter One: 1955 - 1971
By resigning from my post as a Superintendent Radiographer to become a sales representative with a pharmaceutical company, I had taken an enormous step. The disparities between the career I was forsaking and the one I was embracing could hardly have been greater. Since leaving school, I had been playing a vital role in the community as a member of an expert team in a well-equipped workplace, to which I made my way every day to find my work there, waiting to be done. But, in no way could the activities of a medical rep(resentitive) be regarded as making such a contribution to the workings of society. If all the medical reps in the country were one day to stay at home, who would notice? who would suffer? who would complain? Only their employers, when they found out. My new job wouldn't even exist until I had created it, and I would be working quite alone in an unwelcoming environment, encountering daily discouragement. I didn't realise this at first, of course, but I soon worked it out, during the first difficult months of my apprenticeship, and, what is more important, I realised that, if I was to survive, I had to come to terms with the reality of my situation, embrace it, and never look back.
The name of my new firm was Upjohn Ltd, and its headquarters were in Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA. It had been founded, in the late 19th century, by a Dr Upjohn of Quaker stock, and some of his descendants were still active in the firm when I joined. The firm's motto was “Keep the Quality Up” and its reputation in the USA was of the highest order. Some of its OTC (over-the-counter) lines were household names, selling well, and its range of exclusive 'ethicals' (medicines available only on a doctor's prescription) were widely prescribed by American doctors. My task would be to recreate this profitable state of affairs in Huddersfield, Halifax, Wakefield, Dewsbury, Batley, Cleckheaton, Heckmondwyke, and even distant Todmorden. How was this to be done?
Since the only way of creating a demand for my wares was to persuade members of the medical profession to prescribe them, the first part of my job was to gain access to as many doctors as possible on a daily basis, starting with the General Practitioners (GPs). Under the British National Health Service, everyone living legally in the UK was entitled to register with a GP of their choice, for which the doctor would then receive an annual 'capitation fee' whether his services were called upon or not. In those days, the vast majority of GPs were male, and most of them worked alone; there were occasional partnerships, but very few group practices.
If you wished to consult your GP, you went along to his daily 'surgery', which was usually held in his own home, where a waiting room and a consulting room had been set aside for the purpose (although some doctors held 'call surgeries' in rented premises in inner city suburbs or outlying villages), and, as there were no appointment systems, and very few GPs employed receptionists, if you wished to consult the doctor, you simply sat in the waiting room during surgery hours, waiting your turn to go in to his consulting room. And, surprising as it may seem, it was accepted practice for medical reps who wished to see the doctor to do the same.
Even more surprising, perhaps, was the fact that, while not actively encouraging it, very few GPs objected to this intrusion. In those days, however, most of these surgeries were held between 8.30 and 10.30am, lasting, in some cases, only an hour, and careful forward planning was required to identify clusters of surgeries at which it might be possible to confront a worthwhile number of prescribers in the time available. Also required was an early start, to be on the doorstep of the first surgery when the door was opened, followed by a frantic driving around the streets to access as many of the others as possible, and get into the last one before the door was closed. This meant that the bulk of my day's work would be done by 11am, by which time, I could hope to have seen at least four of the six doctors that were my daily target.
Fortunately, there were a few late morning 'call surgeries', and a small number of afternoon surgeries, usually between 2 and 3pm, to be picked off at a more leisurely pace. There were also the local pharmacists to be visited, in order to brief them about the drugs promoted to the doctors, and prepare them for the impending demand(!), and, once the GPs had been taken care of, I could turn my attention to the local hospitals, where I might hope to gain access to those consultants (and their registrars) who specialised in the conditions which my drugs were designed to treat, and whose use of them would carry great weight with the local GPs. Obviously, making these calls was absorbing work, and of vital importance to success, but it was all too easy to become so involved in clocking up the visits that the purpose of the visits was given shorter shrift than it deserved, because the most important part of the job could not be done until the rep was face to face with the doctor.
What was required, then, was a different set of skills, although planning was still involved, since this was to be a 'planned presentation', using a variety of techniques to give proper weight to every persuasive detail. We actually called it, in fact, 'the detail', and, in the USA, medical reps were referred to as 'detailmen' [I recently discovered that, in Italy, they were called 'informers'], and the GPs accepted our intrusions because the drug revolution was proceeding at such a pace, and so few of them had the time and/or the inclination to keep abreast of it by reading medical journals, that we reps had become virtually indispensable as a source of information about new developments. Nor could it be denied that the appearance round the door of the cheerful face of a medical rep could come as a welcome change from those of the sad sufferers who had preceded him. But, there would always be an acute awareness of the patients waiting outside, and the length of time granted would depend entirely on the amount of interest generated, but would rarely exceed the amount expended on the average patient, the optimum being about fifteen minutes.
