Alan Bristow

by Alan Bristow

  I made the first Widgeon flights to Das Island in 1957 and once again was struck by the incredible profusion of sharks in the shallow waters around the island. I had discussed the accommodation arrangements for our growing staff of pilots and engineers with Peter Wainwright, and they had been housed in a collection of small Portakabins, which were adequate in the short term. They had a dining area and a bar where the air conditioning was excellent. Even so, men could go stir-crazy. On Das Island we began having a Happy Hour every Friday night, a tradition that was to spread across the world wherever Bristow Helicopters flew. We had a pilot called Bill Farnell, an ex-RAF sergeant pilot, who one Friday night took exception to something an American had said about Britain, or Bristows, and sought an apology. None was forthcoming so he bashed the American, who worked for BP. This started a rough-house that wrecked the bar.

  Peter Wainwright rang me up to ask what I was going to do about it. Now, with my track record I was the last person in the world to get all pious about a man punching out an antagonist. Wainwright himself had been handy with his fists during his days as a roughneck.

  ‘Tell you what,’ I said. ‘You move your man off the island, and I’ll move mine.’

  So that’s what happened – and strangely enough, the BP oilies on Das Island petitioned me to bring Farnell back. They thought he was a good character, and I agreed. He was a big man, a six-foot heavyweight who drank hard, flew hard and barely scraped inside the rules. But by that time Farnell had been redeployed to a new contract.

  New work came thick and fast in 1957, and I spent much of the time in the office in Henstridge setting it up. Success bred success. Once Bristows were in, it was difficult for the competition to dislodge us. Setting-up costs alone were a barrier to entry for a competitor, and aircraft mobilisation was expensive. We flew our aircraft out from England – we’d looked at freighting them, but sea freight was slow and air freight was little cheaper than flying them there. At least if you flew in you could get to work next day, rather than having to spend a week rebuilding the helicopter. In later years we found it cost-effective to fly helicopters from England to Indonesia and even Australia.

  Our next new contract was with Amoco, who were working in Iran under the name of Iran Pan American Oil Company. There were furious complaints from the American helicopter companies, who thought we should not have been allowed to bid. Amoco was an American company – why were they hiring the British competition? The day was won thanks to the credibility we’d built with Shell and BP. Price was important, but our proven ability to deliver was priceless. BHL offered a monthly standing charge, plus a fee for every hour flown – some other companies offered only an hourly charge. BHL could live with the small loss it would make on the fixed monthly establishment charge if it did not turn a rotor blade, but the contract started to show a profit after about thirty hours flying in a month. Usually, we flew thirty hours a week.

  On the strength of the Amoco contract we leased two more Whirlwinds from Westlands and based them at Bushire in Iran. I started off the operation, and soon realised that the flying was the most difficult BHL had ever done. We were required to fly along survey lines and set charges to measure the subsurface structure across an area called Gachsaran at a place called Mas el Suliven. Gachsaran made Abu Dhabi look like a land flowing with milk and honey. Rocky, ovenlike and desolate, it boasted hardly enough flat ground on which to land a helicopter. Not far inland from the Gulf was a line of shark-toothed mountains called the Khor-i-mand, and surveying them on foot would have taken years. Explosive seismic pots had to be placed on the mountainside very accurately, and often we were hovering with the blades a few feet from solid rock while the explosives were put in position by hand. The Whirlwinds were seriously underpowered in the midday heat and the pilots were constantly battling with severe and unpredictable turbulence while lowering a chap on a sling to place the charges. Then they’d have to move up the mountain and place another. As a result of my experiences I decreed that only light fuel loads should be carried. This increased our refuelling time and made me unpopular for a while with the client, but they realised that getting the job done safely was paramount. We landed on remote tracks where a fuel tanker could be positioned. It was all very primitive, and only the best pilots could handle it. I was glad to get out after a month, but Earl Milburn and Alastair Gordon kept at it for a year.

  The BP contract on Das Island was extended following the discovery of oil in two offshore fields, Zakum and Umm Schaif, and the Widgeons were replaced by Bristow-owned WS55 Whirlwinds, able to carry larger numbers of people on and off the rigs. These too were written down over four years and were still flying with BHL many years later, so we got our money’s worth out of them. They were converted to turbine-engined Series III Whirlwinds in 1964 and flew well into the 1970s. The Widgeons came back to England and were deployed on the ‘Blue Chip’ scheme under which helicopters were chartered to major companies who paid a call-out fee and an hourly rate. Based at Battersea Heliport in London, the service attracted companies like United Steel, ICI and Plessey. It made a bit of money, and it ran until it became impossible to get parts for the Widgeons.

