by Alan Sugar
I had loads of enterprises on the go. Next to Woolmer House there was a rag-and-bone merchant who would go round collecting items such as old iron and other metal, clothing and material. He’d pay scrap value for the stuff. In his yard was a sign saying, ‘Wool 5s per lb [five shillings per pound of weight], cotton 1s 6d per pound [one shilling and sixpence], brass and copper 2d per pound [tuppence].’ Playing out in the street when I was eleven, I noticed people taking items in and getting money in exchange and I wondered if I could get hold of any stuff, so that I too could make some money. It was during one of my other ventures – car-cleaning – that I found something.
In the back streets of Clapton, some of the big Victorian houses were converted into small garment factories with rooms full of machinists. These factories would sub-contract for bigger manufacturers using ‘outdoor workers’ (the old name for sub-contractors). One day, while cleaning the factory boss’s car, I saw in the front garden some open sacks of material trimmings, ready for the dustman to take away. When I went inside to collect my 1s 6d, I asked the boss what was in these sacks and he explained they were remnants of the material used to make the clothes. I asked him if I could take some and he said I could, but looked puzzled.
‘What are you going to do with them?’ he asked.
‘Don’t worry, leave it to me,’ I replied. The sacks were bigger than I was, so I went back to the flats and borrowed a pram. I loaded on two sacks and took them round to the rag-and-bone man.
Here was my first experience of getting ‘legged over’. Unbeknown to me, the sacks contained gold dust as far as the scrap merchant was concerned, as the material was wool. This bloke took one look at this eleven-year-old and said, ‘What you’ve got in those sacks is rubbish.’ He weighed the stuff on his scales and said, ‘I’ll give you half a crown [2s 6d] for the lot.’ I took it. Naïve – stupid, you might say – but half a crown was a lot of money in those days.
The next week, after cleaning the boss’s car, I asked him what kind of material was in those sacks. When he told me it was wool, I was furious – I should have got at least £1 10s for two sacks of wool. I took a scrap of the material to the rag-and-bone man and confronted him. ‘I’ve just been told this is wool – you told me it was rubbish. I want some more money or I want the two sacks back,’ I yelled at him angrily. I won’t tell you what he said to me. He slung two shillings at me and told me to clear off.
‘I can get loads more of this stuff and I’m going to find another rag-and-bone man to sell it to!’
He just laughed and virtually threw me out.
Another side of me came out now. I was wound up and angry. I wasn’t frightened to speak up, but short of grabbing hold of him or kicking him, what could I do? He was a grown man and I was an eleven-year-old shnip. I went back home and told my mum and dad what had happened. They laughed, then my father asked, ‘How much did you get in the end?’
‘Four and six.’ A sudden look of fear came over his face at the realisation that his eleven-year-old son had made 4s 6d.
‘Where did you get this stuff from?’ he said.
‘I told you – from the factory down the road.’
‘They let you take it? You sure you didn’t take it without asking?’
‘No. The boss gave it to me. He wanted to get rid of it. Normally the dustman takes it away.’
‘Are you sure?’
I couldn’t believe it. Instead of being complimented, I was being interrogated as if I’d done something wrong! It was a strange attitude, but one I’d become increasingly familiar with in later years. Many’s the time I’d have to play down the success of my business activities because my father could not believe that someone so young could make so much money. To put things into perspective, his take-home pay at the time was £8 for working a forty-hour week. How could an eleven-year-old boy go out and make 4s 6d in just a couple of hours? Basically, I’d spotted some stuff in one place and seen another place to sell it. And what’s more, I really enjoyed doing it.
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1959 – 1963: Enterprise activities
While my social life was non-existent, I still kept busy with work and my hobbies. Sometimes they combined, as with the Saturday job I took in a chemist’s in Walthamstow High Street market. Having found that I enjoyed science and engineering at school (in contrast to some of the more boring subjects such as history and the arts), I thought pharmacy might be the way to go, and naïvely I figured I would learn about it on the job. The shop was owned by a very nice man called Michael Allen. When I told him I aspired to be a pharmacist, he taught me as much as he possibly could about drugs and that sort of stuff.
