Sinclair and the 'Sunrise' Technology: The Deconstruction of a Myth (7 page)

Sinclair’s resentment of the bureaucratic NEB activities is well documented, and his version of events has been promulgated relentlessly. We have the advantage at this point of the testimony of people who, in contrast to Sinclair, who has a public persona to protect, have nothing to gain but the satisfaction of setting the record straight. To us, the authors of what was originally to have been a straightforward account of a techno-hero of the late twentieth century, what we found on investigation was a contorted fable. One noteworthy aspect of this is the response we received on approaching people involved in the story for information. Sir Clive’s capacity to produce what is normally termed ‘loyalty’ among his underlings is often noted:

[The Radionics R&D team] were so loyal that they stuck in with Clive to the end. Clive is incredibly good at selecting the right people.’ (Interview with John Pemberton, 22 October 1985.) The team spirit among the ex-Radionics design team is strong enough to bring them all together again each Christmas to replay the ‘great parties’ that they used to have on the top floors of the Mill. This relation is, or is perceived to be, reciprocal: ‘One thing about Clive is that he had a terrific loyalty to staff.’ (Interview with Alfred Marks, 25 September 1985.)

So far, so good. Obviously this is a skill or attribute of Sinclair’s relations with his technical staff that serves him well. However, the relation manifests itself in peculiar ways. Those not incorporated in Sinclair’s ‘family’ have a great many more complaints about his ways of dealing with both people and business, some of which are to be found within these pages. More revealing, however, is the frequency with which a defensive reflex comes out of the blue when Sinclair’s associates are approached. Any writer pricks up his ears when an initial approach for information produces responses such as ‘I won’t be part of a character assassination’ (telephone conversation with John Nicholls) or ‘The story is grey, not black or white. I don’t want to contribute to a muck-raking story’ (telephone conversation with Nicholas Barber). Over and above a probably justified distrust of those members of our trade plying it in the gutter, such responses raise questions of whether the truth, in so far as it can be unearthed, might be potentially damaging. It certainly shows an awareness of truth being in short supply.

However, enough of these interpolations and back to the witnesses. The brief from the NEB to the new managing director had been minimal:

The NEB didn’t have any views much, except that they hoped and prayed that I would be instrumental in getting Radionics into profit. (Interview with Norman Hewett, 16 October 1985.)

Hewett was given a block of Radionics shares by the NEB to provide a personal incentive over and above his proven professional competence. This didn’t please Sinclair, who thought the NEB was giving away bits of his company. The new MD and his aide set about the task:

Derek Holley reorganized the financial side and tidied it up a great deal, since it was in a pretty terrible shambles. I insisted that I wanted a monthly report and account from the various managers. It took quite a long time to get this over, particularly to Sinclair, who was in charge of research. His dignity did not really allow him to give me a report, much, so he never did it properly, but now and again he issued a rather lengthy lecture cum edict as to the future progress of the company as it was going to be. Apart from him, the others did co-operate, the manufacturing and finance chaps. So we knew the worst within a few months, (ibid.)

The best of this was the instruments side; steadily profitable and unproblematic, and producing some 20 per cent of the turnover.

Calculator production was continuing, but putting together the Sovereign and Cambridge models in order to sell them at a loss was not good business, and hardly justified the NEB support for ‘Europe’s one remaining calculator company’, as Nick Barber put it - Radionics produced the diplomatically named Enterprise calculator at £9.95 in October 1977, but its display of red digits reflected its effect on profits. It was followed by the Enterprise Programmable scientific calculator nine months later, but that was the last stab at an innovative product. Other calculators introduced in this period - the President, President Scientific and Settler models - were all made in Hong Kong. The latter was a betting calculator produced for Sporting Life (who funded the research costs) that calculated accumulator odds and the like, and was surprisingly successful. However, the fact remained that the pioneer of the pocket calculator was now reduced to importing desktop models from the Far East. We asked Sir Clive recently if with hindsight he could have survived in the calculator market:

