The 1986 World Exposition on Transportation and Communication, or simply Expo 86, was a World’s Fair held in my home town of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada from May 2 until October 13, 1986. Conveniently, for the first and only time, I had just been laid off. I immediately bought a season’s pass to Expo.

Along with the layoff came a very nice ‘to whom it may concern’ letter from the company saying it wasn’t my fault. Nor was it that of my numerous also laid off yeoman cohorts. We worked for one of the top five mainframe computer manufacturers in the known world. My job which I very much liked, was to sell local time-sharing access to engineering and financial planning software applications installed on our mainframes in Toronto. The software was accessed by using remote terminals connected to our mainframes by telephone land line. (initially operating at 30 Baud i.e. characters/sec, eventually 120). The terminals used were either those available at our downtown Vancouver offices on a walk-in basis or those owned by our customers.

The customers were mostly engineers of various disciplines along with more than a few financial planners. Both groups accessed software that enabled them to perform calculations in seconds that might take hours to complete manually even with the aid of a slide rule. Remember them? Typically perhaps a foot or so long, I used one at one company that was six feet long! It was an *Otis King which very cleverly was a spiraling device about 2” in diameter and 6” high with a six foot helical scale printed on the spiral barrel. We did calculations to two decimal places but I digress.

Control Data our US based former employer, manufactured and sold mainframe computers along as stated with offering software time sharing access to those we maintained in-house for the purpose. They employed about 60,000 people worldwide. In a very few months most of those employees were gone along with most of our customers. A few major ones remained typically owning one of our mainframe computers and being engaged in businesses which required a huge amount of computing power, weather forecasting for example being one such application. 

What caused this catastrophic reversal of fortune for not just our company, but for the likes of IBM, Honeywell, Univac and essentially all of the others in the mainframe computer hardware business? A device called a PC. Yes, the advent of personal computers was upon us. Once sophisticated existing software from the mainframes had been converted to run on them and new applications written specifically for them, it did not take very long and bingo, that was it, we were done. Thanks to a night school course in economics I attended eons ago, I can report that our demise was a classic case of **structural unemployment. On the plus side, I got to spend a lot of time at Expo 86 whilst mulling my next career move.

A British ex-pat turned Canadian citizen and a singer with a tenor voice, around the time of the Expo 86 opening I had just joined the Vancouver Welsh Men’s Choir quite by ***accident. The choir had been invited to perform at Expo on a day when the British pavilion would be hosting the UK’s then prime minister Margaret  ‘Maggie’ Thatcher – the Iron Lady as she was euphemistically known in many quarters. It happened that a touring men’s choir actually from Wales was in town and had unwittingly agreed to perform with our choir not knowing that we would be performing with ‘Maggie’ seated front row centre. 

Mrs.Thatcher had very recently closed most all the coal mines in Wales thus putting most all of our guest choir along with myriad other Welsh men out of work. Worse, she had done nothing to help laid off coal mine workers retrain for alternate jobs. The tension and hatred when we went on stage was both understandable and palpable. We wondered if we might have to physically restrain some of our guests from going after arguably, an iron lady’s iron lady.

Maggie had arrived in Vancouver quite literally supersonically aboard a British Airway’s Concorde to great fanfare both for her and for the Anglo French Concorde’s first visit to Vancouver. A lifelong aviation buff and sometime private pilot, my primary interest in the visit was in the delta winged bleeding edge Concorde. She flew at up to 2,200 kph or 1,354 mph and routinely crossed the North Atlantic in 3.5 **** hours. Pundits had it that Concorde was pressed into service for Maggie’s visit in case she ran low on a specific UK hairspray product of which she was renowned for making copious use, in order that they could quickly fly back and get some more. 

We performed our thirty minutes or so set, some of the songs being in the Welsh language, to an appreciative audience. Just as we were finishing our last number we were suddenly drowned out by an ear shattering and earth shaking noise. Concorde came from behind us low and fast, flying right over the outdoor stage, Maggie, the large audience and the British pavilion before then pulling up into a very steep climb.

The exhausts from all four engines, readily visible to us, were lit up with orange-red fire as the pilots ‘floored it’ with the afterburners. As Concorde quickly disappeared from view, Maggie jumped to her feet and ran right up to the stage stopping us in our just initiated exit stage left tracks. 

With no microphone to hand nor for that matter, security in tow, the Iron Lady thanked us profusely and loudly (not easy outdoors) walking up and down only about two feet from the stage. She seemed determined to make eye and voice contact with all eighty or so of us. Certainly I had a sense that she was talking directly to me as felt it turned out, many of the others. I didn’t like her politics but I did welcome her genuine sincerity and *****appreciation of our performance. We never did find out if Concorde was en-route for hair spray or not. It was on a northwest course when last sighted which put it on the great circle (shortest) route to London and shall we say Selfridges? If not, then Harrods for sure.

*Otis Carter Formby King was an electrical engineer in London who invented and produced a cylindrical slide rule with helical scales, primarily for business uses. The product was named Otis King’s Patent Calculator, and was manufactured and sold by Carbic Ltd. in London from about 1922 to about 1972. He was born in 1876.

** Structural unemployment — a longer lasting form of unemployment caused by fundamental shifts in an economy exacerbated by factors such as TECHNOLOGY CHANGES (our case in point) government policy and new competition.

*** See my short story Broadway Beckons November 7, 2021.

**** It took me ten days aboard — when ships were ships, a trans-oceanic passenger liner serving the London (Tilbury docks) to Montreal route. She was the then Russian flagged and operated ‘Aleksandr Pushkin’.

***** The theatrical goal always is to ‘move the audience’. No question. Maggie was genuinely and considerably moved by our combined male voice choirs.

POST SCRIPT:

Thatcher’s strategy:

She believed that the excessive costs of increasingly inefficient collieries had to end in order to grow the economy. She planned to close inefficient pits and depend more on, presumably she figured, efficiently mined cheaper imported coal, along side of oil, gas and nuclear power. That was it. No indication of what to do about the impact on jobless Welsh humanity.

The Tory Government shut down dozens of pits in the early 1980s, costing thousands of people their jobs.

Mrs Thatcher planned to shut down 20 more, which caused the mass miners’ strike of 1984-85.

She opposed the strike, believing trade unions to be harmful organisations, and wanted to reduce their power.

She refused to meet the miners’ demands, saying in a 1984 speech: “We had to fight the enemy without the Falklands”. “We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and is more dangerous to liberty.”

The strike ended in 1985 without a deal, and with the mines being closed down.