Rowing Against the Tide - A career in sport and politics (5 page)

During an interview at Marks and Spencers with a lady called Bessie Werner, I had the chance to either join their trainee managers course, or join one of their suppliers. I was introduced to one of those suppliers, Richard Stump who ran a dress manufacturing business in Nottingham, and I felt I would be more at home in that atmosphere rather than the retail shop floor.

Just as would have been the case at M&S, you started at the bottom, and in my case sorting and logging the vast collection of buttons, that were the stock in trade of a manufacturer of women’s clothes. A good friend who chose the M&S store route, was handed a broom as a starting point, and just as the store was about to close, he attempted to stop a little man entering. After a few moments he had to give way, since the little man was none other than Sir Simon Marks, the boss-man on one of his unannounced store visits. My friend did survive to have a successful career with them.

I was found accommodation with a Mrs Annie Caldwell who looked after me like I was family, and because it was close to the factory, I soon found myself opening and closing up, and generally taking on managerial roles. The factory had been the local cinema – The Kinema – with the ground floor now used as working factory space, and what had been the balcony as a cutting room. The projection room had been made into a small but adequate canteen, and visiting suppliers and customers, were impressed at it’s conversion following Richard Stump’s London factory being destroyed during the Blitz. Local callers always recalled the double seats at the back of the balcony, for those who were less interested in what was being shown.

I attended night school at what was then the Nottingham District Technical College , which became Trent Polytechnic, and latterly now Nottingham Trent University, studying textiles and management techniques. Work study fascinated me, and it was not long before I was given free reign to try to bring sectional priced piece work into our garment manufacturing, which until then had mainly been poorly paid time work, or simple piece work based on a machinist making the whole garment. When breaking down the operations necessary to put a garment together, the easiest operation to measure and price was over-locking, which was a means by which the edges of cut cloth were over-sewn before the parts were put together. We had a Greek girl, known only as Greek Anna, who handled bundles of cloth and her machine in a way, and at a speed, few others could match. Having set those first rates, I found that all the over-lockers had disappeared into the toilets, and having asked one of my supervisors what was going on, I found that the girls were concerned that Greek Anna was earning too much money and that I would therefore be tempted to cut the rates. On assurance that I was happy with the rates set, and that if Anna earned twice as much as the others, well the chance was there for them to watch, learn, and raise their own income. It was pretty plain sailing after that, and steadily all aspects of the manufacturing cycle were covered by sectional piece work rates, raising the income for everyone, including the business.

The textile slump that had kicked in around 1950/2 was a difficult time, for the boom that followed the years of austerity during the war petered out, and I found I had joined the company at a very difficult time in late 1952. The strange thing was that as trade picked up again, the restocking that was necessary, required greater financing, and just as now in 2012, firms were going bust through lack of finance, just when trade was on the up. By the end of 1953 we too ran into difficulty with the local regional manager of Barclays Bank. In short he would not allow an increase in our facility, regardless of the fact that the company had continued to make a profit and was well able service a larger overdraft. We then found that he had taken the same line with many other textile manufacturers in Nottingham all of whom were Jewish run businesses. It was clear that once again anti-semitism was rearing its head. The local branch manager had no power to overrule his regional manger, and directed us to the manager of Martins Bank. The manager was Raymond Usher, who took one look at our accounts and expressed amazement as to why we had been refused facilities, and readily agreed to take our account. In return we recommended, and he accepted, all the other firms that had run foul of Barclays prejudiced way of doing business. It was ironical that some years later, Barclays took over Martins Bank, but by then Barclays had discovered the prejudiced actions of their regional manager, and he had been dismissed.

Adjacent to the factory was a site of equal size occupied by a garage business. The owner was seeking to retire, and it gave us an excellent opportunity to expand the size of the factory. Having bought both his business and the site, we constructed a modern extension of three stories, allowing not simply to the more than doubling of the potential capacity of the business, but it created enough space to bring in some of the modern developments in mechanical handling and production flow. At that time we employed around 200 staff. The business grew steadily, and as demand increased, and as we did more and more business with M&S, another factory was opened in Nottingham’s Lace Market, and our staff grew to over 400. Many friends in the trade expressed concern at how big a slice of our capacity went to M&S, but it was sound business, tough, but guaranteed, and in all the years, until I retired from the company in 1983, we had never failed to make a decent profit. I was very much at home as director on the manufacturing side of the business, leaving the selling first to Richard ( Rick) Stump the owner and MD, and ultimately to his daughter Wendy, who was a real chip off the old block, was well liked at M&S and who worked with our design team to ensure we were always working at capacity. She could sell the proverbial deepfreeze to Eskimos.

It wasn’t all work, for apart from joining the local rowing club, I found myself with a group of men of my age, give or take a year or two, from the Jewish Youth Club, who played cards on a Tuesday evening. We took it in turn to play host, and to provide the food that along with the banter was certainly for me, far more fun than the card game. One Tuesday, in I think the late fifties, the stock market had crashed, and I had been dabbling in small purchases through a local broker. So small were my activities that I dealt with the receptionist rather than one of the partners. I was pretty shattered, for whilst it was only around four or five hundred pounds in shares, it was all I had. Rick Stump assured me that I should not worry, for after all, shares were for the long term and they would recover. The fact that he had also lost a lot was little comfort. We played a game of Auction Solo, and if you bid five tricks or more, you had to cover the kitty in the middle, which on that evening stood at some two pounds ten shillings. I had a good hand, and hesitated to bid and cover the kitty. I’d hesitated so long, that one of the group, Brian Appleby, who later became a Circuit Judge, got on to me, with “the come on, bid or pass, but don’t hold the game up” Thinking of how much I’d lost that day, worrying about the tiny kitty on the table seemed ridiculous and I just had hysterics, and eventually explained to the gang the days disaster on the Stock Exchange. However the following morning I rang the receptionist to see what was happening, and she assured me that whatever had triggered the crash that Tuesday, the market had bounced back to where it had been before the crash. Great I said, sell the lot. She said it would take time for they were all small bits and pieces of holdings. She came back at around three that afternoon, and asked what did I know that the brokers didn’t ? I asked why, she said, “well you’ve lost little more than the costs of selling, and after I was clear, the market had crashed again and was lower than it had been at close on the Tuesday”. I had to explain that I had just finished reading the Lanny Budd series by Upton Sinclair, where in one of the books, the story of the Wall Street crash of 1929 featured, and the concept of the dead cat bounce became notorious. I got out before the cat came down a second time.

One other card evening that sticks in my mind, was when we were at the home of one of the crowd, Stanley Goldman who ran what we called a “swag” shop. He sold all sorts of small things, toys, trinkets, general domestic stuff, and we used his stock when we ran a fund raising Tombola stall. It was amazing how many small prizes you could get for just ten pounds, to ensure the stall was well provisioned. The room we played in had a large, then fashionable, mirror over the mantelpiece, with another large mirror on another wall.

We had been playing for a while when I realised that Stanley, and indeed others, could if they took the trouble, see the cards of others in the mirrors around the table. We gave him a lot of stick over what he claimed was an innocent error, but we gathered his long playing records and stacked them across the mantelpiece and along the beading or dado rail round the room, to ensure fair play. I can’t pinpoint the date, but I do remember that Shirley Bassey was the young rising star at the time, and one of the LPs was hers which included Kiss Me Honey Honey, the song that hit the headlines at that time.

The youth club was a useful link within the Jewish community in Nottingham, and it was frequented by many of the older members, as well as youngsters. On one of my weekends back home in London, my father asked if I’d met any nice people in the community, and I said that of course there were the usual Cohens, Goldbergs etc, but had also met two brothers by the name of Sells. My father thought for a moment and said that I should ask when I met them again, if their real name was either Lopez or Gomez Elzader. If they were Lopez, just shake his hand and say nice to meet you cousin. A few weeks later at a gathering at the club, the brothers were there, the question was put, and they duly owned up to being Sephardic as myself. Now the community in Nottingham were almost entirely rooted in the exodus from Europe in the early 1900s and the thirties, and were Ashkenazi’s. There had always been a little tension between themselves and the much earlier settlers, the Sephardim, and the “Sells” had thought best to keep it quiet. There was quite a discussion that followed, but the biggest laugh was when one of the girls, Valerie Bentley, said that now it was all in the open, her family were also Sephardic. The question promptly was asked, what had been their family name. She brought gales of joshing when she admitted that had her father not changed the family name, she would have been Valeresa de Fonseca de Pimentel.

Around 1955 or 56, Rick had given me the chance to buy a small stake in the business, and Raymond Usher readily gave me an overdraft to be able to buy the stock he offered. That small stake was the added incentive to stay and help make the business grow. The business did well and in 1970 we sold a majority stake to a major private company Readsons of Manchester. Rick had had a real cancer scare a couple of years before, and sensibly wanted to secure his family’s future, should that scare become a reality. There then followed a reverse takeover by Richard Stump Ltd of a public company Hall and Earl. That gave us extra manufacturing units to take under our wing, a small one in Cwmbran, one in Newcastle a third in Chester le Street, plus a knitting unit in Leicester and a dyeing and finishing company. The largest manufacturing unit was the Durham Company which I visited on a fortnightly basis, but the staff there were surprised that I took the trouble to walk round the factory greeting everyone. What had been the regular routine in our Nottingham units, simply had never happened under the previous Durham management, yet was just the normal and right thing to do if good industrial relations were to be maintained. It turned out that all such matters previously went through the union, and since their representative was based in Loughborough, it was clear why problems took time to iron out. We’d never had such problems in our Nottingham factories, for on the contrary, our staff who were picketed every few years by the clothing and textile union representatives, always asked that I send them away. I made clear they had the legal right to try to sign the staff up, and we would not stand in their way if they wished to do so, but since we had good working relations with all our staff, no one ever signed up. Every six months, we gathered in the factory canteen, and set out where the company stood, what the prospects were, and so forth, and we found we ran a happy ship.

Rick was a true entrepreneur, and when it was clear that knitted fabrics were coming more and more into fashion, and knowing that yarn and knitting had been part of my textile studies, it was a case of my finding a firm of commission knitters, buying yarn, and producing our own fabrics to offer M & S. To make sure M & S bought into those plans, he bought a small company in London who specialised in knitted dress-wear, and on the basis of their range showed we could supply them with both woven and knitted garments. That purchase took us into the typical West End Fashion World, and by 1964, when I married my wife Sally, she was able to go down to London during the showing time, and model the range for us. It had a double benefit, for the samples having been worn, or rejected for whatever reason, they could not be sold, and she had first choice of whatever she fancied. I’m sure my friends in Nottingham were convinced I’d married an heiress, for she certainly was one of the best dressed around, and bear in mind Nottingham was reputed to have the best looking girls in the country!

We’d met in the most odd of circumstances at a Jazz Night at the Trent Bridge Inn, in the autumn of 1962. M&S had recently persuaded us and a number of their dress manufacturers to handle a very small and uneconomic contract of upmarket garments for a selected number of top stores. It was the brainchild of a daughter of one of the directors, who could not be denied the chance to show what she could do, and we as manufacturers were in no position to refuse. The fabric allocated to us was great in appearance, but an absolute nightmare to handle. It was an American foulard using an artificial Arnell fibre, so woven that it frayed the moment it was cut. We feared that from cutting room to machine floor, the garments would be one or two sizes smaller than planned. Our engineer solved the problem by setting a hot wire into the edging machines, so sealing the edges that we could avoid fraying until the garment had been put together. Because of the length of our cutting tables, we were always left with cloth lengths quite suitable for single dressmaking, and we had regular sales to our staff at a tiny fraction of cost, for whatever it raised, and it raised quite substantial sums, it was better than having to either dump it, or try to sell it to market traders. On this occasion we were only too pleased to sell as much as we could to our staff, even if that meant we only delivered 70% of the contract. The cloth was so distinctive, that when I saw this young slip of a girl sitting with a crowd of hairdressers I knew, all I could say was “Where the hell did you get that cloth”. The girls rallied round and told me not to be sharp with her, after all she was relatively new at their salon and she was only 18. She explained that one of my cutters, instead of giving her a tip each week, bought some of our remnants and every month or so gave her a dress length instead of a tip. The girls all worked for the biggest hairdressing salon in Nottingham, with no less than a staff of 50. We reckoned they were the best looking bunch in town, and we lads used to queue up outside the salon to collect our girlfriends at closing time. I apologised, offered to drive her home, and the rest as they say is history.