INTRODUCTION
HAROLD VINCENT BECK
To introduce myself, I was born in North Kensington, London, U.K. in September 1924 and brought up there with three brothers and one sister by very caring parents.
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Mother & me, 1924
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My father was a master printer and Church organist. I attended the local Oxford Gardens school and from there, aged 10, I got an L.C.C. Junior County Scholarship as well as a Free Place to the Regent Street Polytechnic School for Boys. |
Dad & offspring, 1932.
I am the gawky one on the right |
I went with the school when it was evacuated to Minehead in 1939 and joined King’s College London when it was still evacuated to much-bombed Bristol. Being deprived of music away from home led me to an interest in radio receivers and thence by natural progression to the fledgling field of electronics.
I returned with the College to its Strand site in 1943, in time for the ‘little blitzes’ and the V-bomb attacks. Asthma had an adverse effect on my education and led to my being declared unfit for military service. I persevered in obtaining a Physics degree while running a radio repair and design business and carrying out electronics research at King’s College. From graduation in 1947 my career looked successful.
Outline of ostensible career, 1947-2006
In 1947 I joined British Oxygen’s R&D unit at Morden, specialising in instrumentation. After three years, during which time I courted and married my darling Sheila, I moved to near Cambridge to take up a job as head of physics research at Cambridge Instruments. I was with the Company for six years, during which time I was active in the Anglican Church, became involved in the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) and was initiated into a Masonic lodge which was primarily for Oxbridge M.A.’s.
I then crossed from town to gown by joining the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, to head the Electronics Section and later a practical class. Through the Cavendish I also got involved with the nuclear side of Civil Defence. The M.A. degree was conferred on me and I was elected a senior member of Gonville and Caius College. In all I was twelve years in Cambridge, our three children being born there.
My next move was back to Industry, namely Marconi Instruments (M.I.) at St. Albans, Hertfordshire. Accordingly in 1962 I moved to Harpenden, an attractive town with a close-knit and lively community, half-way between St. Albans and Luton. In addition to running a research department I became active in the Institute of Physics as well as the IEE. Corporate as well as professional progress was rapid. Among other developments I became head of a Consortium of companies in a project (MATE) concerning secret Army equipment and so came into closer contact with security issues. I became well-known in the English Electric (E.E.) Group, which owned Marconi, the parent company of M.I.
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The expense account living at M.I. was very congenial and in view of hints that I would rise to the top, get knighted, etc. I suppose I was at the plumpcat stage of becoming a fatcat. The reality of my career is, however, very different from the image. I did not take kindly to the Managing Director's instruction in manipulative techniques nor to veiled communications which seemed to be standard practice in the top echelons of national life. It was also made clear by the Managing Director that I had been closely enquired into before I joined the company and that I was still under some kind of surveillance. |
Plumpcat HVB, 1964
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Because of the manipulative and intrusive atmosphere, I wished to move out of M.I. but I found my repeated efforts to get another job within the E.E. Group or outside were blocked. Conversely M.I.’s Managing Director seemed obsessed with keeping me in the instrument industry for, without my permission, he informed his opposite numbers in two other instrument companies that I would like a job with them.
Entirely unwittingly, I had become caught up in power politics within E.E. and Marconi. I seemed to be well-regarded outside M.I but inside I was subjected to quite bizarre pressures. In the context of some puzzling approaches by and about Cambridge Consultants Limited (CCL), a small high-tech enterprise in Cambridge, I decided to resign on the basis of an agreement in which the company undertook not to prevent me getting another job and in return I undertook not to take legal action against the company.
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It was at this stage that M.I.'s Managing Director said that prior to my joining his company I had been spotted by an industrialist on a visit to Cambridge and it had then taken eighteen months to 'winkle' (sic) me out of the Cavendish Laboratory
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It was also at this point that the English Electric Staff College at Dunchurch sent me the book Managerial Psychology by H. Leavitt (University of Chicago Press), which was used on one of its management courses. This marked the beginning of my understanding of what had been taking place, which is what I now call Advanced Organisational Behaviour or AOB.
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