When I were a lad my first proper job, in 1984, was at Marconi on Doddington Road in Lincoln and Dave Hopkins and I used to nip home to his place at midday for a spot of lunch. Things were pretty easy going in those days and lunch wasn’t typically an hour. We would pop to the Birchwood to buy some fresh crusty bread from the bakers together with a bit of ham and maybe some cheese and swing by his place to eat it.
Hopkins was a dab hand at making tea and I was happy to be the good guest and wait whilst he warmed the pot and made a proper cuppa. Dave was more conscientious than I was and was usually the one to call time and drive us back to the factory.
There used to be a pub on the Birchwood called The Wildlife and on Friday afternoons we would repair there for a few pints, often not returning until 3pm at which time we would go straight to the canteen for afternoon tea. It wasn’t much of a pub but we were fresh out of college and our standards weren’t that high.
They were pretty halcyon, those early days at Marconi. The company took on around 50 graduates over a two year period and it was a happy go lucky environment with almost every night being a party or a night out in the pub somewhere or another.
The Wildlife was the venue for one of the more memorable activities of the Marconi days which was “star stiff”. Star stiff was a competition whereby 200 celebrities, selected for their likelihood of keeling over and dying over the following twelve months were divided up into 20 “stiff portfolios” of ten names. Twenty engineers from Marconi took part, each carrying one stiff portfolio.
The names of the celebrities were contributed by all the contestants and a computer programme was written to randomly allocate the celebrities across all the portfolios. Each person had a seed which was a celeb highly likely to die over the year of the competition. The seeds were usually made up of Formula One racing drivers, which in those days was a far more dangerous sport than it is today, rocks stars known for their high living and drug abuse, and other famous people thought to be already at the edge of the abyss.
We would all gather on a day in July in the pub and eagerly wait to see who the computer had allocated us for our stiff portfolios. As I said the competition lasted twelve months. The deal was of one of the names on your stiff portfolio died you were given a pound by each of the other contestants. This may sound a little macabre but in reality if a particular celebrity looked like popping off you might have one person willing him or her to die but nineteen people doing the exact opposite and willing them a long and happy continuation of life.
The competition made for some tense moments. Salvador Dali was burned in a house fire but it took him months to actually die. Richard Burton actually went and died the day after the twelve months was up. Jim Patterson, who had him in his portfolio was gutted. Nineteen pounds was a reasonable wodge in those days when a pint probably cost 50 or 60 pence. Richard Burton, being known for his fondness of the sauce, was almost certainly a seed. I don’t think any of the racing drivers died during the competition.
When the twelve months were up we would reconvene in The Wildlife, replace the deceased with new prospects and start again with a totally new random allocation of celebrities.
After three of four years the original gang at Marconi started to focus on their careers and went their separate ways. Life was never the same again though I do look back very fondly at what might be called the star stiff days.