Plans have been submitted to Bexley Council to convert the large retail unit at number 77 Bexleyheath Broadway Shopping Centre into a coffee shop. Recently it was used as an overflow office for Bexleyheath Job Centre, and prior to that it was the home to Argos. Modifications to the current building would include a new shop front, complete with signage and new entrance doors. The proposal is on behalf of the Jamaica Blue Australian coffee company, who already have over 20 shops in the UK. Personally, I do not drink tea or coffee, due to the fact I react very badly to anything with caffeine in it. I know that many people do enjoy visiting a coffee shop, both for a hot drink, and often to socialise with friends. However, bearing in mind the number of existing coffee shops already located in very close proximity to the proposed new one, it does strike me as this could be a case of over saturation. Do we really need yet another chain of coffee shops when we already have so many in the area? I do welcome the fact that it will offer employment in an town where entry-level jobs are in very short supply. I just wonder if they do get permission to open at 77 the Broadway, whether The Jamaica Blue Cafe will be around for very long, and any associated jobs will be short-lived. Your comments and thoughts would be welcomed as always to hugh.neal@gmail.com.
This month marks the 42nd anniversary of the launch of a very short-lived but extremely influential and disruptive radio station that changed the way music broadcasting was carried out in the United Kingdom and Ireland. It caused much concern from establishment radio stations including London's Capital Radio, and even national stations such as BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 2. It got so much publicity and very quickly established an absolutely huge listenership that the government was forced to get involved. One of the effects of this radio station was to remove the legal requirement for what was known as needle time, when licenced radio stations were limited to a fixed amount of music being broadcast in every hour, and as a result had to fill it with talk from the presenter, much to the annoyance of many listeners. The station I'm referring to had a catchphrase which really underlined the entire philosophy of their programming which was "Never more than a minute from music". The station was called Laser 558, and it broadcast from a ship moored in the international waters of the North Sea for around eighteen months from May 1984. It provided a very different musical output to its' long established competitor, Radio Caroline, which I was to work for some years later. Laser 558, the offshore radio station that for a brief period between 1984 and 1986 became the most popular music radio station in the UK. Laser was known for its fast paced format and exclusively employed American DJ’s, including some, like Charlie Wolf, who went on to become household names. It all sounded very glamorous, and nothing like any rather more staid British radio station of the period. Most listeners believed the story that the station was crewed and operated exclusively by Americans, and supplied from mainland Europe, and therefore operating completely legally. The reality was that whilst the broadcasters were nearly all US citizens, the station and the supplies all came covertly from the UK – the main supply point was at Herne Bay. The Laser ship was called the M.V Communicator – it was a converted Lowestoft hydrographic survey vessel originally named the Gardline Seeker. The work to convert the ship to a marine broadcasting station was carried out in Port Everglades in Florida – if you ever see a rerun of the Miami Vice episode “Phil the Shill” (the one that guest starred Phil Collins) there is a long aerial tracking shot of Crockett and Tubbs driving through Port Everglades – and the M.V Communicator can clearly be seen whilst it was being converted into a radio ship. When Laser 558 first came on air from the North Sea, the station tried using a novel wire antenna suspended from a helium balloon. Whoever thought of this idea clearly had no concept of the atrocious weather frequently experienced in the area. The strong, gusty and changeable winds soon destroyed the balloon antenna, and a conventional tower array was built to replace it. Laser quickly picked up a massive following in both the UK and Europe. Certainly, Laser's signal - and their following - reached into Holland, Belgium, and other Continental European countries. Laser 558's ship, the MV Communicator was anchored in the Knock Deep area of the Thames Estuary of the North Sea. The anchorage was approximately 3 miles off the Essex coast, not far from Harwich. It had a strong, loud signal on Medium Wave, it played far more music that BBC Radio One, and operated a format of top 40 pop and familiar oldies, played back to back. The sound was slick and very professional, and soon listeners started to defect from local radio and BBC national stations to Laser. At this point the government became worried – they could not let this upstart pirate take all of their precious listeners from the BBC and ILR stations. Laser 558 claimed an audience of some 8,000,000 listeners and was seriously threatening the long established duopoly of the BBC and the IBA. The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) started to take action against the station, firstly by advertising in specialist magazines to warn boat owners of the penalties of supplying "pirate" broadcasting ships. Notices began appearing around the British coastline warning not to supply the radio ships, though this was widely flouted. A ship called the Dioptric Surveyor was despatched by the Department of Trade and Industry Radio Investigation Service to monitor both Laser 558 and Radio Caroline, in what became known as the “Eurosiege”. It was soon apparent that Laser, rather than Caroline was the real target. This was mainly due to the constant on air jibes and arch comments made by Laser DJ’s – most notably by Charlie Wolf, the station motor mouth, and at that time a serious rival in popularity to Radio 1's Steve Wright. Soon a spoof record was released called ”I Spy for the DTI” by the Moronic Surveyors (actually the Laser DJ’s) which got heavy play on Laser, and got into the lower reaches of the charts. In contrast, Radio Caroline continued in their policy