Rowing Against the Tide - A career in sport and politics (8 page)

With Sally  in 1997

This became very clear, when Ernest decided to take what had become a closed but still quoted company, back into private ownership, and buy up all the minority holdings. As the only member on the board of the public company Hall and Earl, but not on the board of the private Readson company which owned the majority of shares, I found myself negotiating on behalf of all the remaining small shareholders. This level of finance was not my field, but with advice from Lord Victor Mischon, an old friend of Rick’s, and a London broking house, a deal was struck, and I obtained a share valuation that Ernest in the end had to accept, and gave me and many employees a nest-egg that allowed me to pursue a new career.

By that time I’d been with the company nearly thirty years, and as much as I enjoyed running the manufacturing side of the business, it was slowly becoming less than challenging, and my interest in active politics was growing. I’d had two spells on the local council, which had its benefits in handling local problems for some of our staff, and by the time I was approaching fifty, I felt I could contribute on the more national scene. I had joined an East Midlands political supper club – The Millbank Club – run by a Leicester man, Maurice Chandler. It was said, granted jokingly, that if Maurice didn’t know a particular person, they weren’t worth knowing. Our guest on an occasion in 1971 was intended to be my old school friend Peter Walker, but there was presumably a three line whip, and he had to send up a prospective conservative candidate from Central Office, to stand in for him. Put bluntly he was awful, and on the drive back to Nottingham, I remarked to my council colleague, Martin Suthers, that any of our members could have done better; indeed this political novice could have done better. Martin Suthers, who had been a past candidate himself, said well why don’t you have a go. It was as simple as that, and the rest as they say, is history.

I was selected to fight the Nottingham East constituency, a typical inner city pocket borough of only a 48,000 electorate. It was a seat by which only a miracle would have taken it from Labour, but Ernest used the opportunity and gave me twelve months notice. The sitting member was Jack Dunnett, who was also the Chairman of Notts County Football Club, so I had an almost impossible task on my hands. The election had not been called by the time the twelve months were up, but the managing director of the parent group, Tom Weatherby, doubtless against the wishes of the chairman, told me to sit tight until the outcome of the election, whenever it came, for it was the time when Jim Callahan failed to call it in October ’78. Strangely enough Jack was an orthodox Jew, and I being a Liberal and Progressive, were unusual opponents. At that time the British National Party were trying to get seats in Nottingham and Leicester, and planned marches in the City. The Anti Fascist League, with the best of motives sent us both boxes of literature intended for use against the BNP. Jack phoned me to ask if I was going to use the literature, and when I said I felt it would be counter productive and I had already met with minority groups with advice as to how to handle the situation, Jack agreed. The literature was dumped; the minority groups kept their heads down; stayed away from the BNP meetings which happily turned out to be damp squibs, and all three Nottingham seats failed to raise 1000 votes between them. I managed to raise my share from 32.8% to 39.9% but there are no prizes for coming second and so I failed, as expected, to be elected in the election of 1979.

I assumed that I would be leaving the company, but on being called to Tom Weatherby’s office he made clear that if I left under these circumstances, he knew that Wendy Stump would leave too, and that we would set up a new business together supplying M&S and the group would lose a big slice of their business. He persuaded the chairman to let us stay and we created a new group subsidiary Richard Stump (1979) to supply M&S. We did so on the understanding that if I was selected again to fight a general election, I would not be faced with notice to quit, and on my part every effort would be made to ensure that if likely to be selected, or elected, I would do everything to ensure a smooth handover to a new MD.

To the M&S supplying factory in Nottingham was added the responsibility of a factory in South Wales. That business had been owned by yet another of the faith, who employed a first class factory manager, Conrad Meyer, who had been a German prisoner of war, but who had stayed on and married a Welsh lass. The joke at M&S had always been as to whether the owner- Manning - I don’t know what his original name was, had ever told Conrad that the war was over ! I used to visit once a fortnight to agree programmes and settle production problems. On one occasion a head poked round the door, and Conrad said “yes Fritz?” It turned out he was the factory mechanic, and yet one more who had stayed behind and made a life here in Wales. Whilst saying my goodbyes, another figure was going round checking doors and windows, when Conrad called out “Heinz”, I said, oh surely not another ! I realised then why the factory was so efficient and on the ball. Manning had known what he was doing when he took them on, swallowing whatever reservations he must have had, knowing his background as a refugee from Germany in the thirties.

