The tie that binds

 

The BREWO company tie

 

Two months ago, on a beautiful sunlit morning just like today, I found this surprising email in my inbox: "Good day! My name is Tim Breckwoldt. I am the son of Hayo Breckwoldt and grandson of Friedrich Wilhelm Breckwoldt. It was with joy and surprise that I just found your post and am therefore writing this email in the hope that it reaches you. First of all, this much: Unfortunately, Breckwoldt & Co no longer exists since 1980. However, there is actually still an active Breckwoldt branch in New Caledonia, which has been in existence since 1971. For several years now, a meeting of former Breckwoldt employees has been taking place once a year, at which I (born in 1971) am of course the youngest participant. I would really appreciate a response and learn more about your story. I would be happy to tell you a little more about Breckwoldt and the end of this great company. Best regards from Hamburg, Tim Breckwoldt".

 

The post Tim referred to was my "Vanished without a trace!" about the sudden disappearance of one of the trading-houses in the South Pacific in the 1960/70s which vanished, seemingly without a trace, in 1980.

 

 

At its peak, Breckwoldt & Co, headquartered in Hamburg and with offices in Sydney, Milan, London, Antwerp, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and Hong Kong, sold German imports such as VOLKSWAGEN and MERCEDES cars, GRUNDIG radios, BAYER medicines, OLYMPIA typewriters, ROLLEI cameras, CONTINENTAL tyres, right down to HOHNER mouth organs and accordions and a host of local trade goods, from its island branches in Port Moresby, Madang, Lae, Kieta, Mt Hagen, and Wewak in Papua New Guinea, Honiara in the Solomon Islands, Apia in Samoa, Suva in Fiji, Papeete in Tahiti, and Noumea in New Caledonia. It also had branches in Liberia and the Gambia. And they all disappeared in the blink of an eye!

 

 

You couldn't travel far in the South Pacific without encountering a Breckwoldt branch. I bought my first portable typewriter, an OLYMPIA, from their Rabaul branch, and when I was the accountant and office manager with Camp Catering Services on Bougainville Island, we bought lots of supplies from their Kieta office. Later, when I lived and worked in Western Samoa, I became friend with their Apia manager and his wife.

 

Breckwoldt's manager in Apia, Horst, and his wife Roswitha with daughter

 

Now that I have become friend with the grandson of Breckwoldt's original founder, Friedrich Wilhelm Breckwoldt, I am learning from him more about the company's history and its eventual demise which, with his permission, I hope to write more about on this blog in days to come.

 

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Unterwanderung

 

Thilo Sarrazins Buchtipp

 

Offener Judenhass durch Migranten auf deutschen Straßen. Schülerinnen werden von islamistischen Jugendlichen drangsaliert. Zwangsverheiratungen gehören längst zum Alltag. Jetzt fällt in Berlin auch das Kopftuchverbot für Lehrerinnen.

 

 

Hamas und Hizbullah nutzen Deutschland als Rückzugsraum zur Terrorfinanzierung. Gleichzeitig verfolgen die Führer des politischen Islams - aus dem Ausland finanzierte Moscheeverbände - eine erfolgreiche Strategie, unsere Politik, unsere Medien und unsere Kultur zu unterwandern. Ein Netzwerk von linken und islamischen NGOs wird seit Jahren mit hohen Millionensummen aus Steuermitteln gefüttert. Kritiker dieser Entwicklung werden als "antimuslimische Rassisten" diffamiert.

 

 

Sascha Adamek ist ein investigativer Journalist, Autor und Filmemacher. In seinem Buch "Unterwanderung - Der politische Islam weiter auf dem Vormarsch" deckt er anhand von geheimen Ermittlungsakten und Dokumenten auf, wie die Islamisten vorgehen.

Ich bin so froh dass ich ausgewandert bin!

 

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My first job as an accountant

 

My first accounting office was as bleak inside as it was on the outside.
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Dou you remember those  TEACH YOURSELF BOOKS  in their black-and-yellow dust jackets? They were supposed to be able to teach you anything, from algebra to swimming to yoga, including how to teach yourself to teach yourself.

 

 

I struggle to think how you could learn how to swim from a book, but I did take a copy of  TEACH YOURSELF BOOKKEEPING  when I flew to Lüderitz in South-West Africa to take up my first job as an accountant.

The "kantoor" in which I had to spend my entire day for the next six months was something straight out of a Charles Dickens novel: dusty, old-fashioned, and run by an Afrikaner woman by the name of "Mevrou Russo" who "commandeered" two other equally imposing Afrikaner women. What their jobs were never really became clear to me.

My own work was simple and undemanding: keeping a mechanised debtors ledger (on a ledger-machine straight out of the Ark), paying suppliers' invoices, and reconciling several bank accounts. There the  TEACH YOURSELF BOOKKEEPING  book came in handy. Opened at the page 'How to do a Bank Reconciliation', and surrepticiously placed in my half-opened desk drawer, it guided me through the process of adding deposits in transit and deducting outstanding cheques from the balance on the bank statement to reconcile to the balance in the cash book.

 

 

As for "writing up the books of this Company up to trial balance stage" which, according to the above reference handed to me after six months of servitude, I did "in a most diligent and competent manner", I relied on a piece of paper I had placed in the same half-opened desk drawer:

 

DEBITS BY THE WINDOW

 

For many years and in many jobs thereafter, I always made sure that I was seated in such a way that the window was on my left. As for the  TEACH YOURSELF BOOKKEEPING  book, it's still somewhere in my library, its yellowing pages being eaten away by silverfish and booklice.

 

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My apologies

 

Over the past months I have posted some inappropriate jokes and pictures because I thought my friends shared the same sense of humour. Unfortunately, this wasn't the case and I seem to have upset a number of people who have accused me of being sexist and shallow.

