One Stop, One Life E-Book

Kevin Threlfall

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 432

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

In the 1970s Kevin Threlfall built up the chain of Lo-Cost discount stores from a single grocery stall on Cannock market. Having sold out to RCA of America he then went on to build an empire of 1,215 shops in just 25 years from a single cigarette kiosk on Wolverhampton market. Trading as Supercigs, Dillons, Preedy, One-Stop and Day & Nite, T&S Stores plc became the largest specialised convenience store group in Britain, eventually selling out to Tesco in 2002 for £530 million. But it was not all plain sailing, as among other challenges he survived having his appendix removed without anaesthetic. Then on 23 April 2014, before completing this book, he dropped down dead for 40 minutes on the golf course and was saved only by the actions of his quick-thinking golf partners. This is the remarkable story of his life, in which passion, hard work, good timing and luck all played a part in bringing together a fascinating tale that is a real page-turner of a book.

Leseprobe

ONE STOPONE LIFE

ONE STOPONE LIFE

From market stall to1,000 shops in 25 years

KEVIN THRELFALL

Published in the UK in 2014 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.net

Sold in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia

by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,

74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA

Distributed in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia

by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road,

Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW

Distributed in Australia and New Zealand

by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd,

PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street,

Crows Nest, NSW 2065

Distributed in Canada by

Publishers Group Canada,

76 Stafford Street, Unit 300

Toronto, Ontario M6J 2S1

Distributed in South Africa by

Jonathan Ball, Office B4, The District,

41 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock 7925

Distributed in India by Penguin Books India,

7th Floor, Infinity Tower – C, DLF Cyber City,

Gurgaon 122002, Haryana

ISBN: 978-184831-858-8

Text copyright © 2014 Kevin Threlfall

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Printed and bound in Europe by Latitude Press

– CONTENTS –

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

Monetary Values

1    Born in a Bucket

2    Lord of the Flies

3    Barrow Boy

4    Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves

5    Moving Up the Food Chain

6    Chain Smoking

7    90p Pete and the Stock Exchange

8    What Next?

9    Marriage of Convenience

10  Following a Paper Chain

11  1,000 Stores

12  Non-Stop then One-Stop

13  Working Day & Nite

14  Over and Out

15  Up the Creek Without a Paddle

16  Jack in the Box

17  Well Done, Beef!

18  Going Back to School

19  Stick to Your Knitting

20  Life After Death

Appendix

Index

– LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS –

Foreword: Sir Terry Leahy

1. My first school: Elston Hall Primary.

2. Moreton Country Club.

3. Inspection day, Denstone College, 1967.

4. The all-conquering rugby side of 1966/67.

5. Shrewsbury House, Denstone College.

6. Cannock market stall, 1971.

7. Celebrating record takings, Cannock market, 1969.

8. The famous dog food delivery van.

9. Outside of Lo-Cost Wolverhampton, 1972.

10. Before the grand opening, Lo-Cost Wolverhampton, 1972.

11. First cigarette kiosk, Wolverhampton market, 1975.

12. St Michael’s Church, Tettenhall, 5 March 1977.

13. The happy couple.

14. Established Lo-Cost fascia for all stores.

15. High street fascia with familiar advertising.

16. Playing golf with the ‘Great White Shark’.

17. The T&S board celebrating the opening of our 100th store.

18. A bit of R&R with the boys, Jersey 1988.

19. Announcement of the Preedy/Dillons purchase, May 1989.

20. Meeting Princess Anne at the NEC.

21. The famous Fantasia range of pick and mix confectionery.

22. Acquisition of Mac’s convenience stores.

23. Press announcement of our takeover of M&W plc.

24. Willie Thorne opens our 1,000th store in Poole.

25. T&S board photo, 1998.

26. A corporate golf day with ‘Monty’ and Jimmy Tarbuck.

27. Convenience stores rebranded to the One-Stop fascia.

28. Expanding up north with the Day & Nite acquisition.

29. Breaking through the £1 billion turnover figure.

30. Front-page news in the Financial Times.

31. Receiving Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

32. Business partner and lifelong friend Dave.

33. Dave, Lorraine, Gill and I.

34. Welcome to the Wolves board from Sir Jack Hayward.

35. Announcing that Steve Morgan has bought the Wolves.

36. Father dies, February 1991.

37. Receiving the ‘Monkey Classic’ golf trophy from Ian Botham.

38. Ian Botham opens Fordhouses Cricket Club, 2013.

39. My office above the garage in Wolverhampton.

40. The opening of the Threlfall Library at Denstone College.

41. The Horns at Boningale.

42. The team that saved my life.

43. The ‘Threlfall’ boardroom at One-Stop Brownhills.

44. At Compton Abbas with my Trinidad TB20.

45. Grandkids Jack, Mia, Sam and Oliver with our dogs.

46. Yet another holiday – Gill and I cruising in 2011.

This book is dedicated to Martin Knowles, Steve Woodward, the Ambulance Service and the Air Ambulance Service. Without their combined skills and quick thinking I would not have survived on 23 April 2014.

– ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS –

My thanks go out to my wife Gill for her constant encouragement and the endless cups of coffee ferried across to my study. Particular thanks also go to the David Peters Photography Studio for all their time and effort in making sense of some very old and tatty photographs.

– FOREWORD –

Kevin Threlfall can claim to be one of the pioneers of the modern convenience store. Today, in villages, high streets, council estates, city centres and university campuses, bright, shiny convenience stores play an important role in people’s busy lives. In a sense, Kevin has changed the face of Britain, and for the better. This lively book tells the story of a great retailer.

Sir Terry Leahy

– INTRODUCTION –

I never really felt comfortable about writing my own book for two reasons. Firstly I doubted my ability to put pen to paper, and secondly I worried that the content might not interest enough people to make the venture worthwhile.

I certainly had no intention of writing an autobiography before I was drawing my old age pension. Too many people write their life story before they have reached the point when they can look back properly and analyse all the years; the good ones and the bad ones.

I eventually succumbed to my wife’s badgering because she desperately wanted the story to be told, if not for me, for our grandchildren.

I cannot claim to be a natural storyteller but I have thoroughly enjoyed trawling through my memory vaults and recalling events that were long forgotten in my normal day-to-day life.

Most of my life has been spent in retail, which for me has been hugely rewarding because it is a career that involves the interaction of people. Developing the skill to understand your customers as well as your suppliers takes time, and to succeed in business necessitates building teams that can work together to achieve a common goal.

The book took six months to write and it was nearing completion when I dropped down dead on the golf course. As you will read, I was incredibly lucky to survive and every day now is a bonus that I never take for granted.

Like most children, when I walked through the gates of my primary school at the tender age of five, I had no idea where my life would take me. Fleetingly, with my interest in nature, I thought about becoming a doctor – but retail was not only in my blood, it was in my bones.

The journey has been amazing, full of mistakes, full of wrong turnings but always eventful and always enjoyable.

I worked with some incredible people, not all of whom are mentioned in this book, and I apologise to those not named personally.

Between us we built a wonderful business of over 1,000 shops.

It is a legacy that endures to this day, and One-Stop continues to prosper and grow under the massive Tesco umbrella.

I feel very humble to have been part of the story, which I hope you enjoy reading.

Monetary Values

Money and its value is always a problem when writing about a period that stretches over a number of years, particularly when parts of that period have included some years of very high inflation. Furthermore, establishing a yardstick for measuring the change in the value of money is not easy either. Do we take the external value of the pound or what it will buy in the average (whatever that may be) weekly shopping basket? Do we relate it to the average manual wage? As we know, while prices in general might rise, and have done so in this country every year since the Second World War, the prices of certain products might fall. However, we are writing about a business, and money and its value crop up on almost every page. We therefore have to make some judgements. We can only generalise, and I think the best yardstick is probably the average working wage.

Taking this as the benchmark, here is a measure of the pound sterling relative to its value in 2014.

Apart from wartime, prices were stable for 250 years, but began to rise in the run-up to the First World War.

1665–1900 multiply by 120

1900–1914 multiply by 110

1918–39 multiply by 60

1945–50 multiply by 35

1950–60 multiply by 30

1960–70 multiply by 25

1970–74 multiply by 20

1975–77 multiply by 15

1978–80 multiply by 8

1980–87 multiply by 5

1987–91 multiply by 2.5

1991–97 multiply by 1.5

Since 1997, the rate of inflation has been very low by the standards of most of the 20th century, averaging until very recently less than the government’s originally stated aim of 2.5 per cent (since reduced to 2 per cent). Some things – such as telephone charges and many items made in the Far East, notably China – have gone down in price while others, such as houses, moved up very sharply from 1997 to 2008 before falling back in the financial crisis. In 2011, on the back of sharply rising commodity and food prices, inflation accelerated again to reach 5 per cent per annum. However, as commodity prices fell back and much of the world suffered very low growth, the rate of inflation began to subside again in 2012 and 2013. By 2014 the industrial nations were starting to worry about deflation.

– CHAPTER 1 –

Born in a Bucket

It was a typical December morning, chucking it down with rain, blowy and very cold. As usual it was impossible to park in the surgery car park and I had to drive a couple of hundred yards to find a spot. I jogged back and, as I registered, was glad to see that the doctor was only running ten minutes late. I took my seat in the waiting room and crossed my fingers.

The doctor opened the door and beckoned me into his room. He fixed me with a somewhat sympathetic stare and took a breath:

I am sorry to say, Kevin, that the results are not good. The tumour appears to have grown, but more worryingly the cancer appears to have spread to your liver and also your pancreas.

I could feel a drop of sweat forming on my brow as I asked him how long I had got. Without hesitation he replied:

I am afraid to say weeks, not months.

