My Dad died. It happened in 2022, long after my Mother had gone. In the final few years, he lived with my sister. He remained remarkable fit until he was 90, then he gradually died, always good humoured, until he final passed away aged 94. He had a good life. This blog is my tribute to him in two halves. Firstly, a piece he wrote in early 2018, in case his role in the development of Felixstowe was forgotten (it is unmentioned in any official history) . This was read at his funeral. It was written when he was 90 years old. The second half is my eulogy at that funeral.
How Felixstowe became a major UK port
What I am about to relate occurred in the middle of the 1960s, which was a strange time in our modern history. The UK had decided not to join the Common Market and opted instead to enter the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). Since, by this time, I had become a well-established member of the Paper Industry in London with some 15 years of experience, this opened up many new business opportunities, because EFTA comprised Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. Until that time, the UK had a significant paper manufacturing industry for strategic reasons, which was largely protected from imports by a 10% tariff barrier. With the exception of Denmark, the other members of EFTA all had major paper manufacturing industries. With the signing of the EFTA agreement, they had open access to the UK and lost no time in taking advantage of that.
At about the same time, the printing industry also underwent a major change. Prior to this, and apart from the newspapers, the main printing from the reel was on long-run magazines and colour supplements. The sudden emergence of reel-fed printers using the offset process changed all that very rapidly. Much printing was transferred from sheet-fed offset to the new process.
The third important factor in this story concerned the docks. Suffice to say that the docks had acquired a reputation for unreliability over many years, and the new overseas suppliers wanted to avoid them if at all possible.
Having explained the background, I can now tell of my personal involvement in the development of Felixstowe as a major port which I should, perhaps, remind you all happened over 50 years ago. I joined a company who were the UK agents for a Swedish paper maker called Munkedal who now wanted to become active in the UK. My immediate role was to find them new business. With this request was another: find a port on the East Coast and avoid the main docks! Finding new business was not difficult, but finding a new port was. Inevitably, Felixstowe had to be a candidate, but at that time it was truly tiny. The port could only take ships up to a maximum of about 8000 tons, and only two vessels at any one time. It really was the poor relation of its sister, Harwich on the other side of the river. The port operated with dockside cranes which would lift about 250kg at a time from the hold in slings and place them on the quay. From there, the goods were taken by forklift trucks and placed in a warehouse. The warehouse was the best feature of Felixstowe Docks. It was huge and absolutely dry, which is essential where paper is concerned. Unfortunately, other elements were less favourable, and one of these was their history, as a small port, of handling a wide variety of goods, and therefore having little experience with products that required a more sophisticated approach. Nevertheless, we began trial shipments from Sweden, and fairly quickly the problem emerged. The system of handling reels of paper led to damage which would not be acceptable and had to be corrected.
Here I need to divert for a moment to cover a little technical information. There are two problems with damage to paper reels. The first is loss. If a reel of 36” diameter is damaged on the rim to a depth of 1”, the loss amounts to 10% of the weight (and paper is sold by weight). Even more serious is damage to the side of the reel. This can lead to breakdown on the printing press, and machine downtime is expensive. Thus it was essential to resolve these problems.
To continue the story, I have now reached the critical point: how to deal with it. And I can modestly claim a touch of genius because solve it I did, with far reaching consequences. I wanted the stevedores to understand the value of what to them was a completely new product, and I did not believe that this could be achieved by involving port management. Instead, I arranged with them that as many as they could spare should be released for one day. I took about 12 of them to London to visit one of our main printer customers and simply left to talk to the staff. Then I took them for a good meal. At the end of the day, the Chargehand came to me and said “Mr Poole, nobody has ever treated us like this before-you will have no more problems bringing your paper through Felixstowe”. And he was absolutely right! It did not take long for the rest of the EFTA paper community to find out about this success, and within two years, Felixstowe had become the most important port in the UK for imports of paper.
Why should this be particularly significant? Because it all happened at least 5 years before Felixstowe began to develop as a container port. If nothing else, I think that I provided the real evidence of the potential for Felixstowe as a major port.
