by Sugar, Alan
He told me he had a Wolseley.
Wow, a Wolseley! That was a great car, real quality. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I had visions of pulling up at my flats and parking the Wolseley out the front in Upper Clapton Road. It would look out of place amidst the Ford Populars and Ford Anglias. I grabbed the job. It turned out that the Wolseley was a Baby Wolseley, an oddball of a car – it looked a bit like a Beetle with an elongated bonnet – and it was second hand. Still, it was better than a minivan.
I duly resigned from Robuck, much to the disappointment of Mr Korobuck. Time to explain to my dad that I was about to change my job yet again. I had a good patter by now – it was all about career advancement and being paid a fair amount for the job I was doing. I told him that I’d been diddled by Robuck and that this new firm was paying me much more money. Thus the transition to my fourth job in two years came without the usual recriminations.
I spent the first couple of weeks out on the road with John Henson, learning the ropes. Then, on the Friday of the second week, I collected a bunch of samples to put in the boot of the Wolseley so I could be off and running the following Monday morning.
The storeman there told me, on the quiet, that the Hensons were the most suspicious people you could ever come across. They assumed that everyone was going to nick stuff off them. Indeed, Peter Henson was rather hesitant in giving me the samples and told me I should bring them back at the end of each day. I told him this was totally impractical. If I was selling in Streatham at five o’clock in the afternoon, I wasn’t going to drag myself all the way across London to Finchley to deposit the samples with them. I said, ‘If you don’t trust me, then I don’t think I should take the job.’ It was a bit of a gamble, but I stood my ground. I also suggested: ‘If you list down every sample I’ve got, then once a week, when I come in, you can do a spot check to see that they are still there.’ To me it was a no-brainer, and he finally conceded.
Working for Henson was a great eye-opener. Naïvely, I had believed that their products were stock items which I could continue to sell. I soon found out that this was not the case when I successfully sold some Remington razors to Gamages – I ended up getting a rucking from Henson Senior! He called me into his office and told me that I shouldn’t have made promises of being able to supply 200.
That’s when I learned that Henson did not manufacture anything. They simply bought parcels of items from various places; there was no consistency in the product range. This was not a problem for me, but, as I said to old man Henson, it would have been nice to have been told about the business model when I joined.
In a way it was interesting because there were always different products coming along. Some weeks we had electric fans, transistor radios, mini tape recorders and loudspeakers; other weeks we’d get a parcel of Hoover toasters or Remington razors.
As time went by, I could easily identify which customers would be interested in the new items. One day I was told there was a parcel of 250 Hoover toasters coming in. A company called Avon Electric in Hanwell, Ealing were one of the first firms to break the mould by selling things at discount prices. As I’ve mentioned, in those days almost everything was sold at the recommended retail price. Avon Electric got round this by claiming that they were a ‘wholesale club’ which offered discounts to its members. You became a member by paying £1 which, of course, was knocked off the item you were buying.
I called the boss at Avon Electric and told him that I had 250 Hoover toasters.
‘What price are they? What’s the model number?’ he asked.
I told him to hold on, asked Henson senior and relayed the details down the phone. I sold the toasters on the spot, in front of the boss, hung up the phone and said, ‘There you are, they’re sold.’
Do you think I got any thanks? No. Not even a ‘well done’. Instead it was just ‘Okay followed by, ‘You didn’t offer him any settlement discount, did you?’
I said, ‘That’s a matter you’ll have to sort out with him when you deliver the goods.’
Henson and sons were not very complimentary. As with S. J. Robinson, you never got a pat on the back for selling, and sometimes you’d receive bollockings when you’d done well!
Who knows? Maybe I picked up my traits from them. Perhaps that’s what you do as a boss. It’s certainly miles away from the schmooze culture which exists nowadays, with bosses or managers spending half their time dishing out insincere compliments. I certainly missed out on that. Information on this is available, for those interested, in the Harvard Business School manual.
Working for Henson, sometimes I would literally do the deal, deliver the goods and collect the money. On one occasion, they’d bought thousands of seven-inch vinyl records under the Blue Beat label. Blue Beat was a kind of Jamaican music popular during the sixties, but the producers had overcooked it a bit and we had boxes and boxes of these records lying around waiting to be sold.
Fortunately, I’d had dealings with customers in Brixton’s Coldharbour Lane. One of them, Clint Atkins, a big, burly black guy from Jamaica, was a real character. Clint couldn’t consume the volume we had, but he liked the product. He gave me some tips on other places in Brixton and Streatham where I could sell them, and I did quite well.
Months later, I visited a customer and couldn’t help noticing some Blue Beat boxes piled up in the corner of his shop. I’d had nightmares about those bloody boxes, so spotting them was easy. I asked the man, ‘What are you doing with those records there?’
‘Don’t ask!’ he said. ‘I got lumbered with these things. I thought they were a good idea, but basically it’s Caribbean music and my clientele are not into it. Plus, I don’t have the facilities to put them on display or play them, so they’re the most useless commodity you can think of. I’d just like to get rid of the blooming things.’
‘How many have you got?’ I asked.
‘About ten thousand.’
‘How much do you want for them?’
‘You can have them for a hundred quid.’
I asked him if I could use the phone in his office to call my boss. In fact, I called Clint, who was always asking me if I could get any more, and did a deal with him. The difference in price between what I bought them and sold them for was £80. Now, considering I was earning £20 a week plus commission and this transaction had been done in a quarter of an hour or so, I thought this was a fantastic bit of business.
The next day, I got Henson’s storeman to come out with me in the van to pick up the records and deliver them to Clint. I told the bloke we purchased them from that my firm would send them a cheque tomorrow. We drove to Clint’s, delivered the records and he duly paid up, which was unusual for him as he liked a bit of credit.
