14th April 1971

GILL HAD ANOTHER TRIP TO UK so another gap in the letters,

St Radegunal

 Graz

Austria

14/04/71

Dear Mum and Dad

Sorry I have not written for so long so I shall post this in Austria and hope it will reach you quicker than usual.

After I arrived back in Bulgaria Tony went to Berlin for another week. The car was not repaired in time for him to drive there so he went by plane. He seems to have had a good time as Greg. W. Andrew, John and Eddie from Czechoslovakia ICL were on the same course. As a result they had a grand reunion. Tony was very impressed with West Berlin. He said it had a very lively atmosphere and is a very stimulating place. He had to work very hard on the course and did not finish until 9 o clock most evenings. He did have some time for sightseeing and bought me home an LP and a new umbrella. I was lucky having the new secretary J H to show the sights of Sofia.

We got the VW out of the garage when Tony got back only to find only the first and second of the automatic gears were working. We decided to drive to Austria and have a totally new transmission installed. We took the Daf as well to make sure we had back up if we broke down on the way. We were surprised that even being limited to 40 mph we did not take too long to reach Graz. We started out Friday morning and reached Graz on Saturday at 11 am. In a way it is easier travelling at 40 as everyone overtakes you and you don’t have to worry about overtaking anyone else. The countryside was much nicer in the spring than when we drove through Yugoslavia on the way here in December. The sun has been really warm and the forsythia and almond blossom are out everywhere and all the trees are busting into fresh green leaves. In Graz we decided not to stay in the centre but to stay in the foothills of the mountains in a little village called St Radeburg. The mountain the Schokenspeil was full of springs supposed to be good for hearts and lungs so we should be healthy. We are staying in a nearly new guest house which is very luxurious but a little bit clinical. We wondered if we had straying into an up market health farm or an exclusive old people’s home for the wealthy. We do not spend much time there as we are out walking the footpaths and climbing the mountain.

The fields are bright green and covered by masses of primroses and violets whilst the woods are dotted with wood anemones and the streets lined with celandines and kingcups. Today we have walking in the hot sunshine and my face and arms are quite suntanned. As we walked along I remarked on how much you would both like it here and I wished I could sprit you both here on a magic carpet. I could just imagine mum practicing her German.

We hope the car will be ready by Friday and we should be back in Bulgaria next week. I am not sure if this week away will count as part of our holiday or not. Tony was disappointed as he planned to go to Istanbul for Easter but it is better to get the car fixed and it is very pleasant here.

The problem with the car is we have to pay for the new transmission and send the old one to Germany. The engineers will examine the transmission and then decide whether to refund us the money for the new one. So we will be hard up until it is settled,

My course in England starts on the 3^rd may but I may not be able to travel until Sunday so I will not visit until the following weekend. Tony may be coming for 2 weeks as well but we are not sure yet. I will telephone nearer the time and let you know what the plans are. I was hoping to call you at Easter but staying at a guest house rather than a hotel makes it more difficult.

I had better close now.

Give my love to Paula and David and family. I hope their decorating went well and that they have found the hole in their oil tank.

Love to Nanny- I am looking out for a birthday present in Austria.

Lots of Love

Tony and Gillian

This was the final solution to the WV automatic gearbox problems which stared in December 1970. The drive to Graz was quite appalling. It was our first experience of driving back to the West. There was a long straight two way road across the top of Yugoslavia where accidents were common. The burnt out, crumpled wrecks of the cars and lorries on the roadside acted as a macabre warning to all drivers. Whereas the Czechs always drove slowly the Yugoslavs liked to race in their old Yugo cars. I followed behind Tony in the Daf and at one point was followed by two Turkish men in an old beaten up Mercedes who flashed their lights at me. Eventually we both pulled over, the Turks stopping too. Tony got out of the VW and told them where to go in International sign language.

There was a terrible part of the journey in Yugoslavia when the main E road climbed over a mountain in a series of hairpin bends. Huge lorries would become stuck round these bends and travel so slowly up the mountain pass so that long queues developed behind them. We found on subsequent journeys that we could still make Sofia to Dover in two days if the road conditions were good.