of not annoying the authorities, and they carried on pretty much unmolested. Eventually a mixture of running low on supplies, bad weather (the M.V Communicator was not an ideal ship for the North Sea and its heavy swell – it rolled terribly due to its very high freeboard - the height of the hull out of the sea - unlike the Radio Caroline ship the M.V Ross Revenge – a massive, former ice breaking trawler - which was solid as a rock in rough seas), and a lack of advertising revenue caused the Laser crew to bring the ship in to port, under escort from the DTI. The other reason for the failure of Laser 558 was its management, which was pretty financially incompetent, and also a few suppliers that managed to con a large amount of cash out of the station for very little in return. The whole project lasted only around eighteen months, but it did massively shake up UK radio, which up until that time was legally restricted as to the amount of music it was allowed to play. The “needle time” rules dictated that fifty percent of broadcasting time had to be dedicated to speech; this was later relaxed when it was found that the audiences for Laser 558 were primarily attracted by the stations policy of “never more than a minute from music”. In contrast Radio Caroline continued at sea for another six years, which was when my own involvement with the station happened. Back when Laser and Caroline were both broadcasting to Northern Europe, I was still at school – I recall many occasions when there would be scuffles in the 6th form common room when some pupils wanted to listen to Laser 558 on the ancient valve radiogram we had, whilst I wanted to listen to Radio Caroline. Strangely I cannot recall anyone wanting to listen to BBC Radio One at the time. I think that just about says it all.
This week also marks the 32nd anniversary of the first popular web browser, called Mosaic. Mosaic was pretty basic by modern standards, and it was not actually the very first web browser. It was however the first one to get any level of popular use outside of academia. Nowadays, the Firefox web browser can be regarded as the great grandchild of Mosaic, as it shares much of the original DNA, and software developers. Previous web browsers had only been able to display text; any embedded pictures were usually downloaded separately, if at all (which was no bad thing in the days of the 14.4K dial up modem – the web was an almost exclusively text based place in the early 90’s! Mosaic brought together a number of then emerging technologies to make what would be familiar to most people as a web browser. Even back then, Mosaic was regarded as being something ground breaking when it was released for the Unix operating system by its’ authors Marc Andreesson and Eric Bina of the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) back in May 1993. Technical journalist Gary Wolfe wrote the following piece about Mosaic in the October 1994 edition of Wired magazine:- “When it comes to smashing a paradigm, pleasure is not the most important thing. It is the only thing. If this sounds wrong, consider Mosaic. Mosaic is the celebrated graphical browser that allows users to travel through the world of electronic information using a point-and-click interface. Mosaic's charming appearance encourages users to load their own documents onto the Net, including colour photos, sound bites, video clips, and hypertext "links" to other documents. By following the links - click, and the linked document appears - you can travel through the online world along paths of whim and intuition. Mosaic is not the most direct way to find online information. Nor is it the most powerful. It is merely the most pleasurable way, and in the 18 months since it was released, Mosaic has incited a rush of excitement and commercial energy unprecedented in the history of the Net”. Wolfe wrote with rare prescience – he hit the nail squarely on the head, a good couple of years before most people were more than dimly aware of what the web was at all. Writer Matthew K Gray wrote “Marc Andreessen's realisation of Mosaic, based on the work of Tim Berners – Lee and the hypertext theorists before him, is generally recognised as the beginning of the web as it is now known. Mosaic, the first web browser to win over the Net masses, was released in 1993 and made freely accessible to the public. The adjective phenomenal, so often overused in this industry, is genuinely applicable to the... 'explosion' in the growth of the web after Mosaic appeared on the scene. Starting with next to nothing, the rates of the web growth (quoted in the press) hovering around tens of thousands of percent over ridiculously short periods of time were no real surprise”. Mosaic later spawned the first massively popular browser, – Netscape Navigator, which was sold commercially, making Netscape briefly the most profitable tech company listed on the U.S stock market, and at one time had a market capitalisation worth $2.9 billion. Eventually Microsoft twigged that the web was the way forward, after an astonishingly long period of inactivity; it went on to licence some of the technology used in a particular version of Mosaic in order to create Internet Explorer, which, along with some more than slightly questionable business practices that I will not outline here (but do feel free to carry out your own research on the subject) effectively killed Netscape by forcing them out of the burgeoning browser market. If you look at the credits screen on any version of Internet Explorer up until version 7, you will see a credit “based on NCSA Mosaic”. As you can see, Mosaic changed the face of computing, and whilst it seems like the dim and distant past, it was actually only thirty two years ago this month. Tellingly a version of Mosaic was developed for the Commodore Amiga almost a year before a Windows PC version was released. How times change. Incidentally, if you hanker after the old Netscape Navigator application suite, which included the Netscape web browser, the mail client and newsgroups reader, and the web page creator, all is not lost. As well as developing and maintaining the mainstream Firefox browser, the Mozilla team have a spin - off group that works on SeaMonkey - a direct descendant on the Netscape Suite - which nowadays is both free and open source. You can get the SeaMonkey suite for Windows, Mac OS , and Linux by clicking here.