So, the principal constraint on the detail was time, but, in spite of the pressures bearing down upon him, it was important for the rep to seem completely relaxed, exuding nothing but respectful bonhomie, and deliver his lines, in spite of knowing them off by heart, at a measured pace, as if minting the words afresh for the occasion. This took some doing, and the ability to give such a performance and repeat it several times a day with minor variations could only be acquired by, first, overcoming the urge to get the message across as succinctly as possible before dashing off to the next call, and, second, listening to the words as if through the ears of the audience, observing their reactions, and adapting to them appropriately. These were the techniques of public speaking, of course, and, along with their acquisition came a growing confidence that nothing could happen to me during an interview that I did not have the words available to turn to my advantage. In becoming both barrister and Thespian, I began to revel in my role, and my enjoyment of it was reflected in my sales figures.
I could not have achieved the level of expertise I eventually did without the help I was given by the firm. A lengthy induction course at a good hotel in London was followed by on-the-job training by an experienced supervisor (Frank), who assured me that he would not leave me to fend for myself until I asked him to do so; after that, frequent sales conferences, local and national, exchanging ideas with fellow reps, and acquiring fresh product information, while being subjected to little of the exhortation popularly believed to be a feature of such occasions. The accent was always on information and the techniques of persuasion. The firm took out subscriptions in my name for the British Medical Journal, the Lancet and the Practitioner, sparing no expense in its efforts to provide me with the ammunition I needed to improve my sales performance.
With the blossoming of my new career, by the time our daughter, Helen, was born in May 1956, Anne and I had decided that, much as we loved our dear little semi-semi-bungalow, we needed a bigger and more conveniently situated family home. Since there was nothing now to keep us in Keighley, and most of our friends and family lived in and around Bradford, we began house-hunting in that direction, and soon found what we were looking for in the historic village of Calverley (pronounced Carveley but spelt Carverlei in the Domesday Book), lying roughly midway between Bradford and Leeds. An estate of about 200 houses was being built on a greenfield site adjoining the old village, with its ancient church, schools, shops, recreation park, large wool mill and two pubs, just off the main Leeds to Skipton Road at the narrowest point in the famous Aire Gap, and, after inspecting a 'Show House', we put a deposit on a large three-bedroomed semi, and moved in as soon as it was completed. We sold our bungalow, for little more than we gave for it, to the daughter of a neighbour who was about to get married and came knocking on the door when she heard that we were planning to sell. Our new home cost 2000 pounds and came with a 95% mortgage.
Moving into a brand new house on a new estate proved to be a memorable experience. The houses were well-designed and soundly built, but the speed with which they were being thrown up to satisfy the demand, and meet the promised deadlines, meant that the finish on them left something to be desired, [eg. lighting a fire in the lounge fireplace might produce smoke in the bedroom above] and, when complaining to the builder about these problems, we found ourselves comparing notes with our new neighbours, most of whom were couples of our own age with young families, and we were soon on friendly terms with everybody in the street - founder members, as it were, of an interactive social club, from which, when the houses changed hands, new arrivals would find themselves excluded. And ten years later when we moved into another brand new house in a new estate in Hampshire, we encountered the very same phenomenon.
From day one, our life in Calverley was filled to overflowing with activities of various kinds. Helen was only six months old when we moved in, still needing plenty of attention, and, although we had two fit and willing grandmas living barely a mile away (in different directions), we were reluctant to have her babysat until she was older. This put limits on our social life at first, but only as regards such things as dining out, dancing, and theatregoing, when invited out to friends or neighbours we could take Helen with us in a 'carrycot', which she quite enjoyed. And there was much to do on “the property”. These were the days when houses were so easy to sell that builders had little need to tempt prospective buyers with “presentational” trimmings of any kind. Inside the house the walls were simply colour-washed, and the woodwork was painted a uniform cream, so every room was waiting to be redecorated to our own taste. No problem there. We had the DIY skills. The gardens, front and back, were more of a challenge. Beneath the thin layer of cosmetic topsoil laid by the builder, there was a jumble of builder's rubble waiting to be unearthed and carted away before the ground could be prepared for the lawns, flowerbeds, paths, patios and rockeries which were to ornament our new lifestyle. I was also obliged to erect a prefabricated garage for the Company Car, since a builder-built garage was seen as such an expensive luxury, that there were only a couple of them on the whole estate.
