JBS

I never saw him angry but once. And that may be simply a false memory, based on a lingering (unmerited) feeling of guilt over a missing briefcase.

The reference to "a missing briefcase" refers to an occasion when a travel report I wrote on my visit to West Africa so excited Jim Sherwood that nothing would suffice save that he join me for the next trip. The good news was that we travelled first class KLM. There was no other good news. He was so discomfited by conditions at Ikeja Airport (Lagos) that he placed his brief case on the floor and promptly forgot about it. I was occupied in checking that all our baggage was safely collected and stored in a taxi. It did not occur to me to check for his brief case, since the assumption had to be that he continued to carry it himself.

When the taxi arrived at our hotel, Jim Sherwood could not find his brief case and wanted to know what I had done with it. You don't tell the Head Honcho of your Company that it was his business to look after his own briefcase, although I came as close as I could to doing so without risking my career. We immediately returned to the airport but, of course, found nothing. For the best part of two days I suffered his continual panic attacks as he discovered more and more missing items that were essential to his comfort.

On the point of taking off for a premature return to London, he received a phone call from the KLM airport station manager to say that they had found a briefcase in their office that apparently belonged to him. The station master's wife had seen it on the floor of the arrival lounge and had placed it in the office for safe-keeping.

For the remainder of my service in Sea Containers I was never allowed to forget the fact that "Joe Sinclair lost the President's bag"!

In 1965, having returned from three years in Switzerland, then a traumatic six months working for an amoral trailer manufacturer out of his West End office/apartment/"knocking shop", and a three-month temporary stint at Bedford College in Regent's Park (all of which are documented elsewhere in this chronicle¹), I was seriously seeking a full-time job.

By a happy chance, my friend Sasha Lyons (c.f.) had just been asked by a contact in the travel industry if he knew of anyone who might be available for a job in a new industry that was being promoted by an American entrepreneur. Sasha immediately thought of me. I went to meet his contact, a man named Ken Holmes who worked for a conglomerate called Shipping and Industrial Holdings (SIH), numbering amongst their companies the large travel agency Thomson's Tours and a forwarding agency called Alltransport Ltd. The SIH group were being asked to finance and support the introduction of a newly developed freight product called the ISO container. Did I know anything about the product?

Of course I did! I was an expert! In those days anyone who knew how to open a can of beans could safely describe himself as a container expert. And I had a further credential. One of the companies I had represented in Switzerland was Cravens Homalloy, a manufacturer of vehicle bodywork. They had recently started building these mysterious ISO freight containers in he UK. ("Say no more, squire. . . nudge, nudge".) Ken Holmes was convinced.

I would have to attend a meeting the following week at which would be present Ken Holmes accompanied by the chairman of Alltransport Ltd., someone representing a Finnish stevedoring company Nordström Oy, and the American, whose name was James Sherwood. The project on the table was a new shipping service that would comprise the containers of Mr Sherwood's company, the name of which was Sea Containers Ltd, the shipping experience of the Nordström company, who had been running roll-on/roll-off container services between Finland and Sweden, and the marketing strength of Alltransport Ltd. The container shipping line thus formed would be the first short-sea container service in Europe. It would be named Containerships. My job would be that of London-based sales liaison with a Finn named Veli Nordström. It sounded very exciting. And I had no hesitation in agreeing, even before I had negotiated salary and other considerations which, as it transpired, were more than reasonable.

Thus began my longest period of single employment, albeit with different paymasters. I was first on the payroll of Alltransport, then that of Sea Containers, finally that of Containerships. The story behind these changes make a fascinating history of the growth and development of the Container Revolution. Now, more than half-a-century later, in retirement from full-time employment, I am a pensioner of Sea Containers, but continue to draw a salary from Containerships. And the background to this somewhat bizarre situation, the peripheral stuff, is described elsewhere².

And the photograph displayed here was taken on December 20, 2018 at the London home of Jim Sherwood, when having been invited to lunch with him and his delightful wife Shirley, we spent most of the time trying to recollect names and incidents from the past. Alas, the majority of the names that had shared Sea Containers' earliest London premises in Old Jewry with us no longer shared even the mortal coil. We could recall no more than four others, and were not totally sure of one of them ³. It is more than salutary to think that 52 years have passed since those days, marked by the picture at the head of this page, and the picture taken yesterday. [Click on the thumbnail for a full size view]