My friend Harry Constable, who has died aged 94, rose to be a prominent figure in the international paper-making industry in the 1970s and 80s by pioneering new processes and modernising management practices.
Among the technical innovations he guided through at the Chartham paper mill in Kent, where he became a senior manager, was the use of photo-base papers for extrusion coaters in tracing paper.
From a managerial angle, he was one of the pioneers in the UK of the Total Quality Management system, which stipulates that every employee, regardless of level or role, should clearly understand a company’s purpose and actively participate in quality improvement efforts – an idea that chimed with his own inclusive philosophy.
Harry was born in Bridgend in south Wales to Henry, a french polisher, and his wife, Jeanette (nee Murphy), who was in service before they married. After a move to England he went to Wycombe technical college in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, and at 16, in 1947, he landed a job as a laboratory assistant at the local Glory paper mill.
The youngest salaried employee in a workforce of 450, on arrival he was told to put on a white coat and take an exploratory walk around the mill, a tour that seemed to generate much mirth among his fellow workers. Only at the end of the day did he discover, scrawled on the back of the coat, the words: “they call me laughing boy”.
Undaunted, Harry steadily ascended the ladder to become production manager there, and by the time of his retirement in 1992 from Chartham he had risen to be its managing director.
Having once suffered a serious injury after his hand was caught in a machine, in his managerial roles Harry was always a great promoter of health and safety. At the Glory mill in the 80s he was also conscious of the part he could play in providing jobs in hard times for unemployed workers, many of whom would come down to Buckinghamshire from northern England or Scotland.
From a bulging file of appreciative letters he received on his retirement, one came from a man who had been sacked from his previous job and at 55 had been out of work for months when Harry took him on, against the advice of colleagues. “I knew he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice,” Harry said.
Harry was for many years a magistrate in High Wycombe and then in Canterbury; a role in which he frequently found himself moderating the punitive tendencies of others on the bench. He was active in the Rotary Club and a keen all-round sportsman, having been an amateur boxer as a young man. A cyclist and a runner, he played tennis well into his 80s.
Harry’s wife, Elaine (nee Fay), a nurse whom he married in 1955, died in 2023. He is survived by their sons, Stephen and Stuart, and seven grandchildren.
