A Passage to India

One of the abiding themes of the post-war world has been the organisation of those grand enterprises on which many of the essentials of modern life depend. Both reconstruction and the demand for modern industrial and transport infrastructure greatly exceeded any private investment available. Much of the capital therefore had to be provided from budgetary resources, or raised by Government from international sources such as Lease-Lend or the International Monetary Fund. But should such funds then be passed on to private entrepreneurs, underwriting their freedom of action, or should the public interest be safeguarded by State-run enterprises? Alongside, starting from simple socialist values, the public interest became progressively defined to include the concept of 'stakeholders', a far wider circle of all those whose interests are affected by the actions - or failures - of great corporations.

The relative role of the private investor, and the competence of the State as initiator and arbiter, have tempered my concerns, not only as one of these stakeholders, but in my active life. It was to be a fundamental decision in the developing world as much as on home ground; and in both it was clear that there could be no overall prescription, either a priori or by adapting a formula already used elsewhere. The best that might be hoped for is a few lessons culled from models which have proved outstandingly successful in practice - in their conditions and their time.

My introduction to Bird & Company in Calcutta was oblique. Born as a trading house joining the interests of two seafaring men, Captains Bird and his German partner Heilgers, it grew apace in the early 1900s, largely through the absence of necessary allied services such as insurance and transport, and later on materials to trade or manufacture. By the time I came into its orbit, it had become that uniquely Indian conglomerate, a Managing Agency House, with some sixty subsidiaries and responsible for many more it did not own outright but whose affairs it managed. They ranged from coal and mineral mining to paper and steel, from construction to electricity, and to railways and shipping to transport their goods. In its heyday, Bird & Company employed half a million men and was responsible almost single-handedly for the development of mining, manufacturing and supporting infrastructure of the eastern half of the Indian subcontinent.

One of its subsidiaries was the Indian Patent Stone Company, born to make ornamental tiles and lay terrazzo floors to patterns developed by its own designers. By 1952 its offerings were no longer unique nor fashionable and it was looking to expand its allied contracting operations with activities of a longer technological horizon. Fate drew its attention to a new process of concrete construction, Vacuum Concrete, whose properties of quick-hardening mass-produced units made it eminently suitable for low-cost housing construction, an urgent need for India's burgeoning population. The United Nations Development Programme invited amongst others the French company which had developed the system, and with which I was by then associated through Lawrence Leech's Millars' Machinery Company, to take part in an international low-cost housing exhibition in Delhi. Thus I found myself building a demonstration house, from the ground up, closely watched by the top echelon from Bird & Company.

Having seen the potential for this and eventually other types of construction, they said, 'Fine, we'll sign up to this.'

Then they added, 'But we shall need someone familiar not only with the process but also with Indian conditions.'

The way I had earned the latter qualification was not uninstructive. The key to Vacuum Concrete was the application of a vacuum to the freshly poured concrete to remove that part of the moisture required not for the chemical reaction of setting but merely for making it viscous to fill the form. One of the elements of the house was a large shell roof, cast on the ground in sections one above the other. The principle was that, having hardened, the same vacuum frame that had treated the concrete would be applied through pads to lift the shell. Casting sections of the shell roof and entire walls one upon the other flat on the ground, then raising them into position with vacuum pads would be a quick and efficient method of building houses for the immense numbers of India's low-income families.

This was but one among some 200 housing exhibits being built at breakneck speed on a vast exhibition ground on the outskirts of New Delhi. Neat rows of wildly different materials, designs and colours were beginning to take shape, striving towards the official opening by Prime Minister Jawarlahal Nehru. All had to be ready, painted, nominally furnished and presentable at that precise hour. Many included in the race small front gardens, potted with the obligatory lilies and bougainvilleas.

The concrete had been poured into my moulds and it was hardening nicely under an unremitting sun. The vacuum pads had been brought from the UK, together with the pump that would produce their suction. All was ready for the lifting and assembly of the walls and shell roof. I went to order a JCB3, a powerful crane that would lift them into position.

