Dr Barnardo's Christmas Flights

Terry Coates (1947 to 1983) writes:

"Eric was a great friend and colleague and a fantastic boss.

Often forgotten are the 747 trips by BOAC over London during the early 70's for children - mainly from Dr Barnardo's homes. Eric inspired these and asked me to try and get something organised. The staff all rallied around and many contributed time and money.

From the outset Eric's instructions were that his name was not in any way to be mentioned. Fantastic man. The flights ceased when BOAC became British Airways.

He was, of course, always known as a ladies man - even my daughter fell in love with him when she first met him in her teenage years. She only told me this in later years and when l asked why, she replied that he was the most charming man she had ever met. I never told him that."

Double standards

If you "Googled" the Web for Eric Engledew before this blog was started, one of the few references was the Time magazine report of BOAC's Swinging Singles tours debacle mentioned in Louise Keim’s article.

Reg Walden recalls from those days Eric bursting into his office with a copy of the Daily Mirror with a pithy, pseudo-purist front page headline decrying BOAC’s "immoral" tour offering. He then turned to the centre pages consisting of a two page spread of a pretty girl, naked, but lying face down and thus revealing a breast in profile. The Mirror’s propensity for double standards, veering from outraged morality on the cover to titillation on the centre spread, was long established - but what made Eric smile that day was that the model adorning the centre pages was his younger daughter, Kate.

This story reminded the writer of another occasion when Kate had been photographed for a bra advertisement. In the picture she was naked but for the product, standing side-on with her body turned slightly away from the camera. Apparently the client thought the image was too sexy and asked that the ad agency to reduce the amount of bare flesh. Rather than re-shoot the picture, the agency commissioned an airbrush artist to add a pair of plain white panties, evidently to the satisfaction of the client.

However, when the pictures were viewed side by side, the consensus of opinion amongst the red-blooded males of the population was that the airbrushed picture was far and away the more suggestive.

I can't recall Eric remarking on the incident but no doubt he would have thought it a case of less being more.

Double entendres

One of the defining characteristics of English humour is the way we play with words, often double entendres involving out-dated or old-fashioned meanings of words. Of course, this can create a joke that someone not in tune with the original meanings might not fully appreciate, but it also means that if one doesn’t recognise the second meaning, no offence can be taken. Eric’s humour was typically English in this respect.

On one occasion whilst Eric was Sales Manager UK, I was a very junior member of a senior management conference held at Turnberry in Scotland. My role was to help organise the event and I’d arranged for one of our Glasgow-based staff, a stunningly pretty girl, to act as Conference Secretary.

That evening the Conference was invited by the Scottish Tourist Board to a reception and dinner at Culzean Castle. During the evening I was talking with the Secretary when Eric joined us and, with his trademark smile, said to her "I hope you’ve kept some time for me later this evening."

Aware of his reputation as a charmer, the girl responded "but Mr Engledew, I’ve been quite overwhelmed by such requests from other delegates. I feel I should be making a list."

"In that case I should be at the top of the list."

"Why so?" asked the girl, to which Eric simply replied, "Long service."

"A Final Farewell to Our Traveling Man"

This article, written by Louise Keim, Eric's editor on his local newspaper in Westport, CT. is an excellent piece with which to start a blog dedicated to his wit and humour. Eric wrote monthly travel features for the paper's Inside FC section from 2000 until he began his battle with cancer in 2005.

This is not his obituary - that can be found in the (paid) online archives of the Westport News - but a personal and affectionate recollection of someone who knew and admired Eric.

There are, of course, things one would not write in any memoir and no-one, however charitable, would accuse Eric of being a saint. Louise Keim knows Eric's widow, Nicola, so her frank recollections serve as a useful guide as to what can be retold and what would be better recalled privately.

Before publishing Louise's article here I remarked about this to her and she replied "I actually think Nicola liked the idea of Eric as a ladies' man, at least in those last 20 years of his life. Probably would have been a different matter if he'd been 30 but I thought the reference would make make her smile and was quite a coup to be able to say that an octagenerian turned women's heads. I thought only Paul Newman could lay claim to that!"

With that and our usual courtesy in mind I hope many will feel moved to add their comments and recollections.

Finally, before readers remind me about the spelling or that there are no grouse to shoot in Sussex or Surrey, or that Rommel's Panzers fought us along the North African coast, not in Sudan, I should add that I have included the piece unedited, just as it was published in the USA.

"Eric Engledew’s travel stories were the first thing many readers turned to in Inside FC. They were filled with sage travel advice (he and his wife Nicola Douglas had both been travel executives), usually off the American tourist’s regular path and always, always droll and witty. I knew when my husband was reading Eric’s tales of wanderlust because I could hear him laugh out loud from three rooms away.

Eric could be bawdy, like the time he began a story on an inexpensive destination saying, "With the Dow going up and down like a new bride’s nightie…" or when he once wrote of NVP’s on Westport’s Main Street. I asked what NVP’s were, thinking it was some sort of travel trade term, and he replied, "No Visible Pantyline."

In the past year, so many readers have asked where Eric’s travel stories were and we all waited anxiously for his return. If anyone could charm pancreatic cancer into submission, I knew Eric, the world-class charmer, would be the one. About two months ago when I ran into him as he was heading into Balducci’s, he was noticeably thinner but still with his trademark blue eyes twinkling and a smile that creased his face from cheek to cheek.

"Darling," he said in that English way of his, "Would you fancy a story on Spain?" I assured him that I fancied a story on anything he cared to write about. His illness precluded his finishing the Spain story, and we’re left to only imagine what wry observations he would have made, what literary allusions he would have sprinkled in and what off-the-beaten-path secrets he might have revealed.

My meeting Eric was serendipity. It was November 1999 at a preview party for Rooms with a View in Southport, where his wife and her new business partner, JoAnn Runk, had set up temporary shop to introduce Runk-Douglas Antiques. The Engledews along with JoAnn and her husband Bob were all in high spirits, which I put down to the fact that the 18th-century Scottish and Irish grandfather clocks, old English chests and 19th-century European paintings were being red tagged as sold at a brisk clip. It was only later that I learned that whenever Eric was in a room, spirits were going to be high, and laughter would reign.

The two couples regaled me with stories of their recent journey aboard the Orient-Express, following the first of what would be many antiques-hunting excursions in the UK (often followed by exotic golf weekends). Off-handedly I mentioned that their Orient-Express trip might make an interesting story for Inside FC, thinking I would interview them at a later date.

The evening passed, and quite honestly, I had forgotten about their trip until one day when Eric "popped ‘round," as he might say, to my office, a large white envelope in hand.

"Darling, I thought I might have a go at that story you wanted," he began.

Inwardly, I groaned because, for whatever reason, at least half the English-speaking population who know where to place a period (no one, it seems, is quite certain about commas) fancy themselves travel writers. And at least nine-tenths of them need to keep their day jobs.

I’m certain I smiled at him, though, because it’s a given he was flashing a megawatt grin at me. We probably chatted for a while - Eric loved people, particularly women - and he could discuss anything from Puccini to the Peloponnesian War, Mountbatten to Monty Python. Although a native of England, he knew more about American history and politics than I and of course, left me in the dust on all things English, Continental or even African (after World War II, he lived in Africa, instrumental in the globalization of BOAC, the precursor to British Airways). I could somewhat stand my ground on Asia, as I had lived in Hong Kong, however, he had been BOAC’s Sales Manager in Tokyo.

After he left, I tentatively opened the envelope and perused his delightful tale, "Was It Murder Traveling on the Orient Express?" where he praised the discreet wait staff but warned, "Honeymooners, beware. There are two narrow single bunks in each cabin, an upper and a lower. And they are definitely not doubles!" Perhaps I should tell you: At the time Eric was 77.

Other than changing the ampersands to proper "and’s" (a habit of which I was never able to break him...perhaps I forgot to try), I ran Eric’s story untouched.

A few weeks after the Orient-Express article ran, Eric appeared with another white envelope in hand and thus did he, after retiring from British Airways in 1977, find another career, with Inside FC gaining a much-beloved contributor. As much fun as his stories were to read, his hand delivery of them was equally a treat.

Newspaper offices, by some journalistic mandate, I believe, are grim affairs. Correctional facilities might have more charm. But when Eric strolled the corridors, it was as if the very molecules in the air had suddenly become more effervescent. The word would filter along the hallway that Eric was here, and ladies along his trajectory would secretly apply a bit more lipstick.

He’d stop at each doorway along the way, complimenting a new hairstyle here, a flattering color of a sweater there. And by the time he left to go deliver his Meals on Wheels or join his foursome at Longshore in Westport, there was a gleeful camaraderie as if we were brilliant conspirators in some "Ain’t Life Grand?" scheme.

