He has also spoken out tetchily about how he is still approached by people who claim they knew him in Hackney ‘back in the day’, but who he doesn’t remember. As you can imagine, the straight-talking Sugar gives them short shrift. ‘You can see them coming from the corner of your eye. He or she has been staring at you all night. No, not plucking up courage, these people are the worst, they are rude, they butt in, they have no common courtesy at all. They say something like “You know my uncle in Hackney.” I say, “Oh, really?” “Yes, he says you know him very well.” Then they rattle off a name. I say, “No, I don’t know him, I’ve never heard of him.” “Oh, but you do know him.” “I don’t know him, I’m sorry.” “But you went to school with him, you must know him.” Then I get a bit annoyed. Yes, sometimes I can be rude. I would probably say, “Well, I don’t know him so clear off,” or words to that effect.’ This tendency would lead to a rather amusing episode concerning Rupert Murdoch later in his life.
Meanwhile, largely eschewing the after-school activities that were on offer at his various educational establishments, the young Alan Sugar preferred to head home and pursue some of his interests, pastimes and hobbies, which included photography and cooking. Both would soon be turned into more professional interests, and rather profitable ones at that. He began to make ginger beer at home, and sold it to his fellow pupils. This was done by feeding a ginger-beer plant each evening. He would then pour out the resulting drink and flog it to friends, undercutting the more expensive big-brand soft drinks such as Coke. He was following the example of his uncle, whom he describes as one of his earliest heroes. ‘At the age of 17, my icon was my Uncle John, because he had a little corner shop in Victoria and was the only person I knew in business. As time goes by, you tend to overtake those people and look back in admiration. I’ve passed Uncle John, Harry the bloke who had the stall around the corner, Fred the chap who had the big electrical store, Bob the bloke who had the big warehouse and Frank the fellow big importer of electronics.’
It’s not known whether Sugar believes in astrology, but those who do set store in that field would find much in him to back up their beliefs. Born under the Zodiac sign of Aries, which is suitably enough the Ram, he has gone on to display many of the associated traits: courage, initiative, stubbornness and straightforwardness are all said to be typical among Arians. Those born under this sign are also often said to be opinionated. Anyone who came up against him in The Apprentice boardroom in later years would go along with that. Some of these traits were apparent from an early age. He recalls himself as ‘not a ruffian’, but admits that, even as a child, with him there was ‘always plenty of talk’. Could it be that some of that ‘talk’ was heard by his teachers when he was a schoolboy? Sugar attended the Brooke House School in Upper Clapton, Hackney. In a school report that was released to the media, one of the teachers who taught the young Alan Sugar, a Mr Robinson, gives an insight into what sort of pupil he was. He believes the teenage Sugar was ‘an able boy’ but he continues, ‘He must take more care in the presentation of his work. A great improvement in his ability, but it is often misapplied. Alan is broadening his sphere of activities.’ More interesting and revealing is the passage that covers Sugar’s involvement in the sporting side of the curriculum. The teacher is full of praise for his pupil: ‘A good year’s work’ from Sugar. He adds, ‘Alan has represented the house in football and rugby. He has helped in the organisation of the teams. Well done, Alan.’ Well done, indeed. And how fitting that a man who would go on to run a top-class English football club should have made such a great job in the organisation of football and rugby teams in his school days. If only he was similarly appreciated by the fans of that club.
Those school reports emerged in 1997, when Sugar returned to the school, which has since been renamed Hackney Community College, to launch its centre for construction, civil engineering and community education. It was an emotional and inspiring occasion for all. Sugar addressed more than 200 young people and talked to them about opportunities for starting their own businesses. A fun run also took place during the day, passing the old centres of the college, which housed the construction and engineering courses. Sugar, a charismatic speaker even before his Apprentice days, had the audience in the palm of his hand, as he told pupils that success requires ‘hard work, focus and determination’. Naturally, the visit prompted headlines and Sugar’s comments give an insight into how he looks back on his own childhood, and how he wants the best for the children of Hackney, where he took his first steps. He told reporters afterwards, ‘I started out in business in Hackney as a kid and earned a living there as a kid, doing things that the youngsters of Hackney can do here today. I want to burn the spirit of entrepreneurship into them not to lecture them, but actually show them that business can be fun and that the rewards of hard work and common sense can be even more fun.’
