Although I was there and vaguely remember taking part in RAF Gatow’s first Open Day, it took a combination of Google search and the services of the station’s philatelic society - see picture - to provide the exact details.
According to the Berlin newspaper “Der Tagespiegel” of the time, there were 60,000 visitors during six hours on a rainy day, with traffic queues all the way back to Heerstrasse.
I recall that, with a couple of other linguists, I was on some kind of game stall set up in a hanger. I also remember that this was a great day for single airmen to strike up friendships with female visitors. Some of these relationships lasted even as long as two weeks. The quote of the day for me: “I didn’t know JT’s were helicopter pilots”. This knowledgable young lady obviously wasn’t going to accept any embellished chat up lines about the significance of the badges on uniform sleeves.
Although I wasn’t to know it at the time, this was the first of over fifty exhibitions in which I was to participate over the years. I take care here to emphasise that this is the number of shows where I was part of an exhibiting team; it does not include the many trade fairs I attended as a visitor. This differentiation is important for me, as for the greater part I was involved with each exhibition from its very beginning to the bitter end.
For nearly a decade I was responsible for organising all aspects of a British engineering company’s participation in exhibitions around Europe and beyond. This started with planning the stand layout, a task I completed by moving scaled cardboard cut-outs around a hand-crafted drawing of the allocated floorspace. This was, of course, in the days before Computer Aided Design.
As we had to install at least one working machine on our display area, our exhibition setup routine was to first erect the machinery in position, connect the services, and only then bring in specialist contractors to construct a stand around the equipment. Our machines weighed around one ton each; it was vitally important at the beginning that we put the positioning chalk marks correctly on the flooring.
I once located a machine back to front. To this day I don’t think anyone noticed. Other than my fitting team colleagues, that is. And they simply commented “You’ll have turn it around on your own. We’ve finished our bit and are going home tonight”.
When I think back about exhibitions, I find that I recall them best in the form of stop-frame images. First the blank canvas of an empty hall; the marking out of the allocated space; the installation of machinery; the building of the stand; the addition of furniture and hosting facilities. All is then ready for the arrival of the sales team, including a nervous wait during the inevitable inspection by company senior management.
The action then moves on to the opening of the show, requiring me to change out of overalls into a suit and tie. Old friends are met, new ones encountered, demonstrations are given and, of course, business matters discussed. All too soon, the show has run its course and the visitors and company representatives have departed. If we’re lucky, someone will have purchased the display machinery “off stand”, meaning that we won’t have to arrange to strip and transport the heavy equipment back to our factory. The buyer will take care of everything.
My final vision is of an emptying hall; no longer a blank canvas but now littered with paper, boxes and stand remnants. It’s as if a whole village has been built here from scratch, to flourish briefly and then be vandalised and abandoned.
The secret of successful exhibition participation? Two basics: become good friends with the hall manager and - most importantly - get to know a cooperative forklift truck driver.
The hall manager frequently has the final say on problems and, with him on your side, any difficulties arising are so much easier to resolve. Should he be willing to accept the odd business gift sample as a souvenir of your visit, so much the better. Often, he has the master key for the locked toilets in the build up period, which can be a great relief.
As for finding a friendly forklift truck driver, this is a must. The earlier you can get him on your side, the better. This can ensure that you are the first to receive your boxes in the build up and break down phases, as well as guaranteeing the demanded skilled assistance when swinging heavy equipment into position.
How you achieve this is up to you. For one exhibition in Paris, we promised the driver that he could have the opened spirits bottles from our bar at the end of the show. We weren’t going to take them back with us. As soon as the exhibition closed, he was at our stand. Having inspected the various options on offer, he took a selection and returned minutes later with our boxes. Mission accomplished.
We packed up and made ready to leave a couple of hours later. On the way out we saw our friend driving his forklift at speed down the aisle, radio blasting, with a bottle to his lips. He saw us, waved and shouted “Santé!”. Thank goodness he wasn’t the driver of the heavier truck which moved our machinery on the following morning.
