ATA- Albury:
The factory in Albury was impressive. Not like New Street, Marconi. Similar, but organised in the way Lindsay desired. Some 250 people were employed in Fallon Street, Albury. The Iran contract was for five years at megadollars, I never knew how much. Sammy and Audrey Knox ran the contract in Iran.
R&D at Fallon Street was intensive.
Lindsay had all sorts of inventive ideas and my job was to tackle them one by one until fruition. I was a member of a small R&D team, some paper qualified, most not.
This was one of Lindsay's traits. He gave people the chance to do if capable. He knew a paper qualification did not necessarily produce results.
We had a 'company' house, not extravagant but reasonable rent and it was only 5 minutes away to work.
Over the next few months I, a 'Pom', became accepted by the Oz workers and came to realise that some equipment had been designed by people with erroneous technical knowledge (i.e. technical phuckwits!)
The factory was very political with a lot of staff manipulating situations for personal gain including 'sucking-up' to Lindsay.
This never worried me. I got on with the job and built up respect since what I designed actually could be made and, more importantly, worked!
My first design was a 'bang-bang' thyristor motor drive for a monorail moving target, (a 'pannier trolley') with Terry Smith. This previous thing didn't work so I made it so. It freed up an Iranian Letter of Credit worth some $0.82M held up by non-delivery. It took me some time to convince Lindsay to let me 'CMOS' the control bit, but he eventually agreed, probably because the TTL version 'smoked' and randomly died.
There were several people recruited at the same time as myself. I learned the previous laboratory manager had been fired. The current one lasted 4 months. His successor, one year. Some had 'big pockets', were technically incompetent and in it for 'gain'.
I just 'did' the work and eventually Lindsay let the title 'manager' lapse as I could supervise the staff concurrent with inventive personal tasks. Not a management prerequisite, however!
I never wore a 'suit or tie!'
Lindsay had a Cessna and a twin-engined 'Duke'. Everything he wanted was for getting the jobs done in a self-reliant way. A controlled way to produce the quickest return. Nowadays termed, 'Vertically Integrated'.
His way was not always the best, in a technical sense, and we often 'crossed swords' in this area but he slowly came to see I was right, in cases of technicality, and reluctantly gave in providing he could add 'something' to my designs to make them 'his'.
His property, in Lyne street, had a laned target range and a sneaker range for demonstration purposes. Many military people from all over the world came there for sales demonstrations even though it was illegal by today's standards to use livefire weapons there.
From 1977 to 1984 I cleared many of the 'bouncing balls' of 'LCK Ideas,' and several of my own, turning them into manufacturable, saleable items, dispatched all over the world.
Around 1979 I put Lindsay in touch with Robert Phillips, (RBP), a colleague from CCL days. Lindsay recruited him and RBP joined ATA for several years to develop the SuperDart projectile location system.
I wish I had been retrospectively there when LCK arrived at RBP's house in a gold-coloured 'Roller' with a towbar!
Then the Australian Government banned trading with Iran!
| The Start | UK Office | Albury Factory |
| Post Iran days | Receiver Cometh | Belvis days |
| HUB days | DART days | ADI days |
| NEW days | The PEOPLE | EXIT |
| The History of ATA |