So it turned out by the time I left the group to enter Parliament following the election in 1983, that nest egg from my share stake allowed me to take a drop of 50% in income, and just about get by with two boys in private day school and a mortgage still to pay. Following the failed 1979 election, the boundaries were adjusted, for the old Nottingham East had, as indicated, been a tiny Labour fiefdom, and the changes made the three Nottingham seats broadly equal. By 1983 the tide which had earlier already begun to turn in Margaret Thatcher’s favour, was boosted by the outcome of the Falklands War, and turned what might have been a small chance of success for me, into a clean sweep of all three City seats, for Michael Knowles in East, Richard Ottaway in North, and myself in what had been renamed South. That seat, the old West Nottingham, not the South that had been won by Norman Fowler in 1970, had only once before in living memory, been won by a Conservative back in1959 when the now Sir Peter Tapsell won it narrowly over a senior trade unionist by a couple of hundred votes. It was said that this unlikely result was down to the fact that Peter was a good looking piece of male cheesecake, and all the women fell for him claiming that the narrow victory was down to them. Certainly the Nottingham hairdressers did well out of that election.

I stayed on as a consultant to the group for a couple of years, in order to ensure the smoothest transition, but the new MD appointed by the main board chairman, only underlined the chairman’s lack of business acumen and knowhow, for the new MD only made losses. It was sad, for in all the thirty years I had been with Rick Stump, and subsequently working with his daughter Wendy who was sales director, we had never failed to make a decent profit.

After I left Parliament in 1992 I did not want to return to work in the manufacturing textile industry, for there was in any case not a lot left in the mass production side of the industry. However I was offered a part time role by some good friends Maurice and Lesley Sananas in their business which included the GB sales side of the French company NAF NAF. My role was as an expert witness in cases of the counterfeiting of their products, and though not a lawyer, thoroughly enjoyed my time giving evidence, explaining how and why the goods that had been seized were counterfeit. Their family had lived for many years in Egypt and ran a successful textile business there. Following the 1956 Suez crisis, they found their business confiscated, and they had to leave Egypt along with a forced exodus of the large Jewish community who had lived there for many generations, and counted themselves as Jewish Egyptians. A few families stayed on, but as restrictions and pressures grew, they too had to leave, often with little but the clothes on their backs, and dependent on Jewish charities to help them find a country that would offer them sanctuary. It is those expulsions from Egypt and other countries in the Middle East, that underline the refusal by the current Israeli Government, to refuse to accept the right of Palestinians to return to their old homes in what is now Israel.

Being part time, it allowed me to return to Local Government, but also to accept the appointment as President of the Amateur Rowing Association, now re-branded as British Rowing. Fortuitously it also allowed Sally and me to buy a tiny cottage in Henley which turned out to be a boon for all our family. That purchase is a tale in itself, for as long as I can remember, I, and then Sally, always expressed wonderment at the crazy prices of property in that delightful town. As President I found myself driving to Henley for meetings in addition to the regattas we had always enjoyed attending. Staying overnight at either Leander Club or in a hotel was not cheap, so when we went out for a curry on the Friday evening prior to the Women’s Henley Regatta in 1996 we could not believe how cheap this delightful, but very old cottage was. I felt sure there had to be something very wrong with it, but having worked out on the back of Sally’s cigarette packet – she doesn’t smoke any more – that in six months I would qualify for some pension bonus and could, with a bit of help from my friendly bank manager, fund its purchase, I agreed that Sally would enquire as to what was wrong with it. She came to the regatta at lunchtime and said we had an appointment at five, and the deal was done. The flaw was the old roof on this 16th century cottage was sagging and since we had re-roofed our old farmhouse in Barton, this did not put us off. Our friendly builder in Nottingham went down with his mate one Monday morning, finished up on the Friday, with the listed buildings inspector quite happy with what we had done. It has given the whole family a lot of pleasure ever since.

