Two of the five bedrooms were fitted with handbasins, hot and cold water, and there were two large sitting rooms, a breakfast room and a kitchen. There was an enormous walk-in pantry where we stored all the fruit, bottled jam and wine which the garden supplied (subject to a lot of hard work and improving expertise). It had been a 'gentleman's' house with servants, and there was a system of bell pushes, even one in the bathroom, with a board in the kitchen with bells that jiggled up and down. The kids had a high old time for the first few days, until we put a stop to it.

The garage and its drive could take three cars end-on, which was very useful when Malcolm and Paul became 'car' owners in their teens. There was a bus service right into the Town Centre at the bottom of the road.

Marjorie has written enough about Tolworth House for me to leave it out of my own account.

The job and its general atmosphere was entirely different from what I was used to at Tottenham, which was one of the largest gas undertakings in Britain and therefore very departmentalised. The pace of work in East Anglia was very much slower.

The Ipswich Division covered almost 1700 square miles, much of which was coastal area and farmland, for which I was now solely responsible, whereas at Tottenham I had never dealt with more than 80 square miles, but very congested with population and industry.

Suffolk and Essex have very large open spaces. The only large towns were Ipswich, Colchester, Chelmsford and Bury St Edmunds. There were a great number of smaller towns and villages where perhaps there might be only one factory, which could often be more than one hundred years old. Many people say that Suffolk and Norfolk were the start of the Industrial Revolution, even before Birmingham and the Northern Counties.

For instance, Leiston in Suffolk, where Sizewell Nuclear Power Station now is, had only one factory, Richard Garrett Engineering Works, over two hundred years old. Garrett's was the town. It supplied electricity, gas, water and a sewerage system to all the houses, and employed over one thousand men at one time, all the male population. It had been known throughout the World as makers of high class engineering products, and there are locomotives in South America, Russia (supplied before the Russian Revolution) and elsewhere still running about in working order. A man had only to say that he had been a Garrett Apprentice to be taken on without further question anywhere in Britain or overseas.

After about four years of discussion with their management I was successful in persuading them to change over to gas for heating their furnaces and the whole of the factory. This was only made possible by laying a new gas main all the way from Ipswich, over twenty-five miles away.

Most of the roof trusses were about eighty feet above floor level, and the gas fitters I brought up from Ipswich had to work at this height above the travelling cranes. I frequently went up in the roof to inspect their work. One of the men failed to secure his ladders properly, fell to the floor and broke his arm.

The old boiler house chimney was more than two hundred feet high and was a landmark for miles. When I asked the factory Chief Engineer exactly how high it was, he sent one of his fitters, a former sailor, up the outside ladder and told him to count the bricks up to the top! After we had put the gas on,the chimney was redundant and the top one hundred feet was cut off.

Most of the men at Garrett's now work at Sizewell Nuclear Power Station, about two miles away on the seashore.

There were many other cases where I was able to get very large quantities of gas into factories. Hoffman's at Chelmsford made ball and roller bearings and their furnaces were heated by Producer Gas from their own Gas Plant, using coal. All these were replaced using our gas, equivalent to ten thousand houses. It was a similar story at Ransomes Sims and Jefferies of Ipswich where all the oil-fired furnaces and much other equipment started to use gas for the first time. Moler Products at Colchester was another case, where all the brick kilns were converted.

I had come to the right place. The Ipswich Division was the major development area of Eastern Gas both for population and manufacturing industry. Many London industrialists wanted to move there and were having new factories and housing for their workforce built by the local councils. Part of my job was to liaise between these councils and the industrialists to ensure that gas was available at the right time and in adequate quantities. In some cases the first occupants were arriving five or six years after first talking to them. It was long-term pioneer work.

My counterpart for Norfolk, Bill Cross, came from St Helens in Lancashire and did similar work. We were known as 'The Terrible Twins' when we went down to London Headquarters for the regular monthly meetings because of the way we challenged everything.

Bill died in 1984 shortly after retiring. I went to his funeral in Market Deeping where he had gone to live after being transferred to the Fens Region based at Peterborough. His wife, Vicky, went back to St Helens.

