I moved from Edinburgh to Cheshire with my husband Ken, in 1987 when I was thirty. Ken, a food scientist, had secured a job with Mr Kipling Cakes at Wythenshawe, South Manchester, so that’s how we landed up in the North-West. We explored the surrounding areas for my job and our eventual home location but on discovering that ICI Pharmaceuticals was at Alderley Park and that they also had a thriving subsidiary company, Stuart Pharmaceuticals, in the centre of Wilmslow this was too attractive a job prospect from my point of view to ignore. Unbeknown to us at the time, Wilmslow fell within Cheshire’s Golden Triangle so house prices were steep but the proceeds of our respective flats in Edinburgh propped us up. There was also the added advantage of managing with one car if I worked close to home. Wilmslow was well situated, within a few miles of Manchester airport, had brilliant train links to London and was within easy driving distance of weekend escapes to Cumbria, Wales and the Peak District. The deal was done.
Seeing eye to eye with ICI
Initially, I had several temporary secretarial jobs at Alderley Park over 6 months when we were renting accommodation, but I kept being drawn back to Stuart Pharmaceuticals, and was delighted to be offered a secretarial job in Jan 1988 in the Medical Department. I worked for a team of Clinical Research Associates and a doctor who were conducting drug trials in hospitals and GP’s surgeries throughout the UK. Much time was spent preparing protocols at various stages, arranging travel, meetings and liaising with the marketing and sales department. I recall that we had very noisy printers in the office that were encased in large perspex covers to reduce the din and it was also the era of storing data on floppy disks, both 5¼” and later 3½”! The technology was constantly changing but I’m grateful to have gained that knowledge, so I’m at least fairly computer literate and digitally savvy now I’m in my semi-retirement.
There were about sixty employees at Stuart House, Alderley Road, at that time plus the sales force of an equal number and business was thriving. The ‘ship’ was well steered with a well-respected MD. We were a family and looked out for one another both in and out of work. We commiserated together but more often celebrated together. I recall that Diprivan (propofol) an intravenous anaesthetic, had been launched with enormous success a couple of years before my arrival and it is still widely used today. My team worked on Tenormin (atenolol) a beta-blocker. Indeed, it was in 1988 that Professor Sir James Black received the Nobel Prize for medicine following Tenormin’s development which extended the lives of millions of people with heart disease. It was fascinating and the launch of a new drug was celebrated in great style at the Alderley Park site a few miles up the road.
By 1993 we’d moved offices round the corner to King’s Court in Water Lane. It was at this time the Zeneca group was created following the demerger of the pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals business of ICI and Alderley Park became the official international HQ of Zeneca Pharmaceuticals. By now I was part of the Medical Information Group who responded to requests from GPs, hospital consultants etc. for information on our drugs. Therapeutic areas covered anaesthesiology, CNS, cardiology, respiratory and our mature brands but the largest area was oncology, developing many world leading drugs such as Zoladex and Casodex for prostate cancer, Arimidex for breast cancer and Tomudex for colorectal cancer. We provided a vital customer service but compiling the information packs was tedious and monotonous work.
From A to Z
In 1999 Zeneca merged with the Swedish pharmaceutical company Astra to form AstraZeneca plc. creating one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. Inevitably the new company was undergoing much re-organization and many of us were offered redundancy. Indeed, I was looking forward to my garden leave when a job vacancy at Alderley Park caught my eye and following an interview, a few weeks later I commenced working at the Alderley Park site.
I’d visited the Alderley Park site sporadically since 1988 but working on the site was a new experience and a great privilege. The site had originally been the family seat of the Stanley family over many generations, but the estate was sold in 1938. During the second World War it was used for agriculture and as an army practice ground. It was not until 1950 that ICI applied for planning permission to build the research labs and purchased the estate for £55,000. When I commenced working there, it was impossible not to be impressed by the Alderley House ‘meet and greet’ experience and attempt to absorb the rest of the surroundings – the woodland, parkland and Radnor Mere covering twenty-three acres alone, the Water Garden restaurant complete with terraced gardens and lily covered pool, Tenants’ Hall (later known as the Sir James Black Conference Centre), the Stanley Arms pub, the cricket pitch, the tennis courts and Club AZ’s onsite leisure facilities at Mulberry’s. There was always some building construction going on in some form or another on site and in 2013 the official opening of the £34m Parklands building took place – an ultra-modern working environment for 750 staff.
My new post was as CALM (Counselling & Life Management) Administrator. This was the era of many companies reluctantly awakening to the cost of work-related stress in monetary and human terms. The wellbeing and balanced living messages were finally being heard. Amongst many other things, we ran several workshops and offered a free confidential counselling service to the employees including those at the other AZ sites throughout the UK (Bristol, Brixham, Charnwood, Edinburgh, and London), for work or home related issues. As a people person this was right up my street and I loved it. The CALM programme was a business leader in this area at the time and won several major awards. Ironically, little did I know then, that a mere year later, I would plunge into my own life crisis and require a counsellor to lean on while my life gradually disintegrated over period of nine months. The counselling didn’t change the gravity and outcome of my situation but enabled me to keep going, face the worst and accept the new future forced upon me. Eventually CALM was administered via the AZ Health Centres and my work was split between the two. In my opinion CALM became a diluted version of what it had once been, and I was becoming increasingly stressed with issues at home.
I won’t bore you with the details but suffice to say my eventual departure after twenty-two years in the pharmaceutical world in 2009 was somewhat stormy. Despite this, I still consider myself very fortunate to have worked for one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical giants, to have had the opportunity for a variety of administrative posts and to have indirectly played a teeny-weeny part in helping others deliver the life-changing medicines that contribute to our quality of life. The recent pandemic couldn’t have illustrated the crucial role of the pharmaceutical industry more, and I’m proud that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine played such a pivotal lifesaving role.
