Looking Back
Occasionally I wonder. ‘How did a first-generation Irish immigrant born in England a few years after World War II, end up living on a Mediterranean island with six Spanish grandchildren’. I assure you it wasn’t planned. Like most things, it just happened without much input from me, but that’s a very simplistic view.
Many people say they have a plan and are in control of their own destiny. I doubt that. The world is a complex place, full of random events and uncertainty. If you take just one of two possible choices you’re presented with each day, for example, do I turn left or right at a T junction. Then, by the end of the month, those twenty-eight days of choices will have generated over one hundred and thirty million possible different outcomes. Mathematically the calculation is the number 2 raised to the power of 28. Any one of those daily choices could prove fatal. The graveyard is full of people who unwittingly made the wrong choice somewhere along the line, and we make many choices every day. No one should feel smug, because the wheel is continually in spin.
If you think too hard about it, you might stay in bed all day instead of trying to decide whether to drive to work or take the train, but staying in bed has its own set of problems.
In Chaos Theory, the butterfly effect says, a small, seemingly trivial event early on can have serious consequences much later. Sceptical? In 1905, Adolf Hitler’s application to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna was rejected twice. See where that rejection got us by 1939.
There’s no space here to analyse the choices that changed my life, our lives, in May 1985. However, consider this. we’re all candles in the wind, and sometimes you have to just throw the dice and see how they fall.
How did Maggie Thatcher’s decision to buy Trident II ballistic missiles from the USA, result in me having six Spanish grandchildren?
In early 1982 Vickers Shipbuilders were given the task of building the four Vanguard-class submarines that carry the Trident missiles. At the time, I was the Technical Manager for Scanray Scandinavian X-Ray(UK). We were asked to quote for the radiation facility to inspect critical parts for the submarines. I was invited to go to Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness for a preliminary meeting to discuss the new radiation facility. From Scanray in Milton Keynes, this was a 390km, four and a half-hour plus journey. The meeting ended just after three in the afternoon. If I pushed it, I figured I could be back in the office by eight in the evening to clear up some work on my desk. On the country road from Vickers to the M6 motorway, I passed through the small hamlet of Newby Bridge. I noticed a signpost to the left, but I was in a hurry, thinking about work and didn’t take much notice. A few miles down the road it struck me, the signpost had pointed to Lake Windermere. I pulled over.
“Bernard.” I said to myself “You are one sick bastard. You just drove past probably one of the most beautiful places in the country and, because you wanted to get back to work, you didn’t even stop to look. You may never get that chance again”.
Then, I did something unusual. I turned the car around and went back. I drove from Newby Bridge, along the banks of Lake Windermere, to Ambleside. After a sightseeing trip around Windermere nestled in the scenic Lake District’s foothills, I made my way home.
I was 33 years old at the time. That incident wasn’t the direct cause of me moving to Spain, but it was an indication that my life was somewhat out of balance.
Please bear with me because although it might not seem so, what follows proved fundamental to our move to Mallorca.
Years before the Windermere incident, Scanray was involved in a UK Ministry of Defence project to develop a pulsed flash X-Ray source called CADEX. I wasn’t involved in that development other than the service department I managed provided the modified 250,000 Volt, X-Ray generator. The product was required to study the performance of Armour Piercing Discarding Sabot (APDS) kinetic energy anti-tank weapons. Basically, the system discharged a controlled amount of stored energy from a bank of large car batteries into an X-Ray tube. This provided a high dose of X-Rays used to study a projectile’s flight as it left the muzzle flash region of a gun or when it hit its target. To do this, it used an X-Ray image intensifier and a Hadland Photonics, Imacon 790 high-speed camera that operated at a rate of 100,000 pictures per second. The equipment got some results, but it had low X-Ray penetration and had been known to discharge the whole battery pack charge in one go with disastrous results. CADEX never got further than the development stage.
A while before this, Scanray had developed another pulsed X-Ray system for airport baggage inspection, which I was heavily involved in. This equipment was required to produce a low dose pulse of X-Ray output, which, unlike CADEX, was derived from a relatively small bank of capacitors. Superficially, the two systems were total opposites.
One day, for reasons I can’t remember, I was thinking about the CADEX equipment. I realised that for technical reasons, that have nothing to do with this story, I could run the CADEX system from the small capacitor bank from the baggage inspection equipment and get the same results as from a ton of batteries. This would make an inexpensive, portable pulsed system for low resolution, high-speed dynamic testing. I didn’t have a client for such equipment. However, I telephoned Roger Hadland at Hadland Photonics to see if he was interested. Roger came over with an image intensifier and an Imacon camera. One evening, when the place was empty, we carried out some tests in the radiation room of British Industrial X-Ray (BIX) in Leighton Buzzard. It looked like we had a viable system.
On one occasion we took the equipment to the Ministry of Defence’s, Terminal Ballistics Trial Facility at Potton Island near Southend-on-Sea. We did some live-fire tests, with a 30mm cannon, using 10mm diameter tungsten-carbide rods in polythene discarding sabots. I distinctly remember standing in a bunker wearing ear defenders and being hit in the stomach by the shock wave when that cannon went off. Seeing the damage done by a projectile, travelling at a velocity of 1000 metres per second, after it penetrates an armour plate, I decided I would definitely not want to be part of a tank crew.
In the three years after I left Scanray, I continued to sell pulsed systems to Hadland Photonics.
What, you may well ask, does all this have to do with us living in Mallorca. All will become clear when you read the extract below from my story. ‘How did you come to live in Mallorca?’
In the words of Forrest Gump, “My mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get”.
On Friday 3 May, I delivered a flash X-Ray system that I’d built for Hadland Photonics in Bovingdon. The system was used with Hadland’s Imacon high-speed camera, to study a projectile’s aerodynamics in the muzzle flash region of a cannon and target impact. This was done for developing some nasty anti-tank weapons for the Ministry of Defence. After commissioning the system, at about eight in the evening, before leaving for home I stopped by the office to tell Roger Hadland that the system was working, but if he needed me, I wouldn’t be available for two weeks. I was about to get into my car when Roger came out and asked where I was going. I told him I was going to Mallorca, but I didn’t tell him where he could contact me. I had been running my own business for three years working seven days a week during which time I hadn’t taken a holiday. Sandy was adamant, we would have two weeks free of work, or else!
Roger said, “My mother and father live in the countryside in Mallorca, they would love to meet you”. He scribbled a map on a piece of paper and gave it to me.
And as they say, my friends “The rest is history!”