No construction site in the world is conceivable without such equipment. The first reply was optimistically ambivalent. 'We shall be looking for you, Sahib,' the office said. Yet repeated reminders produced progressively more evasive answers, until at last the truth could no longer be denied. 'There is not such a crane within twenty miles.'

The system was beautiful. Simple and elegant. Pour the concrete, apply the vacuum to remove the surplus moisture, let it set and lift it into position. Even now, my panels lay in neat mounds on the ground, their life force thrusting to develop into a sturdy human habitation. Any halfways civilised country would have the means to release it.

Abashed and dejected, this was the first profound lesson about the developing world. Ambivalence instead of dependability. The sudden void where more conditioned expectations relied upon a rarely withheld trust. The shared responsibility of a normal compact, a task allotted and a relationship which ensured it as accepted. No longer my duty but that of a joint endeavour.

Not so in this world, where goodwill greatly exceeded rudimentary capacities to perform and deliver. The bargain implicit in the dealings of the western world, here broke down because it was impolite to say No, to appear to refuse to carry out what was expected. Courtesy and amiability were all. Though negative for immediate purposes, there nonetheless remained a friendly disposition, a will to help, cheerfully undiminished by any sense of shame or failure.

Here and there in the nocturnal construction field were pools of light, storm lamps or arclights testifying to the urgency of the final days before the formal opening. There was nothing to be done except dully to admire these often heroic efforts and wonder what possible solution the dawn would bring. A sense of shared destiny made one measure the vast exhibition ground, guided by the sight and sounds of distant activity. Most revealed structures already predominantly finished, here and there some rectification or the adding of some embellishment. Most plots needed only to be cleared of builder's rubbish, spiced with some touch of greenery and a lick of paint. Ours stood out crassly against its neighbours because of its void and the accusing mounds of precast elements still to be hoisted to make a recognisable, habitable shape.

The heat of the day was rapidly being replaced by the chills of a desert night, causing a patchy haze to develop in the air. It added to the unreality of the scene, causing strange shapes to loom out of the dark and as rapidly to destruct and deny they had ever existed. The accompanying sounds were equally impenetrable, strips of chaotic orchestration to a madly scripted suite. It became a nightmarish world of a Midsummer Night's Dream without a resolution.

One pool of light was brighter, standing out from the rest, the mist seeming to form a cupola high above it. Getting closer, more familiar sounds became discernible: a motor straining, a void rush, renewed efforts accompanied by the crick-crunch-creech of full-stretched ropes bending to a heavy task.

And there - out of nowhere - appeared a JCB3, its black and yellow lines clearly recognisable through the haze.

Confounding all the doubters, the Jeremiahs, my own despair, there stood this beautiful apparition that could just save my skin.

The lanky Sikh seemed unaware of the miracle he represented. Perhaps we all do that time and again in our daily lives.

'Can you possibly spare me half a day tomorrow? Not five hundred yards from here?' 'Thik-hai, Sahib. No problem. Eight-thirty?'

All apparently matter of fact. No acknowledgement of how our lives had changed.

Only by me, with a great rush of gratitude to all our Gods. And Mother India.

To maintain the momentum, I therefore found myself within a few months in Calcutta as part of the Bird & Company management structure, tasked with reorganising the Indian Patent Stone Company from an unsuccessful general contractor and terrazzo flooring specialist into whatever could be a profitable role based on my knowledge of prestressed concrete and the opportunities offered by the vacuum concrete process. As with so many before me, the wide horizons of the Empire were offering me unimagined opportunities and a radical transformation of my life. India was to be the turning point, both in itself and for the paths I would follow from then on.

The Empire - Plunder or Blunder?

Since the last ice age, migrations have been enforced by climate or tyrants, or entrained by trade or curiosity. Explorers, eager upon conquest of the natural world, blazed the trail for those who sought newly uncovered riches - minerals to be mined, spices to be imported, souls to be converted, territory to be annexed. Thus the ancient Chinese and their trade with the Gulf, the Vikings, Phoenicians and Greeks, Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus, de Lattre and Rhodes. Thus also the East India Company and its multiplicity of descendants.