Much has been written about the history of the late former Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. What is less well known is the influence the paint business played in her life. She would never have met Denis Thatcher, the man she married, if it wasn’t for an Erith based business. Denis worked for his family’s paint and wood preservatives company, Atlas Preservatives, originally based in Deptford, London. It later relocated to a factory on Fraser Road in Erith, where the Wickes DIY store now stands. He became works manager and later general manager. In February 1949 Denis met the then Margaret Roberts, who was a chemist, at a Paint Trades Federation function in Dartford. They fell in love and married in 1951. While they were both right wing they did not agree on everything in politics. He was totally opposed to capital punishment while she was strongly in favour of it being reinstated. Using his knowledge of running a paint business and his accountancy qualifications Denis wrote a book entitled “Accounting and Costing in the Paint Industry.” In 1965 Atlas Preservatives was purchased by Castrol which was later taken over by Burmah Oil, but Denis remained involved in the business up to his retirement. He died in 2003. A historic press announcement of the engagement of Miss Margaret Roberts to Denis Thatcher can be read here:- "It was not so very long ago that Miss Margaret Roberts, 26-years-old Conservative candidate for Dartford, told supporters that she had set up bachelor-girl house-keeping. She commented at the time, “The only trouble is that there is only one to collect the weekly purchases—instead of two.”Now all that is to be changed, for this week she stated she is going to marry a fellow-Conservative, Major Denis Thatcher, 36-years-old company director, of Erith. But they will wait until after the election. At the moment the engagement, although confirmed by Miss Roberts, is not an official one. Nothing must be allowed to interfere with the campaign to wrest the Dartford seat from its occupier for the past six years, Mr. Norman Dodds. No word about the impending news was breathed at the Bedonwell Schools' meeting at Erith on Monday night, although Mr. Thatcher, chairman for the evening, was sitting next to Miss Roberts. In his opening remarks, however, he did say, “She has unlimited beauty brains and charm, three qualities which we can do with in the House of Commons.” They first met in February, 1949, when Miss Roberts was chosen as prospective candidate. “Since then he has helped me tremendously on the economic and industrial side of politics,” smiled Miss Roberts. Major Thatcher is managing director of Atlas Preservative Company, the paint manufacturers, Fraser-road, Erith, and is chairman of the London Association of the National Paint Federation. A member of the Order of the British Empire, he was commissioned in the Royal Engineers and later was transferred to the Royal Regiment of Artillery. He gave full-time service from 1939 to 1946, becoming a brigade major. He saw service in Sicily, Italy and France, being twice mentioned in despatches. After demobilisation, he rejoined Atlas, for whom he had worked from 1934, and became general manager. In 1948 he was appointed managing director. An athletic six-footer, he is a keen Rugby football referee and a member of the London Society of Referees".
As regular readers will be aware, over the past few months, I have featured Morrisons supermarkets in quite some detail, especially analysing the problems the store chain has been experiencing with a lack of stock, few staff members, closure of many of their restaurants, butchery sections and fish counters, and the general lack of quality which has been experienced by many members of the shopping public. I have attributed much of this to the fact that the supermarket chain is now owned by a major American private equity company. A number of readers have us asked me to explain what exactly a private equity company is and how they operate. Rather than me personally labouring the point, please watch this short and easy to understand video, which explains not only what private equity is, but how they make large amounts of money in ways that many people may find dubious. This has not just affected Morrisons, but other once popular High Street retailers, including the former WH Smith. Please send any comments to me at the usual address - hugh.neal@gmail.com.