I shot bolt upright in bed, my heart thumping as it slowly dawned on me that I had been having the same repetitive dream once again. For two years since my lifelong friend and business partner had died of throat cancer, I had experienced this same dream every couple of weeks. Dave had suffered for ten long years and I guess that deep down I was frightened of going the same way. My life had been wonderful and I hoped for a few more years yet.

That life had started back on 29 September 1948 in the Queen Victoria and Albert hospital in Wolverhampton. According to my mother I had been born into a bucket; why a bucket, she had never actually told me.

I remember very little of childhood up until my first day at school aged five. My sister Sharron, who was two years older than me, had walked me through the gates for my first day at Elston Hall Primary School. It was one of the largest primary schools in the West Midlands, with over 600 pupils and average class sizes of 42.

I hated it, cried all day long and would not play in the sand tray with all the other boys and girls. Things only got worse when at the age of six I developed a squint, which meant that I could only really see out of one eye. So there I was sitting in a classroom of 42 with my pink National Health specs, unable to read much on the blackboard. It was not a great start to my academic career.

I lived in an area of Wolverhampton called Low Hill, which was one of the largest council house areas in the Midlands. My mother was one of eleven children, her father having developed a local painting and decorating business. My father was a Lancastrian whose family background was very much coal mining and weaving. Dad worked in a cotton mill for three years from the age of fifteen. In later life it was to come back to haunt him as he suffered quite badly from emphysema.

Dad moved down to the Midlands for a job as a sales representative and my mother was one of the people he interviewed for promotional work. Needless to say she not only got the job, she also got the boss because within two years they were married.

My first school: Elston Hall Primary, Stafford Road, Wolverhampton.

My parents were early entrepreneurs; they were determined to get on the housing ladder and my father used to go around the pubs in the town selling hot dogs, which my mother had made in the kitchen of their one-bedroomed flat. Mom quickly realised that if she cut the ends off the hot dogs, every sixth hot dog could be made out of all the end bits. At a stroke she had improved the gross margin by 20 per cent and the profits started to roll in.

Within a couple of years they had made enough money to put a deposit down on a small semi-detached house on the edge of the council estate in Low Hill.

Central heating and refrigerators were still only for posh people but we did have an inside loo, so I guess we were semi-posh. In the winter, frost would accumulate on the inside of the windows and I used to drive my sister mad by scratching my fingernails across the glass. With open fires being the only source of heat, the real fun was making the fire up with paper twists, sticks and coal. Sometimes the chimney would catch fire and I would run out into the cul-de-sac to watch the flames bursting out into the night sky.

The other really good game in town was to watch the chimney sweeps’ brushes protrude out of the top of the chimneys while they were being cleaned. Now that really is an industry that has disappeared for good.

Life at school started to improve after I had an operation on my left eye to correct the squint. As an eight-year-old, I was terrified when they wheeled me down to the operating theatre and I can still remember the green gown of the surgeon as he told me that I would soon be going to sleep.

I woke up with both my eyes bandaged and unable to see a thing. In literally blind panic, I tried to rip off the bandages because I was convinced that I was now blind. Can you believe that nobody had told me that for a couple of days after the operation, I would not be able to see? To this day I cannot sleep in a completely darkened room; if I do, I wake in the same traumatised state and have to switch on a light.

Now I was old enough to wander beyond the confines of our culde-sac I became a little more interested in what was going on around me. The main railway line was only a couple of hundred yards away and within months I was completely hooked on trainspotting.

It became my life’s ambition to become a train driver, and all my spare time was spent standing by the bridge with my Ian Allan trainspotting book hoping to see one of the glorious steam trains of the day.

The best times for us as a family were summer weekends. My father was captain of our local cricket club and from April onwards we spent most Saturdays and Sundays at the ground. My sister would help my mother with the teas and I would make a general nuisance of myself, either by climbing trees or by running across the nearby field to get the number of another passing train. I never went anywhere without my precious trainspotting book and it lived with me day and night.

Most of the players hated me, because just before the game was about to start I would pinch the brand new match ball and hide it under the pavilion. I would then refuse to give it back until they had all given me a penny so that I could buy some sweets. They regularly gave me money to go and play on the railway lines; I could never understand why!

I often got a swift backhander from my mother when she caught me stealing the cakes that had been put out for the players’ tea.

But they were great family days and I would be immensely proud of my father if he scored 50 runs or more. He opened the batting for the first team and when he was eventually out, I would run on to the pitch to congratulate him. From a really early age he became my hero.

In those days there were no drink-driving laws and Sharron and I would be allowed to stay up late while Mom and Dad enjoyed a tipple or two with their friends and the players from the visiting team. I could never understand why they were always so happy when we were driving home and we would all sing songs at the top of our voices. They would rush us off to bed and bet that they could get to sleep before us – I don’t think so!

I was now growing up fast and doing better at school as I could finally read what was on the blackboard. My father had started his own grocery wholesale business and was now earning enough money to educate Sharron and me privately, so just before I was to take my eleven-plus exam I left Elston Hall and started a new life at Birchfield Preparatory School.