The British Empire, on the whole, was assembled haphazardly. The impulse was not a planned strategy of expansion but the unco-ordinated thrust of merchant adventurers. The Home Government was usually brought into the picture only once trading interests required the protection of the Crown, by devices such as the Honourable East India Company and the Hudson Bay Company. Their Charters lent the authority of the Home (later Imperial) Government to the colonisation process, enabling the merchant companies to act as vice­ governments and consolidate their new dominion through civil administrations.

Already in the 17th Century Britain was becoming too small. Its centralised monarchy offered too few horizons to the bright and ambitious. Trading opportunities were commensurately narrow. Those denied the role of courtier or campaign commander needed to look further afield. Fitting out a ship and returning with treasure that would kindle wealth and recognition seemed an increasingly attractive prospect. Politicians and others equally anxious to enhance their position were ready to finance such ventures.

As the new British possessions became recognisably areas in which to find fame and fortune, they turned into a magnet for the adventurous misfit. Whilst trade had been captured by the merchants, progressive development and administration became the responsibility of younger sons and remittance men. John Bright called the Foreign Service 'A gigantic system of outdoor relief for the British aristocracy'.

With the beginning of the Victorian age, opportunism came to be accompanied by missionary zeal. Earnest men and women believed in Britain's duty to civilise the world and keep it in order (Smiles all round). Britain's hierarchical society meant that men possessing a genius slightly out of the ordinary would find themselves stifled at home. The Colonies would then offer a ready way of finding new opportunities overseas. Narrow and obtuse bureaucracies at home often failed to understand what was being accomplished there.

As a result, Britain's creative genius, much of its best administrative talent, many of those who should have laid the foundations of social renewal and economic prosperity at home, instead found full play for their capacities overseas. Not only younger sons and fortune hunters but school teachers, railway engineers, medical missionaries, harbour masters and, of course, soldiers left their mark and their bones there.

Far from exploiting the wealth of the Colonies, Britain unconcernedly witnessed the drain of some of its best talent into them. Later this extended to the liberation of other people's colonies, romantically with Byron, politically in Latin America. Britain's own impoverishment was hidden by its capacity to assume the renown created by men to whom its social structure failed to offer an adequate future. For two centuries it lived in genteel decline on their repatriated gifts of honour, respect and species.

Traditionally the Dependencies looked after their own development. Neither the British Government nor their own administrations regarded it as their function to assist the merchants and their factories in ways other than to hold the peace and secure the sea lanes. Private investment encountered few constraints. Land was freely granted, as were mineral and prospecting rights. There were few controls on trade other than in favour of those already entrenched; no exchange controls or currency problems; and what today is called the investment climate lay forever unclouded under a sun that would never set. British private enterprise was given the patent to go overseas - and it developed the world.

Not until 1929 was it thought necessary to provide funds from His Majesty's Government, via the Colonial Development and Welfare Fund, towards the dependencies' capital investment needs. By that time the zenith of Imperial history had long passed. Britain had acquired and

maintained an Empire at minimal cost to itself. Yet no one will ever know whether the benefits the country drew from it remotely served to compensate for the outflow of some of its best brains and administrators whose genius and diligence could have kept Britain great. Conversely, no accurate balance sheet is likely to be drawn for what is now the developing world. Would its 'emerging economies' now be part of the world system without the infrastructure built up by the privateers who once regarded them as their home?

Curiously, the unconcern with the building of new enterprises beyond these shores exhibited by the stay-at-homes is still loyally represented today by those who would have us stand aside from Europe and rely on our 'historic ties' with the wider world. They are effectively the inheritors of those whose sole ambition lay in trade and who wanted to shun all other commitment. Whilst others worked hard to secure new dominions, and were regarded as mildly eccentric for it, those in Britain assumed the glory as their country's natural station. That that station might not endure without new structures and alliances seemed as difficult to believe then as it seems for their successors today.

