About David Jenkins
Since WordPress apparently allows me the easy ability to show images in sets of 3 I’ll use it as a standard to tell you about myself.
I was born in South Africa, long before they used this flag though. I left at the age of 2 and first returned in the late 80s just before the end of apartheid. I have been back many times since and have enjoyed 2 awesome holidays. I grew up in Wales and therefore I am Welsh. That’s more of a geographic than a political statement but it does mean that I am not English and that Wales’ 2 recent grand slams have meant a lot to me. And finally my passport says that I am British which I am proud to accept. As Brit I am often critical of my country but recognise that in matters of nationality you can’t pick just the good bits, it’s a package, and there are enough good bits about the UK that I am proud to be British.
I’ve enjoyed a varied career with several companies but I guess 3 stand out as giving me the opportunities and experience which shaped me and my later life.
I joined Shell straight from university (after my abortive PhD) where I worked at Shell Centre (in the downstream building which is now a block of flats) in an operational research group in the computer centre. I spent most of my 4 years there working on LNG projects using mainframe computers and mechanical terminals which were state of the art in those days. It’s a measure of how the world has changed that I remember we had a capital authorisation for £1000 to buy a new desk top calculator; that was 1970. It was Shell which introduced me to foreign travel and I spent two long periods in Japan supporting contract negotiations. After Shell I moved to Mobil Oil (now part of Exxon Mobil) with which I worked first in New York and then Indonesia.
In 1976 I persuaded Dow Chemical in Hong Kong to take me on. I worked there for 3 years travelling over most of Asia and Australia and New Zealand before relocating to Dow Europe in Switzerland where I spent 13 splendid years visiting just about every European country and moving from function to function before settling in marketing. I went about as far as I could with Dow before it became clear that I would have to move on again. I was head hunted by FMC to run its newly acquired flame retardants business in Trafford Park, Manchester. By contrast with my stay at Dow it was not a happy time and I was made redundant after just over 2 years.
Most people come out of redundancy better than when they went in and that was true of me. Linx Printing Technologies of St Ives near Cambridge offered me the position of Sales and Marketing Director and that gave me the chance to work for a much smaller company, to run a substantial department and to be a part of managing a global business. It was tremendous fun; I travelled widely and developed contacts in the world of industrial printing which have stayed with me ever since. After 4 years at Linx I moved to one of its arch competitors, Willett International, but 2 years later found myself on the receiving end of an acquisition and was made redundant again.
That was 2003 and since then I’ve held an interim management position in Spain and worked on my own for a year (i2i-management.com) before joining Qi3 in 2005. Coincidentally I was elected a County Councillor in the same year and the combination of the two jobs pays the bills and keeps of the streets.
and here’s a long overdue update ….
I was re-elected to the County Council in 2009 and I left Qi3 earlier this year to return to running my own business, i2i-management.com. I am also a non-executive director at Cambridgeshire Community Services, an NHS provider trust, and at Labfax, a small supplier of labels, labelling equipment and systems.
Hi David – I think being a County Councillor keeps us on the streets not off them, well at least when we canvas! It does keep me out of the shops, who has the time?
Sue
Some, with a vested interest in Histon FC, have attempted to portray the debate sparked by destruction of trees by the club as football versus local community. This is not the case. I like many other Histon FC fans am extremely angry. I am a football man. I played football for my home town team in my youth. My son is a promising footballer who may play for Histon himself one day. The inconvenient truth for Histon FC is that they have acted illegally. The single line of trees they have planted, right up against the boundary with the busway, does nothing to reinstate the wildlife corridor and is intended to leave the area, now cleared to bare earth, for the construction of a training pitch. The children of the village do not want their football at any price and certainly not as a result of an impoverished local amenity. The club should now do the right and proper thing which is to replace the trees with a planting scheme that completely reinstates the wildlife corridor and the sound and wind barrier that used to protect the Recreation ground. This done, the club and local community will be reconciled and community cohesion will be the stronger.
This came to my attention in discussion with a parish councillor today and I agree that the behaviour of Histon FC in this respect is not really good enough. I understand that the District Council is already ‘having a go at them’ over the illegal felling of protected trees.
Great biog David – a pleasure to read!
Regards
Martin
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