No, we weren’t a big enough company. Calculators became a mature industry. There wasn’t much technical change, so we couldn’t put any fresh innovation in. The heart of the calculators were the keyboard, the chip and the display - the chip was the major cost item most of the time. We didn’t make the chip or the display. We could perhaps have made the display, and we certainly set up a pilot plant for that at one stage. But the chip we couldn’t manufacture ourselves, we didn’t have the financial resources for that. We certainly did talk to people about manufacturing the chip for us in the UK, but it didn’t work out. Effectively, we had to buy the chips from Japan, the dominant suppliers, which says really that if you allow the Japanese to take the component market, you sooner or later say goodbye to the finished product. (Interview, 6 November 1985.)

It was an extended farewell, however, Holley recalls

... sitting at a board meeting here where [Sinclair] actually said that LCD calculators would never take off, and we decided to continue to manufacture the old LED type. On a technical basis that was the only time I could fault him. That “led us as far as calculators were concerned, because within six months every calculator made anywhere was LCD, and ad lower battery cost and longer battery life. The development engineers were pressing to develop an LCD display calculator, but Clive rejected it. (Interview, 13 November 1985.)

In the light of the fact that LCD technology has now proven itself, not only in calculators but in computer screens and even pocket televisions, Sinclair’s aversion to this technology has not stood him in good stead.

The last calculator project was for a credit-card-sized calculator, which got as far as a printed circuit board, but the Japanese came in with far thinner models (LCD displays are also thin) and the calculator era was over. Before their demise they gave Norman Hewett his first taste of the Sinclair style of marketing:

[Sinclair] would insist on these early launches, and he was always warned against it by his PR chap and other people in Radionics. ‘Never mind about not having a production model,’ he’d say. ‘By the time that everyone gets around to placing orders we’ll be ready.’ So wooden mock-ups are made ... I don’t remember a single calculator finished model being photographed, not even a prototype model. (Interview, 16 October 1985.)

Hewett has been criticized for bringing inappropriate big-business practices into a small firm, but he made efforts to adjust. He and Sinclair went to the 1977 Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, so that he could get a feel for the industry, and he was willing to adopt flexible attitudes. On the premature launches of calculators, he goes on to say:

I was new to the industry, and as far as I was concerned maybe this was the way it was always done, and maybe it was true that, in a fast-moving industry, [Sinclair] was right, and two months’ delay would diminish your market, (ibid.)

What did concern him, however, was the problems in producing such prematurely launched products. Asked if early launches caused production problems:

And quality problems, yes. With the calculators, more quality problems, probably, than production problems as such. We had a reasonable set-up for calculators, and on the whole what was then knocked out tended to be pretty good. Nevertheless, there was never enough time or money spent on continuing quality control, (ibid.)

Whatever Hewett’s inexperience with the arcana of electronics, his conflicts with Sinclair are hardly concerned with the technical and research arena. They were concerned simply with the logistics, efficiency and profitability of producing goods for sale. While Holley was sorting out and systematizing the financial structure, Hewett was faced with the reorganization of a development, production and marketing system that had hitherto hinged on the predilections and practices of one man. In the best of circumstances there would have been frictions. With the new regime attempting to ‘
set the company up in a proper way with proper procedures, I don’t mean in a big business way, we would have regard for the type of industry we were in and how fast moving it is
’ (interview with Derek Holley, 13 November 1985) in a context of Clive’s ‘
lack of faith in Norman Hewett’s experience and personality
’ (The Sinclair Story, p. 82), his resentment at his financial masters calling a tune that introduced constraints and the challenge to habitual practices and methods, there was going to be conflict.

Hewett saw his role as reforming the company and providing an efficient set of interactions within the various sectors of the company. The various department heads, which Hewett saw as autonomous within their spheres of responsibility, were seen by Sinclair as his people, necessary to keep the show on the road, but in the final analysis subservient to the founder. They in turn had a loyalty to Sinclair, and a history of abiding by his decisions. Sinclair had hoped that the imposed MD would, while relieving him of tedious tasks, effectively fall under his control. The blunt and businesslike Hewett, however, set Sinclair up as research director, since this was Sinclair’s main avowed interest, and then expected to be left to manage.