The Hidden Jewel in the Crown

The trade with India, incited in the 17th Century by its spices and the 18th by its tea, became an even greater magnet in the 19th with the raw materials for the burgeoning industries in Europe. Cotton, jute, coal, iron ore, minerals became the new cargoes. With them grew shipping and insurance, and locally the development of extractive industries, railways and port installations. In turn these required power and their own raw materials, the timber and steel for mines, factories, the transport network, the wagons and the housing of workers at ever more remote locations.

It was towards the end of that century that Captain Bird from Britain and Captain Heilger from Germany began to grow rich on such trade. Each had his own sources of materials as well as his own markets in Europe. Eyeing each other initially with a competitor's suspicion, they soon came to realise that they could become greatly more successful through co-operation. In 1903 they established a joint company in Calcutta, Birds-Heilgers Limited, to bring together their interests. The traditional Calcutta commercial elite of tea companies such as James Finlay and Balmer Lawrie watched these traders in crude materials at first with disdain, then with admiration and finally with contracts to ship their own cargoes with greater speed and efficiency.

There were few impediments to Birds-Heilgers' expansion. Their prospectors located new deposits of coal and minerals beyond West Bengal into the gigantic neighbouring state of Bihar. Their jute mills and plantations spread into East Bengal (now Bangladesh). As their industries themselves required an ever-greater diversity of materials, they set up paper mills towards the South in Orissa State. Before long, they were responsible for the bulk of trade and the majority of industrial activity in the whole of the eastern part of the Indian sub­ continent. In the West, the firm of Killick-Nixon, based on Bombay, had gone through a similar process of spontaneous growth. It was as if a line had been drawn through the centre of India from North to South, with each of these companies dominating their half of this immense territory.

In time they became known as Managing Agency Houses - in effect not only were they owners by way of holding companies, but they were also appointed managers and secretaries for outside businesses. Other undertakings, too, came to entrust their business to the Managing Agency's more professional management.

At its zenith, the company's enterprises had employed an unimaginable half-million people. It owned 32 distinct mining companies, each with at least three or four active colliery undertakings; steel mills to look after their needs and those of subsidiary facilities; mineral mines, cement plants, construction companies, a private rail network and other transport infrastructure; paper mills and pulp plantations, and a great deal else. On top of this was the administrative and commercial apparatus which managed all the production and traded, shipped and exported these products. All this activity was governed by a board of five divisional managing directors, chaired by the owner, Sir Edward Benthall. So powerful was the company that later, when investment became heavy and outside funds were needed, Bird & Company was one of the rare enterprises to negotiate directly with the World Bank, which normally dealt only with governments.

When I became fully acquainted with them in 1953, they had long passed their high point. The war, partition and independence had curtailed their traditional business. Five years after independence, it was clear that India needed not only capital for industries that would underpin its economic independence, but social funds to deal with endemic poverty. The British Raj had held the peace, upheld justice and facilitated commerce. It had trained a first­ rate civil service and a brave and efficient fighting force for all these tasks. But its responsibilities had not been thought to include the relief of poverty, considered an internal and altogether 'Indian' problem. A democraticallyaccountable government now had different priorities, accentuated by its left-of-centre complexion and the Gandhian spiritual legacy. The economy became highly regulated and, little by little, restrictions were placed on private enterprise. The steel sector, in particular, came increasingly under national control.

The free hand of non-Indian owned business was also to be curbed. Three of the five managing directors were already Indian, men who had gained their positions by merit over many years' service. Eventually the time came for Sir Edward Benthall, still the patriarchal owner, to relinquish ownership, hastened perhaps by a tax dispute with government provoked by one of the last British managing directors. Realising that the company's assets could not be sold, its net worth could not be realised, nor did the senior Indians possess the capital to acquire them, they were quietly handed over to them for a peppercorn.

