Sinclair and the 'Sunrise' Technology: The Deconstruction of a Myth (8 page)

Another thing friend Clive isn’t keen on is spending money on quality control. Quite often, when there was a meeting where production and engineering needed to be brought together, I wanted to have the quality-control manager in as well, because this is of the essence. Clive was always against having him there! ‘Don’t have him in,’ he’d say. ‘He just causes problems and trouble!’ Not only did he not want to be involved with [quality control] himself, but he didn’t want to know about them or their problems. Extraordinary fellow, (ibid.)

Although our readers, cognizant of earlier history, might at this point in the story not find it so extraordinary that Sinclair possessed the attitude Hewett described as ‘if you make it, and it just works, then get it to the customer and if possible forget about it, we don’t have to deal with the consequences’. Hewett was finding it increasingly difficult to deal with Sinclair, from whom he expected at the least passive co-operation. Instead, he was put in a position where he received minimal co-operation, maximal irritation, and interference. The conflict was one of style rather than personality:

Personally he didn’t dislike me, neither did I personally dislike him, although I got professionally very annoyed with him in many ways, (ibid.)

That the management styles conflicted is not in doubt. Derek Holley admits that Hewett was at a disadvantage in making the transition from the heavy electrical industry to consumer electronics and may not have adapted sufficiently. The wider problem was Sinclair’s character, and his resistance to any changes, however businesslike, that ran counter to his own views. His then wife said, in response to the question of whether the NEB was putting constraints on Sinclair and his ideas:

Well, I think constraints is a bit strong. If he has an idea and wants to put it into action usually his reasons for doing so are very strong indeed, and considering that he’s also very much a fighter, I wouldn’t like to be the one trying to put a constraint on him ... He has a very quick temper indeed, and a rather noisy temper. Also being quick-tempered he doesn’t hold grudges. If he’s angry he’s angry and everyone in the workshop knows about it. To a certain extent the business is him, it’s his ideas and his innovative powers that have made the business what it is, and I think anybody that tried to stop him doing that would be very foolhardy, because you’d end up with another run-of-the-mill business. (Ann Sinclair, BBC Radio 4, 18 January 1978.)

It is worth emphasizing that, as of the time of the NEB’s initial funding, what Sinclair had made the business was a company so close to bankruptcy that his financial advisers had thought that bringing in the receiver was the correct course of action. Sinclair’s ‘innovative powers’ had been given due leeway, with work supposed to be proceeding within his allocated fiefdom of the research labs. His ‘ideas’ on how to run a company had not proved themselves in practice, however much Sinclair wished to place the blame on the volatile calculator market, and something had to be done. Sinclair’s complaints about the Hewett period are, as a presumably considered case, petty. The commissioning of a business plan by Hewett, on the advice of Nick Barber, is presented as a sneaky act on Hewett’s part. The likely reason for the resentment is suggested by Clive’s biographer’s comment: ‘
not that Sinclair had much faith in management consultants anyway
’ (The Sinclair Story, p. 83). Clive’s constraint that all recruiting was stopped by Hewett was mildly countered when we asked him about it with the comment that it’s standard practice to halt and reassess recruitment when in financial difficulties, and that anyway it wasn’t Sinclair’s job.

The true trouble lay in the fact that Sinclair thought it was all his job. A typical difference was over market research. Sinclair’s view was that he knew what the public wanted:

It has to be done on the basis, I think, of understanding why people like products or dislike them. It’s no use saying to somebody, ‘Would you like a pocket TV?’ when no such thing exists. The question comes out of the blue to them, they haven’t any chance to think about it. It’s much more useful to think oneself, you know, will people like them once they’ve had a chance to play with them. (Clive Sinclair, BBC Radio 4, 18 January 1978.)

Hewett was rightly dubious of Sinclair’s powers of prediction in this area. He felt that the company was exposed and vulnerable with a single profitable product, and the fact that the saleability of this product was based on faith in Sinclair’s vision. As he says:

When the development of a product has taken the place of market research, you presume that by developing it it’s going to be sold, whether the public wants it or not. You have to assume they will, because you’ve already burnt your boats. (Interview, 16 October 1985.)

