Chapter Twenty One

     We had during our time at the Duke bought a couple of cottages in the village and had let them to officers from the Warminster School of Infantry so we were assured of a small rental income to help with expenses.

      But then the strange hand of fate entered the scene. In the past, I had usually tried to show our visiting Spanish waiters a little of the local hotel scene. Pepé Cubero was the current Torremolinos incumbent in our final months at the Duke. One day I took him back to my old hotel, The Goddard Arms at Swindon to lunch there. Of course my old staff still remembered me and when they heard me talking in Spanish, they told me there was a visiting Spaniard in the hotel, together with his wife, and they were having great difficulty in making themselves understood. Apparently he spoke very little English and had been asking for help. They suggested I find him and see if there was anything we could do to help.

    We finished our lunch, drank the last drops of our Rioja wine and went searching for this gentleman. We eventually tracked him down in Room 24, his bedroom. By then it was about two o’clock. Stupidly I forget about the Spanish habit of taking a siesta so I went to his room and knocked on the door. A rather gruff and heavily accented Spanish voice called “Quién está?” (Who is it?) I replied “A friend of Spain” in my best Castilian accent. Back came the order “Enter, friend of Spain!” So together with my young Andalucian waiter, we went in. We found a couple in their early sixties, or so I imagined, in bed!

      Overcoming my confusion, I explained haltingly that I had been told they were looking for some help and I wondered if there was anything we could do. I introduced Pepe and explained who we were. Then we heard their story.

      Seňor Orbegozo, who came from the Basque region of Spain, was the owner of a large steel mill. He bought scrap metal, added additional metals such as molybdenum melted it into ingots and then extruded it in order to make car springs and also steel for high grade knives. At that time, Britain was giving permits to some foreign manufacturers to purchase scrap steel from our stocks. He had been the lucky recipient of one of these permits and had been purchasing a special category, No. 4 bales and steel turnings, from a scrap dealer in Swindon. However, after several successful deliveries, his supplier became greedy and had been inserting lumps of concrete within the bales, increasing the weight and robbing him of the scrap equivalent.

      Señor Orbegozo was looking for a lawyer to sue this man but he also needed a translator. So during our conversation, he suggested I should act on his behalf. I realised that my Spanish was really not up to such an onerous task but I suggested I would put him in touch with someone who had been giving me some private lesson. He was delighted. I made the necessary phone call to Brian Steel, a teacher in the nearby the Public School, Dauncey’s. Subsequently he proceeded to act on Señor Orbegozo’s company’s behalf and I believe a satisfactory conclusion and appropriate reparation were arranged.

     Pepe and I left the couple, still in bed, when we had concluded our discussion and we returned home. I imagined I had now left the matter safely in the hands of others.

However, three weeks later, one late morning as I went into the Lounge Bar, to my surprise I found both Señor and Señora Orbegozo sitting at a table by the window, enjoying a glass of wine. I went up to them and greeted them warmly and asked what they were doing. Imagine my surprise when this opulent steel magnate told me he thought I was a good business woman and he had come to offer me the job as his Purchasing Officer of scrap steel in Great Britain. He said he would pay me fourteen shillings (70 pence) per ton and he wanted three thousand tons a month of No.4 bales and turnings.

    Getting over my astonishment and jumping in with both feet, I agreed I would take it on! He said he would send me my air ticket and I was to fly to San Sebastian where he would meet me. We would then go to the British Consul and sign an agreement and how soon could I come? That’s how three weeks later; I was sitting in the Consul’s office in San Sebastian and signing on as a scrap metal dealer.

     I realised that my knowledge was sadly lacking on the subject of scrap and that I would have to do something about it. So first I thought I would find out what exactly a No. 4 bale was. By phoning around, I found out it was a bale of pressed clean steel, i.e. without any treatment of paint or solvents, such as the trimmings from sheet steel when cutting out car part shapes, such as doors. I learned turnings were clean bits of steel scrap when the metal was ground or turned into shapes. Then I wanted to know the prices for buying and selling.

      This needed a little more careful planning. First I rang up several metal producing firms such as Pressed Steel, in the guise of a secretary, asking how much they charged for bales of their scrap metal. This I followed up with calls to several scrap metal merchants asking how much they sold them for. So I had the upper and lower figures to work from.

     I had once done a favour to a well-known steel fabricating company in Swindon, who made car bodies, when they had a strike on their hands. They needed to meet with the Communist leaders of the striking union but didn’t want the Press to find out. They had approached me and I had offered them our personal sitting room at the Goddard Arms for the meeting. So contacting the Managing Director, I reminded him he owed me a favour and had he any No. 4 bales to sell.  He immediately offered me a guaranteed thousand tons every month towards my purchasing target. This was a start.

    Before long, I realised I would need help to get the rest of the quota. I decided to approach through my son’s Godmother, the then Chairman of the Chamber of Shipping, who happened to be her son. I asked him if he could recommend a good and reliable scrap dealer, used to dealing with metals and who could arrange purchasing and shipping. He was most helpful and put me in touch with John Lowenstein who had a very large business in this area, shipping regularly from Dagenham. We made contact by phone and it was agreed we should meet in for lunch in London. John suggested the Baron of Beef, a restaurant in the City used for many business deals. I think he wondered who this lady from Wiltshire was, who wanted 3,000 tons a month of scrap steel!

   The day came. I arrived on time outside the restaurant and there was this elegant young Jewish gentleman in his late twenties waiting for me. In a rather condescending fashion, he informed me, the country cousin, that he was very well-known here and we would get an exceptionally fine lunch and very special service.

    I remember to this day how we entered the foyer and then descended down a wide impressive staircase to the restaurant floor. Below, awaiting our arrival was the Restaurant Manager, in his morning coat and with a carnation in his buttonhole. He was smiling broadly. My escort turned to me and said “I am well-known here, I come quite often.” As reached the foot of the stairs, the Restaurant Manager ran up to me, threw his arms round my neck and said in a heavily accented English “Allo, Mrs, Young’usband, ‘ow nice to see you again”.

      Amazingly it was Jean Braconnier, a young once-trainee Manager, I had been asked to train at the Goddard Arms. My escort was more than surprised and I think I went up considerably in his estimation from then on!  I thoroughly enjoyed my lunch and we certainly did have the best attention possible. 

      Obviously this scrap metal project would be ongoing so I decided to form a company that would cover all future occupations when we finally left the Duke. So Younghusband Sales and Development Agency was formed, with a schedule covering many areas of operation. We could have run businesses from boating pools to holiday camps, dealing in all kinds of metal to providing wedding breakfasts, Catering consultancy to packing herbs! This would then cover all our occupations from then onwards.

      However, although the scrap metal project fared well during the next three years and on several occasions, I needed to return with John Lowenstein to the Hernani steelworks to sort out minor problems with Señor Orbegozo; General Franco decided to put his finger in the pie. His regime had always had bad relations with the Basque region. They offered the strongest resistance against him, during the Civil War. So when his industrial friends told him they wanted to buy steel from Great Britain, he prevailed upon Mrs. Thatcher, the then Prime Minister, to change the method of issuing of permits. Instead of Britain allocating permits to export scrap steel; he would instead issue permits to import. The consequence was all his friends got the permits and the Basque companies lost out. So sadly that was the end of a very interesting sortie into the manufacturing world for Younghusband Sales and Development.  We had to look to other sources of income.

Scrap Metal Merchants!

Bridging the Centuries 

By Eileen Younghusband