That move was to change my life forever.

The first shock was that the teachers had difficulty in understanding my broad Wolverhampton accent and I was sent for elocution lessons. I didn’t realise it at the time but most of my fellow pupils came from a completely different social background to mine. Back in the late 1950s the only people who could afford private education were professionals such as doctors, dentists and lawyers. Arriving at school in my dad’s van did little for my street cred and because of this it was hard to make friends. I think the other parents thought we were gypsies.

As time went on I did make some good friends because parents may be snobbish, but children rarely are. I was amazed at the size of some of their houses, and the gardens were enormous. Where I lived all the houses were the same, with almost identical postage-stamp lawns. I think the first seeds of ambition were sown when I realised what could be bought with money.

The class sizes were much smaller than I had been used to, and it was strange to sit among only 16 pupils having been used to 40 or more. Some of the teachers were very scary. Our Latin teacher, Mr Ratray, used to pick at the skin around his fingernails, so much so that they were permanently bleeding. He was a stickler for using correct English. One day I asked him if I could go to the toilet.

‘You certainly can, Threlfall,’ he boomed across the classroom.

I got to the door and he shouted, ‘Boy, where do you think you are going?’

‘To the toilet, sir. You said I could go.’

‘I said you could go to the toilet. In other words you are physically able to go to the toilet. The correct question should have been: “May I go to the toilet?”’

‘OK, sir, may I go to the toilet?’

‘No, you may not. Go and sit down, you horrible little child!’

Another teacher, called Mr Carver, had a fearful temper and it didn’t take much to wind him up. In those days the blackboard rubbers were about 20cm long and made out of solid wood. In one fit of temper he hurled it as hard as he could at a boy at the back of the class who wasn’t paying attention; missing his head by a whisker, it hit the wall and a great big chunk of plasterboard fell to the floor. If it had hit him I am sure it would have killed him instantly.

My parents were paying good money for this!

The teachers generally were very strict and misbehaviour was just not tolerated. The punishments included detention, standing facing the wall or, the most ludicrous of all, changing practice. This involved changing from school clothes into sportswear, including putting on and lacing up your football boots. You then had to report to the master and then change back again. The normal punishment was to do this five times but sometimes it was ten.

Unfortunately I didn’t like the headmaster and he didn’t like me so I was not picked for any of the school teams, although he knew I was good enough to play in them.

With my father’s business doing well, we had moved house a couple of miles into the Fordhouses suburb to be close to some garages where he could store his stock. We were now within a stone’s throw of the cricket club, but unfortunately for me nowhere near a railway line. I was slowly becoming a real anorak!

However, every cloud has a silver lining and I soon made friends with a boy from across the road whose mother owned the Moreton Country Club. In the 1960s there were a lot of privately owned country clubs, which were only open to members, and the attraction of them was late drinking (pubs in those days closed at 10.30pm) and gambling.

Lee was the same age as me and in the school holidays I spent most of my time over at the club, either playing football or just larking about. However, the real benefit of the friendship was the food. In the evenings I would watch the television with Lee and we would order all manner of fantastic meals from the kitchen. The restaurant was never too busy, so the chef was happy to cook us the most amazing dishes you have ever seen. We were growing lads and used to order the biggest mixed grills you could imagine, followed by treacle sponge and custard. We even had a waitress bring the food up to us, which I have to say I am embarrassed to admit to. Needless to say my mother was delighted, as it was one less mouth to feed. The waitress, Anne, had a daughter named Christine who became my first girlfriend and, all in all, I really had landed on my feet.

I had to catch two buses to get to school, one into town and then another out to Tettenhall. The benefit of this was that the twenty or so boarders at the school could ask me to stop off in town and pop into the Models and Hobbies shop for things they needed. This presented me with my first business opportunity as I quickly became one of the shop’s best customers. With the boarders spending most evenings making models, I was constantly being asked to pick up balsa wood, thinners, glue, etc. After a few weeks I asked the shop owner if I could have a 10 per cent discount for orders that came to more than £10. He agreed to let me have a rolling credit and in no time at all, he owed me enough that I was able to buy a wonderful model of an American fighter/bomber called an NA39. Everyone was happy; the boarders got what they wanted on a regular basis, the shop owner got the bulk buys but more importantly, I got to be the middleman.

I worked hard and did well at Birchfield. I even managed to come top of the class in every subject one term and I still have the school report to prove it. I wasn’t clever; it was just that I was incredibly competitive and hated being beaten.

All that wonderful food at the Moreton Country Club.

I was only at Birchfield for three years and at the age of thirteen I sat the Common Entrance exam for senior school. It was decided (I certainly do not remember being involved in the decision-making process) that I would be sent to a boarding school and Denstone College just outside Uttoxeter became the hot favourite. If you were clever the options tended to be Shrewsbury, Oundle or Repton. If you were average then Bromsgrove, Wrekin, Denstone or Ellesmere were the obvious choices. Denstone had a great reputation for sport, and as a pal of my father had been there it became the natural choice. I loved all sports and couldn’t wait to go and visit the school where I would be spending the next five years of my life.

– CHAPTER 2 –

Lord of the Flies

It was in the spring of 1962 that I started at Denstone College near Uttoxeter. Back then it was an all-boys boarding school with 365 pupils and fairly full. There were nine different houses in all, with about 40 boys in each house. All the houses except one were located in the main building, in either the north or the south wing.

I had never been away from home before and I didn’t know a soul, so to say that my stomach was churning when we drove in through the gates was an understatement. I felt physically sick.

My parents and I were ushered to the library where I met my housemaster, Mr Brear. He and my father got on like a house on fire as they both had an interest in cricket and I relaxed a little. Mom put on a brave face as we said goodbye, and I wandered off to the common room to meet the other new boys.

The dormitory had 21 beds on either side of a long corridor and your belongings had to fit into a cabinet about one metre wide by two metres tall. Lights-out was at 9.30pm and, as I drifted off to sleep, I wondered what on earth I had done. I was already missing my pal Lee, my first girlfriend Christine, my nice warm bed but, most of all, those wonderful mixed grills!

I was woken in the morning by the loudest bell I had ever heard. It was a nightmare getting ready, as I had to learn how to put a collar and stud on to my shirt. In this way you saved on laundry as the collars were washed regularly but the shirts only twice a week.

It was a mad dash down to breakfast and, if you didn’t make it for 7.45am, you were in big trouble. A first-termer was called a ‘Sprog’ and you had to sit at the end of the table known as ‘The Arse’. It was your responsibility to clear away all the plates and leftovers as they winged their way down the table to you. Anyone who has been to boarding school learns to eat quickly; otherwise there is not enough time to do all the jobs. In addition to this there were always any number of hungry jackals waiting to steal your food.

Breakfast was horrendous, with thick porridge being the staple diet, followed by fried eggs which came on a tray covered in grease. The eggs used to slide around and were accompanied by deep-fried bread, baked beans and, depending upon the day, either sausage or bacon. It was not exactly a Jamie Oliver-type school meal but I have to say that the taste of baked beans on fried bread still brings back great memories. There was never really enough food to fill you up and most of the time you felt hungry.

After breakfast you had to rush upstairs to make your bed and have it inspected by a dormitory prefect before dashing off to go to the loo. The toilet block was outdoors and absolutely terrible. Six ‘traps’ were designated to each house and you had to secure one of these before the older boys came along and kicked you out. Because the traps were only fitted with half-doors, in the winter months the snow would blow under the doors and around your ankles. The only benefit of this was that you really didn’t want to hang about.

Then it was off to chapel for a quick morning assembly, a race back to the house common room to collect your books, and then off to lessons, which started at 9.10am sharp.

Lunch wasn’t much better than breakfast and I struggle to remember what we were actually given. It really was cheap and cheerful food washed down with a glass of water.

In the winter months we played rugby in the afternoons and then lessons followed, but in the summer months we had lessons after lunch followed by cricket or athletics later on.

Tea was around 6.00pm followed by two hours of prep and then bed. Every day was the same routine and apart from the sport it was bloody awful. Those first few weeks seemed to pass like months and my mother must have done something right because I became very homesick. Why had I been sent to this horrible cold gulag on top of a hill when I had been so happy at home? Because I couldn’t settle, I also got into a lot of trouble with the prefects. At my prep school, I had been a top dog in my final year and very popular with the boarders but now I was a nobody. Everyone was older than me, no one seemed to like me and I became desperately unhappy. I used to walk out to the phone box in the village and beg my mother to take me out of this hellhole and let me come home. I would inevitably end up in tears when she kept telling me to give it time as I would eventually settle.

I didn’t settle and they had to drag me back to Denstone to start the winter term of 1963, which was to be one of the coldest winters on record. The rugby pitches were frozen and the fields were thick with snow, so no cross-country running; the food had got no better, the prefects were vile and my work started to suffer badly. On top of this, two weeks into that third term, Christine wrote to tell me she had met someone else and it was all over. I looked down into the quadrangle from our second-floor dormitory and seriously thought about ending it all.

After what seemed like twelve years, the twelve-week term finally ended and I was able to go home from prison for a few weeks before the second year started. My parents knew I was desperately unhappy but I agreed to give it two more terms. The Lent term would be followed by summer, when I would be able to play cricket and at least it would be a little more bearable.

I somehow got through that first year and had made a few friends. We were all in the same boat; some boys were bullied more than others, with cold baths a regular occurrence. Because I was in the school teams and could be vicious, the bullies tended to pick on weaker members of the house.

With me being away from home and my sister Sharron now working as a junior hairdresser, my mother had joined the family business. She was a fantastic saleswoman and soon had the orders rolling in from new accounts. My father had also taken on a Saturday stall on Wellington market, selling cut-price groceries to supplement his wholesale business.

Changes in the law relating to competition in retail had created new opportunities for entrepreneurs like my father.

The most significant concerned resale price maintenance. This was the practice whereby a manufacturer and its distributors agreed that the distributors would sell the product at certain prices (resale price maintenance), at or above a price floor (minimum resale price maintenance) or at or below a price ceiling (maximum resale price maintenance).

Some manufacturers defended resale price maintenance by saying it ensured fair returns, both for manufacturer and reseller, and that governments did not have the right to interfere with freedom to make contracts without a very good reason.

However, in 1955 the UK government recommended that resale price maintenance when collectively enforced by manufacturers should be made illegal, but that individual manufacturers should be allowed to continue the practice. And in 1964, the Resale Price Act ruled all forms of resale price maintenance to be against the public interest, unless it could be proved otherwise.

Effectively the floodgates were now open and heralded a new era for cut-price operators. My father was one of the first people in the Midlands to sell cut-price groceries. He knocked a penny off the price of a packet of Typhoo tea and had a queue of people twenty yards long waiting to be served. He restricted their purchases to a maximum of four packets, but if they wanted more they invariably just got back in the queue for a second time.

He increased the range of cut-price products he was selling and also took a stall on Thursday as well as Saturday. He was now working very hard but for the first time in his life making very decent money. Instead of playing football with Lee, school holidays became all about helping my parents on the market and also earning some pocket money for myself. But of course, he didn’t have things all his own way for long; throughout the mid-1960s supermarkets such as Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Fine Fare started to spring up all over the country.

Jack Cohen, the son of Jewish immigrants, founded Tesco in 1919 as a series of market stalls. The name Tesco was first used in 1924 when Cohen bought a shipment of tea from T.E. Stockwell and combined these initials with the first two letters of his own name. The first Tesco store opened in Burnt Oak, Middlesex, in 1929. By 1939 there were 100 stores. The company was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1947. During the 1950s and 1960s Tesco grew both organically and through acquisition so that by the end of the 1960s there were 800 stores. The first self-service store opened in St Albans in 1956 and the first supermarket in Maldon in the same year. Jack Cohen’s motto was ‘Pile it high and sell it cheap’. He also had a motto for his staff – YCDBSOYA – or ‘You can’t do business sitting on your arse’.

The Sainsbury’s chain, a partnership between John James Sainsbury and his wife, started as a single shop in Drury Lane in 1869. It expanded under the heading ‘Quality Perfect, Prices Lower’ and, in 1922, when it was the largest grocery group in the UK, incorporated itself as J. Sainsbury Limited. When John James Sainsbury died in 1928 there were 128 shops. In the 1950s and 1960s the company pioneered self-service supermarkets.

Fine Fare opened as a single shop in Brighton in 1956, and by 1962 there were 200 outlets. It was acquired by Associated British Foods in 1963.

The queues stopped forming at our market stall in 1965 when Fine Fare opened in Wellington High Street. Dad still had a good business because he could still undercut them on a lot of products, but the days of easy money were over.

I was good at mental arithmetic, which helped enormously, as our till was an old OXO tin.

Having decided to stay at Denstone after all, the second year improved a little as I got over my homesickness and made friends with a couple of boys who could not have been more different. Jim Davies loved soccer, trainspotting and larking about, whereas Bob loved rugby and was quite serious and very religious. He also happened to be one of the best sportsmen that ever passed through Denstone. He ended up as first-team captain of rugby, cricket and fives and at the age of sixteen was scoring centuries for the first XI cricket team. He was also an outstanding centre at rugby and pretty much unbeatable on the fives court.

Jim was from Leicester, and we had an ongoing banter as to whether Wolves were a better footballing side than Leicester.

I was in my last year of ‘fagging’, which involved doing any odd jobs that were required by the house prefects. This could be cleaning their army boots, cleaning their shoes or just running errands from one end of the school to the other. The reward for doing this was the occasional piece of toast or, if you were really lucky, beans on toast.

I got into the under-15 rugby, cricket and cross-country running teams and although we never played other schools at soccer, I did introduce it into the school as a Friday afternoon activity.

Inter-house rivalry was almost tribal and depending upon which term we were in, there were matches played between houses to find an eventual overall school winner. There was a flag each for the major sports of athletics, rugby, cricket and fives and these were hung above the winning house’s three tables in the dining room. The minor cups for other things were arranged on the window shelf above the tables.

It was fantastic to be involved in these inter-house matches and if you won it was celebrated by ‘dormitory singing’. When we were all in bed the house captain would bring through the trophy and we would all sing our hearts out. The prefects would bring in hot chocolate and toast, and for that one night of celebration we were all friends together.

The juniors would be made to stand on top of their cabinets and sing a song. If you had a reasonable voice you were fine but if not you would be battered with pillows and eventually knocked off, hopefully onto your bed.

After the first year we were allowed home more than twice a term and my sister would come to chapel on a Sunday morning. She was not religious so I can only think that, being a mini-skirted blonde, she enjoyed the attention.

In my second year, I received what was known as a sixth-form beating. I had sworn at one of the prefects for picking on me and rather than apologising to him, I was prepared to take a beating. This involved standing in the middle of the prefects’ common room, leaning on a chair, with my trousers and pants down by my ankles and being beaten in front of all eighteen school prefects. I found out where the prefect lived and for a couple of years, I was going to go round to his house in the holidays and get my own back. Fortunately, I didn’t and now I can’t even remember his name.

The other unfortunate incident that happened to me that year involved me ending up in hospital. I was playing in an under-15s rugby team against Bromsgrove and dived on the ball just as the opposition forward decided to kick it. Unfortunately he ended up kicking my head instead of the ball. This resulted in me losing my two front teeth and badly breaking my nose. I was rushed off to Derby hospital and spent the next week there while they tried to patch me up. What was never a pretty face in the first place was now considerably worse and for the next fifteen years of my life, I had to put up with a partial plate with two false teeth. At least I did look fearsome when I took it out.

As I moved up the pecking order life improved term by term and I was delighted when we got a new housemaster, who was not only much more lenient but was also married. Mike Swales was an Old Denstonian himself, who had gone to Cambridge and then returned to Denstone to teach biology. His lovely wife, Elizabeth, taught art but also had a never-ending supply of biscuits. It was really through Mike that I became interested in all aspects of nature and I was lucky enough to study both botany and zoology at A level.

He was a fantastic teacher who had the knack of being able to hold your attention. The 40-minute lessons seemed to fly by and I always looked forward to his classes. Unfortunately, I had chosen chemistry as my other A level and that bored me to death.

I was now in my penultimate year at Denstone and had been made a house prefect, but my best pal Jim had unfortunately been expelled. At the age of sixteen he had met an attractive blonde in the nearby village of Alton (of Alton Towers fame) and was seeing her at every opportunity. Unfortunately this started to extend to evening trysts and, as Deanne could drive, they started to meet more regularly. Instead of being in prep, Jim would cross the fields and meet her in the nearby village. This all worked perfectly well until one evening, when they were enjoying a meal in a nearby restaurant, one of the masters happened to walk in with his wife. The sight of Jim drinking a pint of beer and smoking a cigarette must have blown his mind!

Needless to say, Jim was expelled and banished to Canada by his father to get over his youthful lust. The happy ending to this romance was that a few years later Jim returned to England and subsequently married Deanne. My wife Gill and I have kept in touch with them and the four of us regularly go away on holiday together. Jim and I helped each other get through those difficult first few terms at Denstone and we have remained close friends ever since.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed studying botany and zoology, I knew by now that university was not for me. I was becoming far more interested in selling cut-price groceries than dissecting earthworms or collecting fungi.

However, I was determined to finish my time at Denstone and my love of sport made me decide to stay on for the last year. Like Jim, I had become a bit of a rebel and had started smoking to relieve some of the boredom. It was difficult to find places that were safe as there were regular checks by the housemasters. The pigsties, however, were never checked and became a great place to go to after prep. The sleeping pigs slowly accepted my nightly visits and they became quite comfortable with my presence. Another secret smoking place was in the sluice area down by the kitchens. It was a horrible place that I never thought would be discovered, but one night, as I was coming out, a master happened to see me. He told me to empty my pockets and my packet of ten Gold Leaf fell on the floor.

This episode led to my second beating but this time by the headmaster. Even with eight sides of blotting paper down my trousers he still managed to cut me with the ultra-thin stick that he used. Today I could have probably taken him to the court of human rights but in those days you just grinned and bore it. As it was a very serious offence, I was told that if I were ever caught again I would be expelled. However, it didn’t stop me smoking; it just meant more trips to the pigsties!

I dreaded my end-of-term reports, which were generally not very good because I was always in trouble. I used to read them before my father could get hold of them and, where possible, try to change a few words. I remember my Latin teacher stating that I tried hard but in class I was the ‘ace interrupter’. With careful modification I managed to change it to the ‘ace interpreter’ and what was bad now became good!

However, Denstone in the mid-1960s was starting to become a little more civilised. Fagging had been abolished and we were allowed to grow our hair a little longer. In the ‘outside world’, The Beatles were at number one in the hit parade and Carnaby Street fashions were becoming more and more outrageous.

Sport was compulsory on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, but Tuesdays were reserved for CCF (Combined Cadet Force) activities. We could choose to be in either the Army, Navy or Air Force section. We had to dress up in full uniform and march around the quadrangle pretending to be the real deal. As we had to do it, I became quite involved and went on a couple of courses with the Army in the school holidays. I even changed for one term to the Air Force so that I could go on a trip to RAF Wattisham to see the Lightnings in operation. I then reverted back to the Army section and headed up the advanced infantry section. I finally made Company Sergeant Major, in charge of the whole school Army section. As a reward for this, I was made a school prefect and was probably the only boy in Denstone’s history to be beaten by the headmaster for smoking and subsequently made a school prefect.