I spent most of my time in the front of the shop selling cough syrups and lozenges. Here I was, a young kid, being asked by punters what cough syrup they should take. Mr Allen taught me to ask if it was a chesty cough or a dry cough. For chesty, you got a bottle of Benylin; for dry, you got a bottle of Pholcodine Linctus.
Mr Allen was a bit of a boffin who knew all the technical pharmaceutical stuff, but in my opinion lacked a bit of business savvy. I introduced one of my marketing ideas to him and his staff. When asked by the customer for a bottle of, say, Milk of Magnesia, if you were to reply, ‘Small or large?’ most punters would say, ‘Small.’ Much better to ask, ‘Do you want the small 1s 6d one or the extra-value 2s 6d one?’ I applied this to lots of things in the shop, ranging from Old Spice aftershave to cough syrup, and it worked nine times out of ten.
There were exceptions to this rule. Packets of Durex, for example, came in both economy and bulk packs, but I wasn’t going to ask a strapping six-foot-tall punter if he wanted the small pack – it could have been taken the wrong way.
Now, here’s a bit of trivia you may find as surprising as I did: a large number of married women would buy contraceptives as part of their weekly shop, on behalf of their lazy husbands. At first, as a young lad of fifteen, I was a bit embarrassed when a woman asked me for them, but after a while it was like water off a duck’s back. However, when it came to Tampax or sanitary towels, I certainly wasn’t going to try my ‘small or extra-value’ scam. Instead, it was a case of: ‘They’re over there, madam, help yourself.’ That was where I drew the line. After all, there was a limit on how far you’d go for the boss!
It was at Mr Allen’s shop that I also developed my interest in photography, which was sparked by the cameras, film and developing paper he sold. I couldn’t afford a good camera, but I soon picked up tips on which model was the most economic to buy. This information was going to be useful because another sideline I had in mind was to become a photographer. While I scraped together the money to buy a Halina camera, I was already working out what to say to my parents. I had visions of my father shaking his head in disapproval when I brought it home. ‘Another waste of money,’ he’d say, while my mother would shrug her shoulders and ask, ‘How much was that?’ All this despite the fact that I was paying for it myself!
It was difficult for me to justify laying out £12 for a camera when the old man got £8 for doing a week’s work, so I tried to save his pride with answers such as, ‘I’m paying off for it to Mr Allen,’ which, to be fair, I did do when it came to my next camera – the Yashica, a poor man’s Rolleifiex.
Not only did I buy the camera, but I also invested in an enlarger, a lens and developing equipment. Mum and Dad couldn’t understand how I’d managed to buy them and the situation wasn’t helped by my brother-in-law, Harold Regal, who said, ‘This is very expensive stuff, Alan. How have you managed to afford all this?’ I didn’t need him winding the old man up.
My father was such a worrier. I swear he thought that one day there’d be a policeman knocking at our door – I don’t know why. He just couldn’t accept what this young lad was up to. My only criticism of him would be that he didn’t support me in any of these activities and always seemed to think there was something wrong. I wouldn’t say the same about my mother though; she was quite supportive.
Once I’d got the equipment an
d converted my dad’s workshop (the spare bedroom) into a darkroom by putting a blanket across the window and shutting the door, I set about finding customers. It struck me that many of our neighbours had kids and grandchildren, so I decided to knock on people’s doors and ask them if they’d like me to photograph the children on a ‘no obligation’ basis – a no-brainer, as you can imagine. ‘Sure,’ they invariably replied. I took the precaution of writing ‘PROOF’ on the corner of the photos in biro and presented them to the parents and grandparents who, of course, loved them.
‘What’s this word “proof”?’ they would say. ‘Can’t I have one without that on it?’
‘Well, that’s a rough example. If you want a final, good-quality one, I’ll print you off a large one for half a crown.’
That was it! I was at the races. It was pictures of children and grandchildren for the next few months.