Hewett commissioned some market research on customer reactions. This showed that people didn’t want a 2-inch screen on a miniature television, because it was too small, but would have been happy with a 3-inch screen. There was a board meeting at which it was agreed that any future model would be a 3-inch version, against the objections of Sinclair to paying attention to survey results:

He announced at the time that he didn’t believe it. I said, ‘What do you mean, you don’t believe it? Are you saying that it hasn’t been carried out properly?’ ‘It’s all rubbish,’ he said, and had no arguments to support his position. So when you ask if he’s rational from a business point of view, I think his reaction to that sort of thing is such that you have to say he isn’t. He’s not objective. He rejects things that run counter to his egocentric views ... they’re not acceptable, (ibid.)

With this sort of resistance, Sinclair and Hewett seem to have existed in a state of continual tension between the Sinclair style of business by internal certainty and the conventional but commercially sound approach of Hewett. Although public dissent was minimized, Hewett recalls that he occasionally was forced to play his trump card in the face of Sinclair’s resistance:

Once or twice I simply had to lay it on the line and say that if I didn’t get co-operation I should have to say to the NEB that it wasn’t on any more, and recommend that they take other steps. He didn’t want that because he didn’t want the money pulled out, of course, (ibid.)

Hewett, fighting a financial battle on the production and marketing fronts, and attacked from the flank by Sinclair, was in an unenviable position. The gradual progress towards an operating profit as television production improved, though slow, was perceptible, but imposing his control on Sinclair as well as doing the job he was supposed to perform was impossible. Derek Holley says:

[Norman Hewett] had the opportunity to stamp on Clive from day one, and did that quite effectively for two months, and then let the reins go. Gradually, as Clive saw that he could overcome this interloper from the NEB, which is how he saw him, it created problems, and that ended up with him leaving ... I find it very difficult to accept that Clive ever [circumvented Hewett] because he had this grand plan to so do. It’s just the way he operated, and he genuinely believes that the way he operates is right. I don’t think there was any grand design, it’s just that he operates by instinct, and those instincts don’t happen to suit the surrounds. (Interview, 13 November 1985.)

Sinclair’s incapacity to delegate responsibility and allow people to get on with their jobs, to accept that ‘his’ company could run without his control, led him to continue the informal command lines by which the company had previously functioned:

In fairness, he never interfered with how I ran the accountancy and finance, because quite honestly he didn’t understand it, and he let me alone. The ones he interfered with most were the production and marketing departments, because marketing in particular is not an exact science, and he had his own views on marketing, and that was the way the company was going to operate its marketing policy, so the marketing director stood no chance, (ibid.)

The circumstances changed when the bottom dropped out of the US market, by that time the only market there was. Contrary to Sinclair’s vision, there was a distinctly finite market for a £200 gimmick, even in the States, especially when reliability and quality were dubious. Norman Hewett’s suspicions about its marketability confirmed, he told the NEB that he thought the end was nigh:

I wasn’t proposing to leave, I was proposing to do what I could to minimize the damage and get them out of it if I possibly could. I made it clear to Barber that co-operation from Sinclair was minimal, and he often used to countermand my instructions behind my back, so I wasn’t very hopeful. (Interview, 16 October 1985.)

Sinclair, his beloved project threatened, seized his chance to get rid of Hewett. Making Hewett the scapegoat for the current ills, he communicated with the NEB directly. The next Hewett knew, Sinclair wanted to see him, told him it wasn’t working out, and the NEB had agreed they should part company. Hewett resigned, betrayed but presumably also relieved, confining himself publicly to the comment that serving three masters, the NEB, the Radionics board and Sinclair, was impossible.