Jack Finedon was another free spirit, operating in South Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire, and based at Hemel Hempstead. He was a droll character with a fund of funny stories, and always reckoned that he was the inventor of a gas-heated lavatory seat, which had not been persevered with owing to its habit of exploding at crucial moments. Clack was a heavy smoker of 'roll-ups' and died of lung cancer in the mid 1970's. Another funeral I went to.

During the 1950's there was a period of depression in British Gas when the Coal Board insisted on charging us almost double the price for coal which they were charging the power stations. They tried to justify this by saying that we wanted special coal which could also make coke, wheras power stations could use any old rubbish. They still do, that's why we have acid rain.

We were in intense competition, and the Labour Government of the day was no help - their watchword was 'Electrify everything and subsidise the Miners'.

So we had to protect ourselves against these attitudes, and together with private plant manufacturers our Research Stations set about developing new ways of making gas out of different materials, such as diesel oil and propane. The new gas plants had to be of a very large capacity to be economic, and Eastern Gas Board could be accommodated with just four. Consequently there was a programme of shutting down the little gas works and joining up the towns with grid mains. This went on all over the country.

It meant a rationalisation of staff. Men who had been works managers (Generals of all they surveyed) became redundant or took less important jobs. Some of these managers had been quite important people in their own towns and many had been mayors or town councillors. Structure became more streamlined and departmentalised as Tottenham Gas Company had been. It didn't apply to my work.

To provide feedstock for these plants, the oil etc., had to be brought from oil refineries here and abroad. Two large ships were converted into refrigerated carriers and plied to and from the Gulf of Mexico in the U.S.A.

One day natural gas was discovered in Algeria and another ship was constructed to bring it into the English gas works.

The Gas Engineer who did all this development was Denis Rooke, later to become Chairman of British Gas and be knighted. He retired in 1989. I met him several times and he always had a kind word. He was a very forthright Yorkshireman, never went in for all the fancy menus you get at official functions, and it was quite customary when he came around to the Regions for sausage and mash to be served.

As the Head of a Nationalised Industry he was entitled to a Rolls Royce with chauffeur, but he preferred to drive himself around in a large old Rover. The Chairmen of the other Nationalised Industries complained bitterly about this and in the end he had to be ordered by the Minister to be like everybody else and use a 'Roller'. He was a thorn in the flesh of the Ministry Officials and was known among them as 'Old Stoneface'.

Within a few months of the first shiploads of natural gas being brought from Algeria large fields were discovered in the North Sea and the big decision was taken to convert the whole of Britain, except Northern Ireland to use it direct in customers' premises instead of as a feedstock. This was in 1968 and resulted in further larger scale re-organisations of the Gas Regions, with particular reference to the Industrial Market which now became the most important because large quantities of natural gas could be placed immediately before doing all the millions of domestic conversions which would take several years. Before natural gas came there were only about two hundred of us Industrial Engineers, now there were to be many more.

So one summer day when we Terrible Twins had gone to Headquarters for the usual monthly meeting, I was called up without warning to see the Board's Deputy Chairman. "I have decided to re-organise the Industrial Department and I want you to take over at Hemel Hempstead. We'll pay all removal costs, legal fees, and any other reasonable expenses, and I want you there as soon as possible. Yes or no?" Just like that, no warning.

"Yes" I said, just like that, and went back to the meeting. There was no question in my mind. I was ready - money in the Building Society sufficient for a deposit on a decent house - only James and Hilary to accommodate - the others had all left home. When I got back that night I told Marjorie we were moving. "Good" she said, "I'll start packing."

I took some days off and we toured around St Albans, Hemel Hempstead, Watford and other towns, looking at houses. On one occasion the car radiator boiled up (I had my own car by then). All in all it was rather tiring for Marjorie and in the end she said "You go off and look by yourself, I'll be happy anywhere."

The next monthly meeting was to be held at our Research Place in Dunstable and the Terrible Twins were booked in at The Old Palace Lodge for the previous night.

I left Ipswich very early and toured the Chesham area looking at houses. There was one at Great Missenden which seemed to meet our book, and I told the Estate Agent I was interested and then drove off to Dunstable greatly relieved. It was about 5 o'clock when I booked in at the Hotel and Bill hadn't arrived, so I went for a short walk around the town.