  We won a second contract from Iran Pan American to provide support to offshore drilling rigs at Khosrovabad near Abadan, and that required the purchase of three more Whirlwinds. Westlands had developed pop-out floats, which stowed in the wheel hubs, allowing us to dispense with the enormous, permanently-fixed balloon floats that cut cruising speed down to sixty-five knots. That was a major step forward. More pilots and more engineers were needed all the time. Contrary to what has often been said, I did not consciously favour ex-Navy pilots – we have employed some excellent RAF and ex-Army Air Corps men – although I did find that Navy pilots could operate autonomously when improvisation was called for, and could get a job done without necessarily having to be told how to do it. The hiring was largely done by Alan Green, who was well-known for landing at a Royal Naval Air Station and handing out application forms to every pilot he could corner. Some of the men who joined us in the Persian Gulf stayed with BHL for decades and reached senior positions in the company; Jean Dennel, Bill Petrie and Clive Wright became long-serving Bristow men. Others didn’t last five minutes. We had a pilot called Sipeck who almost cost us a Whirlwind. My orders required lifejackets to be worn over the sea and to touchdown, despite the fact that they were damnably hot and sticky. On crossing the coast inbound to Khosrovabad, Sipeck tried to pull his lifejacket over his head, and in the struggle he managed to knock off the magneto switches on the overhead panel. The engine stopped, the helicopter made a heavy landing in the mud of the Shatt el Arab delta and had to be dismantled and taken out in pieces. Sipeck did not become a long-serving employee.

  One contract came out of the blue from a German mining company working in the Zagros Mountains. George Fry took the call and came into my office. ‘Some Germans want you to stick agreat big probe under a helicopter and fly around in the mountains looking for plutonium,’ he said. It was clear that the WS55 was not up to the job – the Zagros Mountains go up to 15,000 feet – so BHL bought its first non-Westland helicopter, a Sud Aviation Alouette Lama, which had excellent high-altitude performance and, flown by Jean Boulet, achieved the world helicopter altitude record of more than 40,000 feet. A Frenchman, Jacques Castaigne, was hired to fly it, backed up by an ex-Navy pilot, Ian Clark, who later went on to take charge of our operations in Australia.

  The Shah of Iran became aware of the work we were doing with the Alouette and hired it to fly around the country preaching his land reform programme. That was the beginning of a long and profitable association that lasted up to the revolution of 1979. At that time we were casting around for an Iranian partner; you had to have one to operate in the country. The oil companies for whom we’d worked had up to then looked after the partnering arrangements and the associated permits to work, but with the plutonium prospecting contract we were effectively on our own. There was no growth in the Doha or Das Island
markets, and I knew that if we wanted to expand into Iran I would need a local partner. In Iran, reliable information was hard to come by; you could never find out who owned what or whether the man you were dealing with could deliver. Spares could get hung up in Tehran for ever if you didn’t have the right muscle. Through the British commercial attaché in Tehran I was introduced to General Mohammed Khatami, Commander in Chief of the Iranian Air Force. Khatami was Cranwell-educated, a great skier and sportsman and an F-14 jet jockey who had been the Shah’s chief pilot for ten years. He also happened to be married to the Shah’s younger sister, Princess Fatima. It was arranged that Princess Fatima’s representative should join the Board of our Iranian subsidiary Iranian Helicopter Aviation, and from that time on we found we had the power to move mountains.

  I had met Princess Fatima once before, when she had landed at Bushire in her private jet. She flew the aircraft herself – she had trained as a pilot in the United States – and she was a quite delightful woman. She wanted to learn to fly helicopters, so I made it my business to teach her. Through Princess Fatima, I got to know the Shah quite well. The Iranian aristocracy had a penchant for home cinema, and Fatima and her husband showed home movies and first-run films to a selected audience at their palatial home in Tehran. The Shah would often be a guest at these film showings, to which I was invited as the Princess’s business partner. The Shah was very easy to speak to, and would often discourse on his plans to bring his primitive country into the modern world. He was planning a programme to eradicate illiteracy and to extend voting rights to women, and was about to launch a land reform scheme under which land bought from feudal landlords was to be redistributed to peasants at a massive discount. More than a million people who had been little more than slaves found they now owned the land they’d toiled on all their lives. The Shah looked on Bristow Helicopters as a vital cog in the oil industry that would fund his programmes, but in the twenty years I knew him he became more and more autocratic and his secret police, SAVAK, became ever more brutal.

  BHL’s early years in the Persian Gulf were a time of extraordinary expansion, but I was always conscious of the dangers of taking on too much and stretching resources too thinly. George Fry and Bill Mayhew kept a tight rein on spending; cash flow was good, but at that time a lot of our income was going straight to Westland to pay for helicopters. I chaired weekly cash flow meetings and made sure that everybody understood precisely where the company stood. In a breathtakingly short period of time BHL had become a major contractor in the international oil industry, and I owed it all to Douglas Bader. I came to relish our meetings, and was regularly asked to accompany him on the golf course, a great accolade.

  Bader was full of surprises. One day at one of our ‘how-goes-it’ lunches at the Savoy he asked me: ‘How many children do you have?’

  I told him.

  ‘And where were they christened?’

  That was a poser. ‘Well, Lynda was christened in Yeovil, I think. Laurence – I’m not sure. He may not have been christened. I don’t think he has been.’

  Bader was aghast. ‘For heaven’s sake, how old is he?’

  ‘Umm .. . eleven, I believe.’

  ‘You must get him christened! I will be his godfather.’