We decided to stay outside Graz while the VW was mended and chose a plush looking B&B. The other people staying there were ancient and appeared to live there permanently. They stared at us coldly at breakfast. The room was freezing as the radiator was turned off and it took us a couple of days to find out how to adjust the heating (we were too scared to ask the forbidding owner). When we went to pay the bill in the office there was a picture of the owner’s late husband in his SS uniform on the wall and we realised why the residents and owner had been so unfriendly. It was still only 25 years after the end of the Second World War. We read a book recently about the Austrian nation during and after the war and found that all the previous Nazi and SS officers were given an amnesty four years after the Second World War. Strangely we never found any anti British feeling from the Germans we met.

28th March 1971

There is a big gap in the letters next probably some were lost and Gill went to the UK for training courses.

C/O the British embassy

Boulevard Marshal Tolbukhin

Sofia

28/03/71

Dear Mum and Dad,

As you can see I arrived safely in Sofia. It was lovely to see you all again. Tony had missed me and does not seem to be so good at looking after himself as he used to be. It must be because he has been married for too long now. Yesterday he went to Berlin for a week’s course. The correct spare part for the Volkswagen arrived from Germany and the garage is trying to mend it at this moment. Tony wants to drive to Germany in a couple of weeks when he has another course so that a Volkswagen garage can check it over and make sure everything is alright. I have just finished cleaning the Daf- it was filthy.

I have courses booked in England in May and July. The first is a one week course starting May 3^rd so I shall be home for Nanny’s birthday. I hope Dad won’t mind if his present is a week late. Tony and I both have courses starting July 5^th but in different places, Tony will be at Cookham and me in London. The following week I have a three day course so I shall probably go back on the BEA flight on Thursday 15^th July.

Our new secretary Jan .H. arrived on Thursday and she is very nice, I am pleased to have her company while Tony is away. Yesterday we went up into the mountains together after seeing Tony onto the plane. We skied, walked and had a meal in the mountain restaurant. My face got quite burnt by the sun. We have had a hectic social life lately so I shall be pleased to have a quiet weekend. Tonight I shall have dinner with Jan H. and then go to the British Embassy to see a film, a detective film this time.

I am wondering if you had a good time in Huddersfield and if Paula, David and the children went with you. I hope Paula has the baby before July so I can see it when I come home.

The weather is quite warm now and the grass is growing in the park opposite our flat, however there is still snow up in the mountains. They were having an international ski competition last time we went up there and we watched the giant slalom for a while. At the moment Sofia is very gay with lots of coloured lights everywhere, I think they are hosting a Communist party conference here next month.

Monday evening.

I have just realised I can’t live without Tony either. First the windscreen wipers on the Daf were taken off by us at the airport so no one could pinch them. I found I did not know how to put them on again and of course it rained all day. This evening I came home to find all the lights in our block of flats were off. Gradually everyone got their lights back except me. Rather than spend an evening in the dark I went to the American embassy to see a film. Mr and Mrs H from ILO came back home with me and restored my lights by screwing back a fuse which had been left out on the landing fuse box. I must talk to the flat chief tomorrow and see if there is some subtle reason for leaving me in the dark. I don’t believe I could be responsible for fusing the whole block as I was not home at the time.

Must go to bed now as it is quite late.

Lots of love

Gillian

So the Volkswagon story took another twist. We eventually got the correct spare part from Germany and the American diplomatic garage willing to fit it. They had partial success. We could drive the car but only in first and second gear!

The fact the lights were not restored to my flat after the blackout was probably a reflection of the attitude of Bulgarians towards foreigners in general. We found them a very xenophobic nation.

