By the time I left my job with Allis Chalmers in London, my parents had moved house yet again due to my father finding a new job - this time with Brittain's Paper Mills in Cheddleton, Staffordshire. My parents had purchased a large house in Leek, a small market town approximately twenty-one kilometres from Stoke-on-Trent.
Having experienced living on my own for the better part of two years I was quite happy to be moving back in with my parents again. My brother Philip had meanwhile left school, but was also still living at home, so at least I had a drinking buddy!.
During my first few weeks in Leek I worked for a company called Adams Foods, a local producer of processed cheeses, including the kind of packaged cheese products you tend to get with airline meals and the like. My job was cleaning out the huge stainless steel vats used in the product sterilisation process.
During these first few weeks I discovered the Moss Rose Inn - a local pub just a few minutes walk from my parents house that could be accessed via a country lane that ran past the back of our house and emerged on a side road, just a few metres from the pub car park. It was here that I spent most of my evenings during the next few years, learning to play darts and developing my beer-drinking skills!
Whilst not being an overly ambitious individual in those days, I nevertheless aspired to something a little more challenging than working with processed cheese. I applied for a job with Norton Industrial Ceramics Inc. (formerly J. Gimson & Co. Ltd.) in Stoke-on-Trent, and following a successful interview started work as a Sales Correspondent in the summer of 1975.
Upon my arival in Leek, I had purchased a Honda 175 motorbike, which I used to ride to work and back every day. This was fun for most of the year, but not so much in the winter. One time it was so cold, I arrived at work having lost virtually all feeling in my hands and feet. I walked into the office and promptly passed out rather spectacularly. I was taken to the company's infirmary, but soon made a full recovery.
My time at Norton Industrial was interesting because, although the Stoke-on-Trent factory produced kiln furniture for the local pottery companies (Wedgwood, Spode, Royal Doulton, etc.) and refractory cement for lining industrial furnaces, we also sold a diverse range of industrial ceramic products that were manufactured either in the United States or France.
I had relatively little to do with the local pottery business. I was mainly involved in the sale of refractory cements, and of ceramic products used in the electronics industry. One product that particularly interested me was the Crystar™ (silicon carbide) "wafer boat".
These products came in various forms, and were often manufactured to a customer's precise specification. Their purpose was to hold some number of silicon wafers during the "doping" process, whereby the silicon wafers are impregnated with various impurities in a high-temperature diffusion tube.
My job was to field enquiries received, either directly from customers or via our field sales representatives. I would then liase with our product development specialists in France or the United states, prepare product documentation and quotations, and (assuming our product specs and quotes were accepted), handle the order processing side of things.
One of the really enjoyable aspects of the job from my point of view is that I frequently got to go out for the day with one or other of our sales representatives to visit customers and see first-hand how our products were used. On one such occdasion we paid a visit to Texas Instruments in Bedford, where I got to see how microchips were mannufactured using silicon wafers.
Because the silicon wafers are extremely sensitive to contaminants, many of the procedures involved took place in so-called "clean rooms", and we had to wear suits and masks like those you see worn by police officers investigating a crime scene!
On a couple of occasions I was sent out on my own to visit customers in a company car, having passed my driving test. The first occasion was a bit of a disaster, because I was supposed to visit a customer in Manchester and, never having been to Manchester before in my life (and not being very good at reading maps), I got hopelessly lost and had to abort the mission.
My second outing was no more successful. On this occasion, two of the engine mountings in the car I was driving - an Austin Maxi that had seen better days - lost their mounting bolts. I took the car to a garage in Sheffield, who told me they could not effect repairs straight away, and if I insisted on driving back to Stoke-on-Trent, I should not exceed 30 mph (50 kph). I made it back OK, but the engine was bouncing up and down the whole way!