Of the exhibitions I took part in - large and small - a few stand out in my recollection, due mainly to the special people I met there. But, without doubt, my first experience of participating in a large show in Moscow is the event which springs most readily to mind.
As a condition of a turnkey machine installation contract signed with Soviet authorities, the company I worked for was obliged to take part in the “Inlegmash” textile machinery exhibition in the city in August 1988.
As usual with such undertakings in the Soviet era, the exhibition - held at the Expocentre on the banks of the Moscow River - lasted a full 10 days. The justification for this extended period: to allow representatives from combines all over the country to take turns in attending. In practice this occasioned that the invitation-only first two days were taken up with ministerial and factory director visitors; their subordinates just had to wait. Perish the thought that the proletariat might actually be allowed to mix with the secretariat.
This meant that any contracts were negotiated in the first 48 hours. The remaining show time was taken up by repeatedly demonstrating our equipment’s capabilities. To be fair to these factory representatives who came later to the show, they soaked up information like a sponge on techniques that they had probably only read about and certainly not observed in practice. I had great respect for the Soviet industrial engineers of this time. They were able to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear in situations where our specialists would simply have downed tools. Dealing with poor quality parts was an everyday obstacle for these Soviet mechanics.
The history of the first special person I met via exhibitions goes back to the preparation stage for the “Inlegmash” show. As usual, the machinery to be featured was erected and tested at our factory, before being taken down and packed for transportation. On this occasion, we booked a Surrey freight forwarding company to supply the lorry with driver to take our load all the way by road to Moscow. The experienced driver would stay in the region, performing local transportation tasks where available, to be immediately on hand to bring our goods back to UK at the end of the show.
During the loading process at our factory, the driver - whose name I have unfortunately forgotten - mentioned that he went to school with a member of Status Quo who, all being well, he would meet again in Moscow. He explained that the group would be completing a three-week concert stay in Moscow around the time of “Inlegmash”. Being typically cynical Yorkshiremen, we quickly discounted his claims.
Within a week of arriving in Moscow for the exhibition, the fitting team and I were interrupted mid-assembly by our driver, who informed us that Rick would be coming for a drink with him that evening; would we like to come along? Having never doubted the voracity of his declarations, we immediately accepted the invitation.
Rick Parfitt and the rest of Status Quo - without Francis Rossi - came as promised to the hard currency bar of the Cosmos Hotel straight after their show. We drank into the night, where Rick proved to be a most sociable companion. I couldn’t resist leaving the bar for a short period to go back to my room and call my wife - a committed Quo fan - at home in UK with the question “Guess who I’m drinking with?”. Her response cannot be printed out here.
During our general conversation, the subject of income was raised. Someone said to Rick “That’s not a problem for you. You’re a millionaire”. He answered in the affirmative, then thought for a few seconds and added “No, I’m not. I’m a multi-millionaire”. Such memories of the sadly missed rock star are priceless.
The ongoing effects of Gorbachev’s perestroika were already evident at the time of this Moscow exhibition. For the whole period of the show, representatives of newly privatised organisations came by regularly with requests for investment, joint ventures and even barter arrangements.
I was once given a CV by a persistent student looking for work in UK. He found it difficult to comprehend why his request could not be easily resolved so - as we weren’t busy - I took time out to correct the English spellings and grammar in his document. It was the least I could do for this enterprising youth. He’s probably now an oligarch.
In another of our quiet periods, I was approached by a smartly dressed man who was similarly looking for potential investment or joint ventures, this time on behalf of the Nizhny Novgorod Region. We started in Russian, but as soon as he realised that we were a UK firm, he quickly switched to faultless English. We soon established that, as a small independent engineering company from the North of England, we had nothing that could interest him. Nevertheless, I liked the cut of his jib and offered him a seat and a cup of coffee, which he gladly accepted.
We spent the next twenty minutes or so generally discussing business and the situation in our respective countries. On leaving he told me to keep his card, just in case I should come across anything of interest to him. I was to retain this card for the next twenty years, as the name it contained was that of Boris Yefimovich Nemtsov.