The training week Tony spent in West Berlin proved to be far more eventful than expected. The East German Airlines (InterFlug?) Ilyushin plane landed in East Berlin where, after a long wait in customs and passport control, people destined  for West Berlin  were eventually driven across a very drab East Berlin by coach, through a heavily guarded Berlin Wall, and into the complete contrast of a vibrant modern West Berlin. It was a very mild sunny late afternoon when, after checking into his hotel Tony found himself taking a pleasant stroll down Kurfursen dam in central Berlin. There were many people out enjoying the early evening, and Tony recalls seeing quite a few hippies sitting on the pavement edge selling trinkets, and became half aware of there being rather more police around than expected.

Amongst the traffic was an old VW Beetle carrying life sized straw effigy of a man in a suit and a placard in German with words to the effect that ‘the mayor was a pig’. The figure fell off the car nearby and someone dropped a lighted match on it. The smoke and fire soon attracted a large number of people and before long members of the crowd started chanting the placard slogan. At the same time (seemingly out of nowhere) a large number of riot police appeared on the opposite side of the street. Tony noticed several surprisingly well dressed men  (rioters or police?) with briefcases (out of which a metal tool emerged) at the back of the crowd of onlookers levering up small cube rock cobbles from the pavement. After just a few volleys of cobbles being thrown at the riot police from the back of the crowd, the police drew their batons, folded down their visors & suddenly charged and fired tear-gas towards the now substantial number of people gathered in the street. The effect of the gas was almost instantaneous as the gas canisters slid along the road & pavement towards Tony. The whole crowd started running away from the police, tears streaming & eyes burning. Extra riot police were beginning to block off side streets as more people joined the crowd of fleeing pedestrians. Tony eventually dived into a basement discotheque (think it was called the Eden Club) and took refuge for the next two hours before finding his way back to the hotel. Thankfully, it was Tony’s only ever experience of tear-gas and being swept up in a riot.

Back in Sofia it was time for Tony’s first progress meeting with the ILO computer site.  The management Training Centre was staffed by both Bulgarians and foreign UN employees/consultants. It was a large establishment carrying out various forms of management training for the whole country. The Bulgarian Director worked alongside an American UN Head of Mission. Unlike the ICC, the IT systems functioned efficiently and the progress meetings were largely routine, although Tony did note that the meetings were always attended by a quiet well suited man who didn’t seem to have any function other than keeping an eye on the Director and the UN staff. The ‘quiet man’ even accompanied the Director on a UK training visit we set up, and it was rumoured that he was actually a major in the Bulgarian Secret Service.

18th January 1971

18/01/71

Dear Mum and Dad

Thank you for the letter which took about 7 days to arrive. We had one express from our neighbours in Prague which was posted on Friday and arrived on Monday. They say they have posted to England a decanter and set of 6 glasses so don’t be surprised if they arrive on your doorstep.

I sent a long letter to Paula this evening but I know you will read it when you go to Belton next.

We have the spare part for the Volkswagen- it was bought out by someone from ICL on Saturday. It was only an oil seal worth nine shillings but it succeeded in stopping our car altogether. We are hoping we can get it working in the next couple of days.

On Saturday a whole crowd of ICLites went up the mountain and attempted to ski. We ranged from almost professionals (CM from the Russian branch of ICL who has been skiing for years) to raw beginner like us. Some of the people were quite old but still had a good style.

Peter, one of the engineers, with an RAF moustache, tweed jacket, baggy trousers and pipe (three nuns best no less) looking quite out of place on skis.

Tell Nanny I think of her every morning when I ladle her marmalade onto my toast.

The water was turned off on Sunday so we went for a drive to the dam on the river. Every bit as beautiful as Slapy dam but more remote and less crowded. I had to leave all the washing up for the whole day. It was lovely to come home this evening and find it all clean and tidy because the water had come on again and Mrs ‘do’ had done.

Tony and I are now keeping healthy probably due to the sour milk we are eating every morning. The food is not too bad and I am learning a few words of Bulgarian. Saturday evening we had the country manager and his friend for dinner and had an good evening speaking in a mixture of English, Russian, French and German.

I am asking someone to take this back to England and post for me so you should get it early next week, post strike permitting.

Lots of Love

Tony and Gillian.