The first and immediate problem was the television production, without which there could be no upturn in the company’s fortunes. The television had suffered from the classic Sinclair style:

It had been launched, but was still in production engineering. It had been launched, but wasn’t available - this was typical. (Interview with Derek Holley, 13 November 1985.)

There was a backlog of orders, so the first problem was to get production levels up. This was not easy, given the way it had been handled once the design came out of the research department:

Clive never had a development phase. What in my old-fashioned heavy-engineering experience happens is that something comes from the research department, then there is a production-development phase which is largely production-oriented, as well as market-oriented, and design. All that was sort of swept out into a vague slide between the research department, through Clive’s office, that says, ‘Well, we’ll have a blue thing round it’, and more or less straight into production. The delay was unacceptable, so he didn’t recognize the need. (Interview with Norman Hewett, 16 October 1985.)

Sinclair’s view was apparently that any product of which a working breadboard prototype existed was finished. The inefficiencies and stresses that Sinclair’s system had produced became Hewett’s problem. The problems of past history didn’t help:

When I went there one of the biggest departments was the one dealing with customers’ returned goods, returned for repair and a complaint-calculators, Black Watches and so on. Over a dozen people doing nothing but deal with complaints, which was a big drain on the technical capacity of the place, (ibid.)

There were lots of orders waiting to be filled for the television, orders that would bring in the desperately needed cash, but the need for a product of quality produced in sufficient quantity faced severe obstacles:

They had the mini-TV which they were trying to get into production, but it was being developed while they were manufacturing them. If you try and develop a product while you’re trying to manufacture it, it isn’t a very jolly sight... there must have been 100 or 150 modifications that had to go through because of inadequacies in the design. The prototype worked, but it was extremely difficult if not impossible to assemble properly, and in fact there were technical snags which had not been properly foreseen or ironed out in the earlier stages. So you had to have technicians doing a lot of the assembly ... the assembly that the girls couldn’t do because it was either too difficult or there were too many modifications and the girls couldn’t be updated in time, (ibid.)

It was not that the staff at Sinclair were lacking in the skills, but continuance of the small-scale company attitudes and informal lines of communication that had worked in the early days at Radionics was inappropriate to the task in hand:

I would certainly pay tribute to the people involved in manufacturing at that time, and indeed the technical chaps. The thing has never been developed as a prototype as a separate operation at all ... so that the technical boys were forever being cursed by the production people because the thing can’t be made, and it doesn’t work properly, this or that is an unreliable component, and so on. The technical people would say, ‘We know, we haven’t had time to look at all this ... we’ll have to change this.’ Then the production people say, ‘We’ve got a million items in stock, but we haven’t got any of what you’re talking about!’ So production staggers on. The tendency was to set everybody about each other’s ears in a way which was really most unfair, most regrettable, because they were really competent and capable fellows, (ibid.)

The production figures gradually increased, as did the quality of the television design itself. The inefficiencies of the process affected the profitability of those televisions that did get sent out, and ate away at the theoretical 40-50 per cent profit on the £200 retail price. From this notional costing margins were reduced by the remedial work that had to be done, the need to employ technicians on the assembly line, purchase costs when components were changed, and so on. It gradually came into profit as production reached some 2000 sets a month in early 1978. Having product available was a separate matter from exercising quality control over the sets that came off the end of the line, of course. Dixons and other retailers started to complain about quality, and the repair and replacement of defective sets decreased profit margins further, as well as discouraging high-street sales. The American Express order, for 10,000 sets, threw up even more problems. Although home sales were declining, the American market was crucial, being the best market for a novel and expensive gimmick. The New York office was inundated with defunct or defective sets from the American Express sale, and quality became as crucial as quantity. Hewett’s attempts to improve this aspect met with resistance from Sinclair: