Chapter 1. Early Days

The Path Trod

Mine is not the rags-to-riches story so often told; nor is it that of great inherited wealth. It is a textbook story on a relatively straight path. That is, straight if I look back from this age, but looking forward from younger years, it was very foggy. One needs a few years to have passed to judge the path trod, and I certainly have that qualification. Although just how it has turned out is still a mystery, I must pinch myself to check not only the aging skin on the back of my hands but to confirm I am in the real world and not some high-tech simulation.

I have written a journal for many years—not a diary but some one hundred plus pages covering the years as they have gone by—but for this story, it feels better to start again. So, much will be omitted and dates will be wrong, but I hope to convey something of the excitement and disappointments that have punctuated the eighty-six years I’ve lived. And there is the place to start—I have lived ten years longer than my father, who died from lung cancer, having smoked cigarettes and cigars for much of his life. He also indulged a happy but less healthy appetite for food and drink, mostly wine.

The following years in England were those of serious deprivation, with rationing of food, fuel, and materials, which continued until 1954, although the war finished in 1945. Somehow, during that period, our parents managed to keep it from both me and my baby sister, Dawn, who was born in 1942, just as America joined the war, shortly after Pearl Harbor. Dawn grew up loving horses of any shape, size, or form and consequently has many screws and plates under her skin. But she survives well and has only recently reduced her stables to storage use but no horseflesh.

With no degree and a foreshortened school education, Mick was a natural businessman and, together with his two brothers-in-law, started Moyden, an engineering firm that manufactured car parts and, frankly, anything they could sell. After that, the war effort took over, and contracts from the War Office took the company into supplying armaments such as gun sights. Mick had been seriously interested in his hobby of collecting rare stamps, as did most boys. He frequented the now famous Stanley Gibbons (SG, founded 1856) stamp shop now located at 399 Strand, which was the centre of this little backwater of specialisation, with several other purveyors close by. The closest was bang next door at 392, where Mr. H. E. Wingfield, an elderly gentleman, was the proprietor, but it was financially somewhat dwarfed by SG. Somehow, the old man took a shine to Mick and invited him in as a junior partner, which eventually morphed into principal as he retired.

The next-door directors of SG were less than dynamic and soon found that Mick’s business was eating their lunch, so they did the obvious thing and negotiated a merger. The result was Dad becoming managing director and later chairman with a significant shareholding, and a new era of SG was born. He then took it on to become an international business with subsidiaries in the UK and a NYC office on Fifth Avenue. In 1957, SG had grown, and it was time to engineer a very successful and well-over-subscribed stock market flotation.

So it was my father who imbued in me a sense of business from an early age. Mick and Enid entertained clients, friends, and competitors at home on weekends, and Enid often made the journey from home to London in the evening to accompany Mick for dinner. I was approaching thirty and had long ago decided that those little bits of paper studied by peering through a magnifier were not going to be the direction of my life. In fact, it was rather decided for me as, when assisting with the stamping and franking of first-day covers, I had disgraced myself by sticking them on askew. Mick was not pleased, and I was effectively fired, never again to cross the SG threshold.

I joined the lower sixth and studied for the Advanced Level, the key to university, and two years later had achieved the qualifications to apply and wait. My ambitions for living, even at that age, stretched my pocket money, so I found a job in a radio repair shop close by and started working on Morphy Richards toasters. In those days, we mended them rather than throwing them away. There, I met two people who were to figure in my life for years afterward. The first was a young actor, Anthony Valentine, who attracted beautiful girls. The second was Bob Graves, owner of the shop, who, many years later, was to become my first business partner.

Rather than waste time listening to the dull history and geography taught by dull schoolmasters, I spent time both in and out of class reading technical and engineering magazines such as Practical Wireless and Wireless World. In addition, I learned plenty about repairing radios and television sets. I put that knowledge to work during the summer holiday to design what was probably the first VHF radio tuner capable of receiving the three new FM radio transmissions from Wrotham in Kent. With the help of Bob Graves, who had a spare company to hand, I took a small ad in the back of both magazines and waited. Soon, orders for kits of parts began to arrive together with postal orders, and I had started the first of what became many businesses. I was nineteen.