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One of the county’s largest hi-tech employers has just celebrated a quarter of a century in business.
To mark the occasion, KentOnline spoke to one of aerospace giant BAE Systems’ former engineers turned volunteer historians to see just how much has changed down the years at its base in Rochester.
Today BAE is one of the biggest names in UK manufacturing and has been at the forefront of military and commercial innovation for decades, with a heritage stretching back centuries.
It was born out of a £7.7billion merger of Marconi Electronic Systems and British Aerospace in 1999 and has since gone on become one of the country’s biggest defence contractors.
Boeing, Airbus and NATO, which uses kit made in Marconi Way for its Typhoon Eurofighter jets, are all among its stellar list of top clients.
Leading innovations from Medway include head-up displays, helmet-mounted displays, flight control computers, and active control sticks.
One of those who worked at the site, which has been a base for aviation development for more than 85 years, during the takeover was Chris Bartlett.
After growing up in Croydon and getting his education at Battersea Technological College the then 22-year-old started at the firm in 1972 as a development engineer and had a 33-year career in Rochester.
He had worked for ITT Europe in Sweden before getting married in Larkfield where he settled down.
In the 1970s the site was under the ownership of the Elliot Brothers, who employed 7,000 people at the premises.
His main job was to design Head-Up displays (HUD), which show pilots essential data that is overlaid onto a view of the outside world.
The 79-year-old, who lives in Longfield, remembers there not being enough space for all employees so the front car park was full of long wooden huts.
He said: “They weren't a good environment as they were very cold in winter and very hot in summer.
“We customised it by setting up a badminton court at one end of the hut. That ruined my badminton, however, as you can't get the high lobs.
“The shuttlecocks also got stuck in the gas heaters, which was a bit dangerous.
“There was quite a hierarchy in the management with different divisions having different leaders.
“Across the front car park was a sort of wooden fence and the management parked between that fence and the towers with us lesser mortals not allowed to park.
“However, the day I got promoted and could go into that executive car park was the day they took the fence down.
“But the equipment was always good and the projects were particularly exciting.”
Chris worked on kit for the F-16 Fighting Falcon for around a decade and in 1983 it saw him become engineering project manager of the enhanced HUD programme.
“I've always liked the human interface because the pilots are interacting with this piece of kit you're designing,” he said, “So you have to consider it's not just a piece of electronics that does something.
“You have to think about the shape and brightness of the symbols, what they mean, how quickly can they be interpreted so there’s a lot of human interaction.
“We also got to talk to people that are the end users – the pilots – if we were lucky.”
The F-16 programme saw Chris make trips across the world for the US-led programme that had production in Europe.
Destinations included Atlanta, Fort Worth in Texas, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands.
In one visit to Fort Worth, he was held up and robbed at gunpoint, while on another trip managed to find himself in the midst of a “shooting match” at Atlanta airport. He also got stuck in Long Island during a hurricane.
The furthest he got to travel was Singapore for a project which he still cannot tell the public about to this day.
When the merger happened Chris was not too worried about what it would mean for the company as there had already been a number of name changes during his tenure.
It had gone from Elliot’s Automation to GEC Marconi Avionics to GEC Avionics Ltd before Marconi Electronic Systems, all before the formation of BAE Systems.
He said: “The name on the Tower One kept changing on what seemed to be a day-to-day basis. The people that made the letterheadings must have had a fortune.
“Anyone who had lived through this just sort of thought, ‘Oh it's just another one’.
“But all of a sudden things began to become much more attractive in terms of things like getting a company mobile phone.
“Before we used to travel the world with no way of getting in touch with home at all.
“We also got a company car, which was special. I got the company pilot's hand-down car, a big red sports Volkswagen Passat that I loved.
“The pension scheme got an awful lot better as well as the salaries. The whole ethos was much more friendly and more rewarding.
“There was also investment in improving the environment. It was the best thing that could have happened.”
The firm officially marked its 25th anniversary at its Rochester base on Saturday (November 30).
But it’s not always been smooth sailing for the company with the firm making a large number of redundancies previously which saw its modern workforce sit at around 1,500 by last Summer.
I was the angel of death. I came home after that and I cried as I was I was so upset at doing that
Chris went through ten different redundancies across his time working in Rochester and says these were “always difficult”.
He added: “The worst one I ever had was when I was given the job of going around to ask people to go to the office and so soon as I appeared at their desk they would know why I was there.
“So I was the angel of death. I came home after that and I cried as I was I was so upset at doing that.”
He explained that computers and automation were partly behind the job losses during this period.
“You don't you don't see people sitting wiring things up the same way they used to,” Chris said, “Some of it has gone out to subcontractors like optical assemblies.
“It's just not economic to make those sorts of things in-house as they are very specialised jobs.
Chris retired from his role as a project manager in 2005 but remains with the company as a voluntary historian and runs the on-site museum.
The purpose of the archive is to show employees the progression of products that have been produced on-site, as well as to preserve these innovations.
The oldest artefact in the collection is a compass made in the 1850s.
Ands jobs are returning en masse to BAE once again as it oversees another mammoth recruitment drive.
Today it employs around 1,600 people at Rochester – seven in ten of which live within a 10-mile radius of the site.
This follows a £220 million investment from the company which was announced in October which will see the workforce grow to almost 2,000 employees.
The major revamp will also see outdated buildings replaced, some of which date back to the 1960s, with a new state-of-the-art factory.