If you were one of those people, please accept my apologies. From now on, I will only do posts with a cultural or educational content, such as old monuments, nature, or other interesting topics. Below is a picture of the Pont Neuf Bridge in Paris which took 26 years to built and was completed in 1604.

 

 

Again, I hope you will accept my apologies!

 

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"Do you remember those Hemingway Robertson text books?"

 

For sale on ebay at $29.95

 

During a recent WhatsApp-session with an old accounting colleague in New Guinea, I asked, "Do you remember those Hemingway Robertson text books we used in our studies?"

 

 

Memories came back of my employment with the ANZ Bank who paid half my study fees each time I had passed another subject successfully.

Working for the ANZ Bank allowed me to not only learn good, almost expletive-free English and mix with people a cut above the rest, but it also introduced me to Australian commercial practices which would stand me in good stead as I worked my way through a correspondence course in accountancy with the then Hemingway Robertson Institute.

 

 

Those were the days before computers, electronic calculators, or even electric adding machines! Everything was done manually and took many hours, like when it was 'all hands on deck' twice a year to 'do the decimals', i.e. calculating the interest on savings accounts. And you needed a strong pair of hands to shake a sorting tray full of coins. Rolling those coins into tightly-wrapped tubes also took some learning.

 

Yours truly outside the ANZ Bank Kingston A.C.T. in 1969

 

And what about pistol practice? Not that we ever fired a shot in anger! That small pistol in the teller's drawer and the red trip lever on the floor that would set off the alarm were our only defense against a hold-up that never came.

 

Here's proof of how big a Proof Machine was

 

There were some machines, like that huge beast of a 'Proof Machine' which was the size of a small room on which all incoming cheques were 'batched' by the respective banks on which they were drawn. And in those days there were many more banks than there are today: who still remembers the Rural Bank of New South Wales, the English, Scottish & Australian Bank, the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney, the Commercial Bank of Australia, or the Bank of Adelaide?

Once a day one of us juniors would be the Exchange Clerk and trot off to the Reserve Bank on Canberra's London Circuit to exchange cheques with the other banks. It was a much sought-after job as some of the exchange clerks from the other banks were of the female variety which gave us blokes a chance to chat them up ☺

For us ledgerkeepers - Kevin Sloan, John Julian, Jeff Bowdie, and yours truly - the race was on every morning to extract as quickly as possible our customers' overdraft balances and report them on blue O/D Cards to the Assistant Manager, Mr Bradford, who would then decide which to pass and which to do the dirty deed on. Back in those days a dishonoured cheque was a disgrace - well, to some; others were daring enough to attempt to 'fly a kite' - and a customer's cheque was 'bounced' for all sorts of other reasons first - Endorsement Required; Signature Unlike Specimen Held; Amounts in Words and Figures Differ; Post-dated - before his lack of funds was disclosed with a gentle "Present Again" or the more abrupt and very final "Refer to Drawer".

Female bank staff were demurely dressed in dark-blue smocks with detachable collars and an ANZ brooch fastened to the lapel. The absence of either resulted in a severe reprimand from the manager. As did swearing: Kay Atkinson once exclaimed, "Strewth!" Within minutes the phone rang and the manager wanted to know who had uttered such profanity.

Back then banks still bothered with small-time banking: we regularly visited schools and encouraged kids to deposit their play money into savings accounts with us. And we offered a variety of Special Purpose savings accounts: for holidays, for education, and, of course, for the eventual home purchase. No bank in those days gave out home loans to customers who had not been diligent savers over several years!

The ANZ Bank also encouraged its customers to save for Christmas with their Christmas Club coupon book which held 50 coupons of either $1, $2, $5 or $10. A customer could walk into any branch, deposit the equivalent of one or more coupons, and then wait until early December before he was sent his final balance, plus interest, in a cheque.

Some customers couldn't wait that long. They were given the third degree by the manager who demanded that they put their reason for an early withdrawal in writing. Once reluctantly approved, they were given back their money but without any interest - as our head ledgerkeeper John Burke used to say, "once you withdraw, you lose all your interest".

Speaking of third degree, woe betide you if, as a teller, you were short of money at the end of the day. All that grovelling and letter-writing to the State Manager who eventually, after you had started paying off the shortage from your meagre salary of forty-quid-a-fortnight or whatever, graciously forgave you the rest.

And I will always remember that small cheque I had sent to the Bankers' Association to pay my union dues. They had taken so long to cash it that I'd totally forgotten about it. When it finally came in, the balance in my account was less than the stamp duty on the cheque. I think turning up drunk for work or being caught out in some osculating activities with a ledger girl in the bank's strongroom would have been more excusable than uttering a worthless cheque. More grovelling and more letter-writing to avoid being given the sack! (By the way, having an account with another bank was also a sackable offense!)

Do banks these days still have an Opinion Clerk? I was one for a while, which was probably the only time when the ANZ Bank gave out opinions in a heavy German accent. My favourite one was 'Possessed of assets' (which in the vernacular meant "filthy rich") which I knew I would never achieve on my paltry bank salary (my penurious situation was best captured by the bank opinion 'Financial position unknown' aka "flat broke"), and so I left the bank again at the end of 1969 to seek my fortunes elsewhere - see here.

 

The tie that binds

 

But I still have my old Bank tie and my memories and, yes, I am now 'Possessed of assets' but rapidly running out of time to spend them all. Unless it is true that old bankers never die; they just want to be a loan!

I'm glad I could share those memories with an old colleague who needed quite a bit of jolting to bring them back. Thanks, Grahame with-an-e!

 

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