Wherein lay the duality, the internal tensions? Each of the actors involved faced a different set. The pioneers, from the doughty sea-captains to those who built up this empire-within­ an-empire, entered on it with little more lofty than their commercial objective, aiming for a personal fortune and independence. Yet step by step they found themselves transfixed by two exigencies: the need continually to expand the range of their activities and investment so as to maintain their primacy; contrasted by their ever-widening responsibility for awesomely large numbers of employees and their dependants. They had brought literally millions of Bengalis, Biharis, Orissans and others into the 20th Century, with all its advantages and defects, and its unanswerable challenge to their traditional societies. Sir Edward himself faced these tensions to the full: his was the ultimate responsibility, sharpened by his cares for the staff and the enterprise as a whole. His also the dichotomy between the needs of that enterprise and its people and the State and its population. But there is something greater at stake than the commercial or political interest. Underneath the human concerns and endeavours there is a flow of history which few can perceive and none can arrest, but which is a more potent determinant of their outcome. Whether the human edifice, however proud, can resist this tectonic flow will mostly become clear only with much delay.

In this case the results came swiftly. Corruption and turf wars between the new Indian owners became extreme. The company as such disintegrated; some of its constituent parts became involved in scandal and litigation; and the substance went to waste. Perhaps its time had come: Shiva had had a long and glorious reign; it was time for Kali to take over.

My own involvement was modest and touched little on this heroic drama. Mine was an effort to bring new technology into the construction activities, turning them from loss-making contracting to manufacture of prestressed concrete components. As in war-time Britain, steel had become scarce and concrete could substitute it in large quantities, especially on sizeable structures such as transmission poles for power lines. We gained a contract large enough to build three factories to produce them. My personal conflict arose between the struggle to train and build on the one hand, and the challenge to deal with corruption on the other. Increasingly stringent regulations had begun to turn the Bengali bakshish predisposition towards more lucrative opportunities. Controllers in Delhi were said to be profiting similarly. The more my colleagues appeared to take all this as given, the greater my juvenile determination not to succumb. I must say that the inducements offered probably corresponded to my lowly station, for it never seemed worthwhile to dent my principles for them. However, a greater test lay in store.

Prestressed concrete is made by pouring concrete into a mould around tensioned wires held at each end until the mass has set and the wires are cut to impart a compression equal and opposite to that which the member will suffer in its working state. At the beginning we had used 'piano wires' won from uncoiling old mining ropes; but these would not be adequate for our new factories. An import licence was needed, and that required political support from Delhi. My colleagues predicted that this would cost us dear, for no official would give such precious services free. In the end the whole episode was to add greatly to my knowledge of human reactions, of India and of the incidental physical delights it had to offer.

I arrived in Delhi on a Friday, in time for my appointment with the Under Secretary. He was nothing if not affable, listened with polite attention to my arguments, and at the end of the interview told me to come and see him again on Tuesday morning to pick up the document. With the cautions from Calcutta still ringing in my ears, there was little else to do other than to have faith and look for an agreeable location to spend the weekend. A friend recommended the hill station of Massourie and I decided to take my faith and doubts there for the enforced wait. Nothing could have been more otherworldly and capable of obliterating one's cares. A pure Victorian settlement of villas and chalets built of dark timber in the Swiss­ oriental style, with only the voluptuous vegetation indicating that one was far from an Alpine pass. Perfectly preserved also the Kurhaus, the Grand Hotel whose vast ballroom must have witnessed all that was elegant under the Raj, and nostalgic since his departure. Lonely ladies were there still, even possessing an added allure. Instead of the usual warnings given to the innocent traveller, it was whispered to me that Massourie was nowadays a hotbed of Soviet spies. What there might be to spy upon became dimly discernible when one of the younger ladies attached herself to me and confided that her husband was a squadron leader, but added comfortingly that he was stationed high in the mountains some three days' march away. I must say the time passed pleasantly, as on an ocean cruise, but with a tantalising air of mystery adding even greater flavour to one's romantic reading.

The return to Delhi on Monday was almost reluctant. The following morning, summoning what remained of my faith, I reported to the Under Secretary's office respectfully at 9.30. His assistant was not at her desk but was eventually located. In seeming embarrassment, she said that he would not be in the office, having been called elsewhere. My heart performed some intricate gymnastics, then sank to the floor. Had he perhaps ...?  No, no message. Pause. But he had left an envelope addressed to me. In it was the instruction to issue the licence....

