Interview with Alan Burkitt-Gray

Alan Burkitt-Gray was born in 1951 in Goole, Yorkshire. The town is a transport hub, and Alan’s paternal grandfather worked on the railways. His maternal grandfather was chief engineer on one of the boats owned by the railway shipping arm going across the North Sea. His mother met his father when she was a secretary in a bottling company in Goole. His father was training to be an accountant at the same company and would go on to be the company secretary. Alan is one of three children, with a brother and sister.

He says his parents were very keen on ensuring their children had a good education, saying: “They were keen on it in the sense of pushing me, they were very happy when I passed my eleven-plus, and when I did my O levels and A levels and went to university. On my side of the family, I was the first to go to university thanks to that huge expansion of tertiary education. I went to Leeds.

 Alan attended Doncaster Grammar School, a state school, where he followed his interest in science and studied physics, maths and further maths for A level. He says: “I was interested in physics. I enjoyed it and, at that stage, I enjoyed the maths; when I went on to university I enjoyed it less so.”

He didn’t initially apply for university in the sixth form, due to his belief that he would not be offered a place. He says: “I had what these days what would be called imposter syndrome and I really didn’t believe that I would get good enough A levels to go to university, so I didn’t actually apply in my second year of sixth form.”

Once he had his A level results, Alan did apply for university and also decided to take a gap year and work. He was recruited by GEC-AEI Electronics which made radar and was based in Leicester. He started working there as a student apprentice in January on a £10 weekly salary.

 He says: “I shadowed the Progress Department, which was interesting. It was a factory making electronic equipment, mostly radar equipment for the Navy Type 42 destroyers and things like that. I went round with this guy checking things had been done on time and were moved to the next stage. It was electronic assembly, but it was also machine tooling, it was plating and all that sort of thing.  It was interesting to see. It was the first time I’d been into a factory.”

At the end of his first year at university, after the death of his father in the middle of end-of-year exams, Alan returned to the factory which was then called Marconi Radar Systems with the intention of taking another year out to help him overcome the stress he felt at that time and to resit his failed maths exams. He continues: “They sent me off to Leicester Poly (now De Montfort University) to strengthen up my maths.I went once a week to do a maths course.”

He also had experience of working in an office, adding: “I was in the purchasing department and I called people to say we have ordered something, where is it, and why hasn’t it been delivered, and all that sort of stuff. So got a taste of office life.”

After doing well in his  exam resits, Alan returned to university to finish his degree.

At university, Alan joined the astronomy society and the conservation society. He adds: “I became interested in the environmental future, joined a conservation society and another organisation that was worried about what science and technology is doing to the planet. I was rather more environmentally interested than most people at that stage.”

Alan worked on his first computer at the University of Leeds computing department.  He says: “I wrote a couple of programs in ALGOL 60. I didn’t then pursue that, and it wasn’t really until after I wrote about computing in my first year as a journalist, when I joined the Engineer magazine and John Mortimer, the editor, thought I could be the correspondent for the electronics industry and the computer industry, but it was really how it was serving the engineering industry. That was good because it did expose me to computers. I actually started using a computer at the next office at VNU in Frith Street, in Soho, when I was editor of Infomatics and we’d managed to cadge some early personal computers, SuperBrains, which ran off CP/M.”

During the summer holidays at the end of his second year at university, Alan volunteered to do some research for a small company called Social Audit, which did environment surveys and was studying the government’s Alkali Inspectorate, which monitored industrial pollution. Alan interviewed people in the area around Doncaster, Sheffield and Rotherham and produced a 30,000-word report. He realised that he did not want to be an engineer but would like to pursue a writing/research career. Having talked to the university careers advisors, Alan was encouraged to finish his engineering degree. However, it was while reading the New Scientist that Alan spotted an advert by Morgan-Grampian, based in south-east London, inviting science, technology or engineering graduates to train to be a journalist.

Alan explains: “I thought this is me, this is what I want to do. I am about to graduate in physics and electronic engineering and I would love to write. So I applied and I went to an interview in April 1973, and got a job offer, which was fantastic.”

