About Alan Wilson & Baram Blackett

(Below info was originally on "Authors" page of www.KingArthursLegacy.Com)

Historian Alan Wilson

Alan Wilson went to university under

pressure from his parents and largely
because his older brother was there. His
own ideas were to leave school at sixteen
and attend a Technical College as he far
preferred the idea of life in industry or
commerce, and he was never comfortable
with academia.

In those days one could do a Pass Degree

in two subjects if not selected for an
Honours course, so he took a Pass degree
in three subjects. Economics, History, and
English and was glad to get it over and
done with and do his two years National
Service in the army.

The problem was largely that large

numbers of ex-service persons were still
leaving the 5 million strong wartime army Alan Wilson
and the several million of the Navy and Air Force and large numbers were claiming
that they would have gone to University but for the war. They were all sorts of ex-
Captains, Lieutenants, and so on up to thirty years old and eighteen year olds were
lost in the dominance of this group.

He did not really decide what he wanted to do with his life until in his late twenties
when he discovered the systems of Pre-determined Time and Motion techniques and
organized Methods techniques that were becoming the industrial vogue. Suffice it to
say that he rapidly achieved a management position running a Planning Methods and
Time & Motion study department for twelve factories in a steel re-rolling and
manufacturing group. He moved on to another large company with six major
factories before being head-hunted by a large international consultancy.

The projects were virtually all located in Shipyards and boiler-making plants. It was
actually best to know very little about ship design, as the problems in the United
Kingdom were massively organizational. Everything depends upon organizing the
flow of materials and the provision of the necessary tools and services in the right
order and in the right place at the right time. This had to be done for 10,600 men in a
Belfast shipyard, for 3,400 in a Glasgow yard and so on. Thousands of men in a
large number of different trades, with millions of man hours, dozens of departments,
hundreds of machines, and all dependant upon Work Orders, Job Numbering, and
services – especially cranes and fork-trucks.

Alan Wilson had found his little bit of work heaven. He worked at Three Sunderland
yards under an American Alec Boyt who had been employed at Pearl Harbour
working to refit USA battleships after the Japanese attack in December 1941. This
man was a mine of information and Alan was needed to do Planning and Analysis
and to try to help to negotiate the consultancy team through the chaotic and
dangerous minefields of British Trade Unions.

Someone should write a book about the comic opera mixture of disaster and hilarity
of these situations.

After this he was sent to Belfast where a new Danish Managing Director had been
appointed at a very high salary and he had chosen to bring in the Swedish branch of
this USA International Consultancy. Well, this hugely offended the British Branch of
the organization, and Alan Wilson found himself in the middle of trench warfare
between the Management and the Unions and the Swedish and British
Consultancies. It was another Alice in Blunderland situation. So with ninety four
staff working for him and located in the old Works offices on the south east side of
the new dock he followed a directive on methods planning laid down by the Swedes.
The problem was that the Managing Director and the Swedes were proposing to
introduce new methods after they finished building the next three 325,000 ton super-
tankers. So nothing would be changed for around two and a half to three years.

It took Alan and Joe Dykes a Shipyard manager about on hour to draw upon a simple
bar chart based on Weekly running costs of the yard and the known total predicted
income that would accrues from ships built in the next 2.5 to 3 years. It meant that
despite a huge government cash grant that was given to upgrade the yards and meet
costs, the shipyards would be bankrupt for around £18,000,000 in that time. The
plan-whatever it was- would not work and the yards with its 10,600 employees was
going to go bust. The detail of what transpired in the chaotic new management
structure was actually more than dramatic.

Against a background of the IRA letting off bombs in Belfast, and No-Go areas
being set up and with road-blocks and masked men all over the place it was quite
something. The routine devolved into meetings between the Management and the
Swedish consultants, who would generally arrive on Wednesday in time for lunch
and disappear on Thursday after a free lunch.

Alan was routinely told "your presence will not be required" and then he sat by the
telephone with Joe Dykes waiting for the urgent call for him to come and referee the
simmering conflict between the two parties. Looking back, it was a situation that no
novelist would dare to write, you couldn't invent it.

Alan was Welsh and not English and therefore not offensive to the warring Irish and
his father was a Catholic and his mother a Baptist, and so he offended no one in
Northern Ireland.

Anyway the crunch came when one day three "bright young men" arrived from
London and that afternoon they finally arrived at Alan's office. They had a huge
bundle of papers that constituted the Government's gift of many £ millions to the
Shipyard in order to carry out the Plan. Alan patiently advised them that he had
never ever actually seen the Plan and so he was unable to say that it would work. In
fact he and Amos Sutcliffe the Shipyard Manager were both of the opinion that from
the little they knew it would result in an £18 million deficit in around 18 months.

It seemed that neither the very highly paid Danish Shipyard managing director Mr
Hoppe, nor Leonard Gustavson the Swedish Managing consultant wanted to actually
sign their own plan. Hoppe had finally told them to get Alan Wilson to sign it. Alan
decided that as he had never seen the "Plan" and rumour had it that there was no plan
he simply decided not to sign it as the management was Danish with Hoppe and his
three aides, and the Consultancy was Swedish. Hoppe was enraged and he told Alan
Wilson to leave the yard by 5 pm and Alan said "Thanks very much", and went
home.

Eighteen months later Alan arrived at the Robb-Caledon yard in Dundee and was
told that Amos Sutcliffe who had left Belfast and was now General Manager at
Dundee wanted to see him urgently. He found the usually quiet and soberly
conscientious Amos in high spirits, bubbling over and ordering tea and cakes to be
brought in. "Have you heard the news?" he asked and Alan said "No", wondering.
Well right on time and target Harland & Wolff in Belfast had gone bust for nearly
£18 million. That was a heck of a lot of money in the early 1970's.

Now after thankfully leaving Belfast, Alan was told by Joe Lands that the Swedes
had another great job for him at Govan in Glasgow. This was like being invited to
ones own business funeral, as the Govan Shipyard was the largest of he four Upper
Clyde yards and it had teetered into near bankruptcy five times already. Finally the
workforce had ejected the management from the shipyard and barricaded the gates.
The workers then proceeded to work without any management and office staff. The
whole action amounted to insurrection and the Prime Minister Edward Heath who
had openly stated no further government cash would be given to industrial "lame
ducks", was in a mess. He did not send in the army to quell insurrection, but he did
do a somersault on the No More Lame Ducks.

After previous fiascos a non-British consultant was wanted, and so the "Swede"
chosen for the job that no one else wanted was Alan Wilson. Glasgow was another
"divided city" with the Protestant Rangers Football Club and the Catholic (Irish)
Celtic Football Club.

The situation was hilarious as Alan arrived on time on Tuesday morning and drove
his old Jaguar car in through the deserted gates and entry yard. He found his way
into the deserted main office block alongside the main road, and reasoning that the
main corridor would be "the golden mile" where the directors had their offices he
finally found an office with a secretary in it and she led him to the Managing
Director. The story from there on is amazing but the two Swedes due to arrive
diplomatically failed to come and came the next day when Alan had cleared matters
for entry.

The conduct of this strange affair saw the Swedes fleeing for home when the
Management rejected their "plan" and refused to co-operate. The upshot was that
Alan Wilson remained and together with the Management he constructed an entirely
new prospective plan. It is a long story but all ended well at that time. Alan Wilson
was in seventh heaven with a whole shipyard to play around with and after five
weeks the Swedes who were supposedly doing the job began fortnightly or weekly
flying visits, in one lunchtime and away the next.

Everything worked out and it would take a long and interesting book to describe the
hilarious mayhem of British industrial life. Govan got the money from the
government and the emergency plan developed by Alan Wilson was put into action.
As usual whenever a Project succeeded a whole army of hitherto unknown carpet-
baggers appeared as if from nowhere, all eager to grab their unearned share of the
glory and financial spoils.

From Govan Alan joined Terry Granell to see what might be done at the terminally
ill Robb-Caledon shipyards at Leith and Dundee. It was there that he learned the sad
but somehow pleasing and entirely predictable news of the collapse of the Belfast
yards

After Govan Alan went out to Italy where he was appointed to Masterplan the work
organization of the new to be built shipyard at Riva Trigoso to build the Lupo Class
Destroyers.

