Boving

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After graduating with a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from King's College, London, I started looking in the Daily Telegraph for a job.  I went to a couple of interviews.  I remember one was at Hoover, in the Hoover building on the A40.  Because of my holiday work as a char (domestic cleaner) I really believed I could improve on Hoover’s household equipment, and told them so.  They were apparently not impressed (their loss) and recommended that I get a haircut.  Another interview was with Northern Foods, I forget what for.  Then I saw the Boving advert for a graduate hydraulic engineer, went to an interview, and they telegrammed me the same day offering me the job.  I suspect that my fluency in Spanish helped.  I was very flattered, so I accepted, even though they dealt in enormous water turbines, and I had the ambition to deal in something smaller than a washing machine.

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Boving was founded by Jens Orten Boving in the early 1900s. He had worked at KMW in Kristinehamn, Sweden, and they eventually took over Boving.

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Boving’s offices were on the 6th floor of Villiers House, a fairly smart modern office building at 41-47 The Strand, a stone’s throw from Charing Cross station.  They had a drawing office of about 20 people, the Hydraulic design department with Gordon Keast, John Eastwood and me, about 6 contract engineers to supervise the tenders and contracts, and about 30 various support staff.  There was no factory.  In the water turbine business you frequently had to subcontract a certain percentage of the business to local firms, etc. In Boving’s case it happened to be 100%, which was actually quite convenient and advantageous.  

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I was in the Hydraulics department.  Power authorities, like the State Electricity Commission of Tasmania,  would have a scheme, with various consultants, for the survey, the dam design, the pipelines, etc.  There would be one for the turbine, for example Merz and McLennan, of Newcastle.  They would issue a specification, usually half an inch thick, giving all the basic requirements.  The boss, Michael Higgs, would decide whether we wanted to quote, and if so hand it to a Contract Engineer, Felix Jaffee or Jack Stevenson, who would then give it to the Hydraulics Department, Gordon Keast, John Eastwood, and me (at the time I joined).  We would work out the best design, based of the performance details of the models in the parent company's Kristineham hydraulics laboratory.  It could be a Kapan (up to 30m head), or a Francis, or a reversible Francis pump-turbine.  We would determine the ideal model and size, depending on the specification of the £ value of the efficiency, and a few other things.  We would then give the details to the drawing office (about 15 draughtsmen) to do the drawings of the turbine, to give to the manufacturers (usually Markhams of Chesterfield) to work out the manufacturing cost, and we would then put together our tender and give it to the consultant.  This process might take 6 months or so  The other tenderers might be Escher Wyss of Switzerland, Voith of Germany, Nohab of Sweden, Alstrom of France, Allis Chalmers of USA, etc.  A few months later the winner would be announced.  In fact (it is probably safe enough now for me to say this) in many cases the winner would have been decided in advance by the cartel of manufacturers in the International Electrotechnical Authority (all highly hush-hush and only known to the Contract Engineers, who would be responsible to put in a genuine quote anyway, in spite of the considerable effort.

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When I had been at Boving for a couple years we had an accident at Cruachan in Scotland where the turbine had seriously damaged itself.  There was to be a conference at Lausanne in Switzerland where this incident would be of great interest.  I  wrote a paper about it, and my boss and my CEO and I went to the conference, where I was to present the paper, to an audience of 200 world experts.  I was quite nervous, and walked up to the stage and started talking, and I had to talk fast because of the nerves.  The chairman came up to me as I was talking and gestured something to me.  Previous speakers had not been speaking loud enough, so I increased my volume.  I could hear people in the audience saying things quite loudly, so I thought me presentation was causing quite a stir.  It was only when I had returned to my seat that I learnt that the simultaneous translators had been unable to keep up, and that I had been shouting very loud and fast.  As you can imagine it took me years to get over the shame.  But at least I knew that it could never be so bad again, and I lost all fear of public speaking.  Write it out, memorise every word so you know how to get back if to go off-track, know that it will take twice as long to deliver, and remember Lausanne.    

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My proudest professional moment was at a meeting with the CEGB at Villers House while the plans for a  pumped storage scheme Dinorwic were being investigated.  They wanted to know how fast the turbines could be brought up to full power output, after they had been spinning in air at no power.  It was a question of accelerating the large column of water in the pipeline and the surges it would cause.  I was then seen as something of an expert on this sort of problem (see the section on Computers), and they had been expecting an answer of about 30 or even 60 seconds.   I worked on my calculator for a short while, and then said to them "6 seconds".  That settled it, and it meant that the scheme went ahead.  The only problem then was that the Welsh Nationalists, of course, turned the name into Dinorwig. 

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In about 1970 there was a fire on the 6th floor of Villers House, where we were, and we lost absolutely everything.  A couple of days later I went to the burnt out remains, and found the frazzled remains of my HP35 programable calculator (very sophisticated and costly in those days, could sin and cos etc) which I took home.  "It tried to do the square root of minus one" we used to say.  For over a year we had to hire space in round-about buildings, eg at the National Liberal Club.  Even in 1970 copies of essential documents existed elsewhere, and we were well rid of a lot of inessential rubbish, and it was nowhere near the disaster you might have expected. 

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Boving wanted to have a 200mm model of the El Chocon runner (actual diameter 6.35m) including the division into 3, and they engaged, via Boving employee Mr Percival, the world famous model makers, Bassett-Lowke, to do it.  The cost was to  be something ridiculous, say £25,000, to do it.  I made a model of one of the blades, which Percival lent to Bassett-Lowke, and they lost or destroyed it.  What they produced eventually was the wrong shape, and useless from my point of view. I was well pissed off, and boasted that I could make my own version,  From the actual runner profile drawings I built up layers on thin wooden veneer to make a wooden mould of one blade with its band and crown sections.  From this I made 15 resin blades, which I could then sand and glue them together, including a 5 blade detachable section.  It was a great success, much better and more accurate th an the Bassett-Lowke version, at a tiny fraction of the cost. I suppose the view was “there goes Gavin, showing off again, and trying to make us look stupid”.

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At El Chocon (6x200MW) in Neuquen, Argentina, there was a problem with the machine oscillating worryingly at near the full output, and I went there 5 or 6 times to try and sort it out.  I staid in one of the houses in the nearby site village,  We used to always bring home a bottle of the local "Cunti" wine . 

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I had several assistants, who I had interviewed and hired, but I was not very good at predicting how they would turn out.  Two successful ones were Richard Tofts and Andy Lewis.  Tofty could do a standing two foot jump onto an office table,  He played for a Bishops Stortford rugby club at the weekends, and would often come in on Mondays all battered and bruised, with tales of horrendous injuries to other less-savvy players,  He was also a serial fornicator, and would tell us all about it.  Andy was a quieter one, but very nice (see picture of him under Cars - Bristol). 

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