Upon starting in the role, Alan was sent on a course at the London College of Printing, now part of the University of the Arts, London. He adds: “They taught me about printing, journalism, how to structure stories. In that period of training I worked on a number of magazines including The Engineer, where I worked on the subs desk, I went to work for a magazine called Electronic Engineering and got my first foreign trip to Paris for an electronic components exhibition. I realised I’d taken the right decision.” Alan also worked on and was part of the team that started Electronic Times, in 1978

Alan recalls his first news story which was around the subject of depleted uranium, a byproduct from British Nuclear Fuels, and how it could potentially be used rather than left as waste. While researching the story, Alan found that depleted uranium was still radioactive when a spokesperson for the National Radiological Protection Board said that it shouldn’t be used for the likes of golf balls etc which had been proposed. He says: “It was a stupid use and the industry was out of control. So probably what I wrote did influence policy, at least it made the nuclear regulators more careful about what British Nuclear Fuels could do.”

After seven years working for Morgan Grampian across a variety of titles, Alan moved to Computing as the news editor in 1980 based in Soho.

He says of the move: “I had been at Morgan-Grampian for seven years. I was at Electronics Times as news editor and had helped to start it, and I had met Joan, who was a reporter there. We got together, got married in 1987 and 40-something years later we are still together..”

 During his time working at Computing, Alan also wrote a book with Elaine Williams, now Elaine McClarence, with whom he had worked while at The Engineer. He explains: “One day Elaine and I were coming back on the train from a press conference and we recognised that most people did not know about the implications of silicon chips that were then being developed.  So we decided to write a book about it. Unfortunately, two other people produced books that came out on exactly the same day from different publishers, both about the micro revolution.  So we had three competing for the market, but it was quite good. It was a significant year for me because we produced that book and it got me doing different things as well and thinking about the wider context of what was going on. But it was a time at which the world at large was starting to think that these silicon things were probably quite important.”

After a period as news editor of Computing, Alan moved to become features editor where he changed the style, he says: “We did more newsy features, which is what I like and what I’ve been doing ever since; feature analysis of news is a good thing.”

With the shift to being news editor, Alan also took on a team. Asked about his management style, he says: “It was the busiest and most stressful job I’ve ever done, bar none. It involved coming into the office on a Monday with almost a clean sheet of what was going to go on pages one, two, three and four of Computing that week. We did pages two, three and four on Monday, getting them typeset, reading them, and then did page one first thing Tuesday morning, using this magic technology called a fax machine. We had a team of eight or nine reporters, and four production people, subeditors, including Liz Anderson as chief sub, and some very colourful characters. There was Steve Connor, who sadly died a couple of years ago, who did great things on The Independent, Peter White who died recently, plus a number of other people working for us at the time who were absolutely superb. First thing on a Monday morning we’d have a meeting at 10 o’clock [that was first thing for us!] and people would list the stories that they were going to do. Some people had some great stories that they would deliver, and some people had some great ideas that they didn’t deliver, and you had to manage that through Monday because by the end of the day you had to have three pages laid out and sent off to the printer on the train to Carlisle where it was printed. It was the biggest weekly publication in the UK. We did 100,000 copies, and they were about 96 tabloid pages, impressively laid out. Great pictures by photographers like Tony Sleep and Dougie Firth.”

Alan next joined Infomatics as editor. He says: “It was initially a weekly magazine but it had become a monthly and it also produced the Infomatics Daily Bulletin, which was an amazing operation, whose successor still exists, but in a different company. That involved producing an A4, double-sided newsletter by about 5 o’clock every day, taking it to a print house round the corner in Soho, who photocopied it a couple of thousand times, and mailing it off first class mail from central London that evening, and it got to people’s desk, certainly within the UK, the next morning. In the days before the internet and web, that was the fastest news service in the IT industry. We got some absolutely great stories by dint of phoning people up and being so close to people that they told us what was going on, but it was a lot of work.”

Alan left Infomatics to return to Morgan-Grampian to edit Satellite and Cable TV News, at the beginning of the emergence of the satellite and cable television industries in Europe. He says: “It was an interesting company because we had a bunch of other publications in the office, particularly rock music publications as well in the same building and we used to get fans standing outside because they were sure that their idols were going to come and be interviewed in the offices.  It was quite fun.”

Unfortunately, the magazine only lasted from January to November and Alan was made redundant.

Having been made redundant and with a good package, Alan decided it was a great opportunity to work freelance and he took on work for Broadcast the weekly magazine for the TV and radio industry. He says: “They wanted me to do two pages of news on the cable and satellite industry every week. So I went in with a clean sheet, and I just phoned around all the people who I’d met in the previous year.  A journalist’s contacts book is their most important resource, and I just used to sit on the phone on a Monday morning and start dialling them all and saying what’s going on? This was a time when the UK’s 11 first operators that the government had nominated were starting to build their networks and there was also a lot of innovation in satellite.”