The goods themselves also led to one of my more memorable experiences. By the time the ship berthed in Bombay we were desperate to have the wire coils to start production. We could not wait for the ponderous system of clearing and forwarding. So I flew to Bombay to despatch the formalities and accompany the 2 2 precious tons on the Calcutta Mail. No more romantic journey can be imagined. Flying in stately fashion through the changing countryside of Gujerat, Mahrashtra, Bihar, occasionally ambling with short breath on steep inclines, through banks lined with unexpected flowers, villages, rivers, forests, holy cows and holy men, the whole kaleidoscope of Mother India was to be revealed in all her manifestations.

The carriages were air conditioned, the compartments apportioned one per traveller. At the end of the corridor was an efficient shower. And in my bag more than enough reading for 36 hours of bliss and tranquility. The scenes outside the windows had an immediacy which has long ceased to exist in Europe or America, where industrial decay and hoardings line the tracks. In India the train slices through people's daily lives, producing a tableau in cross­ section. It became a time for observation and reflection, with my books becoming an intrusion from another world during the day and hence reserved for after dark.

The other inner man was also solicitously catered for. There was no restaurant car, for Indians prefer to cook their own food, even in the middle of a railway carriage. The first-class passenger also received personal treatment. Stops were not frequent, but at roughly the mid­ points of morning, afternoon and evening a bearer would mount the train, take one's order for the next meal and respectfully withdraw. The order would then be telegraphed to the next station, where another bearer and his helper would bring aboard brimming trays of smoky curries, crisp salads, honeyed sweetmeats and cool drinks. A table was laid out with these delicacies, real cutlery was produced and the diner left to savour his meal as the train departed promptly on completion of this ritual. One had dim recollections of railway hotels that once set the standard, and restaurants de la gore still fabled in France for their gastronomy. Today, only the airline passenger well forward can match such treatment.

As station succeeds station, one wonders what life would look like in Narsinghpur, in Mirzapur or in Allahabad - romantic names which even short acquaintance with India cautioned one to associate with a more prosaic reality. Except that a friend who had visited the last of them recounted a story which must also have passed into the sepia-scape of the evening of the Raj. There being no obvious hotel at the time, he stopped at the Club. On entering the bar, a large, florid man of military bearing greeted him and said, 'AAh! You must be Benton. They told me you were coming.' He turned out to be 'The Colonel', an Indian Army officer who had retired there because by the end of his service there was no one left 'at home' whom he knew. He had an arrangement with the Club Secretary to alert him whenever a European alighted in town. Over dinner, the Colonel lamented how young men (Benton had barely escaped National Service) were no longer what they used to be.

'I remember,' he said, 'when I was with Kitchener in the Sudan as a young subaltern. In one skirmish one of those fuzzy-wuzzies hit me with a ball, knocked me clean off my horse. So my Major comes galloping up and says, 'What the hell do you think you are doing down there?' and I say, 'I'm wounded, Sir'. He looks at me and yells, 'Good God, man, get up at once! Remember you're British, and don't lie there bleeding all over the bloody map!'

So lived the privileged, even if enduring their own kind of hardships. Countless, faceless thousands were crowded into shanty towns. Many, many more did not even have the protection of a cardboard box; a tea-chest would have been a mark of the highest caste of the dispossessed. Many slept, and died, on the street. During the monsoon, some found shelter in the porches or compounds of the well-to-do, by courtesy of the night-watchman who diligently collected his commission of a fraction of a cent from each customer.

The Indian middle classes were not uncaring. Yet in the turmoil created by partition and independence, they faced their own struggle for identity and position. As in medieval Europe, the beggar stood not only silently at the door but tended to live with you permanently. He became your responsibility, in addition to the ample circle of your servants. Concern with wider poverty fell somewhere beyond what was thought a practical reach and the even less practical identification with gurus and teachers who travelled among the poor, shoeless and without belongings, precisely to waken the consciences of the rich. That is not an arch judgement upon them. Far from it; for I found myself in precisely the same situation of having to rationalise one's responses - or deaden them altogether. The evidence, not just of poverty and homelessness, but of physical suffering, of people sick and deformed, desperate and mute, assailed one at every turn. It was a tension to be assimilated and turned into something positive, if one wanted to survive and not be dulled.