While on the subject of photography, one of the young lads I’d seen around was soon to be Bar Mitzvah’d and, as his mum and dad couldn’t afford much, I offered to take the Bar Mitzvah photographs.
Bloody hell, what a risk that was! When I got to the venue, I found myself taking pictures of adults and doing group photos. Only then did it dawn on me: these people are expecting memorable photographs, pictures they’ll frame and treasure for the rest of their lives. I thought to myself, ‘What have I done? What am I doing here?’ Thankfully, it came off quite well in the end. I can’t remember what I charged but I certainly undercut the professional photographer.
Based on that event, I decided to professionalise myself. I went to a local printer’s, Austin Press, who made me a rubber stamp: ‘Photographed by ALAN SUGAR – Phone: UPP 7875’. Even as I tell this story, I can see my mum smiling and shrugging her shoulders and my dad still shaking his head.
The stamp I used when I set up as a ‘professional’ photographer.
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1959 – 1963: Enterprise activities
At school, photography was becoming a fashionable hobby and we had a photographic society whose members included one of the more financially fortunate pupils, a posh kid who used to hold court. His dad owned a shop and everybody looked up to him as if his shit didn’t stink.
When I showed my photographs, he’d sneer at them and look down on me as a second-class photographer. On one occasion, I showed him some negatives I’d developed myself. He observed some smear marks on them and announced haughtily, in front of the society, ‘Oh, Sugar, it seems that you dry your negatives by farting on them.’ You can imagine the laughter.
My next scheme wiped the smile off his face, in more ways than one. At that time, he used to be the supplier of photographic materials to the kids and the teachers. Now, at the rear of Mr Allen’s shop there was a small film-processing factory. I’d occasionally go and see how the developing process worked and noticed that they discarded the empty 35mm cartridge cases. I wondered what could be done with these seemingly useless items, but at the time nothing came to mind. Until one day I went into the ex-army shop on Chatsworth Road in Hackney. Ex-army stores originally sold second-hand uniforms, boots and other surplus army supplies, but the availability of this stuff diminished in the post-war years, so they extended their stock to anything surplus. I went to buy a pair of army boots (a fashion statement at that time) and noticed some large, round cans that looked like something you would store film in – the type of film you’d see on a cinema projector. I asked the fellow what was in the cans and he told me he’d bought a job lot of unexposed Ilford FP3 film, as used by film studios for the making of black-and-white movies. FP3 was also sold in photographic stores as black-and-white transparency film for around 5s 1d for a 20-exposure roll and 6s 10d for a 36-exposure roll. Now here I was in the ex-army store, with reels and reels of this stuff, each reel with hundreds of yards of film on it, the very same film you could buy in the photographic shops, but in bulk. The vision of the empty 35mm cartridges came out of my memory bank and I asked the man how much he wanted for a reel.
‘What are you going to do with it?’ he asked. ‘Who do you think you are – Hitchcock?’
‘Never mind that, mate, how much for a reel?’ I persisted.
He was bright, because before he gave a price, he wanted to know what I had in mind for it, in case he was missing a trick. There must have been fifty cans there, so who knows how much he paid for them. I bet he bought them for the scrap value of the metal cans.
‘How much do you want to pay?’ he said.
I looked at the can. The label indicated 500 yards of film inside. I knew from watching the process at the development factory that a 36-exposure film, out of its cartridge, was about two yards long. If I sold the film to the punters and undercut the shops by, say, 50 per cent, it would mean that I’d have to charge about three bob for a 36-exposure film. I quickly worked out that 250 x 3s came to £37 10s.
‘I’ll give you five quid for one can,’ I said. After a bit of haggling, the bloke accepted. He was intrigued about what I was going to do with it. Now I had to set up a production line. Although I’d converted my dad’s workshop into a darkroom, there was still light coming around the edges of the blanket over the window and around the door frame. This was good enough for developing prints on photographic paper, but not good enough for playing with unexposed film.