The VW saga continues................................... we were always hopeful of a cure. Our faulty VW Variant car had now seized up entirely and was parked permanently outside our apartment in Sofia, unable to be towed because it was the automatic Borg Warner gear box that had locked tight. The Bulgarian repair garage thought that they could get it running again but needed a spare part that, due to the lack of hard currency, they could not obtain from VW in Germany. Using our second car it should have been a simple and pleasant excursion to drive down to the VW agent at Thessalonica in northern Greece to obtain the spare part. However, the car was on Tony’s visa and he could not leave without it. This gave us a real dilemma.

So, being quite unable to leave the country and unable to move the VW to the ‘Customs’ car park at the airport, Tony went to the British Embassy in Sofia to seek help to get his visa stamped so that we could leave the country. Mr. P. the Commercial Attachés response was typically unhelpfully, “we cannot help you, but if you still have the problem in 6 weeks time come back & see us again”. Silly us, there we were thinking our embassy might be able to help a British subject in difficulties!

Tony then went to the US Embassy and explained our problem. They immediately responded, made some phone calls and gave Tony a translator for as long as needed. Within an hour a team of men arrived at our apartment, lifted our car onto a flat-bed trailer, took the car to the Diplomatic Garage where it was locked & sealed in a large cage. We still had problems persuading the Bulgarian customs to stamp Tony’s visa. We refused to leave the office and Gill sat on a table crying which eventually did the trick. We have often wondered what on earth the British Embassy staff in Sofia thought they were there for. Thank goodness for the Americans. The new part from Greece did not work either and we had to request a part from Volskwagon in Germany so another long delay in getting the car mended!

Apart from skiing in the mountains, eating in the posh hotels and going to the cinema at the embassy we also had to work. Gill worked at the Institute of Cybernetic Construction in a huge building in the centre of Sofia. She was allocated an office which belonged to the Vice Minister for Construction with a huge desk and a sofa to sit on. The Vice Minister was almost never there except when he occasionally met with the ICL country manager Terry C.

The customer was very unhappy with ICL and their systems 4 computer. They were trying to run the Pert (Programme and Evaluation  Review Technique which is a project management tool based on critical path analysis)  package to control all their building projects including the new motorways which had just started being constructed. A lot of Gills work was sorting out problems with the PERT software which she had helped to write in the UK. The customer had reasons to be dissatisfied. System 4 was a relatively new computer based on the IBM 360 design and software production was well behind schedule. ICC had been promised a civil engineering package to manage problems like cut and fill in road design and this was being written by one man in London and was well over schedule.

The Bulgarians were adept at magnifying the software problems to get more free support and hardware out of ICL and the sales people from ICL did not have the detailed knowledge to refute what they said. This was the first thing that had to be sorted when we arrived. Gill implemented a complaints control system, where any error in software was logged by Gill and agreed with the ICC staff. The form was then used to record actions taken by ICL and the customer and the results of those actions.  ICC managers had to sign off when they agreed the problem had been satisfactorily solved. Gill came to the meetings with the ICL salesmen and was able to correct the statements by the Fox and the Bear when they said ‘none of your software works’.

We were reliant on the telex system to alert ICL UK about software faults and getting software patches to correct errors.  We always dreaded a new version of the operating system as they always led to teething problems.  (It is the same today with new versions of Window).  Gill was often cajoling ICL visitors to take core dumps back to the UK but by now Gill was adept at reading core dumps herself. The software did gradually improve and the customer stopped shouting at us over the conference table and banging their fists on the table. Not the most stress free jobs for Gill now aged 26. Working for ones husband did not always help as we would lie in bed at night and discuss COBOL problems or how to deal with one of our awkward customers.

10th January 1971

C/O ICL

British embassy

Boulevard Marshal

Tolbukhin

Sofia

10/01/71

I have borrowed the office typewriter in the hope it makes my letter more readable but I know my typing is so bad it will not help much. I am fully recovered from my stomach bug. I felt a fraud only working three days in my first week. So far work has been quite interesting mainly because we have several people from England on a short visit and I have been helping them. Tony has been very busy organising these visits and waiting for people to arrive at the airport as well as doing his ordinary work.