Our friends Frank and Joyce were now closer at hand, of course, and we began to develop a relationship that was to last us for the rest of our lives with friends Gerry and Jessie, who were now married and living with Gerry's parents in their big Edwardian terrace house, which looked out, from the rear (on a smog-free day), over the municipal golf course, Myra Shay, Hanson School, and the rest of Bradford, and, from the front, at the municipal park opposite. The house had now been converted into two large flats, Gerry and Jessie occupying the first floor and Gerry's parents the ground floor. There were spacious cellars and attics below and above, with which, as we shall see, I was soon to become familiar .
Surprising as it may seem, my eccentric friend, Bob, was already a married father and living nearby, having wed the charming Margaret after inadvertently getting her pregnant during a typically tentative relationship. She seemed to be just as unworldly as he was, but wonderfully sweet-natured and even-tempered, looking at life through lovely, dreamy eyes, as if trying to make sense of it, but she was a fully-qualified nurse and midwife whose services had been much in demand before her marriage, and would be again, once her children had grown up. They lived in a smaller, but still substantial, terrace house a couple of hundred yards away from Gerry and Jessie, on the other side of the road, enjoying the same view over the golf course from the front that Gerry's parents' house had from the back. Our relationship with both these couples blossomed vigorously during our time in Calverley, bearing memorable fruit.
Gerry was the eldest of three brothers, all of whom had attended my old school, but only the middle one, Tony, as a contemporary of mine, and he had the misfortune to be in the 'A' stream – considered to be a bunch of boring swots by those of us who were lucky enough to be in the 'B' stream – so I only knew him by sight. The three of them had grown up together enjoying the sort of sibling rivalry from which respect and affection are not entirely excluded, but rarely made explicit. On the way, they had developed a number of ingenious activities of a competitive nature for their mutual enjoyment, some of which they liked to share with their friends at an annual Christmas Party. The first of these parties Anne and I attended, was unlike any other party we had ever experienced. There was the usual food and drink, of course, but we were only allowed to consume them during the brief intervals between a series of organised party games, some of a quite boisterous nature, in which we were expected to participate from the moment we arrived and were handed, not an aperitif, but the first clue in a treasure hunt which was to take us on an introductory tour of the house, only Gerry's parents' quarters being out of bounds.
In attendance were Gerry and Jessie, of course, Tony and his wife Pat (the youngest brother, John, was now living in the USA), Bob and Margaret, and three or four other couples, friends of theirs, most of whom were schoolteachers or similar, and knew that they were not there to stand around chatting and flirting, but to make fools of themselves in various ways, playing alternate sitting-down games and running-around games. A typical sitting-down game involved forming a circle round a huge hamper full of old clothes, many of which were items of outsize lady's underwear, and passing round some object until the music stopped and the person left holding it was obliged to open the basket, dip into it (without looking), extract an item and put it on. Some of the sitting-down games were more intellectually demanding, but not by much. The high spot of the evening was a running-around game called 'Paper aeroplanes' for which a large number of folded paper darts had been prepared in advance. The game had a 'fox and hounds' format requiring four 'foxes' to be given six darts each and allowed to go away and hide in some remote corner of the house before being searched for and hunted down by the remaining 'hounds' armed with two darts each. Anyone struck with a dart was 'dead'. Given the size of the house, and the extent of its attics and cellars (and the amount of cheating going on) the game could last quite a long time and be quite exhausting. Needless to say, Anne and I came away from that first party with a different understanding of the word 'party' from the one we had arrived with, and happy to repeat the experience whenever the opportunity presented itself.
Another revelation was that Bob and Gerry were founder-members of a rather unusual Debating Society, which, although it had existed for several years, meeting once a fortnight, boasted, when I joined it, only three regularly attending members. It was called 'The Taverners' because it met in a pub called 'The Barrack Tavern” which stood at the crossroads at the corner of the municipal park, only a short walk from Bob and Gerry's homes, and was, in fact, their 'local'. [There had actually been a military barracks across the road from the pub when I was a lad, but it had long since been replaced by an estate of small semis.] Appreciative, no doubt, of their regular patronage (and the amount of beer that was consumed per head at the meetings), the landlord had granted them the exclusive use of a small, inaptly named, 'snug', in the corner of the taproom bar, for their Tuesday evening meetings. The third founder-member of The Taverners was Albert, a little older (and much balder) than Bob and Gerry, but also an Old Hansonian, and 'something in the city' (of Bradford, of course) who often arrived sporting a bowler hat and wearing pinstripe trousers. I applied to join The Taverners, having no previous experience of formal debating, and not knowing what to expect, but it turned out to be, not only a good move, but a good career move, too.