Having dumped my pension pot into the purchase of the cottage, I was taken aback when the following year, Sally was having a quiet drink with one of our neighbours whilst I struggled to get a new refrigerator up a ladder, through the bedroom window, and finally into the kitchen. On joining them, Sally said that our friend Daphne was selling her boat, a Shetland four plus two. Sally saw the negative look on my face, for whilst we had always fancied a gin palace on the Thames, I was nervous at the outlay and running costs – and with justification ! However as Sally put it, “How old was your brother Michael when he died, and how old will you be next year. 66, well buy the b***** boat”. She was right of course, and we had great fun for four years with the Shetland, when we swapped it for a bigger craft with an inboard engine, and of course a larger galley for Sally! Only in 2010 when we were both seriously ill, did we accept that it was too great a risk to keep it and sold it to our friends in the next door cottage in September 2011.

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Chapter 5

ROWING DAYS

Having as I’ve said faced up to my lack of hand, foot and eye co-ordination, and taken to rowing and athletics at school, the former became my relaxation, if that’s the right word, from business for thirty years, and politics spanning those years and all subsequent time thereafter.

On leaving school and moving to Nottingham as a trainee manager, I found my greatest need for diversion was satisfied when getting down to Trent Bridge and finding there were three clubs there. The first was the Nottingham and Union Rowing Club, and because I was wearing my Thames Rowing Club tie – shameless advertising – I was collared by the then chief coach Freddie Brooks and the skipper Bobby Swift and agreed to join. The other two clubs were the Nottingham Boat Club and the Nottingham Britannia Rowing Club. The “Boat” had been formed in the late eighteen hundreds because the Rowing Club at that time would not permit rowing on a Sunday. The “Brit” was formed to provide artisans the chance to take up our sport, since - as artisans - they could not join either the “Boat” or the Rowing Club, those clubs being affiliated to the Amateur Rowing Association. There was friendly competition between the clubs and the University, and I knew I’d joined the right set-up when at the February Head of the Trent long distance time trial in 1953, my club won the Headship, only to be disqualified on a technical objection from the president of the “Brit”.

By then I had put on enough weight, I weighed in at about ten and a half stone, to row rather than Cox, and won a place in the club junior eight planning to race at Chester Regatta. The then classification of junior was not related to age, but what you had won at open regattas. The first stage was Novice, the next Junior, followed by Junior Senior, then Senior and subsequently Elite. Back then there were still crews who rowed on “fixed pins” though most had taken up the modern swivel rowlocks and blades. These fixed pin rowlocks were usually a rectangle formed by a metal base, with two upright metal pins, and a twisted rope across the top to close the rectangle. The blades had a curved leather collar that you drew though the rowlock from the outside, and the curve of the leather collar or button, aided the finish of the stroke. We had no means at that time to take our own racing eight to regattas, and we arranged to borrow a boat from the Royal Chester Rowing Club. We made clear we would bring our own oars for the modern swivel rowlocks, but when we arrived the Chester boatman was, he said on instruction, removing the swivel rowlocks on the boat we were borrowing, and fixing the rectangular rowlocks that could only be used with the old fashioned blades that I and some others had never handled before. Regardless of our protestations, they dismissed us on the basis that since we would certainly lose the first round to the local school, it wasn’t worth leaving the boat with swivel rowlocks in place. Nothing could have wound us up more, and after a couple of outings to try out these old blades which they then provided, we duly thumped the school, went on to win the final, and the faces of the officials at prize-giving simply made our day. We had a bit of a comedian in our crew, Colin McKay, who examining the trophies and winners tankards that morning, remarked to the official setting out the pots that the Junior Eights pots were not engraved – the more senior ones did show the title of the event. With a bit of a sneer, the official said “Well we don’t know you’ve won it yet” When it came to the prize-giving and Colin received his tankard from the same official, everyone heard him say “I told you they should have been engraved this morning”.