  With Shell-like speed Bader made the arrangements, and Laurence was christened in a church Bader went to in Knightsbridge, near the Natural History Museum. Bader was one godfather, and the other was Ted Wheeldon. I went along with it because it clearly meant a great deal to Douglas. I don’t know what Laurence made of it. But to the end of his days, Bader sent Laurence a crisp £1 note on his birthday.

  Not until after he had become Laurence’s godfather did I consider we were close enough to call Douglas Bader by his first name. Once one got under his professional shell, Douglas was delightful company, although he rarely spoke about his wartime exploits and his years as a prisoner. He seemed to have blanked out the bad times, as many people do. A film had been made of his life, based on the book Reach for the Sky, which was a best-seller. Douglas had initially co-operated with the film-making and had shown the actor Kenneth More how to imitate his walk, where he wheeled his left leg around at every step. But he had withdrawn his co-operation when the film-makers refused to employ a man whom Douglas requested they feature in the film. This chap was the RAF mechanic who had rescued Bader from the wreckage of the air crash at Woodley, near Reading, in which he had lost his legs. This man had fallen on hard times after the war, and Douglas hoped to restore his fortunes. The producers argued that the man did not have an Equity card, therefore they could not hire him. Unable to overcome their obstinacy, Douglas stopped teaching Kenneth More how to do the walk and had nothing further to do with the film.

  ‘There wouldn’t be a Douglas Bader story if it wasn’t for him,’ he said.

  He was never enamoured of Reach for the Sky, which he said had fictionalised some episodes of his life for dramatic effect.

  ‘Take my advice, Alan,’ he said, ‘never have a book written about you while you’re alive. They’ll say what they please about you.’

  I mentioned this later to James Clavell, who said: ‘He’s absolutely right. I always insist on having absolute control over my books. Nobody can add anything or take it away without my permission.’

  I took this advice to heart, and every time my grandchildren tried to persuade me to write my life story, I told them it would have to happen after I was dead. But now, here I am, temporarily paralysed and in a wheelchair, so I have overruled Clavell and Bader and taken the plunge.

  Bader lived in a mews house in a quiet back street in Knightsbridge, and only occasionally was I invited there – he did not mix work with home life. The house was tiny, but then there was only Douglas and Thelma in it. The atmosphere was thick; Thelma smoked at least two packs of cigarettes a day, Douglas puffed contentedly at his stubby pipe, and I would happily contribute with my Montecristos. I’d be asked to come to dinner, or to play golf, with Douglas even at times when I was bidding for Shell contracts and not getting them, but business was never discussed. He was a man of absolute probity, and I often thought he favoured my competition in tenders in order to demonstrate that our personal friendship did not influence him in business.

  Douglas would often contrive an excuse to leave the office to play golf, and he was a meticulous and competitive player with a handicap of four. He was a member of the Royal Berkshire – in fact, he never seemed to have difficulty getting a tee time at any of the best golf courses in the Home Counties. I had a handicap of nine at the time. He was known to play for money, but he never did with me.

  After playing several rounds at courses nominated by him I invited Douglas to the links course at Pulborough in Sussex. He came down in his specially modified Alvis car and insisted on pulling his clubs around himself – he wouldn’t have a caddy. It was a ding-dong game with no quarter asked or given. Douglas stumped around with his little pipe clenched between his jaws. The tension rose as we ran neck and neck. At the sixteenth, I was lying well on the green and had visions of a birdie to go one up. Because I was nearest the hole he had to putt first, and as he addressed the ball he twisted his body strangely and fell over. He lay on the ground like a beached seal.

  ‘I’ve broken my bloody leg,’ he said.

  ‘Stop mucking about, Douglas,’ I said. ‘You won’t put me off like that.’

  ‘No, seriously, I’ve broken the strap on my right leg. Help me get my trousers off, will you.’

  I realised he wasn’t joking. I pulled off his trousers as he sat on the green and he removed his artificial legs. One had been amputated above the knee, one below. I put his legs on an embankment at the side of the green and parked his trolley next to them.

  ‘How far is it back to the clubhouse?’ Douglas asked.

  ‘It’s about 200 yards over there,’ I said.

  ‘Can you give me a fireman’s lift?’

  I never knew a man with no legs could weigh so much. He was all muscle. I hefte
d him over my shoulders and staggered off through a copse. We came to a greenkeeper’s hut.

  ‘Let’s stop here for a breather,’ I suggested.

  ‘No, keep going. It’s only another sixty yards.’

  Wilting under the weight, I got him through the clubhouse door and plonked him down on a bench. I sat next to him, panting like a racehorse. ‘I’d better go back and get your legs,’ I gasped.

  Douglas pointed to a cricket bag he always carried with him. I’d seen it before but had no idea what it contained. ‘Just fetch my bag, will you.’ He opened it and pulled out a spare pair of legs.

  ‘Game’s over,’ he said. ‘We’d better get dressed.’

  We had a shower – Douglas could ‘walk’ on the ground with his hands as fast as anyone could on legs, and you just had to turn the shower on for him. He dressed and we went to the bar, only to find the secretary asking who had left artificial legs at the sixteenth?