I can remember my first days in Venezuela as if it were just last week instead of 60 years ago. I think this is a symptom of dementia or old age or something, so I had better get it written down before it's too late!
When we finally got my visa sorted out it was time to leave England. Claude Diamond, the company's Agent in Leamington Spa had forgotten to tell the factory that I was married and so when I went to the Venezuelan Consulate in Liverpool there was only a visa for me. Instead of a mechanical engineer, my true title, I was entering the country as a 'Textile Technician' Jenny and I after only a month of marriage were to be separated indefinitely while I made the application for her visa in Venezuela. (An amusing story about this later!)
I had flown in propeller aircraft before in the TA with the Airborne RA and a couple of flights to Paris via the Lymne to Le Touquet route, but when I boarded the Panam 707 at Heathrow to fly to New York it was another adventure. In those days ordinary people didn't fly the Atlantic as it was expensive, but for me I was now a business traveller at the start of about a million miles of jet travel at my new company's expense.
It was possible to fly with BOAC to Caracas, Venezuela in one aircraft, but the route was long, via Bermuda, Barbados and Trinidad whereas it was more comfortable to make the 6 hour flight to New York, stay the night at the airport hotel then catch the 10 am direct flight down to Caracas which only took 4-1/2 hours also with Panam. The flights were very comfortable, with wider seats and more legroom than the Easyjet planes I fly now, also there was a free meal and drinks were also free.
I arrived the next day, the 5th December 1961, at Venezuela's Maiquetia airport on the coast about half an hours drive up the mountain to Caracas. Dennis Ball, a fellow brit who was 10 years older than me, met me at the airport with Salvador the company driver, and we started the 3 hour drive through Caracas then west to Maracay which would be our home for the next 30 odd years. For me it felt very hot and damp, the temperature about 30 degrees C with high humidity specially on the coast. On arrival in Maracay, Dennis dropped me at the Hotel Bermudez, a few hundred yards from the factory, with the instruction that he would pick me up at 7.15 the following morning for my first day in the job.
Maracay was a fairly large town with paved roads and not as primitive as I had imagined. The Plaza Bolivar was enormous with lots of trees and areas to stroll about in. One of the longest serving dictators, Juan Vicente Gomez, as a paranoic dictator who trusted no one, felt insecure in Caracas the Capital city and made his home in Maracay which he turned into the main military base of Venezuela. There were two airfields and a large barracks for an infantry division which was located close the the hotel. The hotel itself was comfortable, about 2 stars with excellent food, and run by an Italian. Our company used the hotel often for lunches and housing visitors. I was woken up about 5am by a series of explosions which I thought might be gunfire—I had only recently watched on TV the events in Cuba when Fidel Castro seized power- but it turned out that it was fireworks. As this was December, in the days leading up to Christmas, the church had early morning Mass virtually every day and to get people awake and to remind them, they had developed the custom of letting off exploding rockets. Also another December custom was to roller skate around the streets in the dawn hours!!!
Sudamtex, my new company, was a subsiduary of Merchants and Manufacturers, at that time the third largest textile company in the States. It had just over a thousand employees and made cloth for trousers, shirts and curtains. Apart from the traditional cotton spinning and weaving machines it had a dye house and finishing plant where high class and nicely designed shirt and curtain materials were made.
Dennis introduced me to the Plant Manager, Lanham McCauley from Georgia, USA. After the usual words of welcome I was taken to meet Ricardo Contreras, my new boss, who was a Chilean. He had studied engineering in the US, so spoke fluent english. His assistant was Jose Bendicho from Barcelona in Spain who had fought in the Spanish Civil war against Franco. He then gave me a tour around the factory to show me the areas of our engineering department’s responsibilities. We had a small steam power plant with a boiler and steam turbine which produced electricity plus transformers to receive power from the Venezuelan Electricity supplier Cadafe. We also had a mechanical workshop, a carpenters shop and an electrical workshop all doing maintenance for the factory.