I crossed the road and in an Estate Agent's window not far from the Hotel I saw similar properties to what I had just seen at Great Missenden, very much cheaper and more convenient to Hemel. The girl sorted out what I seemed to want and I picked out two which I could see straight away before Bill arrived. While we were talking their Surveyor came in, back from measuring up 2 Penrith Avenue, so now I had three to look at.

No 2 was the last I saw. It was a Doctor's house. I rang the bell and told Mrs Seligman that I had been sent round by her Estate Agent. "Oh, you've come for the Surveyor's tape measure which he left behind," and gave it to me.

"No, I've just seen him and I've come to look at the House", which I did, went back to Thorne Reeke's and said that I was very interested. They were closing up for the night and I arranged to go back to the house for a better look round in the morning before 10 o'clock, when our meeting was due to start.

By 10 o'clock the next morning I had seen the house again, decided to buy it, told Mrs Seligman, been back to the Estate Agent and knocked £500 off the price. This was possible because I was a first-time buyer, there was no 'chain', and they had already bought their new house and could move into it straight away. Everything was working out.

When I got home that night I told Marjorie I had bought a house but couldn't tell her too much about it because the details hadn't even been typed. She was very happy about it.

The next week we went up to North Wales for our holiday with Barbara and Lindsay, and on the way up I diverted from the M1 and showed Marjorie the house. "Great" she said and we continued on our way, very relieved. We had a happy holiday that year.

This is what I meant a few pages back about opportunity making and taking. It was the second-best decision I have ever made. Marrying Marjorie was the best. Some other thoughts .............

Tolworth House had become too big for us, and too much work for Marjorie, although we paid a lady to do the rough cleaning a few hours a week. Malcolm, Paul and Gay had made their own decisions, married and left home. School fees were finished, except for James who was at St Joseph's College as a Day Boy. All this had helped with saving up for the deposit.

I had actually decided to buy Tolworth House, which would put me in a good position should we ever get the opportunity to move from Ipswich, and had had discussions with the Board, to such an extent that the price had been settled, subject to re-roofing, which had actually been done, and some other repairs. That was all changed, and a year or so after we moved, the Board sold it to a developer who built a large number of retirement homes on the land, which was renamed 'Ashfield Court'. The house is still standing. When our American friends, Jeff and Madeline came over to us in 1986 I took them over to see it. There are some photographs in one of the albums.

The re-organisation meant that my Ipswich patch was to be split in two, with a manager and an assistant in each. Although I had had a succession of assistants I had lost the most recent, John Calver, who had been promoted to run our Research Centre at Dunstable, and he had not yet been replaced, so effectively I was being replaced by four engineers! Although the date of handover was officially to be September 1970 it didn't work out like that. Suitable people were hard to come by - the other Gas Boards were also looking for the same sort of people, and as I said before, there were only about two hundred in the whole country, and we all wanted the right sort.

Nevertheless, we moved over to Dunstable on September 1st and I commuted to Ipswich on Mondays, staying in hotels and coming back at weekends. James and Hilary were able to start school at the start of the Autumn Term. It wasn't until January 1st that I could take over officially at Hemel hempstead.

One of my replacements was Alex Raworth who had been working in the Natural Gas Conversion Unit. He had spent some time on my patch surveying the factory equipment and agreeing methods and programmes with the factory managements. Now he was in charge - the biter bit! I had also done a great amount of preparatory work. When I got to Hemel it was at the time when it had to be done there as well. Later when I transferred back to Tottenham it happened all over again, so that I was involved in natural gas conversion for almost five years, for about two-thirds of the Board's industrial and commercial business. Alex is still a very good friend, and we had a great deal to do with each other when he became Secretary of the Eastern Section - another story to come later. When I left Ipswich my friends at Divisional Headquarters gave me the oil painting of Aldeburgh Beach, which I had chosen myself at the Artist's Studio and failed to notice that the fisherman's face had not been completed. It will be necessary to have a competent artist to put this right, but as the man who painted it has died, it might have a rarity value and perhaps should not be touched.

Ipswich and East Suffolk Cricket Club gave us the silver salver. The other gallery salver was my father's.