My second darkroom was my bed. Under the bedcovers, I’d open the developing tank, take the undeveloped exposed film out of its cartridge, thread the film on to the tank spool and then put the lid on the tank, ready for the developer fluid to be poured in. I went back under the covers for this bulk film operation. With a pair of scissors and the wooden yardstick my dad used for tailoring, I measured off and cut the film into two-yard lengths from the bulk reel. The whole operation was risky because if any light got in, I could expose the whole spool and that’d be a fiver down the drain. Once cut, I loaded the film into one of the discarded empty 35mm cartridges. I tried to be selective and take only those that had an original Ilford FP3 label on them, but I had to accept what was available. If I loaded the film into a cartridge with an FP3 label, it would be an easier sell; if I had to use an empty Kodak cartridge, you can imagine it would take a bit of explaining as to why the film inside was FP3.
In those days there were no inkjet printers or photocopiers to run off labels. Instead, I got some kid at school to use the library typewriter to type out ‘ILFORD FP3 36 EXP’ over and over on a sheet of A4 paper, cut the words out and glue them on to the non-Ilford cartridges using LePages glue. In exchange, I gave him some film, so he was happy as Larry.
Word spread like wildfire at school: ‘Hey, Sugar’s got 36 EXP FP3 for three bob!’ At first, I had to overcome the suspicion that they’d fallen off the back of a lorry, a rumour put about by the posh tosser. That was easy to dispel because when you looked at the end product you could see it wasn’t packaged in the same way as retail film. I was soon getting orders from the kids, the kids’ parents and the teachers. Like all products, it was accepted with scepticism at first, but eventually they realised it was okay. In fact, my generous length of two yards gave them forty-odd exposures.
The posh tosser didn’t give up. After his suggestion that the stuff was nicked had backfired, he then said the film was out-of-date and thus inferior. I killed that one off by offering a money-back guarantee.
This exercise had a twofold benefit. Firstly, I made some money and saw how cutting prices generates sales. But I also learned a valuable lesson about what happens when someone encroaches upon the territory of the so-called elite, be it disturbing their business or upsetting what they perceive to be their special rights. They go into arsehole mode and use rather sneaky and spiteful tactics.
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1963 – 1967: Early career
I started looking for another job and saw a promising newspaper advert for a trainee cost accountant with a statistics background. The firm was Richard Thomas & Baldwins, an iron and steel manufacturer located on the corner of Gower
Street and Euston Road.
The first obstacle I had to overcome was telling my father I was leaving my Civil Service job. His mentality was that you didn’t leave your job. You worked for a company and you got ‘grandfathered in’ – for ever. He wasn’t happy that I was flipping jobs so quickly, but I brought him round by explaining that I’d now attained experience in statistics which, if I got this new job, would eventually allow me to become a qualified cost accountant.
I did get the job and the pay was a bit more, about £10 or £11 a week. I was planted in a small office with ten much older men, all of whom were either qualified or trying to qualify as cost accountants. These guys ended up doing me the biggest favour of my life, as I’ll explain shortly.
The function of this department was to produce a weekly report on the output of the factory in Wales for the directors. My job was to get the daily output figures from the blast furnace and put this information into a format which would become part of the directors’ report. Each day, a chap called Alun, who had a strong Welsh accent, used to phone me from the factory and read me the output figures.
The lads in the department warmed to me because I was forever messing around and telling a few jokes here and there. One of the things I did was put on a Welsh accent whenever I spoke to Alun at the plant. One day he called up and said, ‘Hello, is that you, Alan?’
I replied in a Welsh accent, ‘Yes, it is me, Alun – this is also Alan.’
‘Where has that Welsh accent come from?’ he asked.
I explained to him that when in Rome, you do as the Romans. I said it was to show my devotion to the firm, and that having dealt with so many Welsh people within the company, a bit of the accent had rubbed off on me. Anyway, I told him not to let it bother him and to carry on giving me the daily figures.
He was obviously a bit thick. ‘Righto, Alan,’ he said. ‘Are you ready?’