Dad originally set up Contour Management Services (CMS) as the vehicle for him and Sue to run the European division of the International Map Trade Association (IMTA) and this was the main source of CMS’s turnover until Dad & Sue stood down from IMTA in 2004.
But CMS also had another feather in its cap: to harness Dad’s contacts in the map trade and from trade fairs by importing and distributing in the UK various specialist maps and publications. CMS was “Importers of maps with a difference” as Dad & Sue’s business cards proudly announced.
CMS predated Dad’s retirement from the Ordnance Survey and so initially the workload and profits fell more to Sue than Dad, given that Dad still had a full time job with the OS. Following his retirement from the OS however in 1999 it was rejigged as a 50/50 partnership to reflect the fact that Dad was now “able to equally contribute to the partnership”.
When it came to importing maps the biggest chunk of CMS’s business was importing Turinta publications from Portugal which necessitated annual business trips to Murches, near Cascais. Well I say business but the map business was always concluded fairly rapidly and then the real business of the holiday with Eva & Hilario (& Jamie) could begin, involving a lot of laughter and Vinho Tinto in the sunshine.
In addition Dad & Sue sourced a lot of US map stock from Bill Hunt (Maplink), from Jana Seta (maps of the Baltic States) & from Australia (Meridian Maps).
CMS also sold historic map cover postcards from Ordnance Survey, produced to celebrate 200 years of the OS in 1991 and procured….well best not to ask, but there sure was a lot of them postcards in every nook and cranny of the house.
CMS was a tidy little business and Dad & Sue had every reason to be proud of their efforts. But there was one map which did not do the business and that was The Titanic Reference Map. For that we can blame James Cameron. The world was going crazy for Leonardo and Kate back in the late 90s and Hedburg Maps had been exhorted/commissioned by Bill Hunt to grab a slice of the Titanic craze by producing a reference map. Dad in turn eagerly signed up to be the sole UK importer and in 1998 CMS took delivery of some 5000 maps.
Fairly impressively it seems Dad managed to shift nearly half of these but a year later and the Titanic craze was definitely past it with Dad’s marketing getting increasingly desperate (get your order in and be ready for the tidal wave of interest) (!) and talk of remaindering hung heavy in the air.
As such I imagine Dad was a lot more reticent when it came to the second edition in 2006. Or perhaps not because there were an awful lot of unsold issues of the later edition knocking around when it came to the painful duty of clearing Spinacre at the end of 2023.
Certainly Hedburg never gave up on the map as I have checked and in 2018 they even produced a fourth edition.
So I gamely messaged Bill Hunt but the message came back…..any remaining Maplink stock and the Titanic Map were strictly for the trash.
But something in me persisted and I kept 30 or so back from the skip and stuck The Titanic Reference map (second edition) on eBay optimistically priced at £13.96, along with a handful of OS historic postcard sets.
Well I sold one set of the historic postcards in 2024. But there have been absolutely no takers for the Titanic map. So I think we can safely assume that there never will be and that CMS is not going to make my fortune, and there will be no succession battles for the family business. Indeed, Dad himself had pretty much stopped by 2018 save for the odd and very occasional eBay sale, which at least gave him an excuse to chat up the nice ladies at New Milton Post Office.
I thought of CMS and that troublesome reference map when we visited Belfast last week. We found the time to drop by The Titanic Museum, as the final item on our itinerary before the airport and home.
As we exited through the cavernous gift shop I suddenly thought of that map. Dad had previously managed to sweet talk the Titanic Museum in Southampton into taking some copies and here we were in the much bigger and gleaming £100 million Titanic Belfast attraction in the Titanic Quarter, the impressive centrepiece of the regeneration of Belfast’s dockyards.
Dad would surely have given it a go but I didn’t……sorry Dad. But I would never have got the stock through on Ryanair anyway, we were at the limits of the small undeseat bag allowance as it was.
Plus we did not want to linger as we quickly decided the gift shop was in pretty poor taste with its Titanic rubber ducks and teddy bears with captain hats etc. Hmm. Although not as bad as the tacky king- of- the- world ship’s brow recreation photo opportunity offered up just after the emotion of the digital Lost & Saved Wall at the end of the experience. We had no problem passing on this.
So that’s my excuses done, as realistically is the trading business of CMS. But it was quite some ride for Dad & Sue and Titanic notwithstanding, a rather splendid side-hustle and map story.