Inspection day, C.S.M. Army section, Denstone College, 1967.

On Friday afternoons we were allowed to do other activities such as canoeing, mountaineering or a non-mainstream sport such as fencing. I chose to do ‘old age help’, which involved doing housework, gardening and errands for older people who lived in the nearby village of Rocester. However, I was somewhat lucky in that the old dear I was assigned to really just wanted some company as she lived on her own and was very lonely. She made the most wonderful cakes and she also let me smoke, so I did absolutely no work at all and just sat there in her armchair filling my face with cakes, puffing away and listening to the same life story for two hours every week. We became good friends and I was sad when she eventually had to move into sheltered accommodation.

Back in Wolverhampton my friend Lee said that he had met a girl called Heather and they were going out together but as I was away at boarding school, he would let me take her out in the school holidays. I thought ‘What a proper chap,’ but when I got home Heather didn’t seem too keen on the idea – so he finished with her so he could knock around with me instead. I told you he was a proper chap!

After a great summer break of thirteen weeks, I returned to Denstone for my final year and for the first time ever, I was actually looking forward to it. I was in a study with my pal Bob Short. He was head of house, I was deputy head of house and we were both school prefects. Bob also happened to be school captain of rugby, cricket and fives.

I was in the school second VIII cross-country running team and on the fringe of the first XV rugby team. I was now over six feet tall and my main job in the team was to catch the ball in the lineout and add weight as second row in the scrum. We had an awesome amount of talent and were tipped to be one of the best school teams in the country. I was desperate to get my place in the team but unfortunately there was a better player than me already well installed, whose name was Andy Seymour. As you can imagine, the inter-school rivalry was immense and every year fourteen matches were played over two terms. We played against the top rugby-playing schools of the time, travelling long distances to compete with schools such as Stonyhurst, St Peters of York, Ampleforth and Bromsgrove. The last two matches were played on a tour of London when we came up against the formidable opponents of Whitgift and Blundell’s.

Dating back to 1868, Denstone had never won all fourteen fixtures in the same year and there was a feeling that this could just possibly be the year to do it. We easily won the first five matches but the team was devastated when right at the end of the fifth match, Andy broke his arm, ruling him out for the rest of the year. Sometimes to achieve your dreams in life you need a little luck, and I stepped into his position as the natural replacement. My first match in the team was at home against Ellesmere College and I was as nervous as a kitten as we jogged on to the first-team pitch to the applause of some 350 boys (the whole school had to watch first-team rugby matches) and as many as 50 parents and teachers. It was bitterly cold, windy and muddy as the ref blew the whistle for the start of the match. After about ten minutes one of the Ellesmere players broke through our back line and as he was now heading for the corner flag, I was the last line of defence. With all the speed I could muster I threw myself headlong at his waist and made perfect contact, taking him into touch and, as we both slid through the mud, about ten yards into the crowd. I had prevented him from scoring a try and also justified my place in the team.

We won the match and also the last two of the term, making it eight straight victories on the bounce. The dream of winning all fourteen matches became a genuine reality as we returned to school for the 1967 Lent term. We trained really hard and prayed that none of the fixtures would be called off due to bad weather. We beat Wrekin College at home and then murdered Worksop away 27–0. It was now ten down and four to go.

The training got even harder as all of us started to realise the enormity of what could be. It has to be understood that rugby success was just as important to the schoolmasters as it was to the pupils. Most of the teachers were confirmed bachelors and came from sporting backgrounds. As they didn’t have children themselves, in a funny sort of way we became their family.

The weather held and so did our next two results. It was now down to the final two matches to be played against two of the top schools, Whitgift and Blundell’s. We knew that Whitgift had a star player but also had about 300 more boys in the school to choose from than we had. They rarely lost a match away from home, and for them to lose at home was unthinkable.

The all-conquering rugby side of 1966/67.

We went through all our plans again and again as we made the long journey from the West Midlands down to London. After spending so much time together we had all become great friends, and we also knew how much this meant to us all. None of us could eat a thing before the meal and the butterflies in my stomach felt more like birds.

Finally the game began and all the nervous energy went in the first few minutes as we ripped into them and started to control the game. We were fast, fit and completely focused on what we had to do. By half-time we were leading 3–0, which was just one score in a rugby match. They didn’t know what had hit them, but they came back at us in the second half and we were hanging on for dear life. The minutes ticked away and although by now we were completely exhausted, we somehow managed to hang on and at the final whistle we sank to our knees. We had achieved the impossible. Teams didn’t come to Whitgift to win, but we had.

After the euphoria of our victory, we had to regroup as there was one more match to play the following day, but deep down we all knew that nothing was going to stop us from winning it. And so we did and the dream was achieved.