After speaking to the reporters, Sugar also granted a then rare interview to BBC Radio 4’s flagship Today programme. The sentiments he outlined there give an insight into how he sees the making of all entrepreneurs, including, of course, himself. ‘You cannot make someone into an entrepreneur, just like you can’t make someone a pop singer or an artist,’ he said. ‘It has to be in-built in you; it’s a kind of a nose for things, a smell for things, and then an instinct to do it and a focus.’ Interestingly, within years of his making these statements, reality television was indeed trying to ‘make’ pop stars and entrepreneurs right in front of our very eyes. However, Sugar’s own slice of the reality television cake was about polishing, rather than making, businesspeople.
Let us return once more to his own childhood. Sugar insists that his love of business started at a very early age. ‘I’ve been in business since I was a 12-year-old schoolkid, really,’ he said. ‘If there was an opportunity and a demand, I’d be there.’ And, in common with all those who rise to the heights of entrepreneurial brilliance, Sugar found opportunities and demands wherever he looked, even back then. At the tender age of 11, he photographed other children and sold the resulting prints to their grandparents. As we’ve seen, he also made his own ginger beer and sold it to thirsty kids. Sugar went on to clean cars, a more traditional childhood enterprise but one that he went about with the trademark Sugar zeal. Later in life, rather than clean cars, he would be driven round in them, including an exclusive Rolls-Royce Phantom. Returning to the photographic sphere, he flogged repackaged black-and-white film and became something of a professional photographer. He would approach grandparents and offer to photograph their grandchildren for them. He would proudly present them with the finished black-and-white snaps, with ‘Alan Sugar, photographer’ neatly typed on the back. He had found a fertile ground for sales; offering to photograph grandchildren for half a crown, he found the grandparents’ answer was always ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ They could never have enough pictures of their grandchildren.’
He was also a paperboy for a while, a job that allowed him to buy himself that copy of the Beano every week if that was what he wanted. By the time he reached the age of 12, the budding businessman would rise at the early hour of 6am to boil beetroot for the local greengrocer. ‘It wasn’t a case of deciding to do that: it was quite common for people who lived in my council block to have a Saturday job, a holiday job, a paper round or whatever,’ he said, keen to play down the significance of the beetroot days. ‘It was necessary – if you wanted your own pocket money you had to go and get it yourself.’ Another job he took was at a local department store. There, his natural brilliance as a salesman came to the fore. He was so good at selling footwear to the customers that he was offered the chance to promote himself from a Saturday job to a full-time job. It wasn’t just his employers who noted his salesman’s tack. Sugar also was described by his headmaster as someone who could sell anything to anyone. He himself had fallen for the charms of the Sugar sales pitch when his pupil asked him if he’d lend him the money to buy a printing machine, so he could produce a school magazine. ‘With your cheek, I will,’ re
plied his headmaster.
He also had a good grasp of mathematics, as many of those who go on to thrive in business are wont to have. He puts this down to a teacher called Mr Grant, whom he still remembers many decades on. ‘I remember Mr Grant, the maths master, because, even though he gave up on me, I managed to pass my [GCE] O-level,’ said the generous Sugar. ‘He was a real eccentric. We used to call him Theta Grant because he made us laugh when he wrote the Greek letter theta on the blackboard. He was accident-prone. He’d come into school with his face smashed in or a broken arm. There were all sorts of rumours going round, but we never found out the cause of his injuries. When I discovered that the maths O-level syllabus involved something called calculus, which was supposed to be really difficult, I was fascinated. I’ve always enjoyed a challenge. I’m a quick learner and have a photographic memory. Within three or four weeks, I became the whiz kid of calculus, which got me through the exam. Grant couldn’t believe it.’
