A day in the life of G/H

There are many stories to be told of Gatwick Handling, my stories lie between 1978 and 1990. A full twelve years, terminating in the end because of the demise of British Island Airways. I survived the fall of Laker and saw the rise of Virgin Atlantic, along with many other Airlines that have now made their last departure and entered into Gatwicks history.

Oh, the tales that could be told. Unfortunately most are not to be told due to possible embarrassment to the people involved, in the most that means too risque to be printed. Fun days however and that is clear from the response regarding my ‘Happy Bear’ story. My time with G/H saw me at first working in the Traffic Office, which was at that time situated under the south pier link opposite the original Concorde House.

Some remarkable characters worked there during the two years I spent in traffic, which was mainly in load control. The 12 hour days and night shifts of four on and four off produced wild times, fun times, naughty times and even some out of control times. But all done in the most professional way. One character, who sadly is no longer with us comes to mind and that is Julian Maude.

Julian could be perfectly described as a typical stand in for Basil Fawlty, (John Cleese). He had a beautifully manic way about him and sometimes used the most outragious and colourful language. He worked as the controller on Chris Morfords shift, a shift that I was also allocated to as well.

On one such manic day shift, a football was found on an inbound aircraft and the traffic officer who met the inbound brought it back to the office to go into the lost property cabinet. The traffic officer and a few others decided not to waste the opportunity of having a bit of a kick about in the office. Unfortunately it got a little wild (unusual that) and the ball hit the glass panel of Julian’s control position. The glass panel popped out totally whole and remained suspended in the air within Julian’s little space inside. I never saw any body dive so fast to get under the desk as Julian did that day, everyone else froze to the spot as gravity then took over and the pane of glass made its way down onto the desk and shattered into a million pieces. Jules then came out from under that desk like a jack rabbit and started ranting at the last person to touch the ball (I believe it was Paul Millard) telling him to ‘Get out’ and that he was now a ‘dead armadillo’ and was nothing short of a ‘fossilised foreskin’ good old Julian.

That was the incident that inspired this sketch.