For a while my office was located in the Calcutta factory which was being readied for production. Knowing the conditions in which they lived, and the distances they had to travel, I rarely ceased to marvel that my employees arrived on time, dressed invariably in a clean dhoti and shirt. They were proud to have a job, to be able to perform it, and to care for their families. Yet the extreme conditions under which they survived kept desperation never far away and made their tether short. Just how short became clear to me as we came up to one of the more important festivals in the rich Hindu calendar. It was customary for all workers to receive a 'Puja bonus', pin-money with which they could buy some new linens for wives and children, and a few votive pastes and baubles for the god requiring to be honoured. But it was also the traditional time for wage increases. The only problem in this my first year as a 'company doctor' was that there was no money, and only a big red hole in the balance sheet.

Excitement ran high at the news that there was no cash. In a flash, a strike was declared.  My Directors advised me not to go near the factory, knowing how ugly strikes by Calcutta's Communist trade unions could get. Yet I found it hard to turn my back on them, breaking off contact and risking things getting out of hand. On entering the gates my car was surrounded by an angry swaying crowd, and a high-pitched babble of voices as only an Indian assembly can produce. Nevertheless I was allowed to reach the office porch, alight and go upstairs into my sanctum. After consulting with my senior staff I sent a message to the effect that I was ready to talk about their grievances, if they would choose six of their number to come up and parley.

Noon came, without any abatement of the confusion but presenting me with the choice of giving in to what looked like imprisonment or, as calmly as could be contrived, to maintain my routine and go for lunch. The car was still at the door, the driver in attendance, but its way barred by the crowd. I settled back and said, 'Let's go, Sankar!' He looked back at me with hunted eyes, knowing perhaps that we could both be lynched.

'Just go forward, inch by inch,' I insisted. He let in the clutch, and we moved imperceptibly. Wondrously, the mass of humanity became viscous. At something approaching one mile an hour we headed for the gates - until there was a grinding crunch which brought us to a halt.

With anguish, I realised immediately that we had driven over a coil of my precious steel wire which had been hidden by the crowd. There was a moment's stillness, then excited shouts by the crowd to clear the obstacle! And dutifully they set to and did just that.

As soon as the car had been freed, however, they resumed their barricade to prevent the car's progress towards the gate. But there was no longer a firm purpose, no true resolve to impede our departure. In that moment I felt a wave of kinship with them: both they and I had somehow lost our horizon.

When I returned, after a lunch without savour or appetite, I called the negotiating team together again and offered them a modest advance against their next month's wages. Feeling the few rupees in their pockets, they proudly went off to celebrate their Puja, secure once more in their honourable estate as family providers.

By mid-1957 the Calcutta plant was in full production, the contract for 40,000 40-ft high A­ frame transmission poles was in full swing, and plans were to go ahead for two further factories in Bihar to enter production. In addition we had been instrumental in creating the Concrete Society of India, grouping all the major construction firms, laying down standards and recognition for the industry. It had made its authority plain in several ways, though perhaps less dramatic than described by an over-diligent writer of Board minutes, who recorded that members guilty of allowing their subscriptions to become seriously overdue 'shall be dismembered'.

I felt my mission had been accomplished and returned to London. The final journey home would take in all the places of legend and beauty along the way - Srinagar, Teheran, Damascus, Istanbul, Rome. It proved an incomparable pageant of history and romance, and in an indirect way a living map of the religious inspirational springs of the World Congress of Faiths.

Not much more than half a year later, news reached London that the Indian Patent Stone Company had gone into liquidation. Concrete, and even more so the rapid hardening variety of cement used for prestressed concrete, needs water for the chemical reaction that makes it set and gives it strength. My personally trained Chief Engineer eventually gave way to an accountant who found the water bill irksome and sought to reduce it. The predictable result was that time after time the transmission poles failed their stress test, until the Government of Bihar cancelled the contract. It was the most valuable lesson of my life, and excellent preparation for a future of building more substantial enterprises on the soil and people of developing countries.