His shoe-selling days would be among the final times that Sugar ever worked for someone else. As he said, proudly, ‘I haven’t applied for a job since I was a teenager.’ Although his success and riches have since brought him all manner of luxuries and pleasures, he insists that his original motivation to getting into business was far more down to earth and simple. ‘When I first started out, I wasn’t interested in making a million, I wasn’t thinking about getting a knighthood,’ he said. ‘It was about getting some wheels. I wanted a car – and I wanted to be independent. I was also angry, and probably a bit arrogant. I was sick of putting money in other people’s pockets when I knew I could earn more on my own.’ This anger speaks of an internal frustration with life. Specifically, he feels that it came from seeing how his father had gone about his own working life. ‘I had seen [him] work hard all his life, putting the family first and playing the safe game in order to take care of us.’ Sugar felt that, in a highly important respect, he differed from his father, both in circumstances and makeup. ‘I was at the point when I had no responsibilities – and I knew I didn’t have his temperament – I would never be able to stay the course working for someone else.’
Therefore, his business ambition has been burning inside Sugar for as long as he can remember. He says he always felt he’d have his own business, and that at heart he has always been a salesman. ‘I never wanted to be a rocket scientist or a football player,’ he adds. He then turns again to the lessons he learned, and the conclusions he drew, from watching his father from a young age. Once more, we can see how he tried to differ from his father, though not to the extent of having anything less than total respect for the man. ‘One of the things that drove me to be self-sufficient was looking at the way my father, a tailor, struggled to keep the family going. I thought, “I don’t want that.” He did a very good job of bringing up a family of four children in very tough times.’
There were tender moments among the tough times. For Sugar, his bar mitzvah would have been one of them. The words bar mitzvah translate as ‘son on the commandment’ and is the process Jewish boys go through at the age of 13. This is a great event in the life of a Jewish male, where he is called up to read from the Torah scroll. Often, the ceremony will be followed by an elaborate and at times wild celebration. For Sugar it was a more modest affair, which took place at a small synagogue in Upper Clapton Road. Nonetheless, this marked his coming of age. A few years later, he left school. ‘It’s generally said of me that I left school at 16,’ he said. ‘The precise truth is that I left school at 16 and three-quarters, having started A-levels at my London school.’ He was the youngest in the family and the first to consider going on to higher education. ‘My father was a tailor and the older children had left school and gone straight into the garment trade. So I suppose I was one of those council-house kids who had the makings of a great opportunity there, but the problem was that it just didn’t suit me. I was simply the sort of person who wanted to get on with the rest of my life.’
However, Sugar did not move straight from school to becoming an energetic businessman. First he was to have a taste of office life working for someone else, but it was not to his liking and his experience of it was to ultimately make him even more determined to be the master of his own destiny.
CHAPTER TWO
YES MINISTER
After leaving school and taking his first steps into the big world, Sugar took a job as a civil service clerk statistician at the Ministry of Education and Science. This was a somewhat surprising choice for a man with Sugar’s drive and imagination. It is perhaps not a surprise, then, that this is not an area of his life that Sugar is particularly fond of reliving. When one journalist asked him about it, he simply replied, ‘It bores me talking about it again and again.’ It is not surprising that Sugar is not full of enthusiasm for this part of his career. The civil service can be an oppressively procedure-driven industry, full of red tape. This has been excellently sent up in the BBC comedy Yes Minister, but it is unlikely that someone with Sugar’s vision and entrepreneurial spirit would have seen the funny side of the civil service as he sat in dull and uninspiring surroundings.
So why did he end up there? Having been allowed to stay on at school longer than his father would have liked him to, and longer than some of his siblings had been kept in education, meant that Sugar felt he had to try to take on a more scholarly career. In any case, as he told David Thomas, ‘Science – this was something I had always been interested in. Statistics, maths – I wasn’t too bad at that. So I thought I’d go for it.’ However, the work was almost cripplingly tedious, ‘the most unbelievable bore going’, he recalled. His tasks were so dull that one of the least objectionable parts of his job was calculating what percentage of children drank milk in the morning at school, which is hardly the sort of work that would appeal to Sugar. No wonder he shudders at the memory of the ‘total agony’ of waiting for the clock to run down each day, so he could get home!
Looking back on this time of his life, Sugar recalls how crestfallen he was when he realised quite how inappropriate his new job was to be. ‘I was quite interested in science and engineering and naïvely took a job with the Ministry of Education and Science, expecting to be involved in interesting scientific projects,’ he said. ‘Imagine my disappointment when I was plonked into a boring office, pushing a load of paper around. This was not for me – though it was far from easy to tell my dad that I wanted out. The old man’s priorities were security and a job for life. Yet here I was, a few months into the job and on my bike.’
It is almost extraordinary to think of Sugar in such surroundings. True, he has a fine mathematical mind and a great analytical ability. But Whitehall’s civil service is for men who are the polar opposite of Sugar. To make his businesses work, he would relish the freedom, the creativity, the spark that secures that next avalanche of cash. Instead, here he was tied to a desk in a sterile atmosphere, with the nine-to-five mentality writ large in the very essence of the job description (although, to be fair, Sugar has always been a nine-to-five man who rarely takes his work home). His unsuitability for the role – or rather the role’s unsuitability for him – can hardly be overstressed. His mother said that he didn’t like it because it was ‘a sitting-down job’. A nice succinct statement – one can see where he got his rough-and-ready wit of the Apprentice boardroom scenes.
Nonetheless, something really had to change before this young man was entirely broken by boredom. Many a man has taken an unsatisfying job, and somewhere along the line lost his spark and with it his ambition to leave, but Sugar was not about to get stuck in such a rut. To earn extra money, he took on a string of Saturday jobs, including one at a chemist’s in Walthamstow. Another came at a clothes shop in London’s West End. Here, he could perform tasks far more suited to his energetic, salesman nature. Soon, he was to leave his weekday job in the civil service to take a similar role at a British steel firm. Here, at least, his colleagues were more his type. There were banter and humour, two qualities that Sugar adored but that he had
found entirely lacking in Whitehall. However, with their encouragement, he was soon to quit this job, too. He was ready to take his next step on the ladder to multimillionaire fortune. And, given his business success and the worldwide fame he found as the star of a television show, it proved to be an entirely prescient step.
Malcolm Cross was an East End television engineer. Sugar had known him for several years, after the pair originally met in the youth clubs of Stamford Hill. During his lunch breaks from his Saturday shift at the chemist’s, Sugar would meet up with Cross and, as they ate their snacks, the pair discussed how they could break into business together. These were days of dreams and ambition. Soon, they had a plan to make a nice little earner together. They would buy cheap television sets that had seen better days; Cross would repair them and generally give them a spruce-up, then Sugar would use his skills and charms as a salesman to sell them on at a tidy profit.
The pair called their fledgling business venture ‘Maurann’, which was a combination of ‘Maureen’, the name of Cross’s wife, and ‘Ann’, Sugar’s girlfriend. Sugar even printed headed notepaper for Maurann, and they hired a room to store the televisions. It soon became something of a legend in the family. His brother Derek noticed an advertisement that said ‘TV for sale’ stuck to a local hot-drinks stall, and quickly realised where he recognised the phone number from: it was his mother’s. As for Fay herself, she dubbed the repaired televisions ‘old monstrosities’, but that did not stop her from doing her part to help her beloved son in his venture. She would show customers up the stairs of the home to where the television was on display, and, if people came back to complain that the set they had bought was not working, she would simply hand over a refund.
Sir Alan Sugar Page 3