Being the satellite and cable expert at Broadcast meant that Alan also got asked to speak on the subject on local and national stations, including local radio stations and the Today programme.

Having worked as a freelance journalist for seven years, Alan returned to a full-time employed role as start-up editor of Cable and Satellite Communications International where he worked for three years.

Alan next moved to Government Computing as editor. He says: “I went on to Government Computing, it was owned by a consultancy, and it was very oriented around the IT industry. We did the first stories about the Post Office getting its first computers when they were starting to computerise their counters. It was already a mess in 1999 and 2000, and that’s what led to that huge Horizon scandal ten, 20 years later.”

Asked about Y2K, Alan says: “It was a hell of a lot of work by a hell of a lot of people. People say it was all a falsehood, but it wasn’t a falsehood, it was lots of people did a lot of hard work late into the night getting systems to work for January Saturday January 1^st 2000.”

Alan added “We had to go to press with the January 2000 issue before Christmas, not knowing whether the bug had been overcome or not. So I talked to John Batten, one of my favourite designers, about doing a cover showing two IT people, a man and a woman, on camp beds in the computer department in the early hours of that Saturday. “How was it for you?” said one of them to the other. Our managing director was a very conservative Catholic and wasn’t happy with the double entrendre – but he didn’t see it until after publication.”

Asked why the UK no longer has companies such as Plessey or Ferranti, Alan says: “They imploded. In the UK, it’s not just government policy, but it’s also shareholder policy, that you basically try and merge companies, and nobody has created a good company by merging them. Ferranti died – there are all different reasons – Ferranti died because of fraud. It bought an American company and didn’t do the due diligence properly and found that it owed billions of dollars, and so it imploded. Plessey also bought an American company called Rolm, because it thought it had to get into modern telecoms, but it bought the wrong company and it ended up looking very exposed.”

“I think the fundamental problem is that people in the financial sector, the City, don’t understand technology, certainly didn’t in those days, and the Whitehall and Westminster establishments don’t understand high technology. They come from a background which doesn’t require any understanding of science and technology, so they can get bamboozled by companies and then they take the wrong decisions.”

Alan reflects on his best story and highlights his following of Huawei over the last few years. He says: “I think it’s when that whole Huawei controversy was unfolding, really driven by senior executives in the US government during the Trump administration. I was on top of that, I knew most of the people in there, not just the public people, not just the Huawei people and some of the security people in the UK, but CEOs and CTOs in mainland Europe, but also some of the lawyers behind it. There’s a thing in the States called Team Telecom, which is a coalition of the FCC and other agencies, bits of the Pentagon and so on, that advise the President on telecoms regulation. I got to know a lot of those, and that was a lot of hard journalism, a lot of keeping in touch, working your contacts.”

Asked about his biggest mistake during his career, Alan says: “Maybe going freelance, but that gave me an opportunity to do other things, including help come up with an idea for the first Channel 4 series with science and technology programmes which was called Equinox, which was their rival in the first few years of Channel 4 to Horizon, which was the BBC’s science and technology strand. We pitched an idea about computers, What They Don’t Tell You When They Sell You a Computer. And Channel 4 accepted it. It was broadcast in 1986 in the first ever Equinox series.”

Before taking some time out now, in 2023-24, for what Alan calls his sabbatical, Alan was writing on the subject of quantum technology. He says: “Quantum computing would blow open the security that we’ve come to expect from our electronic communications, but it would also allow people to increase the level of security in new communications. With quantum you will be able to protect it to work on another generation, and that’s all going to hit us in the next two or three years. … The governments of the day will have a huge issue because it will be completely unbreakable. There will be no back door. That’s the positive side to it, it will protect our communications.”

Alan expects to see quantum computing in the next five years. He continues: “If you go to the new UK headquarters of IBM, there’s already a quantum computer in their shop window. There are some amazing developments in Chicago and Denver, in Dutch universities, in Cambridge and Oxford and UCL and Imperial in London. There’s a huge amount of work going on there and a huge amount of investment going into quantum computing. People are talking about it as equivalent to those first few years after the people at Bell Labs developed the first transistor and then started developing integrated circuits, and there was that huge upsurge of innovation, which then transferred to the West Coast and to companies like Fairchild and Intel and so on. Quantum is going to be like that, there’s going to be a lot of money. The investment people are already looking at what they want to do with quantum computing and the banks are investing in quantum because they want to know about it and they want to not only invest in it, but install it for their own protection and their customers’ protection.”

Interviewed by Richard Sharpe

Transcribed by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley