The Rise and Fall...and Rise Again E-Book

Gerald Ratner

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Seitenzahl: 428

Beschreibung

In 1991, Gerald Ratner made a landmark speech to the Institute of Directors After over 25 years in the jewellery trade, Gerald Ratner was one of the most well-known and successful retailers of his generation. He had built up a highly profitable, multi-million pound international business, including household names like Ratners, H Samuel, Ernest Jones, Watches of Switzerland, as well as over one thousand stores in the US. Being asked to give the keynote address at the Institute of Directors' annual conference at The Royal Albert Hall was a great honour and should have been the crowning glory on two decades of empire building. Gerald's speech was seized upon by the media after he included jokes about the quality of some of the shops' products. But the far-reaching impact that these jokes would have no one could have predicted. "Even though I had once had my name above hundreds of shops up and down the country, it had become more famous as a byword for crap. It took several years to realise just what an impact the speech had had on every aspect of my life." Press coverage of hardback version: "... a rollicking good read" --Michael Skapinker, The FT "Most business autobiographies are so overlaid with ghost-writerly blandness that the character of the subject is lost. Mr Ratner had help with this one, but fortunately he is still there: obsessive, funny and a bit of a scoundrel - the last mitigated by how well he knows it." --The FT "self-effacing, revealing and human" --Luke Johnson, FT Business Life "A few ill-chosen words to a well-heeled audience 16 years ago reduced Britain's biggest jeweller to poverty. Now he reveals how he bounced back" --Jewish Chronicle "...contains lessons for us all" --Management Today "...worth its weight in gold" --The Independent Amazon reviews "Everyone knows the story of Gerald's rise and fall - what an amazing story and well worth reading.... I couldn't put it down, totally gripping and inspiring stuff, you really couldn't see this coming from such an energetic, passionate man" "I have read many bio's from business leaders and most are boring 'how to get rich' or 'let me tell you a long list of not very interesting stories with all the good bits missed out'. Gerald's book is very different it is a great read, I could not put it down" "Sobering and enlightening at the same time. A great read and a morality tale of our time."

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Introduction

ACT I - The Rise

CHAPTER 1 - Family Life

CHAPTER 2 - Growing Up

CHAPTER 3 - Toughening Up

CHAPTER 4 - The Family Business

CHAPTER 5 - Growing the Business

CHAPTER 6 - Going Public

CHAPTER 7 - The Home Front

CHAPTER 8 - Downturn

CHAPTER 9 - Taking Over

CHAPTER 10 - Turnaround

CHAPTER 11 - The Big Time

CHAPTER 12 - Trauma

CHAPTER 13 - Thatcher’s Decade

CHAPTER 14 - The Incredible Eighties

CHAPTER 15 - Going Global

CHAPTER 16 - Riding the Acquisitions Express

ACT II - The Fall

CHAPTER 17 - Welcome to the Nineties

CHAPTER 18 - An Invitation

CHAPTER 19 - That Speech

CHAPTER 20 - As Bad as it Gets

CHAPTER 21 - The End

CHAPTER 22 - The Wilderness

CHAPTER 23 - Out of the Frying Pan

ACT III - The Rise Again

CHAPTER 24 - Starting All Over Again

CHAPTER 25 - The Launch

CHAPTER 26 - Dotcom Millionaire

CHAPTER 27 - Thinking Big

CHAPTER 28 - What Goes Around

The Speech

Index

Copyright © 2008 by Gerald Ratner

First published in Hardback in 2007 by Capstone Publishing Ltd. (a Wiley Company)

This edition published in 2008 by

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For Moira, Suzy, Lisa, Sarah, Jonny and Alfie, my dog

Introduction

In 2006, a book was published called History’s Worst Decisions. Alongside Nero burning Rome to the ground, Eve eating the apple, and the choice not to install a Tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean, was a speech that I made in 1991. Despite the fact that I didn’t kill anybody, I didn’t do anything illegal, and I didn’t even say anything that I hadn’t said before, that speech caused me to lose my business, my reputation, and my fortune. The cost of most people’s mistakes can’t be so precisely measured, and I think the reason my story keeps turning up in these lists is that my losses can be quantified. It says something about our society that people like to know what I lost in monetary terms: a £650,000 salary, £500 million wiped off the valuation of my company, and a billion pound turnover slashed virtually overnight.

In the weeks and months immediately after the speech, my life changed almost seismically. I kept thinking that it would soon be over and that people would forget about the speech, that they’d stop calling me Mr Crapner, and that the phrase ‘Doing a Ratner’ would disappear. I was wrong: if you Google me, which I confess to having done (who hasn’t?), the first result is a Wikipedia entry on ‘Doing a Ratner’. Even though my name had once been above hundreds of shops up and down the country, it had become more famous as a byword for crap.

It took several years to realise what an impact the speech has had on every aspect of my life - emotionally and socially, as well as financially. I didn’t know it at the time, but it turned out to be the most significant moment of my life, and it now casts a strange light over everything that led up to it, and everything that’s stemmed from it. As I’ve written this book, I’ve noticed that it’s crept onto many of the pages, either directly, or as a figure in the shadows, waiting to make its entrance.

It’s not nice to be known for just one thing - I imagine, even if that’s a wonderful thing like winning an Olympic medal, as we are all more complex than the headlines let on. But when the thing you’re known for is a negative thing, a stupid thing, a thing that only lasted 30 minutes, you start to resent it. Especially as in the years since, so much has been written about it that is inaccurate. These days, I do a lot of public speaking, and when I tell my audiences that I never said my jewellery was crap, they are surprised, if not amazed.

It’s now been 16 years since that speech, and from time to time journalists ask me if I regret it. Well of course I bloody regret it! Who wouldn’t? However, as time has gone on, I’ve started to appreciate what it has given me: as Frank Sinatra knew, comebacks are a lot of fun.

ACT I

The Rise

CHAPTER 1

Family Life

My father opened his first jewellery shop in 1949, which also happens to be the year I was born, and as my mother worked in the shop while she was pregnant with me, I think I can claim to have been born into the jewellery trade. It is in my blood, and that makes it almost impossible to talk about my family and childhood without also talking about the business - in my mind the two things are inseparable. And that, of course, is what made losing the business all those years later so much harder. I didn’t just lose my job, I lost the only job I’d ever had, and the only job I’d ever wanted. If you’ve never worked in a family business, it can be hard to understand, but I loved the business like it was part of the family, and in some ways the business was a bit like having a third parent or an extra sibling.

My parents had met in India during the war, when my father Leslie was stationed there. On Fridays, local Jewish families invited Jewish soldiers to participate in the Sabbath with them. One of those families was my grandmother’s. She had fled to Bangalore from Iraq with her 11 children to escape persecution of Jews after a coup had brought a pro-Nazi leader to power. Call me cynical, but I’m pretty sure my father was invited with the sole intention that my grandmother would be able to marry off one of her daughters, and as it happened my father fell hook, line, and sinker for her eldest, Rachelle. He was a very impulsive man, and the fact that my mother had a daughter from a previous marriage didn’t deter him at all.

My parents were to remain utterly devoted to each other for the next five decades, but their marriage caused friction between my father and his family. When he returned to their house in St Albans after the war, they were appalled.

‘What have you done?’ they asked. ‘Not only is she divorced, but she’s not even English!’

They turned him away, and from that day on, my father never got on with my grandfather again. It wasn’t much of a welcome home for a returning soldier, and my mother was left in no doubt about what her in-laws thought of her. I’m sure this made my parents even closer.

While he’d been in India, a friend had given my father some Persian carpets to sell as they’d fetch a better price in England. He used to tell me he was demobbed with 10 shillings and a packet of cigarettes, so he was very motivated to get a good price for these carpets. He went round to my grandfather’s rich neighbours with the rugs on his shoulder, selling them door to door. By all accounts they were amazing carpets, and when he got on his hands and knees and rolled them out, people had never seen anything like them. He was supposed to wire the money straight back to India, but with a wife and step-daughter to think of, he used the cash to open his first shop, which was in Richmond, West London. The fellow in India kept asking for the money, but my father kept stalling him until he had sufficient cashflow. It was very naughty of him, but I imagine that my mother was somewhere in the background, egging him on. She always told me that she was from a very good family, and I get the impression she was a bit shocked at her economic status in post-war London. At the time my parents were living in two rooms above a dental surgery in Richmond, down the road from the shop. Before long they’d be sharing those rooms with their first child together, my sister Juliet.

It could have been any kind of shop - I’m sure my father would have made a success of any trade he’d gone into - but he chose jewellery because his father had once been a watchmaker, so I guess he felt he had a bit of grounding in the industry. It wasn’t a great business at first, but it paid the rent. A few months in though, he had a stroke of luck when one of his contacts supplied him with gold lockets from America that transformed his business. Lockets were hugely popular after the war, but the only place you could get them in West London was Ratners. As soon as the stock came in, it went out again. Then, just as now, a single line can turn a business around.

My half-sister Diane stayed in India until my parents could afford to support her, and by the time I was two, we had moved from the rooms above the dentist’s to a detached house in Hendon. The business was expanding quickly, and Diane joined us not long after; and as my parents were so involved with the business, Diane practically raised me and Juliet.

I think it’s fair to say that my mother really pushed my father. She had aspirations and spent a lot of money on things like mink coats and spin dryers that the neighbours would be impressed by. She used to borrow a lot of money too, and so my dad had to work even harder to pay the banks. She encouraged my dad to drive a Jaguar, albeit a second-hand one, because she wanted to show off. These days you need a yacht and a plane to show off, but not a lot of people had money in the Fifties, and if you had a fur coat and a spin dryer then your stock really went up, and that’s what she wanted.

We usually ate as a family, even though my mother was a pretty lousy cook. All those years in India and all she’d learnt about spice was how to tip far too much curry powder into a stew! She really wasn’t a woman suited to domestic chores, and found the business much more exciting. So whenever we sat down to a bland meal of meat and two veg, the conversation would inevitably turn to the business, which always made up for the spice lacking in the food.

At some point when I was quite young, my father had merged his shops into a business with his father Philip and brothers Jack and David, who also ran jewellery shops. They had a chain of about 13 when they joined forces, which gave them more purchasing power and streamlined overheads. Although my father was the major shareholder, my mother still felt Jack and my grandfather had too much say in how the company was run. As a young child, I sat at the table listening to the gossip about the business, how David had got the shop fittings wrong, or where they should open the next branch. It was quite clear that my mother thought my uncles and grandfather were a waste of space, so I learnt early on that running a family business always involves a fair amount of feuding. From about the age of 10 onwards, I was always asked for my opinion on things like who deserved promotion or what lines we should discontinue. I was so involved that I really felt like I was part of the company, even though I was still at school.

My father seemed to have the solutions to most problems, and I began looking up to him from a very early age. I absolutely adored him, and when I was taken to the shops I’d be so excited to see him that I would run into his arms. I worshipped him and even as a young child looked at him as a great success. He was a wonderfully kind man as well, and very generous to his family and staff. He started a scheme to let his managers borrow the deposit for a home so that they could get a mortgage, and this only add ed to the respect and loyalty he inspired. He really cared about everybody, and genuinely got upset if anyone was in difficulty. He had the most incredible personality; he only ever wanted to talk about you, and he encouraged all his family and his staff to do their best.

While all my parents’ talk about the business inspired and excited me, looking back, I can see that it created problems too. In my young mind, I believed that the most important thing was to make money, and that to please my parents I had to be successful in business. It was drummed into me the whole time, and I was given examples of other people who were successful; they were called ‘menches’, people like Charles Clore and Isaac Wolfson who were the big successes of their day, and they were gods in our house. You didn’t look up to a great poet or musician or writer in our house - they were not even mentioned - that’s how focused the family was on business and wealth. That’s not to say we were wealthy. We were not even particularly well off in comparison with some of our neighbours, and the arrival of my younger sister Denise in 1956 added to the monthly expenses.

When I got a bit older, I used to spend as much of my summers as I could at the Hendon Hall Hotel, where there was an open air swimming pool. All the local kids hung out there and I seemed to know everybody. I guess I showed a bit of early business promise by arranging to work there so I didn’t have to buy a season ticket. I was only young - probably under 10 - but I worked the turnstiles and in the café. In those days, you used to get a penny for empty glass bottles, so I had a nice little sideline saying to the swimmers, ‘Have you finished your drink? Let me take that away for you.’ Those pennies added up, and I enjoyed having a bit of spending money.

One season I got the job of painting the swimming pool blue. I got a bit of paint on my shoes, and for some reason I thought it might show less if I painted the whole of my shoes and trousers blue too! My logic was that it would somehow be better and wouldn’t look as bad. Needless to say, my parents never forgot when I returned back to the house for lunch completely covered in paint. They relayed that story to friends for years, often comparing it with a time when I had turned blue for real: according to my parents, when I was a baby I had been left in the garden in my pram during a thunderstorm and had been hit by lightning. By the time they remembered me, I had turned blue, but my father put me in a bath of warm water and I came back to life.

Each year, for 11 years running, the Ratners went on holiday on precisely August 15th, and we always went to Cannes. Lots of my father’s friends went on holiday there, I guess because it was the place to be seen. I’d sit on the beach and look at movie stars like Terry Thomas, Tommy Steele, and Sophia Loren. It was incredibly exciting, but for the Ratners it was glamour on the cheap. My parents were careful not to pay for things like a sea view, and eventually they rented an apartment because it was more cost-effective. And my father worked out that the public beach was right next to the private one, so he asked the bus boys to set out his sun lounger right at the edge of the public beach so that you could kid yourself you were in with the in-crowd. Of course, I found it a bit embarrassing that my dad went to such lengths to save a few quid, but he let us order a Coca-Cola, and they would serve it in a glass with lemon and ice - this was in the early Sixties when we just didn’t do that in England - and charge a franc for it, which was about 1s 6d, when a Coke back home only cost thruppence. But it didn’t matter because they served it beautifully and we just used to sit there and watch the beautiful people. And at night I would hang out in the hotel lobby and look at couples who dressed up in their jewellery and finest clothes to go to the casino. My parents were one of those couples, and in the morning they would tell us who they had seen. Although the jewellery business was growing, my parents weren’t rich by any means, but somehow they managed to have a glamorous lifestyle on a modest budget.

Despite the glamour, nothing ever seemed as exciting to me as my father’s business. It was an adult world that I was endlessly curious about, and if I was ever bored and my mother asked what I would like to do, my answer was always to visit my father in one of his shops. When I eventually took over the business, we still had some of the managers from the early days, and a few of them found it odd having me as their boss. They’d say things like, ‘I remember when your head didn’t reach the top of the counter, are you sure about those figures?’ Whenever my father let me, I would work in the shops running errands and delivering messages. They were some of the best days of my life.

CHAPTER 2

Growing Up

I think we can all look back on our lives and pinpoint moments when things changed. I have a very clear recollection of sitting on the stairs at our house in Hendon with my sisters. We were watching my mother’s lips move as she told us that our father was about to have an operation.

‘He’s unlikely to survive’, she told us.

Nobody else would say something like that to their children, but that was my mother - she just loved to say ridiculously outrageous things, even if it meant scaring her children so they wouldn’t sleep. She knew how much I loved my father, and saying something like that was incredibly cruel, but she just said things the way she thought they were.

My father needed an operation to remove a tumour in his brain that was pressing on his optic nerve. It was a dangerous operation, but the odds were that he would survive surgery, despite what my mother had said, and as the tumour wasn’t malignant, I discovered later that he should make a full recovery. When he came home from hospital, however, it was clear that he had changed. Not only was his head shaved, with a big U-shaped scar across the top, which was quite frightening on a man of 6’ 2”, but it gradually became clear that his personality had altered. Some people wouldn’t have noticed, but compared with the person I knew, he had become much colder and he’d get easily frustrated, and that made him impossible and irrational.

In the first few weeks after he came home, he couldn’t lie in bed because of a drip-line fed through his nose, and because I felt sorry for him I sat with him. I kept thinking it was just the operation, and that he’d be back to his old self soon, but it turned out that it was just the first of several operations on his brain, and his personality continued to harden over the next few years.

I was spared the worst of it. I remained his blue-eyed boy, but he was incredibly rude to my sisters, and my mother would lose her temper with him frequently. ‘I’m never eating in a restaurant with him again!’ she’d claim dramatically as they came in the door. We all knew why: he had become very argumentative. He would have rows with waiters and shop assistants and air stewardesses. At times he was so rude that it was almost funny.

‘Look’, he’d say, ‘could you cut out all this chitchat and just serve me the meal?’

We were too nervous to laugh as people were frequently offended. But because he was successful, and was starting to have money to spend, people put up with him. In those days, if you were successful, you could get away with being rude. Years later, he would come for Sunday lunch at my house with my kids, and complain of feeling cold - he thought anything outside of London was draughty - and he’d get up from the table and fetch his hat and coat. He’d spend the rest of lunch in his hat and coat! He didn’t mean it in a jokey way, which was a shame, because my kids thought it was hilarious.

It was like he had developed what people now call autism - we’d never heard of it in the Sixties - and of course it had a knock-on effect on the business. Key members of staff found him impossible to deal with, and his relationship with his brothers became increasingly fractious. For long periods at a time they refused to speak to each other, and only communicated through the company accountant, Mr Hussein.

‘Mr Hussein, would you tell Jack to go to the Slough branch this afternoon.’

‘Mr Hussein, would you tell Leslie to make sure he keeps his appointment with the wholesalers.’

It was even like this when they were in the same room as each other. It was an absolutely ridiculous situation, and at times they must have seemed like a dysfunctional family from a sitcom.

It affected all of us a great deal, and my performance at school started to nosedive. I had scraped through my Eleven Plus and had just started at Hendon County grammar school when my father got ill, and I found that most of what I was taught went right over my head. At my primary school, which was a small school in a house that had only four classes in it, I’d practically received one-to-one teaching. I was now in with 32 other kids and when the end of term reports came out, I had come 33rd out of 33. Looking back, I wonder if I’d had some kind of learning difficulty that was never diagnosed, because I just don’t remember understanding any of it.

On the last day of term I went home with my report. I wasn’t worried what my mother would say, because I was never scared of my mother: she would scream and shout, but there wouldn’t be any real venom. It was my father I was worried about.

‘Let’s look at your report book then. What’s it like?’

‘It’s terrible’, I said honestly.

‘It can’t be that bad. Hand it over.’

He opened it up and saw it had 33 with a line and 33 underneath.

‘You came bottom? You came last?’

I had always wanted to impress my father and I felt I had let him down. I came 33rd in the second term too, and Mr Potts my headmaster called my parents in to the school. Not only had I come bottom again, but in one exam - German - I’d got nought, which I think means I didn’t even bother to put my name on the exam paper. He told them that if I came bottom in the third term then I would be asked to leave the school. He said he was particularly annoyed because my Eleven Plus had been borderline and he’d had to persuade the governors to let me in. That made me feel like I’d let everyone down, but it still wasn’t enough for me to raise my grades.

My parents knew I wasn’t stupid though, as I’d started studying for my bar mitzvah with a rabbi who came round to teach me each week. I had to learn about the Bible, the Old Testament obviously, and memorise some prayers in Hebrew that I had to sing in the synagogue. I learnt all of that perfectly well, and to this day, I know a hell of a lot more about the Bible than I know about chemistry or geography or anything like that. I’m pretty sure it’s because I had one-to-one teaching, and my results at school were bad just because I couldn’t cope in a large class.

Needless to say, I came 33rd in the third term as well and so I moved schools to Town and Country in Swiss Cottage, where I did equally badly. Being the new kid wasn’t easy, especially as people soon learned why I had moved schools. I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to leave.

There were just two things at school that I wasn’t the worst in the class at - football and maths. I certainly wasn’t great at football, but I enjoyed it and it bred in me a lifelong love of the game. I started going to Arsenal matches with my friends, and when we got a bit older, we followed them around Europe. In my teens, Arsenal became a major obsession and I can still remember the names of the entire 70/71 team. I can even remember the Spurs team from the Sixties.

To this day, I still have the head for maths that saved me from further embarrassment at school, and although I can’t remember trigonometry or logarithms, I can multiply a three-digit number by another three-digit number almost instantly. In fact, this was my party trick when I was younger, and when we had guests, my parents got a calculator out and people would test me on random sums. I can still work out figures faster than any accountant I’ve worked with, but at school I could never seem to work out what the question was asking for. To put it simply, I was a complete and utter disaster at school.

Obviously this wasn’t something I was pleased about, but I wasn’t devastated about it either. These days, for my kids and their friends, grades and qualifications mean so much more, but in the Sixties it really wasn’t that unusual to leave school without any qualifications. It certainly didn’t mean you couldn’t get a job, especially when your father ran a business that you were itching to get into. My parents gave my education one last chance by sending me to a cramming school, but that wasn’t the answer either. One day I came home from school, clearly miserable, and my father recognised what a complete waste of time my education had become. I had just turned 15, which meant I could legally leave school.

‘It’s clear you want to work in the business and that you don’t want to be at school’, he said, ‘so why don’t you start with us full time?’

I’d been the Saturday boy at the Wood Green branch for a few years by then, and I’d loved it. So when my father said this to me, it was just about the best thing I’d ever heard. I left school without a single qualification, quite happily, and went to work behind the counter in the Oxford Street shop, one of the flagships of the ever-growing Ratners chain.

CHAPTER 3

Toughening Up

London was the centre of the universe in the Sixties, and my friends and I made the most of it. I was part of a big social scene, and every Saturday night without fail we would meet at 7 o’clock outside Golders Green Station, which was about 15 minutes on the bus from Hendon. About 150 kids would turn up and say ‘Right, what are we doing tonight then?’ Someone would always know about a party in Temple Fortune or a club on Tottenham Court Road. Then we all got on a bus - we behaved really quite badly, throwing things and shouting - and went off en masse for another great night. If there wasn’t a party, then we’d go to the bowling alley and hang out there. You never knew where you’d end up until you got to Golders Green.

I used to spend quite a lot of money on clothes; I and a few friends would think nothing of going down to the West End to buy our Cuban heels in Anello and Davide, because that’s where the Beatles bought their boots. I don’t think I’ve ever had a bigger thrill in my life, not even making £100 million, than buying those Chelsea boots with my friends on a Saturday morning. We all bought exactly the same boots, and then went out in them that evening. We felt fantastic, not only were we that bit taller, but they were the thing to have and not everyone could afford them. We were flash, there’s no other word for it, although my dad said I was turning into a ‘spiv’. I used to walk along Golders Green Road in my Beatle boots, and for some reason there was a particularly cool way you had to wear your coat. It always had to be undone and your hands had to be in your pockets so the coat looked good. That was the way to walk, and so that was the way I made sure I was seen walking!

As far as I remember, none of us drank alcohol, although we all smoked. There was one kid who never touched cigarettes, so we gave him the nickname ‘Smokey’. There was a fair bit of gambling too, and although every gambler tells you he wins, I’m pretty sure I made money playing Shoot Pontoon. I certainly got a reputation for being a tough opponent because I had the balls to shoot the whole bank, and most people were too scared to. Often I could make a couple of quid, and once, I remember, the bank was £7, and that seemed like a fortune when my pocket money was only 15 shillings. Perhaps not surprisingly, there were a few of us who were gambling mad, and who knows, perhaps it was this exposure to risk tolerance that helped a number of us become successful in business later on. One of my toughest opponents at Shoot Pontoon was Irving Scholar, who would go on to make a fortune in property and become the chairman of Tottenham Hotspur.

We went to some of the hippest clubs, including the Country Club in Belsize Park (where I met a relatively unknown band called the Rolling Stones and chatted to Mick Jagger for a couple of minutes), Beat City in Tottenham Court Road, and Whisky-A-Go-Go in Soho, but despite our sophistication I don’t think any of us had ever done more than kiss a girl, and no one had a steady girlfriend. That was still a few years off, but nevertheless I was very confident and thought I was one of the coolest kids in London.

Occasionally, we’d get into fights. I don’t know if it was because we were Jewish, but our parents always told us, ‘Don’t fight amongst yourselves’, so we were very defensive of each other. You had to put across to people that you were hard - that was the word we used all the time - but as I was a bit on the young side to be in this social scene, there were always older people in the places we went to who were in a position to beat us up. It was quite terrifying, but it was all part of the excitement of the clubs and secretly we all loved the danger.

For a few years, my relationship with my friends was more important than my relationship with my family, even my father. I’d got to an age where I could see his flaws and the days of hero-worshipping him were long gone. I had two particular friends, Tommy and Eddie, who both lived in the flats on the Great North Way round the corner from our house. I think Tommy was the only kid I knew whose father wasn’t Jewish, which was so unusual people used to say ‘You do know Tommy’s not Jewish?’ all the time. They said it so often it almost became a catchphrase.

When I was 16, we left Hendon and moved to Re-gent’s Park after the company had started to do well. The change in our financial status, combined with the change of address, meant I suddenly had a whole new group of friends, and I barely saw the Hendon and Golders Green crowd again. One day I was at a party near our new house, when a very flamboyant and confident boy came in wearing a college scarf. His name was Michael Green, and a couple of years later, Michael turned up at a party with another friend called Charles Saatchi. Michael and Charles would become important figures in my career, and Michael remains my best friend to this day. If I’m honest (much as I hate to admit it) our friendship - or more accurately the rivalry inherent in our friendship - was a big motivator in my career. In the years that followed, the three of us would push each other to succeed, and all three of our companies - Saatchi & Saatchi, Carlton Communications, and Ratners - benefited from our need to brag to one another when we met up for a game of snooker.

I’ve since heard several business commentators refer to our ‘North London mafia’, which was clearly a euphemism for being Jewish. My relationship with my faith has changed over the years, but as a kid I saw it as something social. I tried to observe the fast on Yom Kippur, but I think I only lasted until lunch time. Trying not to eat for a day was more of a game for me, a bet I could have with my friends. I couldn’t stand sitting in the synagogue all day, as you’re supposed to, and so I and my friends used to walk from one synagogue to the next synagogue just to see who was at those synagogues, a bit like a pub crawl.

My parents weren’t particularly religious, in fact they then became Reform so they could sit together in the synagogue rather than my mother having to sit upstairs, and they certainly didn’t go every week, only for the major feasts. If I’d had my way, I don’t suppose I’d have gone at all, but my parents thought there was something odd about a Jew who didn’t go to synagogue on Yom Kippur. I suspect they were only really worried about what the neighbours would think if I didn’t go. The Fifties and Sixties was a God-fearing time for the Jews after the Holocaust, and most of my friends’ parents wouldn’t dream of not going to synagogue on important occasions, and some of them made sure they went every Saturday. My grandfather was unbelievably religious, and I wouldn’t dare let him know that on a Saturday I might have gone on a bus.

In time, my parents became less observant, but their obsession with what the neighbours thought in those days was, I believe, the cause of a tragedy that scarred our family for ever. When I was 19, my sister Juliet met a boy called Barry who worked in a fish and chip shop, and even though it was his parents’ shop, my parents didn’t think it was a good enough occupation for a potential son-in-law. So my dad gave him a job as a manager of one of our shops, but there was a bigger problem: Barry wasn’t Jewish.

My parents were convinced any marriage would be wrong and they told Barry he could only marry their daughter if he converted to Judaism. ‘Marrying out’ still had a huge social stigma attached to it, and despite the disapproval my grandparents had shown them when they’d got married, my parents still worried about what the neighbours might say. So Barry took lessons with a rabbi and began the conversion process. He even got circumcised in his twenties, so there can be no doubt that he was serious about my sister.

At this time, I was with my first serious girlfriend called Jackie, and I wanted to impress her by driving Barry’s MGB. I pestered him for weeks, and he eventually relented. Cheekily, I assumed that because he’d given me permission once, that meant I could drive it any time I wanted. So whenever he called on Juliet, I took his car out for a drive, pulling up outside my friends’ houses and showing off. Needless to say, I thought Barry was a great guy and I was thrilled he was going to be my brother-in-law. It came as a complete shock when, several months later, the rabbi refused him permission to convert.

Barry had had enough of the demands my parents had put on him, and the rabbi’s rejection was the final straw. Although he said he still loved Juliet, he couldn’t take the interference any more and so he broke off their engagement. This created hostility between my parents and my sister, which caused Juliet to slump into a serious depression. As the weeks went by she got worse and worse, and was eventually put on medication. It was an uncomfortable time to be at home, so I was glad when my new girlfriend’s father invited me to stay with them at their apartment in Monte Carlo. Angela Trupp had previously been dating David Green, the brother of my best friend Michael, and our getting together had caused a bit of a rift between me and the Green brothers. At the time I didn’t care: I knew I was more serious about Angela than I had been about Jackie because I would rather spend my Saturday afternoons with her than watching Arsenal at Highbury.

On that trip to Monte Carlo it was separate bedrooms, of course, but it nevertheless felt incredibly grown up going on holiday with my girlfriend. Angela’s father was a successful businessman, and staying in the apartment in Monte Carlo was a real taste of the good life. However, a few days into the trip, Angela came to my room at 8 o’clock in the morning and told me she had some bad news.

‘It’s your sister’, she said, ‘she’s taken an overdose’.

I didn’t want to hear what she was going say next.

‘And she’s dead.’

My head suddenly rushed with emotions. My first thoughts were that I needed to get home, but those practical notions were swimming around with a volatile mix of grief and guilt, because I felt I had been such a rotten brother. I fluctuated between sensible and dramatic for a few hours as Angela and her family sorted out a flight back to London. I sat there having breakfast and was consumed by misery. I had never known anything like it.

The practicalities of leaving for the airport, the processes of checking in and boarding a plane helped to calm me down a bit, and Angela came with me for support. A few hours later, I was back in Regent’s Park and as I turned my key in the lock, the door opened. It was my father. He gave me a big hug and said something crass like ‘It’s good to see you. There aren’t many of you left.’ To be fair, none of us knew what to say, and my mother was so grief-stricken that she didn’t speak at all. She had been the one who’d found Juliet’s body, and I think this traumatised her in ways the rest of us could only imagine. Certainly the one thing none of us said was ‘It’s your fault’, but I don’t think any of us were in any doubt that the way my parents had treated Juliet’s relationship with Barry had contributed to her actions.

Denise, Diane, I and my parents barely left the house for the next four days as neighbours, friends, and relatives came to pay their respects. One person who didn’t come to see us was Barry. He had severed all ties with the family after he broke off the engagement, but I heard through friends that he was completely devastated.

Many of the shop managers came to mourn as well - all of us had been in and out of the shops our whole lives and many of them had known Juliet since she was a toddler - and when my father’s conversation inevitably turned to ‘So, how’s business then?’ I made my excuses and left. I realised then just how seriously his operation several years before had affected him. He really didn’t feel any pain. He could see that my mother was upset, but it was clear he didn’t completely understand why. His daughter had died, killed herself even, and he just didn’t show any emotion. A bomb could have gone off in the garden and he wouldn’t have flinched. We all remembered the man he had been before the operation, a man of empathy and spirit, and seeing him like that at such a terrible time for the family only reminded us of the man we had lost.

My mother was too upset to go to the funeral, and the months that followed were incredibly tough. It was almost as if Juliet came between us as we each dealt with her death in private as best we could, and the family unravelled around her memory. It’s terribly sad that that’s how we dealt with it, and I had to force myself to remember the good times we’d had as a family, and what a fabulous sister she had been.

I was helped through my grief because a friend of mine who lived round the corner had lost his sister in exactly the same way the year before. I’d written him a letter at the time, which was very unusual for me because I wasn’t very good at writing letters, and when Juliet died, he wrote to me. It helped me come to terms with the fact that death, even suicide, is just part of life. I know some people would look on my family as dysfunctional, but I think that every family has its fault lines and secrets.

In the days after Juliet’s death I’d watch TV and see those adverts for washing powder with a family where everybody was healthy, happy, and smiling - the idealised caricature everyone supposedly aspires to - and it just seemed so fake. In real life people do die, people get ill, and people do not fit into perfect slots. So I still look back at my family as a normal family, even though one died, my father was ill, my mother was a bit eccentric, and I came bottom at school. I think that was pretty normal.

My mother’s grief was without limits, although the coroner’s conclusion that Juliet’s had been an ‘accidental death’ was some comfort. Without wishing to be too graphic, she had choked on her own vomit, and this allowed my mother to believe that Juliet hadn’t meant to kill herself. It wasn’t much consolation, of course, and it was almost as if my mother was grieving on behalf of my father too. In the months afterwards, it became gradually clear that the trauma had affected her health. The list of medical complaints was a long one, and eventually, a few years later, she was diagnosed with cancer. In a way it was like she had willed her guilt to make her pay, but on the other hand she was adamant she was not going to succumb to the disease. In the years to come she would fight the cancer successfully, but it would come back somewhere else. At times, I’m ashamed to say, I became immune to what seemed like ‘the next medical emergency’. Perhaps I was reacting with the thoughtlessness of youth, but maybe it was also a kind of survival mechanism because I just couldn’t face the reality of losing my mother as well as my sister.

However, she continued to defy the doctors’ prognoses for the next 30 years. Those decades were overshadowed by her constant battles with illness, and my parents would spend many, many months and a considerable amount of money chasing cures.

Juliet’s death had another consequence, one that changed my life quite profoundly. Well aware that their meddling had been the cause of their daughter’s heartbreak, my parents were determined that they would not make the same mistake with me. When I returned from Monte Carlo, my mother said something that I thought was a bit strange at the time:

‘You can’t go and stay with someone’s family and not show that you’re serious.’

I didn’t pay it too much attention, but a few months later my parents went out and bought an engagement ring from friends of ours who ran a jewellers called Kutchinsky’s. It was an awful ring, and we could have got it much cheaper from one of our wholesalers, but maybe they couldn’t wait. It turned out they couldn’t even wait for me to propose, and gave it to Angela themselves! I was 20, and even though Angela was a little older at 24, neither of us was ready for marriage. However, as we both came from the sort of families where you did what your parents told you to, we were married in February 1971 and moved into a house in Primrose Hill that Angela’s father had bought for her.

CHAPTER 4

The Family Business

My father had trained to be a doctor before the war, but he found business far more challenging and exciting. He was an intelligent man and he told me that he thought business was a way of using all of your skills and knowledge, of using everything you had. He saw it as pitting his wits and brains against other men, like a game of chess, and felt it was the ultimate test of strategy and competition. Very early on, I assume he wanted to outperform his brothers and father who were all in the same trade. He used to read this book called Strategy of Desire that was based on always doing the opposite of what everybody else does. He found strategy fascinating, which meant he got a huge thrill out of being in business and that made him ambitious for success - there was little chance that he was going to stop at just the one shop in Richmond.

Although jewellery wasn’t the most exciting sector to be in, my father reasoned there was very little competition and you could make a good profit margin on each transaction. There were a lot of independent companies in jewellery, as well as a few established firms like H. Samuel - and that meant he felt there was room for his business to grow.

His second shop was in Slough, and I remember being at home with my mother when I was very young and her being restless. She clearly thought she was missing out on something.

‘Do you want to go and visit your father in his new shop?’

It was just about the most exciting thing I’d ever heard.

So we got on the Green Line bus from Hendon and spent most of the day getting there and back, but there was nothing else either of us would have rather done with our time. My mother was so in love with my father that she hated to be apart from him. They were like Siamese twins they were together so much, and when we turned up he was absolutely delighted.