Jetrader - Summer 2014 - 39

In Memory of
Gilbert W. Speed
A personal appreciation
By Martin Bleasdale

I

I first clapped eyes on Gil Speed in early
January 1966. I was 22; he was just about
to be 33. He had rented an office near
Heathrow, from a would-be publisher who
was interviewing me for an aviation journalism position, and was rushing out the
door to do battle with the traffic on the
M4. I got the job, but little did I know that
this brash American, as I thought then,
would become a major influence on my
life and career, as an employer, mentor,
inspiration and very good friend over the
next five decades.
Gil had arrived in London 6 months earlier with nothing but a hotel reservation, a
checkbook and his wife, Ann, having been
enticed away from his eight-year engineering career at Pan Am, with a remit to
establish the UK and European operations
of Brownline Corporation, Redondo Beach,
Calif., the then-major world manufacturer
of air cargo pallets, nets, fiberglass "igloo"
containers, restraint straps and fittings to
the nascent jet cargo industry.
A year later, the publishing company
folded, and I ended up being taken on by
Gil at Brownline London Ltd. as a "senior"
sales engineer (there weren't any others)
and quickly became accustomed to the
now-evocative smell of fiberglass resin that
infiltrated every corner of the building.
By then I had met the effervescent Ann
and a three-week-old Lizzie (Joanna had
yet to be thought of) at the beautiful old
cottage they had discovered and rented,
in a village near Reading, some way west
of Heathrow.
Gil and Ann were born in Bristol,
England, as children lived through the
bombing of that port city during WWII,
and soon after getting married in the early
'50s, decided to emigrate to the U.S. Gil
saw no future in the stultifying atmosphere

Gil Speed accepts the 2010 ISTAT Award at the ISTAT Americas conference in Orlando,
Florida, 16 March 2010.

of post-war Britain, with its rigid class
system, old boy networks, living on past
glories and resistance to change and modernization. No place for entrepreneurial
types or those who simply wanted to "get
ahead," even in its developing commercial
aviation industry. They arrived by ship in
New York harbor, were "processed" on board
by whatever homeland security looked like
in those days, and were let in to the promised land. They set up home in New York
City and Gil soon landed an engineering
position at Eastern Airlines and two years
later at Pan Am. Ann also found success as a
senior personal assistant at ITT's executive
offices in Park Avenue.
Gil often spoke of his time at Pan Am,
which I think he found very fulfilling

and full of great experiences. At Pan Am
he worked alongside Fred Bearden, Paul
Hannak and Tom Seery, amongst many others, who therefore knew him for longer than
I did. He very much admired John Borger,
the senior vice president of engineering,
who had worked under Juan Trippe, and
often quoted his engineering truisms.
Later, he had another mentor in Bob Looker,
the president of Brownline, who persuaded
him to leave the close Pan Am "family" and
experience life on the other side of the
business, as a supplier.
After his three year spell back in the Old
Country (which had changed and improved
a little since he left-but was still a frustrating environment for him to get things
done), Gil and Ann returned to the U.S. in
Jetrader * Summer 2014 39
Jetrader - Summer 2014

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