I followed the career of Boris Nemtsov from afar after this. Under the patronage of President Boris Yeltsin, he was to rise quickly up the hierarchy of the newly independent Russian Federation. He first became Governor of the Nizhny Novgorod Region, eventually advancing to the position of First Deputy Prime Minister of Russia. He had popular support and, indeed, in 1997 he was introduced to Bill Clinton by Boris Yeltsin as his chosen successor. However, after the market crash of 1998 and the ascent of Vladimir Putin, his political standing waned. He left government, moving over to become an opposition leader, a foremost critic of the regime. It was in this role that his assassination in February 2015 shocked the world. Yet to me he remained that special, unassuming guy who had come to our exhibition stand over 25 years earlier.
My only participation in an exhibition in the USA was, to say the least, a disappointment. Like the majority of marketing students worldwide, I had crammed the “Principles of Marketing” good book written by professor Philip Kotler of Northwestern University. I was therefore saddened to discover that his compatriots did not apparently follow his lead. I spent days at the mid-nineties show in Greenville South Carolina observing clients being talked at, rather than talked with. It made me feel uncomfortable; I vowed there and then never to be found guilty of similar conduct.
A wise source once told me “The key to selling is empathy: the ability to put yourself in the other person’s place.” However, one neighbouring exhibitor in Greenville - a good old boy who always appeared to have a fat cigar stuck in his mouth - at least seemed to pick up on this. One day he walked over and asked me “Can you smell it?”. “Smell what?” I questioned. “Bull****!” he explained. His pithy descriptor mirrored precisely the behaviour being played out around us.
The runup to this exhibition had its comic moment. As usual I had reserved a forklift driver, who was late coming to our stand. I found him in the area devoted to Japanese manufacturers, surrounded by half a dozen installation engineers. He promised to come to us as quickly as he could. He eventually arrived and immediately asked where we were from. Having been informed, he continued “Do they speak English in England?”. We had to supress our laughter, all aware that an irritated forklift driver is a dangerous one.
When he had completed his lifts with us, we were able to relax and clarify the situation. Apparently, the Japanese engineers had been giving him up/down, left/right instructions from all sides in a language he could not understand, hence his introductory question to us. Interestingly, we were the first to receive our boxes at the end of the show. Applied empathy does have its advantages…
Probably the weirdest exhibition I took part in was in Tehran, also in the mid-nineties. Having experienced Iran before the Revolution - courtesy of 51 Squadron - it was always going to be a revelation for me to return there in completely different circumstances. It was with relief that I was able to observe familiar landmarks on the road from Mehrabad Airport to the city centre.
What made this event different was that foreign exhibitors were only allowed to open their shipping boxes in the presence of customs officers who moved, stand by stand, through the hall. At other shows outside the EU this procedure was completed with less formality, often by the freight forwarder and customs staff alone elsewhere, and certainly not requiring the presence of members of the exhibiting team.
When it came to our turn, the reason for this strict regime was quickly made clear. Once we had opened the box, the chief official asked to see any business gifts we had brought. We showed him the collection of pens, lighters, keyrings and other packed items, at which point he simply helped himself to handfuls of each, passing them to his assistant. Without a word to us, he placed an X chalk mark on the box and left. Customs clearance had thus been completed. Our Iranian trade representative whispered to me “Now you know why I told you to bring plenty of gifts”.
If I had to pick out the most prestigious exhibition in which I participated, my times at the biennial Moscow Air Shows in 2007 and 2009 would have to be the choice. Where else would I find myself not once, but twice, within a few metres of Vladimir Putin? In 2007 he was there as President. Two years later he was Prime Minister to President Dmitry Medvedev; these roles were reversed in 2012 and remain the same to the present day. On both occasions I was away from my indoors show stand, trying unsuccessfully to get out of the way of the groups of dignitaries who were already circulating the fair. My instant impression of Putin was that he was smaller than I expected and that he was a glowing picture of health. It’s funny how you remember people.
