Technical service — marketing's right arm?

Despite three generations of military fiascos scattered around the Empire from Afghanistan to the Crimea to the Transvaal, the British officer corps ended the century (1899) with its gallant amateurism intact. Those were indeed the days when the New Imperialism precipitated an environment in which both the European military and those ‘in trade’ could do no wrong (sic). This was the epoch in which some decorative paint salesman used the Clerk of Works Smoking Concert as their panacea. By investing a few gold sovereigns he would get them pie‐ eyed and, without having mentioned business, would send them all fifty gallons of white undercoat next day, or anything else the factory wanted shifting. And so the wheels were oiled until comparatively recently with the customer receiving support made up of nothing more than a superlative product and commercial amateurism, carried out with gentlemanly relish. Indeed, the writer (when very young) can well remember offering to radically modify this service, to receive the reply from a somewhat grizzled and articulate foreman painter: ‘The only technical service I require, is my regular delivery of Scotch whisky so sensibly instituted by your predecessor.’