Geoffrey Arthur Poole
Eulogy
One of the things that we will all remember about Geoff was his laugh, which was loud and frequent. It was distinctive or, viewed less charitably, it sounded a bit deranged. It punctuated every social occasion. I often heard it as I dropped off to sleep as a child. In the early 1950s, a colleague asked Geoff if he had attended the Dominion cinema in Tottenham Court Road the night before, because he had heard his laugh. The Dominion held 3,000 people. Geoff loved to laugh. He would approve of us calling this occasion “Geoff’s Last Laugh”.
Geoff was a popular man with a big and generous personality. He was also a man of paradoxes. He grew up mainly in Edmonton in North London, a lifelong Tottenham Hotspur supporter, but during the War, at the age of 12, Geoff and his younger sisters, Pam and Marjorie, were evacuated for two years to the Cornish countryside near Falmouth. Farming methods were organic and traditional, and he always felt that part of him was a countryman. For most of his working life, he lived in Kidbrooke in South East London, but he yearned to return to a rural setting, and when he retired, Greta and Geoff moved to Southwold.
Geoff liked good beer, good wine, a single malt, and good company. He was capable of becoming quite intoxicated, but always insisted that he had never experienced a hangover. He loved a party. In London, he and Mum usually had a planned party in the summer and at New Year, but there were many spontaneous parties with neighbours, family and friends. There were always copious supplies of booze and, often, Mum’s excellent cookery. His standard party trick, once sufficient alcohol had been consumed, was to stand on his head. He was proud of his achievements in life, but he did not take himself all that seriously either.
Sport was one of his major pleasures. Although he got a scholarship to attend a grammar school, he did not press himself academically. At sixteen, he matriculated, and his father, who was a socialist plumber and trade union activist, was keen for him to attend university. Geoff, however, still had hopes of becoming a professional footballer, and he left school to work in a draughtman’s office and then for an estate agent. Unfortunately, his highest achievement in football was to captain Reading Barracks 2nd XI during his national service. He was a good standard road race cyclist who competed successfully at county level. When he married, his sporting activity fell away. In 1958, he was found to have tuberculosis, which led to a major operation and a lengthy hospital admission. During his recovery, he took up golf, which was his great passion for the next sixty years. He was a member of the Royal Blackheath Club, Southwold Golf Club and Risborough Golf Club. He loved the game, but he also relished the social aspects of golf club membership.
He visited us during the summer relaxation of lockdown in 2020, and he played a round of golf with his eldest, grown-up, grandson in Manchester. I went round with them. His swing was not powerful, but his shots were accurate. If he had kept score, he would have easily beaten his grandson, who hit the ball a long way but in no particular direction. Geoff kept himself fit. At 45, he found he could only manage nine press ups, so started he doing them every morning. Having got up to 50 press ups a day, he continued to do his morning exercises until quite recently. Reflecting on mortality after his 90th birthday, he told me that he was happy to carry on living while he could play a round of golf, but once he could not, he would be ready to go. So it turned out.
Music was another of his lifelong enthusiasms. He listened to Radio 3 in the car, and the Proms and Young Musician of the Year were a fixed part of his TV viewing. We went to some really excellent concerts as a family. In his youth, he played violin well, and he was a member of an amateur symphony orchestra. He continued playing at home for some years. Having neglected the violin for a couple of decades, he started playing again when he moved from Southwold to Haddenham. He was inspired by his niece Kathy to start playing fiddle tunes. He tried to teach himself piano for about 45 years. As Mum regularly told him, he was terrible on the piano, especially when he played the Mexican Hat Dance, which he never mastered, despite dogged persistence. He had a strong preference for the music of Mozart, but he sometimes came to my gigs. He really enjoyed our loud rock band that played in bikers’ pubs; my gentler acoustic guitar performances bored him.
When I went to his paper trade dinners, intoxicated men in dinner jackets would come up to me and say that Geoff was a good man with great integrity, but that he had some very strange opinions. They were referring to his unapologetic socialism, militant atheism and visceral anti-monarchism. He expressed his opinions calmly and, although he was forthright, he somehow avoided rows with business friends and colleagues, most of whom were conservative in all meanings of the word. Dad grew up in an inner city in the 1930s, but he had a complete lack of prejudice or bigotry. I never heard him say anything that was intended to be racist or homophobic, and he became increasingly feminist in his outlook under the influence of Lindsey. He caused controversy as President of the Stationers Society by ending all of the men-only dinners. He loathed Conservative politicians, but he was entirely tolerant of people with different views to his own.
It must be said that Geoff was driven and competitive. He had major setbacks in his career, but always picked himself up and found a way forwards. I never beat him at chess or snooker. During holidays in Southwold, we used to try to throw each other in the sea. I rarely won. In the hot summer of 1975, when I was a very fit hospital porter, we went swimming at Hornfair Park Lido. He challenged me to a race. It was a dead heat, but he went very pale and shaky afterwards, and for a moment I thought his competitiveness might have killed him.
Geoff had a keen intelligence. In contrast to his warmth and love of friendship, he had an abstracted and cerebral way of thinking about things. On holiday near Margate in 1963, he sat in a beach deckchair and watched people who paid 2/- to have a go at water-skiing. One after another, they fell in the water. Eventually he said “I can do better than that”. He went and had a go, and water-skied perfectly, the only time in his life he ever tried it. I learnt sailing on a school trip in 1968, so he bought a Mirror dinghy from John Selby, and got a book on how to sail. He sailed competently from his very first attempt. He taught himself the technical and scientific aspects of paper manufacture, and, as a young man, he taught night classes at the London School of Printing. Several people who had attended told me what an excellent teacher he was. He loved playing Bridge, initially with Mum, and later with Lee, and he enjoyed intellectually stretching puzzles. He was keen on Suduko, on Free Cell and before that, he did the crossword every day. On long journeys, he could do the Telegraph cryptic crossword in his head. I read the clues, he solved them whilst driving.
I have to tell you that Geoff had some faults. Despite his love of company, in another one of his paradoxes, he did not understand other people at all. This is known to psychologists as a lack of theory of mind. One of the many things that made his relationship with Greta so close was that he was totally dependent on her excellent psychological understanding and advice to navigate office politics. He had a touching belief that people could be helped by unsolicited advice such as “you need to be more confident”. He was also extremely tactlessness, a fault which I am afraid I share.
Geoff’s incongruous other-worldliness was a factor in some unusual episodes. In my late teens, I came home one evening to find that Dad had picked up two glamourous young women at Heathrow Airport, and they were now sitting in our lounge. Mum hustled me into the kitchen to explain that these were the daughters of President Sadat, who was currently in power in Egypt, and who was assassinated a short time after. She said that they had been let down by the embassy, which was now closed, and they were going to stay the night. My streetwise teenage self could see that this was obviously some kind of elaborate scam. In the morning, the embassy car arrived with police motorcycles, and the Sadat sisters were swept off to Belgravia, never to be seen again.
Dad knew no embarrassment. He would talk to anyone. He came home from a foreign trip and asked if I had ever heard of a band called Rufus, which I had. He’d been sitting amongst them on a plane and their very charming singer had chatted with him for the whole flight. She had offered him a signed copy of their album, but he declined. The singer was, of course, Chaka Khan. She went on to get 10 Grammys and sell 70 million albums world-wide.
Geoff and I agreed that the main problem with dying is that you don’t get to see what happens next in all of these long arc stories that are playing out before us. He was too ill to enjoy the downfall of Boris Johnson and he missed the Lionesses winning the Euros, which he would have loved. He held to atheism with an unshakeable certainty. He said that this was because the idea of an afterlife was totally implausible. Geoff found meaning, and a type of continuing existence, in family. He liked to see himself as the benign patriarch of an extended Poole diaspora, which included the Nybergs, the Van Hattens, the Bains and others. He was intensely proud of our various achievements. He was especially proud of his grandchildren. He adored his great-grandson, the only small child I ever saw him patiently read to. Our holidays in Southwold over the past 50 years, with their link to his mother’s Walberswick childhood, were the tangible manifestation of his sense of family, and he wanted them to continue after his death. They will, because we all enjoy being together. He consciously facilitated that.
Dad would want me to say how well Lindsey and Greg have looked after him since Mum died. They have done a fantastic job. Although illness progressively reduced Geoff, he was cheerful and discernibly himself right up until his brief final illness. There is no doubt that his life after Greta died was happy because of loving care he received at The Red House.
Finally, in Dad’s account of Felixstowe, he has given us his own epitaph: “I can modestly claim a touch of genius”