I had been hired by George Murphy, not for a specific post, but as a group of international engineers to be trained up for the future. He had hired 2 englishmen, for our english-speaking, 2 portuguese for our plant in Brasil and 2 Spaniards. He was a plain speaking man. He said that I would need 5 years training before I would be useful to him and that although I imagined I was going to an exotic place, after 2 years it would be just like anywhere else I had lived in!
Ricardo soon gave me my training plan. I was to start in the power plant and every month study one piece of machinery and write a report on it. He was an autocratic boss and told me that I was to stay all day in the Power Plant and not go wandering around the rest of the factory. Pretty harsh, but in fact he did me a favour. Being an American company, there were americans and 2 other English in the plant, Dennis Ball and Gerry Holland who was manager of the dyehouse, so it would have been tempting to spent time chatting with one of them in their offices , but instead I had to spend all day with the boiler house crew, none of whom spoke English so I was forced to practice and learn to speak Spanish.
They were a great group of men and we got on well. The crew were mostly Italians and a big Austrian called Karl Pavalec. The Italians I remember were Carmelo Minimo, Benito Pellarini, Carmelo Scorsonelli, Leonidas Spagnolo and a Sicilian called Fazio. Honestly, he really looked sinister, dark looking face, you wouldn’t want to meet him on a dark night in an alley!! But, he was a great guy, lived alone and I remember he invited Jenny and I to his house one Saturday to listen to the first stereo system that we had ever heard. Later he took us to eat our very first Pizza. The Pizzeria was run by a guy from Naples. He was a baker and made bread every day. He called it the Pizzeria Vomeresa, as he was from a napolitan suburb called the Vomera. On Saturday and Sunday only, he would make pizzas in the same huge brick oven used for his bread. He had a large patio and so we ate sitting in the open air, which of course is possible all the year round close to the equator. It was in a residential area and only really known about by aficionados. I can still remember the joy of eating his Pizzas with a nice cold Polar beer on many a weekend evening. When Nick was old enough, he would run into the kitchen and get some cheese or black olives and he made friends with the owner. Great times.
I don’t remember a lot about the first month there, except phoning our Mr. Fixit in the Caracas office, almost daily, to see if he had got Jenny’s visa. He seemed to be having problems, so one day when he visited the plant, towards the end of December, I asked him what the problem was and he confessed that the Ministry official in charge of visas didn’t seem to like him. I asked if I could go with him and talk directly with the official. ‘Nothing ventured nothing gained’ as they say, so a few days later I walked into this scruffy looking office in the Ministry of the Interior. My heart sank, as there was the most miserable looking man seated at a desk. I won’t get anywhere with this most unfriendly looking man, thought I. My conversational Spanish was non existent after only a few weeks in Venezuela, but I could manage to string a few words together . He looked fiercely at me and said, in Spanish, “What do you want” He already knew why I was there, so I replied in my “Me Tarzan” Spanish. “Me here—wife there—me want wife here!” To my amazement he burst out laughing and when he recovered, he said “OK I’ll do it” and he sent the visa that very afternoon to the Venezuelan Consulate in Liverpool .
We were very close to Christmas 1961 by now, so I told Jenny to follow the same route via New York as I had done. Her flight from London to New York was full of American servicemen who were going home for Christmas. In those days of the ‘Cold War’ there were thousands of American service personnel in Britain and Europe. She said that the flight was one great party and she was given several marriage proposals. Luckily she resisted and I got my wife back in time for Christmas.
I was still in the Hotel Bermudez and we were expected to look around for a place to rent, buy a car and some furniture. There was no pressure and so we enjoyed our stay for a few weeks with the good Italian food provided at the hotel.
While I was there , alone before Jenny arrived, I woke up one morning to the sound of gunshots, as I thought , as across the road was the Venezuelan army barracks, built by the dictator Juan Vicente Gomez. Apparently they were very loud fireworks, mostly rockets which the Church set off during december to get the people into church for early morning mass. They also had the custom of roller skating around the streets at the crack of dawn. Ah well, we all have local customs, especially in catholic countries.