The Life and Times of a Teenage Scribbler E-Book

John David Keith Richards

• Herausgeber: novum publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 650

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Growing up in Roath Park, Cardiff, John Richards never envisaged a career in the cut-throat corporate 'City' – London, the world-renowned hub of trading, retail and financial marketing. Spending his childhood obsessed with trainspotting, music and girls, John had no aspirations to become a player in the arena of stocks and retail. But through a combination of luck, hard work and happy 'accidents' he found himself in the esoteric world of stockbroking. The path of John's career moved into retail analysis, and his experience provides a highly engaging and insightful account of the machinations and vicissitudes faced by some of today's most eminent retailers as they struggled to establish themselves in the ever-evolving twentieth century.

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© 2024 novum publishing

ISBN print edition: 978-3-99130-316-9

ISBN e-book: 978-3-99130-317-6

Editor: Charlotte Middleton

Cover images: Edhardream | Dreamstime.com

Cover design, layout & typesetting: novum publishing

Internal illustrations: John David Keith Richards; diagram: © John Lewis & Co.

www.novum-publishing.co.uk

John David Keith Richards

The Life and Times of a Teenage Scribbler*

* A Derogatory term for City** analysts first coined by Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1983 to 1987 and now Lord Lawson of Blaby, prominent Brexiteer and climate change denier. Ironically, he learnt his trade as one of the ‘teenage scribblers’. Lord Lawson died on 3rd April 2023. ** Throughout ‘City’ refers to London’s financial centre.

QUOTES

‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whetherthat station will be held by anyone else, these pages must show.’

CHARLES DICKENS, DAVID COPPERFIELD

‘Most people live their real most interesting life under the cover of secrecy.’

ANTON CHEKHOV

CHAPTER ONE

TIME TRAVEL

It is 1967. Think the game-changing Beatles ‘Sergeant Pepper’ album, psychedelia, the Summer of Love, and imagine my excitement at moving to London and starting my first job. Think again! I was starting work in the City, where pin-striped dinosaurs still ruled. You could still see them every morning among the multitude swarming across London Bridge, the bowler hats and furled umbrellas marking them out. It could be 1867 not 1967, the singular difference being that in 1967 a substantial proportion of the commuters were female. ‘Essex girls’ saw the City as a magnet, a short, convenient commute into Liverpool Street or Fenchurch Street stations, which opened the doors to a different world. The Holy Grail was a job as a telephonist, typist or better still a secretary in a stockbroking firm.

I should have known better. In the spring of 1967, I had done the ‘milk round’ of uninspiring job interviews while in my final year at Birmingham University. I was highly qualified to do nothing, although not as highly qualified as I should have been, having in my second year discovered bridge and spending weekends and evenings playing endless hands of cards. This had not, of course, been my fault or design. One evening I was sat in the faculty common room before going home and was seduced by three guys desperate for a four to play bridge. I protested my ‘virginity’ but learnt to play that evening through bitter experience and grew to love it.

My degree had involved a mix of economics, politics and sociology and a smattering of psychology, which only convinced me that I was ‘mad’, and I had a vague idea about wanting a job in marketing. My mother had insisted that I should do accounting because there would be a job at the end of it. However, at the end of my first year I switched courses. Accounting was dull, but what finished it for me was my friend, Phil, who patently did very little work. As I emerged from the examination room, bruised and fearful of the outcome, I bumped into a smiling, ebullient Phil. ‘That was easy,’ he said.

‘You have got to be joking!’

‘No,’ he said, ‘accounting is easy, because if you don’t know what to do, just do the opposite to what seems sensible. It works every time!’

That finished accounting for me, but I was yet to discover that the ‘dismal science’** was also fatally flawed. In many ways my switch from accounting to economics was akin to jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. I had already harboured doubts about economics, since its theories were often based upon totally unrealistic assumptions such as there being no transport costs in international trade theory. The fatal flaw is that it is a social science which has to rely upon the fatuous assumption that people behave rationally, whereas the natural sciences can rely on immutable facts such as how molecules or particles will behave. In order to achieve greater influence and respect economists harnessed the power of numbers, calling it econometrics, and presenting themselves as pseudo-pure scientists. The tyranny of numbers has lent a credibility and certainty to economists’ forecasts, which is totally unjustified. I would hold economists as guilty as the bankers in the 2008 financial crash and our seemingly ongoing economic malaise. Economics can never be a pure science which provides the politicians with accurate guidance. If I were to reproduce the answers that I gave in my 1967 final degree examination today I would fail!

** The derogatory alternative name for economics attributed to the Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle in 1849, a phrase deliberately chosen to contrast with the then familiar phrase ‘gay science’ in relation to song and verse writing. This had been derived from the Friedrich Nietzsche book. ‘The Gay Science’. Carlyle was popularly supposed to be referring to Thomas Malthus who had published his essay on the principle of population in 1798, in which he predicted widespread misery resulting from the exponential population growth outstripping the arithmetic growth in food supplies. In fact, Carlyle had been writing about the slave trade and complaining that there appeared to be no justification for it to be found in political economic thought!

As I increasingly discovered in my life, the main determinant of my path and subsequent success has been a series of unplanned accidents and coincidences. To this day, I invariably distrust and pity anyone who tells me they knew from childhood exactly what they wanted to do when they grew up. I think this irrational prejudice was fuelled by the question I always feared from kindly aunts, who would beam at me and say, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ Once I’d passed the stage of ‘engine driver’ being acceptable, I felt increasingly embarrassed and worried that there must be something wrong with me, because I didn’t have a clue as to what I could actually do. If I’m totally honest, I did fantasise about two activities: being the manager of a pop group (sadly none of my friends had any musical talent) or a film director. I was afraid people would mock these choices and, in any event, I had no idea how I could prepare for or make either of these pipe dreams a reality.

Fortuitously, my generation never needed to worry about getting a job. We were always spoilt for choice. In her book, Snakes And Ladders The Great British Social Mobility Myth, Selina Todd labelled children born between the mid-1930s and the mid-1950s as ‘the Golden Generation’. We were more likely to be upwardly mobile than any generation before or since. If you were a man, over fifty per cent (for women, forty per cent) reached a higher social class than their parents. The UK’s post-war economy created an abundance of ‘white collar’ jobs in the public and service sectors, and no unusual ability, hard work or overriding ambition was required to find a secure job. You fell into work, and the real challenge for many of us was to try and avoid work for as long as possible, always secure in the knowledge that there would be a job waiting the moment it was wanted. We enjoyed an exceptional ascent towards opportunity and prosperity, which for a time looked like the way life would always be. The Golden Age applied to the world of work but not to social attitudes (there was a time lag) and certainly not to educational opportunities. In the early 1960s, no more than three or four per cent of school leavers went on to university, while the Eleven Plus exams had labelled millions of children as failures at eleven years of age.

Had anyone ever said to me that I would work in the City, I would have looked at them in amazement and probably retorted with a string of four-letter words. There was though a strange portent. On a school trip to Stratford to see Henry V, while we were waiting for the train, I suddenly had the idea of buying the Financial Times. I sat on the train with my paper, looking at share prices, pretending to my friends to be a city gent. Another pointer to my future destiny, which I did not consciously recognise at the time, was my prolific letter writing. Our local ‘rag’, The SouthWales Echo, included a four-page ‘Pop Special’ every Saturday, which was devoted to pop music, trivia and gossip. It included a letters page, ‘Teenage Post’, and a few of my friends and I competed with each other to see how many of our letters we could get published. It was no contest; I won easily with around fifteen letters appearing over the period from the summer of 1962 to the autumn of 1963. My nearest rival, J A (Tony) Davies, managed to score only five, while Jeffrey Fifer and Peter Harwood managed only one each. Other contributors included Sandra Westlake, my girl- friend and first wife, and Janet Burden, my first ‘real’ girlfriend. She wrote a letter in response to a letter that I had written about ‘sad songs’, saying, ‘After reading J Richards’ letter in last week’s “Pop Special”, it appeared to me that he could never have experienced the tragedy of a broken love affair, or he would never dislike sad songs.’ I was not amused, as some time before, Janet had ‘dumped’ me and was now going out with one of my friends. Even more annoying was a subsequent letter written jointly by Janet and my ‘friend’ Dave Bale! More aggravation was to follow in June 1962 when a letter from a Miss Heyman, an unknown female, appeared. It said that after reading my letter in last week’s ‘Teenage Post’, she thought that it showed one of the biggest failings in today’s youth – its narrowmindedness. I was driven to write the following riposte.

Ignorant?

I was absolutely astounded by Miss Heyman’s letter in last week’s ‘Teenage Post’. Does she have the audacity to say that anyone who writes about ‘pop’ music is ignorant, uneducated and uninterested in politics?

‘Teenage Post’ is, in my opinion, primarily intended for letters about ‘pop’ music. I suggest to Miss Heyman that she reads the South Wales Echo Postbag if she wants to read letters about politics.

J D K Richards, Windermere Avenue, Roath Park, Cardiff, South Wales Echo, Saturday 30th June 1962

I enjoyed writing and found it easy to adapt my style and subject matter to the target audience. And contrary to the previous letter, I did write about serious issues such as reducing the voting age from twenty-one. I enjoyed the public profile and was incentivised by the competition and the fact that ‘starred’ letters – and six of mine were – won a fifteen-shilling record voucher, enough to buy two singles in those days.

My job interviews with illustrious giants of British industry proved depressing and uninspiring, and the thought of spending my working life with these narrowminded, unimaginative, conservative and complacent management hierarchies seemed like purgatory. I had arranged a job interview with United Biscuits in West London and, merely in order to double up on expenses and make a profit on the day, I also arranged an interview with the mighty Prudential Assurance (the ‘Pru’) on the same day. I had no interest in this job and hadn’t even bothered to find out anything about it. Surfacing from the underground at Chancery Lane, I gazed across the road at the red brick Gothic monstrosity (no doubt loved by John Betjeman!) that was the Pru’s head office. I wondered if I’d come to the right place, half-expecting to see monks emerging from this august monument. It was the right place and, as I announced myself in the impressive entrance hall-cum-reception area, discovered to my relief that I was expected. In due course I was ushered along, up and down a maze of corridors, and such was the configuration of this old building, which had been partially modernised to create offices, that I had a panic wondering how I’d ever find my way out of this rabbit warren.

Reaching the end of this tortuous journey, I found myself in a small office being greeted by Ron Artus, whom I later came to admire and recognise as a City luminary and innovator, who pioneered two important developments – the use of research as an investment tool and the consequent employment of investment analysts and the duty which institutional investors should exercise on behalf of shareholders to ‘police’ and enhance management performance. At this point I didn’t even realise that the job I was being interviewed for was anything connected to the City. The interview went surprisingly well, and I had no hesitation in immediately accepting the subsequent job offer. It was a ‘no-brainer’. For reasons I didn’t fully understand and didn’t question, they were offering more money than anyone else. Also, I was to work in what was called the Economic Intelligence Department, which sounded more like academia than business. It would be a comfortable half-way house between university and the real world and would give me the breathing space to discover what I really wanted to do. Little did I know what a momentous step I had taken into the unknown.

My starting salary in the Autumn of 1967 was the princely sum of nine hundred and twenty-four pounds per annum including the London allowance (equivalent to around seventeen thousand pounds today). At university, my best friend, Roger Latham, always said that his ambition in life was to earn one thousand pounds a year and own a Jaguar car, the supreme status symbol of the West Midlands and therefore entirely appropriate for a Wolverhampton boy like Roger. Well, I was almost halfway there. A number of my other university friends were unhappy with my career choice. They immediately recognised what I did not – that I had joined the City. They accused me of ‘selling out’, and I never saw or heard from most of them again. I guess they had the wrong impression of me. I was a natural rebel (most of my friends would say cynic), left-leaning and attended meetings of the university’s Communist Society. However, my attraction to Communism was to listen to the romantic idealism of much older party members who painted a picture of a paradise not dissimilar to the Christian one. It bore no relationship to reality, Russia or current politics.

I was, however, to see several of my old fellow students again when, in 1977, I received an invite to attend a Commerce and Social Science Re-union in Birmingham, ten years after we had all graduated. Initially, I wasn’t convinced this was something I wanted to do, but curiosity got the better of me. It was a weird experience. Some people I didn’t even recognise, including one seemingly dissolute, scruffy, anarchic student who had transformed himself into a pillar of the establishment and was a local Tory councillor. Yet, there were others I could chat away to as if it had only been yesterday that we had last seen each other. A common theme was that almost all the students who had chosen to become accountants were feeling frustrated with their lack of progress and increasingly mundane, unfulfilling roles. While nobody specifically talked numbers it was readily apparent that I was earning more money than anyone else in my year, not an outcome that seemed remotely likely in 1967. While personally very satisfying, I recognised that this imbalance was an indictment of the UK economic structure and, in particular, the low status of industry and any social work. It was as if little had changed since the eighteenth century, when the favoured career choices were politics, the army, serving in our overseas possessions, the church or running your country estate. Anything except ‘getting your hands dirty’ in industry, which was not considered proper for a ‘gentleman’, and it was left to non-conformists and immigrants who were either barred from the professions or lacked a family inheritance.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

My City career began in mid-September 1967. The Economic Intelligence Department was a retreat from the bustle and noise of High Holborn. It looked out onto Leather Lane, which at that time was a narrow, dark passage between the Pru and the Gamages department store and was laid out like a library. The only differences were the partitions separating the three groups of desks and, in the middle, the ‘box’, which was built to shield the head of the department from the rest of us. The more senior you got to be the more you were isolated from the ‘workers’. This took several stages. Initially, there was a dark-wood box with a window and one end open to the department, then a completely enclosed separate office along the corridor and, finally, an office on a different upper floor. This segregated hierarchy was further reinforced by managers’ also ‘enjoying’ separate toilet facilities and a separate canteen. The formal, one might say fossilised, management structure at the Pru was the norm in the 1960s. Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’ had, as yet, to impinge upon office life or begin to change entrenched attitudes to work practices. This was highlighted at Christmas, when we were all instructed to line up to be presented to the chief executive. This tradition was meticulously modelled on a royal visit, with the chief shaking hands with each of us and pausing to exchange a few words with a selected few. This was pre-arranged, and exchanges were of the ‘I hear you were a rugby blue’ type and never about work. At our department’s celebratory Christmas dinner, I shocked everyone by turning up wearing my blue crushed-velvet jacket from Take Six in Carnaby Street. But my real ‘crime’ was not wearing a tie!

We were a motley crew, predominantly Oxbridge and male of course, but nevertheless an interesting variety of colourful characters with several exceptions to the rule. There was Mick Newmarch, who went on to become the chief executive of the Prudential Corporation on the 1st April 1990. Mick had joined the department straight from school (a North London grammar school) in 1955 and had been employed as a statistical assistant, essentially a general ‘dogsbody’, primarily tasked with plotting and drawing up share price graphs. He took an external economics degree and by the late sixties was deemed qualified to be an investment analyst. He was an outstanding bridge player, county standard and way beyond my league. His ambition was very visible and highlighted by the annual senior managers’ Christmas dinner, at which junior staff were ‘privileged’ to wait at table. Mick volunteered to be a waiter every year and encouraged others to join him, saying, ‘It’s a great opportunity to get your face known by senior management.’ Naturally, this was an opportunity that I felt as a matter of principle was demeaning. And on a more practical level, I felt it could ruin my promotion prospects since it was highly probable that I would end up spilling the soup over someone!

Then, there was Stewart Fleming who, on the face of it, was just another traditional rugby-playing Oxbridge product but proved to be a great and interesting friend. Stewart went on to be a journalist, working primarily for the Guardian and the Financial Times. At one stage, he was the FT’s Washington correspondent and enjoyed a one-to-one with President Reagan, who Stewart said proved to be surprisingly knowledgeable and erudite. His interview related primarily to the treaties and talks with the Russians regarding the controls over nuclear weapons, hardly the simplest and most straightforward of topics. I always found it ironic that Stewart for the most part was an economics correspondent, having never studied economics and not trusting banks. While at the Pru, he insisted on collecting his monthly salary in cash from the cashier’s office rather than having it paid directly into a bank account like everyone else. Well, perhaps in the light of the 2008 financial meltdown, Stewart was remarkably prescient and knew something that nobody else even suspected! Sadly, Stewart was one of the first recognised cases of RSI and was forced into a premature early retirement.

My immediate boss, Brian Edwards, was notable for being risk averse and even had an insurance policy to cover him in case he hurt anyone with his umbrella. We used to joke that when he received his monthly salary cheque, he actually owed the Pru money after they had deducted all his insurance payments. I should explain that there was an incentive to take out insurance with the Pru since, as employees, we would count as an agent for the policy and receive a commission.

I was not the sole redbrick university product in the office. The year before I arrived, the first ever non-Oxbridge graduate had been recruited. Graham Poulton retained his northern accent but otherwise appeared to conform to the accepted mould. I always regarded Graham and myself as being something of a social experiment, but all credit to Ron Artus for taking what was a bold and revolutionary step in graduate recruitment at that time.

THE WORK

As the department’s name suggested, the work was research. There was no formal on-the-job training, a situation that was common to all City institutions. You were thrown in at the deep end and either sank or swam. I remember hearing my new colleagues constantly referring to P.E.s. I couldn’t work out what on earth this might be beyond being something to do with the valuation of shares. Not wishing to display my ignorance, I visited the local library one lunchtime and found the equivalent of a ‘teach yourself investment’ book and began to teach myself investment analysis. The mystery of the P.E. was simply the ratio between a share price and a company’s profits. The role of the investment analyst is essentially to identify value for shareholders. The actual work involves understanding, forecasting and commenting with authority on all the factors affecting an industry and its major companies. This must be put into numbers in order to make it respectable and acceptable. Thus, the knowledge would be converted into estimates of company profits expressed in terms of earnings per share (EPS), dividends per share (DPS), and return on capital. These would then be compared with the rest of the stock market in terms of ratios such as the P/E and earnings before interest, tax and depreciation (EBITDA). This would tell you whether a company’s shares were under- or over- valued and, on this basis, you would make your recommendation – the sensitive part of the process since it impinged directly upon management’s egos and pride. My glossary of City terminology can be found as an appendix at the end of the book.

This lack of formal training, allied to the fact that at this time investment research in the UK was still in its infancy, meant that, in contrast to other professions and industry, it was possible to advance very quickly. In the 1960s, the Pru was the UK’s largest institutional investor, owning approximately three per cent of the UK equity market and, under Ron Artus’s leadership, it pioneered the development of investment research in the UK. In 1963, Ron Artus chaired the committee responsible for compiling a comprehensive bibliography for each country of sources of statistics and other information useful to analysts. One had access to previous reports that had been written and an extensive library, and this could be supplemented by talking to industry trade associations and other research bodies, visiting Companies House to obtain subsidiary company accounts and using the City Business Library. Increasingly, stockbroking firms also produced research, and we received these reports and talked regularly to their analysts. Stockbrokers would also organise company visits, which provided an opportunity to meet with and question senior management and, given the size and importance of the Pru, we were always on the guest list. The Society of Investment Analysts also organised a monthly programme of meetings, where a company would be invited to make a presentation.

Beyond this there was no direct contact with companies and the amount of information which a company was required to disclose was quite limited. It was not until the Companies Act 1968, for example, that there was any requirement for a company to publish its sales figures. In 1969, there was a shock when Tesco first announced its sales numbers and we all discovered that our guesses had been wildly inaccurate. In my first few years, I was fed a very varied diet of companies to research, ranging from British Leyland to P & O and Distillers. I also had to prepare regular quarterly reports on the Pakistan, Cyprus and Maltese economies, the purpose being to respond to individuals in these countries who were lobbying the Pru to allow them to act as agents selling the Pru’s insurance policies. There were also occasional reports on a town, such as Tredegar or Abertillery, where the Pru had been approached to provide the finance for a proposed supermarket development.

I enjoyed research work, although it was rather like doing a jigsaw puzzle knowing that many of the pieces were missing. The icing on the cake was the external aspects of the work, the invitations from stockbrokers anxious to do business with the Pru. At least once a week I would enjoy a lunch invite, enabling me to sample the delights of the best restaurants in the City and the West End, restaurants I would never have dared or dreamt of frequenting myself. For me this was a new world. Hitherto, my experiences of eating out were rare to say the least, the height of ‘luxury’ being the occasional curry while at university in Birmingham. Back home in Cardiff I never ate out, there being nowhere to go apart from ‘greasy spoon’ cafes, tea shops and a few Italian-owned ice cream parlours. For most people, eating out was an unaffordable luxury and there was an ingrained mistrust and suspicion of anything ‘foreign’. Apart from fish-and-chip shops, take-aways, convenience food and fast food did not exist – the first McDonald’s in the UK did not arrive until 1968 and, while Pizza Express opened in Wardour Street in 1965, its second outlet only opened in 1967, and it took many more years before these experiences extended beyond Central London.

I took to dining out like a duck to water. Initially, of course, I found the waiters intimidating, the atmosphere very formal and struggled with choosing which glass and cutlery to use for which course. As with my research work, I learnt quickly by observing what other people did and copying them. To begin with, this also extended to the choice of food and wine, since the menus seemed incomprehensible. I had never heard of many of the dishes, and my O-level French had not equipped me to go beyond a vague idea of what some of the dishes could be. Most stockbrokers also had their own private dining rooms and prided themselves on catering to a standard often superior to the restaurants in the City. My voyage of discovery of fine food was only surpassed by fine wine. I had never really drunk wine before. At home we never had any alcohol in the house beyond a bottle of sherry at Christmas. What wine I had tasted was unpalatable and, in any event, in Cardiff ‘real men’ didn’t drink wine and neither did the girls, whose standard fare was a rum and coke, gin and orange or a Babycham.

As I grew in confidence, I discovered a new dilemma. I had naturally assumed that the lunches were for business, but no, they were primarily seen to be social occasions, where even the mention of business was improper. At a lunch with a director of Burton, the men’s tailors, as the principal guest, I asked a question about their shops. It was not provocative or critical and yet, when I returned to the office that afternoon, my boss had already received a phone call from the stockbroker hosting the lunch complaining that I had spoilt the lunch with my question. Now, the problem was that I had very little in common with most City people. I was an outsider, and if I didn’t talk business, I really didn’t feel that I had anything to say. The classic illustration of this was a lunch I was invited to with a major food company. It turned out to be a farewell lunch for one of the directors, who was retiring. He talked about how he was planning to move to Portugal and when asked why, he said, ‘The servant problem. You just can’t get them anymore.’ I couldn’t restrain a wry smile a few years later when I saw the newspaper headline – ‘Portugal revolution’.

I FOUGHT THE ESTABLISHMENT AND THE ESTABLISHMENT WON***

*** With apologies to the Bobby Fuller Four, who released the song ‘I Fought The Law’ in 1966.

I felt that I was in some sort of alternative universe, and as the first summer of my working life approached, I became quite depressed. Instead of anticipating several months’ holiday, I had only two weeks! I booked an overland trip to Greece. My fellow travellers were an odd collection: a free and easy Dutch couple, several solo Brits including Paul, who instinctively distrusted everything foreign and our driver-cum-guide. We drove through Germany, Austria and Yugoslavia and, at each restaurant, Paul would grab a waiter and in a loud voice ask for ‘cluck-cluck’, while waving his arms like a chicken flapping its wings, ‘with chips’.

It was my first time abroad and it was to be quite an adventure, especially since our driver seemed very vague about our route or itinerary. His laidback attitude meant that he got us to our final destination, the island of Thasos in Greece, two days later than scheduled. En route, I remember the petrol pump attendant in Belgium pointing at the flag on our van and saying ‘onion jack’; my freezing feet one night camped on a hillside in Germany; nearly getting left behind in Salzburg after I had downed a litre of lager in one and getting locked up in the bar we had been in; the roads in Yugoslavia teeming with people on their way to work at four in the morning and the big lorries we passed decked with lights, which our driver called ‘Christmas trees’.

Our arrival in Greece marked the beginning of a life-long love affair. Thasos was idyllic. We were camping on a small headland overlooking a deserted crescent of sand. Hidden among the eucalyptus and olive trees which fringed the beach was a small village with a general store, two tavernas and a small square, where all the men of the village appeared to spend most of their time drinking coffee and playing backgammon. We had arrived in the village in the early hours of the morning. It was pitch black and there was no sign of life, not even a stray dog or cat. Undeterred, our driver loudly honked the horn on the van, leapt out and hammered on the door of one of the tavernas. Within minutes the lights came on and people appeared and welcomed us like conquering heroes returning from the Trojan Wars. Drinks and assorted meze materialised, soon to be followed by a delicious omelette and chips. Contrast this with the reception we would have received in an English village at eleven in the night let alone two in the morning!

On our second night in paradise, I discovered ouzo, and that night I enjoyed one of my most restful night’s sleep ever propped up against a tree. After three perfect days, our driver, recognising his incompetence, told us we needed to start our return journey. This was a whole day ahead of our scheduled departure, and I reacted angrily, saying that having got us here two days late there was no way we were going to leave a day early. Our driver lost his temper, and with a squeal of brakes and a cloud of dust he drove off without us. My companions all turned on me, saying, ‘Look at the mess you’ve got us into now.’ In the taverna, over the next hour and several bottles of retsina, I argued that this was a wonderful opportunity.

‘Haven’t you always dreamt of dropping out?’. ‘We have a whole summer ahead in paradise.’ (This was the 1960s, remember!) After tackling the third or fourth bottle of retsina I’d finally won them all over, but then disaster struck. Our driver returned, recognising that if he returned to the UK without us, he would certainly lose his job. We eventually left Greece a day later than scheduled, hung around in Munich enjoying too many beers and finally got back to the UK a week late. And I still had my job.

Back from the brilliant, sharp-edged, Van Gogh-like colours of Greece to the grey, muted, watery colours of England, I re-evaluated my life. Socially I still felt lonely, inadequate and uncomfortable, but I really enjoyed the work and in that context was growing in confidence. I was well paid and, in relation to any other work, I had considerable freedom and responsibility. This reflected the fact that although I was part of the staid, structured Pru, my department was relatively independent and culturally was part of the City rather than the insurance industry. For all its tradition and formality, the City was remarkably unstructured, and anyone who showed promise (and most importantly made money!) could rise very rapidly. In my case this process was hastened by the fact that people kept leaving my department. Within a year, half the people who had been there when I arrived had gone, lured away by stockbrokers offering much more money and even more freedom. At twenty-two, I was one of the more ‘senior’ members of the department, and a year later I was the boss of one of the three teams in our office and was supervising the work of two junior analysts.

By the early 1970s I was no longer being given random companies to research but was given responsibility for what was termed the consumer non-durables section of the market – retail, food, drinks, textiles, paper and packaging and leisure. I focused on the drinks and retail sectors and allocated the rest to my two juniors. Earlier, I had completed a research project on department stores and, having never thought or known anything about retailing before, I was fascinated. It was love at first sight and was to determine my whole future. I read every book I could find (there weren’t many) including what I still regard as the classic textbook by Dr James Jeffries. The secret of success was simple – the key was efficient buying. If you could source what you sold at a better price you could improve your gross margin (the ratio between your bought in and selling price) and you had the luxury of either choosing to lower your prices or increase your profits, and it was the former which usually laid the foundations for future healthy profits growth. The economies of scale in buying explain how our high streets came to be dominated by the familiar multiple retailers Marks & Spencer, Boots, Tesco, etcetera, and left small independent shops struggling to survive. Later I was to discover that there was a downside to choosing retailing as my specialist subject. The familiarity with retail names through everyone’s own shopping experiences breeds contempt and makes being objective much more difficult. And worse still everybody thinks they know and understand retailing!

The management that I met in retail also appeared to be more charismatic and inspiring, whereas in general the management that I was privileged to meet underwhelmed me. Maybe I was naïve, but I had assumed that the senior management of companies would be impressive, inspiring people. As I made more visits where I was able to lunch with senior managers as an equal, I became increasingly disillusioned and critical. Socially, it was odd because they would often ask after particular senior managers at the Pru whom they appeared to be friends with. I, of course, had never met my own senior management let alone been able to talk with them on any terms. In this context, two stories highlighted to me the glaring shortcomings of UK management. At the annual meeting of the British Society of Motor Manufacturers, at a time when the Japanese had begun to make inroads into the motorcycle market, the president was asked if he was worried about Japanese competition. ‘No,’ he confidently replied, ‘they can make bikes, but cars are much too complex and difficult for them to manage!’ Some years later, in the 1980s, I remember Sydney Robin, the treasurer of Great Universal Stores, telling me that he’d just been to a quarterly meeting of the CBI, where the great and the good of British industry were assembled. As he listened to the speeches and looked around, he said that he thought ‘if they dropped a bomb on this place now it would be a giant step forwards for British industry’.

In retail, lines of communication are direct and short. The mantra is ‘keep it simple’. Arguably, the only strategic tool required had been a map of the UK. In every head office that I visited there would be a big map on the wall with coloured pins stuck in each town where they had a store. Planning ahead merely involved identifying the largest towns where there was no pin and instructing a property agent to find a vacant site. Retail managers kept close to their customers, regularly visiting their shops, and they knew who their customers were and what they wanted. This was the missing ingredient in much of British industry – marketing.

My research reports developed a more critical edge. In 1971, I completed a review of the Distillers Company Limited, which was the dominant force in the Scotch whisky industry with a fifty-two per cent share of the global market. It did not depend upon the UK market, with almost ninety per cent of its spirits sales made in overseas markets. For good measure it also held an eighty-two per cent share of the UK gin market and a twenty per cent share of the vodka market. Yet in a global whisky market, which was growing at an average rate of ten per cent per annum, its profit record was indifferent. My conclusion was unambivalent. ‘This primarily reflects management deficiencies, particularly with regard to marketing and the characteristic non-profit oriented decision-making process.’ It was a clear example of a company where it was the Pru’s duty as a major shareholder to exert pressure on the management to change.

To my surprise and delight, the Pru’s senior management agreed, and a meeting was set up with Distillers’ management. Naturally, I was not invited to attend. The day after the visit, I came into work eagerly anticipating hearing what had happened, but all morning I heard nothing. After lunch I was unable to contain my mounting frustration any more. I ventured along the corridor to my boss’s office. ‘Well, what happened yesterday?’ I demanded.

‘Oh, we had an enjoyable day and they have invited us back up again to play golf,’ came the deadpan reply.

I was rarely too far away from trouble or controversy. In March 1971, I was invited on a trip to visit Vaux Breweries in Sunderland. The invite came from Dennis Bailey of the stockbroking firm Hichens Harrison. I found Dennis to be the most useful contact I had on the brewery industry, which he clearly knew and understood. He was an enthusiast and persistently questioned management in great detail. We were a small group consisting of Dennis and myself plus representatives from Hambros Bank and Guardian Assurance. In the taxi from Sunderland station, our driver said nobody liked the Nicholson family who owned the brewery – ‘They still drive round the town like they own it, and their beer’s lousy as well.’

Our meeting was notable for one thing, although being a younger member of the family, Paul Nicholson strode into the room as if he had just dismounted from his horse and conducted most of our meeting standing with his back to the fireplace, elbows firmly resting on the mantelpiece. To me this would not have looked out of place in a Jane Austen novel. Being with Dennis, I had little opportunity to ask many questions and was sure that I had said nothing that could be construed as offensive. I had also researched the company and knew my questions were relevant, unlike our friend from Hambros who, as we were getting out of the taxi had said, ‘I thought we were visiting Vokes Group, the engineering company.’ As far as I could tell, he proceeded to ask the same questions as the ones he’d prepared for Vokes. All in all, it was an uneventful visit and I thought no more of it until, a day or two later, I was summoned to Ron Artus’s office to be shown the following letter.

Vaux Breweries Sunderland

17th March 1971

Dear Mr Clarke

Yesterday, I saw, at the request of the stockbroking firm Hichens Harrison & Company, a delegation consisting of a representative of that firm, Hambros, The Guardian Assurance and yourselves, who had come to discuss our overall company policy. Your representative who described himself as a ‘brewery analyst’ was a weird and unkempt young man, very far from what one would expect of a man from the Pru.

I am writing to you because I consider it discourteous to send as your representative such an individual on a party which has been granted the opportunity of meeting senior management.

Because you are one of our major shareholders, I welcomed the opportunity of meeting a representative of yours in this delegation, but if this particular individual had been on his own, he would not have lasted two minutes in my office.

Yours sincerely

Paul Nicholson

Director

H G Clarke Esq., B.Sc., F.I.A.

Joint Secretary and Investment Manager

The Prudential Assurance Company Limited

I was very relieved and pleasantly surprised when it became clear that the Pru was going to support me and saw their response to the Vaux letter as a massive vote of confidence. The letter was apologetic, but the key message was as follows.

‘Mr Richards, our brewery analyst, is more junior than we would send alone to visit senior management, but he is a man whose ability, personal behaviour and integrity give us every satisfaction. We all have our opinions of the younger generation these days, but I would hope that you will allow on reflection that, however out of sympathy with the idiom of his appearance one might be, your description of him is unwarranted.’

In retrospect, it turned out that the letter was primarily intended to put pressure on the Pru to look more favourably on the provision of finance for the diversification into hotels which Vaux Breweries was undertaking.

CHAPTER TWO

CHILDHOOD MEMORIES

But how did I get to be here? Where had I come from? My true origins are shrouded in the secrets, silences and little lies which still pervaded family life in the mid-twentieth century. I was born on the 20th June 1946 at Stonefield Maternity Home, 58 Kidbrooke Grove, Greenwich, in South East London. My birth mother was Elreda Mary Collins, described on my birth certificate as a nurse (domestic staff), while my father and his occupation were marked with dashes. I was adopted by private arrangement and, within a matter of weeks, was carried off by my adopted parents, Doris Annie and Albert Edgar Richards, who lived in Cardiff at 71 Windermere Avenue, Roath Park, my home for the next twenty years. I became John David Keith Richards, the story behind my having three Christian names being that my adoptive parents and adoptive sister couldn’t agree on a name so they each got to have their choice. On my original birth certificate, I had only one name – John.

None of this was ever talked about at home and I was never told that I had been adopted. Inevitably, the secrecy aroused my curiosity and suspicions and there were some leaks, notably by my sister, Jeanne, who was naturally very talkative and normally hopeless at keeping a secret. While she never said any­thing to me directly, she did confide in some of her friends, but to this day I still know remarkably little about my true parents. Elreda was sixteen years old when I was conceived, and my father was a Canadian air force man stationed in the UK during the war. That was the sum total of my knowledge and I didn’t learn these few rudimentary facts until I was in my forties. So, faced with an implacable wall of silence and a seemingly insoluble situation, I determined that I would have to be independent and make my own way in the world, and to this day the hardest thing that I find to do is to ask for help. I lived with a pent-up anger with my adopted mother and sister for never telling me anything and an anger with my birth mother for giving me up. Elreda did send me presents, which of course I never received, and she also made several unsuccessful attempts to contact me but was thwarted on each occasion by my new family. Whether my father ever even knew of my existence I don’t know.

Although I was kept in complete ignorance from a very early age, instinctively I somehow knew that I didn’t belong, that I was an outsider and the ‘cuckoo in the nest’ of my new family. My sister, Jeanne, who knew the facts but had been sworn to secrecy was eleven years older than me and more like a surrogate mother than a sister, being already well into her teens by the time I was three or four, so that I felt that I was really on my own. Whenever I had the opportunity, I would search for evidence, but all I ever found was a short version of my birth certificate, which merely confirmed my date of birth, name, sex and place of birth (England), the latter inconvenient fact being explained away by my adopted mother saying she had gone to a nursing home there in order to give birth. While this may all seem strange, back then most families had secrets and things were not talked about.

What is my earliest memory? This is in one sense a difficult question. In the 1940s, one’s every move and development was not recorded on camera. Yet in another sense it does limit the amount of information to what I can really remember, whereas I wonder if today it is possible to distinguish between real memory and experience and the mountain of pictorial evidence? My earliest memories only date back to when I was coming up to being five years old. Our non-descript suburban avenue of 1930s semi-detached houses was very quiet and largely free of both vehicular and pedestrian traffic. Ours was the end-house, where for some reason building had stopped and there was an area of overgrown scrubland affording an unrestricted view of the hills in the distance. Over the road on the corner, where a lane led down to the main road and the park, there were often signs of life. In this house lived old Mrs Harvey, the avenue’s busybody and gossip. I remember one morning setting off to get the bus into town with my mother and being waylaid by Mrs Harvey. ‘How old are you now, young man?’ she asked.

I replied very proudly, ‘I’m nearly five.’

I remember trolley buses, especially the drama when the trolley poles became detached from the overhead wires and the driver or conductor would have to struggle with a long pole to re-attach them. I remember Guinness adverts (my first reading lesson!) featuring this strange big bird and the wonder of the system of wires in the big department store, along which canisters full of money would whizz around the store to deliver our change. My most frequent outing was down to the lake in the park to feed the ducks and swans, where I was always told to be very wary of the swans, as they could break your arm if you disturbed them.

At home, I would go and play with my grandmother each evening. We would play ‘buses’, imagining that I was the conductor issuing her with her tickets for our journeys. For tickets I would use the collection of now redundant food ration stamps that I had collected. I would also help her by threading the needles that she used for her sewing. She was my mother’s mum, born in 1871 and, therefore, already into her mid-eighties. She was confined to living in one room, eating on her own and never joining us for meals, even at Christmas. On the occasional hot summer’s day, she would be allowed to venture into the garden to sit in a deck chair, which on one occasion collapsed under her weight, leaving her sprawled on the grass. I assumed her isolation must reflect the fact that my father had not been happy with the idea of her coming to live with us but, as was the norm in our house, nobody actually said anything. I always suspected that my father had perhaps only reluctantly agreed to my adoption, my mother initiating it and insisting on following it through. He was even older than my adopted mother, being born in 1892 and would have been in his late fifties by the time I arrived. Having a young baby around the house again was hardly likely to have been an attractive prospect. I was also very aware of the fact that I had been a replacement for Janet, a baby daughter born in 1941 whom my adopted parents had lost to meningitis a few years before my own arrival. This trauma had left my mother angry and depressed and consumed by an intense mistrust and hatred of the medical profession, and it seemed obvious that I was perceived to be a much-needed remedy for this grief and emptiness. In these circumstances I guess my father felt he had no alternative but to go along with my mother’s needs.

I don’t remember much else until the trauma of my first day at school. This would have been 1951. It was pouring with rain, and we had to wait seemingly for ages until we were all taken into a classroom. I felt very alone and afraid and bemused by a girl who was happily singing that old nursery rhyme, ‘It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring’. I did not like school, and I refused to learn anything. In fact, it wasn’t until I was kept down a year that I began to take any interest. I started getting up early in the morning and studying my first reading book and I soon caught up. I was painfully shy and only too aware of how I felt and that it was very different from everybody else. I had led a very sheltered existence and didn’t know how to make friends at school. My theme song, which I later identified with, could have been the Brian Wilson composition for the Beach Boys, ‘I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times’.

Religion overshadowed everything, an unremitting bleak Methodism, which in my father’s case was even more extreme, as his family had been Plymouth Brethren and he had grown up in a house with no books apart from the bible. It also appeared that God put an end to my father’s driving. Up until the early 1950s we had owned a car and, one Sunday, we had parked it on the road outside the church. When we finally emerged from the purgatory of a Methodist service the car had disappeared. We eventually found it several hundred yards away at the bottom of the hill – my father had forgotten to put the hand brake on. After that, my father rarely drove anywhere and the car was soon sold. Miraculously it had not hit anything on its hillside adventure.

Sunday was the most tedious, boring day of the week. I was not allowed to play outside, and with the exception of a chapel service, I was confined to the house. Religion frightened me. I was six (what an age!), walking to school on one of those crisp, tingling, smoky-breathed mornings that made the world seem clean. My companion, Susan, was a motherly nine-year-old, who delighted in the authority given to her by my mother. There were so many things to remember: not to step on the lines between the paving stones, to look detached from Susan in order to feign independence and, most of all, not to say to myself, ‘I wish I were dead.’

What had I overheard that boy saying? ‘If you wish something as wicked as that, God will strike you down.’ What a thought, and there I was, six years old and tempted to challenge God. Yet, I was really scared. The ‘establishment’ had already dug its claws into my poor, unsuspecting mind. If a religion is the light, the truth, why do its followers feel that it is necessary to instil fear in order to ensure its survival? The answer is of course power and the patriarchy.

I survived, my faith in God badly dented but not as yet destroyed; after all, Father Christmas still came every year without fail. Christmas was the highlight of the year. By five o’clock on Christmas Eve, I would be happily asking if I could go to bed, eagerly anticipating waking in the early hours of the morning and feeling the weight of the bulging pillow slip packed with goodies at the end of my bed. My favourite presents were always the annuals, especially the Eagle Annual, and my best ever present was a toy garage complete with petrol pumps and an elevator to transport my dinky cars to an upper level. I also loved putting the Christmas decorations up – paper streamers that needed to be glued together and our Dumbo Christmas tree lights from the 1941 animated Disney feature film. The lights never worked straight away, each individual bulb needing to be carefully checked and tightened. I still have them today and they still work, although not straight away!

It was being compelled to go to church and to Sunday School that finally destroyed my faith in God. At Sunday School, we learnt the stories about Jesus and drew pictures of him riding a donkey, but I couldn’t get my head round how he had been born at Christmas, became a man and was dead by Easter. I was too young for the virgin birth to be an issue! I absorbed the teachings literally and yet at church could not understand why none of the faithful congregation appeared to put any of these teachings into practice in their everyday lives. I soon took to hiding in the garden when it was time for church, knowing that my mother would not have the time to try and find me since, as the Sunday School superintendent, she couldn’t risk missing the bus and being late. It was only my belief in Father Christmas that lingered on for several more years.

A constant presence seemed to be the cold, an unforgiving chill that would seem to eat into me. Houses were poorly heated and poorly insulated and ours was no exception, and being the end house it faced the full fury of a north wind. The winters were much colder then and it was normal to wake up to find ice had formed on the inside of my bedroom window. I would return home from school with numb feet and fingers to toast myself in front of our kitchen fire. We lived in fear of frozen and burst pipes, so that for much of the winter my father wouldn’t allow anyone to have a bath. Nevertheless, I loved the snow and hated the fact that on the South Wales coast any snow rapidly tuned to rain and didn’t last long. The big exception and a high point in my life was the Big Freeze of 1962 to 1963, when the snow arrived on Boxing Day and the cold didn’t relax its icy grip until well into March. There was no school for weeks on end, and I could ride my bike across the lake in the park – it resembled a medieval scene from a Breughel painting. Normally I would be so desperate for any snow to settle that I’d brush away any water in our back yard and spread bits of newspaper on the ground to provide a dry surface on which any snow might settle – it never worked.

In retrospect, I find it difficult to believe what a primitive Spartan life we led. We had no fridge, telephone, car or TV and our only heating was the coal fire in the kitchen. We did have two electric fires but my father severely rationed and frowned upon their use. I think that being even older than my mother he was still of an age that mistrusted electricity. It all felt much worse because our house always seemed such a mess. Nothing was ever thrown away (it might come in useful was the mantra inherited from the 1930s and the war years), any­thing that broke was never repaired and any mess on the kitchen floor (lino, not carpet) would not be cleaned up but covered with newspaper. Coming down to the kitchen in the morning was like an obstacle course, avoiding the dog’s mess, a give-away sign being that the newspaper had turned yellow! We were always running short of basic necessities, and I particularly hated having to use bits of newspaper rather than toilet paper. What was annoying was that this did not reflect any serious shortage of money but the simple fact that my mother didn’t prioritise housekeeping, cleaning and shopping, which could always be deferred and usually were, and the unsurprising result was chaos.

Our food was wholesome, my mother not just being a fiercely committed vegetarian but an advocate for what was then termed ‘food reform’, what would now be called healthy eating. At best, her views were cranky and they were seen by the world at large as peculiar and incomprehensible at a time when, with food rationing only having finally ended in 1954, the focus of the food industry and consumers was on quantity not quality. What made it all uncomfortable was her inflexibility and determination to try and convert everyone else – even the dog had to be vegetarian. Her views were not ‘trendy’ as they would be today and any discussion about vegetarianism would invariably centre around Hitler having been vegetarian, hardly the ideal role model less than a decade after the end of the war.