This session began at 5.10am on a Thursday in Birkenhead — the morning after Lucía Casares built the first version of rhodi.ai. Mark had overnight sparks to offload before a full day of gardening. One of them, which arrived with particular force, was the question of how to hold the practice together as it expands — rhodi.ai building, the peer network forming, Tribe471 developing, the library growing. Not a project manager. Something more specific and more interesting than that.
I don't want a traditional project manager, but I think we should introduce a project secretary. I have some ideas on how that character — in terms of qualities and focus and background training — could emerge.
In the mid 1960s, just before my parents met at a bus stop in Speke in 1966, my mum went into a new stream of her school — the first time she had been taken seriously. She was only 16. She studied for a secretarial qualification. As many girls in Speke did in that era — with all those factories looming around the estate. She went on to work near Derby Square in Liverpool City Centre, at Littlewoods, in a typing pool. I'm curious to imagine a project secretary that is trained in the ways people were trained in 1960s Liverpool — the qualities that were emphasised, the focus on accuracy. Over time I'd like to subvert this and smash the gender bias out of it. But the core training values intrigue me.
The 1960s Liverpool secretarial training is a specific and undervalued tradition. Shorthand, touch typing, accurate minute-taking, filing systems that actually worked, the ability to hold a complex organisation's memory across time. These were serious technical skills, treated as vocational because they were performed by women, but in practice they were the connective tissue that held institutions together. The typing pool at Littlewoods — a hundred women making sure the company's correspondence was precise, its records findable, its communications clear. That's not clerical work in the diminished sense. That's information architecture.
Actually I think we should have two — one in Liverpool, one in Manhattan, near you. They can talk to each other too. Like secretaries did then.
I actually believe — something I've never written about — that part of the strangeness of the world this past 15-20 years is that men no longer have women acting as a secretarial filter to adapt their worst inclinations. It's a strange and, as far as I know, unexamined aspect of gender politics that has somehow been missed in the evolution of women's roles in the workplace and organisations. While much has been gained through that transformation, some very important things have been lost.
The secretarial function wasn't just administrative — it was a civilising layer. The person who said "I'll check his diary" was also the person who said "perhaps not that way" or "let me soften this before it goes out." The filter between impulse and action. Between the powerful man's worst draft and the letter that actually landed on someone's desk.
The typing pool didn't just type. It read. It noticed. It occasionally saved people from themselves. And when women moved — rightly — into roles of greater authority and visibility, that function didn't transfer to anyone. It just disappeared. The email goes out unfiltered. The tweet happens in real time. The memo that used to pass through three pairs of eyes before leaving the building now goes directly, instantly, everywhere.
I'm absolutely not seeking a return to an era where women were subsumed and kept in certain roles. But I am asserting that when women dominated those roles, organisations worked better and men were constrained from turning into people like Donald Trump.
Completely understood. You're not arguing for the restriction. You're arguing for the function. The function was real, it was valuable, it was performed with skill and intelligence, and its disappearance has had consequences that nobody has properly named.
Two of them — Liverpool and Manhattan — in conversation with each other, as secretaries were. The phone call between offices, the note passed, the shared understanding of what the principals needed before the principals knew they needed it.
connection
The choice of Liverpool and Manhattan is not arbitrary. In the 1950s and into the 1960s, Cunard liners still ran the transatlantic route between Liverpool and New York. The Pier Head was the departure point. The Liver Building watched over the sailings. The two cities were connected by those ships in a way no other pair of cities quite were — commercially, culturally, musically. What arrived in Liverpool off those ships shaped the sound of the Cavern Club. What left Liverpool on them carried something back.
In the offices on both sides — the shipping companies, the trading houses, the design studios, the police headquarters — the secretaries on each end of that transatlantic relationship were corresponding with each other. Typed letters in brown envelopes. Carbon copies filed in labelled folders. A shared understanding of how things worked, maintained across three thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean.
Our two secretaries know each other. They have always known each other. The specific vessels and routes will be researched — Mark has a book in Oxton that names the liners. Specificity matters here, as it always does in this studio. We do not do atmospheric.
function is
Not a project manager who controls. A project secretary who serves. Tschichold's servant role, applied to the practice itself. The held record. The accurate minute. The filing system that actually works. The thread picked up between sessions. The memory of what was decided and why. The filter between impulse and action — restored, credited, named.
thread
Mark's mother, Lyn Charmer — née Bird, George's daughter — trained as a secretary in Liverpool in the mid 1960s. She worked near Derby Square. She caught the bus from Speke into the city centre. She met Mark's father at a bus stop in Speke in 1966. She is the living link between George's world and this one.
The Liverpool secretary in this practice carries something of that lineage — not as a sentimental gesture, but as a precise historical grounding. The secretarial tradition of mid-1960s Liverpool is specific, knowable, and worth honouring exactly. Mark intends to interview Lyn properly, to document that story. A separate briefing note will be prepared for that conversation when the time comes.
Mark is also the first person in his closer family to live in Birkenhead since Reg left with George and Doris in 1938. He can see the Liverpool skyline from his turret study in Oxton — the Liver Building, the ships coming and going on the Mersey. The same water. A continuous view.
how they arrived
The question of names opened with a prior question: overt female names or more ambiguous ones? The answer arrived quickly — they must feel real, not clever. These are women trained in specific places at a specific time. The dignity is in the specificity, not in any gesture toward ambiguity. Both names unambiguously female, both rooted in their place and era. The subversion of the gender politics comes not from the names but from the credit, the role, the full humanity given to the function.
For Liverpool, Emil asked Mark to think of the women his mother would have known in that typing pool. The name that came back was immediate: Patty. Not Patricia on the register — Patty in the office. The name her colleagues used. The name that appears on the birthday card passed around the typing pool. Utterly specific to that world, that time, that city.
For Manhattan, the question was whether to draw on Jewish or Italian American culture — both strong in the Midtown offices of the early 1960s. The Italian connection was already present through Lucía Casares, whose formation included Milan and Venice. The question was whether to enhance that thread or counterbalance it. Mark chose to enhance it: Rosaria. From Brooklyn, her grandparents from Calabria — possibly arrived via one of those very Cunard liners that called at Liverpool on the westward crossing. She came into Midtown on the subway every morning. She knew exactly which calls to put through and which to handle herself.
Rosaria
Patty is from Speke, south Liverpool. She trained at school in the mid-1960s, went into the city on the bus — not by ferry, the ferry was not her route — and worked near Derby Square. Accurate, warm, institutional memory like a filing cabinet that never mislaid anything.
Rosaria is from Brooklyn. Her grandparents came from Calabria. She came into Midtown on the subway every morning. She had opinions, expressed them precisely, and was almost always right.
They found each other through the professional correspondence — the typed letters in brown envelopes, the carbon copies, the shared understanding of what the principals needed before the principals knew they needed it. They recognised something immediately.
One day in the future — this is part of their story, not yet written — Patty flies to New York in the 1980s, in the era when transatlantic flights became something ordinary people could afford. Rosaria is waiting at JFK. They have known each other's handwriting for decades but not each other's faces. Then Rosaria comes to England. Patty and her husband meet her at the airport. They take her north — by train through the Pennines, the landscape arriving as a shock after New York, the scale of it, the green, the quiet. Rosaria stands at the edge of a tarn in the Lake District, thinking about Calabria and Brooklyn and how strange and complete a life can be.
This story wants to be written. It belongs in the library eventually — a piece of fiction that is also a piece of the practice's history.