We have been out a few times this week; once for a meal at the Mekana- Veal roasted on a skewer washed down with wine. There was a whole crowd from ICL and they taught us liar dice which is like the card game ‘cheat’ only played with dice. We only played for fun not money. Last night we went to a film show at the American Embassy. Unfortunately we had seen the film before ‘Wait until Dark’ but it is an extremely good film and no so frightening when you know the ending.

Yesterday we went up the mountain and christened our skis. The ski slopes are only about an hour’s drive away. There is a very modern hotel there with good facilities. We were not very ambitious on our first trip and kept to the gentle slopes but still fell down a few times. I had a problem because when I fell down I could not get up and had to wait for a passerby to take pity on me and help me up again. There are plenty of ski lifts there for when we get more proficient and they play music over a load speaker giving the ski slope a holiday atmosphere.

The scenery is beautiful, snow covered trees and mountain peaks though you could not see the view down the valley as it was snowing and foggy. It is incredible to have a mountain and ski resort so near a capital city. As you can see our warm weather did not last long and now we have some very cold weather and lots of snow; about six inches fell last night. Today we went for a long walk in the park. All Sofia were there too, with lots of people especially children on sledges and skis. I think we will be able to get some skiing practice there in the evenings as most of the paths are lit at night.

The Volkswagen is still leaking oil but only when the engine is running. We may try to get it mended in Sofia. We are using it as little as possible and the Daf is very good in the snow and Tony can take me to work as it is near our flat and the office.

I have been thinking of you all today and wondering if you are in Belton or Duggins Lane. I must close now as my fingers are getting tired. I shall have to improve my typing before I write my memoirs. Give my love to Paula and family. I hope she is feeling better soon. Love to nanny as usual

Lots of love

Gillian and Tony

There were fewer ICL computer sites in Bulgaria than in our last posting in Czechoslovakia. The Institute of Constructional Cybernetics (ICC) was in the centre of Sofia (with an ICL ex-English Electric System 4 computer), and the Bulgarian Management Training Centre was a short drive outside Sofia. The Training Centre with an ICL 1900 mainframe computer was established by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), a UN agency based in Geneva, and was funded by the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). There was another large mainframe computer at the Local Government centre in Russe, a delightful city in the north east of Bulgaria, on the Danube and bordering Romania. These three were the main customers with whom ICL had contractual obligations to provide technical support & training, but there were others. For example, there was a shipyard at the port of Varna on the Black Sea coast that owned an Elliot 803 computer, Elliot Computers being one of the several companies that over the years had merged with Leo-Marconi, English Electric and ICT in order to form ICL. For some unaccountable reason the Elliot 803 was still in its packing boxes years after delivery and was still in that state when we departed over a year later.

The first meeting at the ICC in Sofia was a rude awakening. There were two Directors responsible for the site, who jointly reported to a Government Vice-Minister. Their names were Mr. K and Mr. B. but out of earshot were known as the ‘Bear and the Fox’. The Bear was a very large, bellowing and forceful individual, whilst the cunning ‘Fox’ said very little but knew just how to quietly provoke the Bear into a strong reaction. Tony’s first progress meeting as Support Manager at ICC started at 7 am in their conference room, with a bottle of Bulgarian Brandy and a box of chocolates in the centre of the table. We were expected to down a couple of slugs of brandy with a toast to the future before negotiations began, a standard ploy aimed at extracting better concessions. It was then that the Bear would begin his usual tirade about how awful the ICL service was and how his computer had hardly worked at all since it was delivered a couple of years earlier, and that my predecessor had promised them umpteen hours training in the UK that had not materialised. None of this was actually true, but I soon learned that it was quite normal for them to exaggerate wildly and aggressively before eventually settling on a far more reasonable compromise. This was a different approach to negotiating which had cultural roots in the history of Bulgaria. Other Bulgarians understood that it was expected to exaggerate the arguments before agreeing common ground somewhere between the two opposing sides. This was a far cry from the gentlemanly reasonableness of the Czechs.