So Norman Hewett departed, taking as a golden handshake the money from the Radionics shares he had been given, which the NEB, either graciously or guiltily (depending on one’s assessment of the reasons for his departure), valued at the notional value they had had when he received them. Derek Holley, for his sins, got to be acting MD until a new one could be found, which turned out to be a couple of months later. With at least some significant progress under Hewett in instituting businesslike systems, and Derek Holley still controlling the finance department, the NEB presumably thought things couldn’t get worse.

The NEB wasn’t happy with the computer project, however. This had been, along with the flat-screen television, Sinclair’s future product, and design work had started some time in late 1977 or early 1978. Basil Smith and Mike Wakefield, who were the only two working on the computer, were not a heavy drain on resources, but the project would need significant investment to get it into production. This would include the purchase of custom chips that would be economical only if contracted in runs of 20,000 or so. Since the Commodore PET and the Apple II had been launched the year before, and had brought a new maturity to the computer market in the States, the proposed machine offered an early British entry into this new hi-tech arena, in line with the NEB’s avowed purpose. The decision of the NEB was to view the computer as, in Sinclair’s words, ‘not being within their realms of plausibility for the company at the time’ (interview, 6 November 1985). With total Apple II sales of only some 9000 machines in the US in 1978, the NEB, already nervous about the amount of money poured into Radionics, was wise to view this as not the sort of development likely to show a quick cash return.

So to Sinclair’s disgruntlement the project, with its personnel, was passed to Newbury Laboratories, where it attracted NRDC funding. Newbury eventually sold it to Grundy Business Systems and the product finally emerged in 1982 as the NewBrain. Although a highly regarded and expandable machine, it came too late to the marketplace. Derek Holley contrasts this delay with Sinclair’s approach:

Those guys never developed that product, they kept redeveloping it. They were technically brilliant... but they didn’t have the same drive. Whereas Clive will get to a point where he says, ‘Well, we’ve looked at it enough, and now we’re going to put it into production and to hell with the consequences’, they kept looking at it and redesigning it. (Interview with Derek Holley, 13 November 1985.)

Sinclair thought the cancellation of the computer short-sighted, but was already looking to hedge his own bets - his alternative company had already launched the MK14 microprocessor kit. The fact that this potential money-spinner wasn’t proposed to Radionics presumably shows that Sinclair saw little prospect of, or little point in, getting Radionics back on its feet. The mounting debts of Radionics, with trading losses of £1.29m in the last eight months of 1977, and a total of £1.98m for 1979, were hardly hopeful, and even Sinclair’s projection of ‘zillions’ of pocket television sales was not likely to get him out from under the control of the NEB. His obsession with the flat-screen project, with its NRDC funding enabling a team of some eight people to work on it, plus access to the lab facilities and his technical team kept him with Radionics, but his development of another corporate option was an open secret within the company. Norman Hewett was of the opinion that Sinclair, in parallel with the full-fledged NewBrain computer project, had a cut-down version, a ZX80 precursor, planned. We checked with Derek Holley whether Sinclair was doing work on this at the time (early 1979):

Well, we believed he was, but I don’t know whether there’s any evidence for it. He had this other company, Science of Cambridge, going. There was always a feeling within [Radionics] that although we had this computer under development we would never see it, that one way or another it would come out through Clive’s other company, (ibid.)

Whatever else was going on at the time we shall leave to the next chapter. In Radionics Sinclair, free of Hewett, went merrily on his innovative way. At this point the efforts of the previous year to get the TV1A Microvision production up to profitable levels had borne fruit, in that they were making up to 4000 a month. The trouble was that demand had slumped and stock was piling up. At a manufacturing cost of around £100 per set, to have 12,000 or so sitting around in St Ives and New York and moving sluggishly at best was a £1m liability. Some 20,000 had been sold, but the market at that price had died. The new, cheaper and better engineered version, the TV1B, was being developed. With a plastic case and a simplified circuit, it was single standard, working in the UK only, and true to Sinclair’s marketing theories would sell at half the price, coming down to the magic £100 mark. Unfortunately the first half of the equation, the production of profit from the first version, hadn’t met expectation.