This project was an outstanding success, and the weird goings on between Swedish
journeys to the USA, to Britain, to Italy, and Russia began to disturb Alan Wilson.
Sweden was not a member of Nato and had remained neutral in both World Wars
whilst supplying Nazi Germany with masses of iron ore, and now they were
involved in a new Nato country warship yard and also having access to UK and USA
shipyards, whilst negotiating with the Russians.

As part of the major reconstruction of the Italian shipbuilding industry Japanese

consultants were active in some yards and so were the Swedish branch of the USA
company. Alan Wilson found himself on his way to Ancona where the Italians had
requested for him to be sent to do the same type of work as had been immensely
successful at Riva Trigoso. Alan Wilson always felt that work was best done by a
committee of three with two of the three permanently absent.

At Ancona there was another vast playground of around 6,500 men for him to deal
with, and so another master planning project was developed. Panamax 70,000 ton
ships, millions of man hours, thousands of jobs, dozens of different trades, hundreds
of machines, masses of consumables and equipment, dozens of departments.
Everything needed to be methodically marshalled into a system that brought
everything to the right place at the right time with the right materials and men and so
on. The Project was deemed to be another outstanding success.

Anyway after further work in Robb-Caledon and at Riva Trigoso Alan Wilson had
had enough of the whole business. British consultants and management were still
suffering from the aftermath of the lunatic "low wage economy" devised by a post
war Labour Government and the Brain Drain out of Britain was still on.

At one angry meeting where the British in the company demanded parity with the
American and European consultants employed, it was stated that British people did
not require the same pay as Europeans and Americans because they did not live to
the same high standards.

Brian Todd of Manchester was rightly furious when he demanded to know how the
hell we could live to the same high standards if we were lower paid. By British
standards the rewards and fat expenses were good, but who wants to do the same job
- and often do it far better - as an American or Swede or other European colleague,
who is getting three times the money, and most often was not as capable?

The detail can be told in a book one day but suffice it to say that the moment came
when Alan Wilson and Baram Blackett got together to "Masterplan" the research
into Ancient British History using industrial techniques that would leave the average
academic standing like a one legged man in a sprint race.
Baram Blackett

In 1976 Baram Blackett and Alan Wilson decided to

hold a meeting regarding a project into the study of
Ancient Britain. Baram listened intently to Alan
when he described what he was doing in industry,
and he proposed that Alan should try to use the same
techniques on all the jumbled mess of chaotic
misunderstandings that bedevil British history.

This is how the Project to find Arthur I and Arthur II

began to form, and from that point onwards one
thing led to another, and that then to another, and
another. A quite brilliant idea from Baram Blackett
that worked exceptionally well.

Baram first decided on a simple solution to finding

the Arthurian battle sites, and his first move was to
buy maps. He soon found that the "untraceable"
Battle of Camlann was very clearly marked at
Mynydd Camlann (Camlann Mountain) in mid-
Wales above Camlann Valley. The equally
"untraceable" Battle of Mynydd Baedan (Mount Baram Blackett
Badon or Mons Badonicus in English minds) was on
Mynydd Baedan at Maes-cad-lawr = "Field of Battle Area", in the Maesteg Valley.
So Baram Blackett began working with Alan Wilson to put the scattered straws of
the British Historical haystack back into place, keeping the files and organizing the
data.

The skill that Baram Blackett brought to the Project was an uncanny ability to spot
the one tiny diamond in a pile of generally unwanted historical data. He has a talent
for setting aside irrelevancies and going straight to the core of the problem. For
example his plan to establish burial customs as used by the ancient British nobility,
led to the easy identification of sites.

The realization that religious customs practised in their original homelands by the
ancient British migrants from Syria around 1550-1350 BC, and the Khumric-Trojan
migrants from Asia Minor and Palestine of c 500 BC, would be repeated in Britain.
Finding ancient temple sites became predictable.

British migrants to America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere, took
their Alphabet, their Language, their religion, their burial customs, and so on with
them. Finding parallels became a major part of the success of the several Projects.

All Content © 2008 Alan Wilson/Baram Blackett | Design & Layout by Paul Graham.