With his natty, checked-shirt, kind of country-gentleman-bespoke style and his passion for opera, theater, bridge, golf and travel, I always assumed Eric came from one of those privileged English backgrounds, where he studied Chaucer and philosophy at some fancy public school while hobnobbing with aristocrats. I imagined his whiling away his youth riding to hounds or shooting grouse or sipping Pimm’s cups at some rambling manse in Sussex or Surrey.

So it came as a jolt to discover that actually, at age 14, he had left the Royal Infants Orphanage (where he had been sent at age six with his two younger brothers after the death of their father) and was working for Imperial Airways (which became BOAC). At 18, in 1940, rather than attending the hunting parties I had pictured, he was volunteering for the Royal Air Force. For the next five years, he would be in the Suez as a radar operator, taking part in the fight to break Rommel’s Panzer cordon in Khartoum and supplying the armed forces via BOAC in Cairo.

In great Horatio Alger fashion, after the war, Eric created a mostly illustrious career for himself with BOAC. As the airline’s first and only Livestock Officer, he helped supply Dr. Jonas Salk with the rhesus monkeys needed in the desperate campaign to find a polio vaccine. He also become the aviation industry’s expert in shipping elephants to zoos and helped coin BOAC’s phrase, "From Orchids to Elephants."

One of his favorite stories was about the time he shipped over two elephants for the British Industries Fair, held at London’s Olympia Hall, which was to be attended by the Queen Mother. The evening before the opening, Eric gave the elephants a trial run. They touched everything with their trunks and pushed at the walls, whereupon, according to Eric’s unpublished biography, "There was an almighty crash from the Royal Doulton stand next door and all the china flew off their wall." But, he added, "The press loved the photo of the Queen Mum almost losing her arm down one elephant’s mouth as she fed it a sticky bun."

In a rare misstep a number of years later, when Marketing Manager in New York, Eric (then a happily-married father of two girls) developed a scheme for BOAC called "The Beautiful Singles of London" that created furor on both sides of the pond.

According to a Time magazine article from Sept. 26, 1969, for "$350 round-trip, Yankee tourists got a 13-day excursion with the added incentive of meeting three ‘scientifically chosen’ British dates at airline-organized cocktail parties." Tourists and their dates were to get dinner at proper Simpson’s-in-the-Strand, temporary membership and gambling privileges at the Victoria Sporting Club, tickets to a West End musical and other perks.

Members of Parliament threatened to take up the marketing ploy in debate, calling BOAC "a bunny club airline." The Sunday Times wrote, "There are visions of the flower of English womanhood being sold into lusty American servitude for the benefit of our sordid balance of payments."

The airline quickly cancelled the promotion and it became the fodder for many of Eric’s greatest laughs on himself.

Another Inside FC contributor, on learning Eric’s age, accurately stated, "He wrote much younger." That’s because he lived much younger. In Eric, we found that passion for life, laughter, generosity, courtliness, kindness and love are ageless. As his good friend "Woody" Woodworth said, "He inspired us in the face of adversity to laugh and enjoy the moment."

Tom Brokaw famously called Eric’s "the greatest generation" and Eric Engledew was among the greatest of the greatest.

The wit and humour of Eric Engledew

Eric Engledew passed away on the morning of Thursday, 31st August 2006.

Although I suppose he had his detractors, I never heard, nor knew, of one; he seemed to be that rare human being, a man who was admired by everybody and of who everybody was proud to be his friend or colleague.

And that was a lot of people. Colleagues from Imperial Airways, BOAC, British Airways and Austravel and friends from his last home in Westport, CT, will all be saddened by his passing.

Of all his qualities, his quick wit is the most widely remembered and this blog is created so that we can share our recollections of this unique man's sense of humour. It was a wit without barb; it never sought to hurt or humiliate, yet was nevertheless sharp and quick.

It remained with him to the last - as the email message he wrote to everyone a few days before his death showed. I can do no better than start this blog by quoting it.

"Please forgive this modest round-robin e-mail but rather than (have you) read about it in the News of the World - the pancreatic cancer has finally caught up with me.

My ashes will be scattered on the 13th (water) hole at the Longshore golf course where they'll be reunited with several hundred of my golf balls.

It's been a great deal of fun these past 84 years and I have no complaints - I hope you all continue to have a glittering future, good night and good luck. Eric "

To that message his widow, Nicola, added, "I know Eric would like you all to remember and smile."

I have no doubt we will, and I hope this blog will be a place we can share our recollections of Eric's humour, and smile again.