Back at Finchley, I proudly walked into the boss’s office and said, ‘Here’s a cheque for a hundred and eighty pounds. You’ve got to write a cheque out to Mr So-and-so for a hundred.’
‘Why’s that?’ he said.
I told him I’d found some records, bought them and sold them, and that £80 was the profit. To my shock and amazement, he said, ‘You should have sold them for much more.’
I was devastated. ‘Mr Henson, I make twenty quid a week plus commission and I’ve just made you eighty pounds in the course of a day – is that all you’ve got to say?’
‘But you knew the price of these records was much more, so why did you sell them so cheaply?’
I could not believe I was getting a bollocking. I walked out terribly upset at this situation.
My travels around retailers while working for Henson coincided with the dawning of the hire-purchase (HP) era, which made it easy for consumers to buy large assets such as television sets. At that time, there was a boom in TV sales, as people were converting from the 405-line system to the 625-line system in preparation for colour television (a bit like the switchover from analogue to digital). Also, a lot of people had TV sets capable of receiving the BBC only, while others had a separate tuner on the side which enabled them to watch
ITV as well. Now you could buy TV sets with combined tuners capable of picking up both.
The way the hire-purchase system worked was that the retailers would take the customer’s old TV in part-exchange, which acted as the mandatory deposit needed to embark upon the HP agreement. The side-effect of this was that many small retailers were stockpiling old TVs.
On visiting a retailer in Holloway, I noticed he had all these TVs stacked up.
I asked him, ‘What’s all this stuff piled up everywhere?’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘We can’t swing a cat in here. We’d like to get rid of it all.’
I thought of my mate Malcolm, who was a TV engineer. He could fix the sets and I could flog them. I said, ‘I’ll take them.’
‘Great,’ he said. ‘You can have them. Free of charge. Get rid of them.’
To be honest, I was doing a bit of moonlighting here because I was on Henson’s time. I gave Malcolm a call that night and asked him whether he’d be able to borrow his firm’s Dormobile van.
‘What for?’ he asked.
‘I’ll tell you later.’
We bowled down to this shop the next day and loaded up the Dormobile to the brim with these tellies. Unfortunately, we had nowhere to store them, so we ended up humping them up the stairs to my flat and putting them all in my brother’s old bedroom/my ex-darkroom. My mum watched this procedure. ‘What’s all this rubbish?’ she moaned.
‘Don’t worry, Mum, I’ll tell you about it later. Malcolm and I are going into a little business sideline here.’
We also cleared out a Rumbelows shop in Walthamstow, taking more TVs. This time, before lugging them up the stairs, we sorted through them in the playground. We only wanted the ones that had a dual tuner to pick up BBC and ITV. I can’t remember how we disposed of the unwanted TVs – I’m sure it was by some means the Green people would be up in arms about nowadays.
Malcolm started repairing them, while I advertised them in the Exchange & Mart as an ‘unwanted item’ supposedly belonging to someone getting married and moving out (well, I would one day). When a punter showed up, I’d take a reconditioned TV into my bedroom, put a small V-aerial on the top and switch it on.
My mother was going nuts. Strange people were coming into the flat and humping TV sets down the stairs, with the neighbours watching inquisitively, wondering what was going on. Quite apart from that, I must have been breaking a hundred laws, like trading from a council flat.
We were doing so well that Malcolm’s repair rate couldn’t keep up with my sales rate. Malcolm is a very nice man and we’re still great friends to this day, but, to put it politely, I must say he lacked the killer instinct, the passion to want to make money. He’d jog along, while I’d be badgering him. ‘Malcolm, I need some more stock. Can you come round on Friday and fix a few more because I’ve got a lot of appointments on Saturday.’
He told me he couldn’t. He spent every Friday night with Maureen and he didn’t have time to do the TVs.
I was disappointed. I was sharing the proceeds with him fifty-fifty, so I wasn’t legging him over. We were making quite a few quid out of this venture, but he wouldn’t budge on his Friday nights, despite me pestering him and telling him we’d already spent money on advertising. The Exchange & Mart came out on Thursdays and I’d have to turn away all the customers the advert had drummed up. It was frustrating telling punters the TV had been sold.
The problem was that we couldn’t afford to take any commercial premises and were operating from home. On the other hand, had the TVs been on display in commercial premises, customers wouldn’t have perceived they were getting the bargain of some individual’s unwanted item.
My brother Derek once told me he was walking along Kingsland High Road and saw an advert in a newsagent’s window for a second-hand TV. He thought to himself, ‘I recognise that number – Upper Clapton 7875.’ He phoned home to ask about it and my mum and dad told him what was going on. Derek thought it was a tremendous coincidence; all it told me was that it pays to advertise.
On the subject of Kingsland High Road, Malcolm and I sometimes used to buy our valves and spare parts from an electrical shop there. One Saturday, there was a man looking at a television in the window. I said to him, ‘What are you looking at?’
He said, ‘That second-hand TV there.’
I said, ‘I’ve got a much better one than that.’ This was a touch of Mr Shuster. ‘It’s made by Ultra and it’s much more modern – it’s got all the tuners, the lot. Plus, that thing there is twenty quid – the one I’ve got is fifteen quid.’
I convinced the guy to jump in the car with me and I took him up to the flat. My mother opened the door and saw my new friend, a rather tall Nigerian, an unusual addition to a Jewish home on a Sabbath, when the ritual lunch was about to be served.
‘Who’s this?’ she said. ‘Shabbos lunch is ready.’
‘Yeah, don’t worry, Mum. He’s not here for lunch; he’s just come to buy my telly.’
Mum shrugged, and I demo’d the telly to the punter, who was delighted with it. The only problem was that he didn’t have a vehicle, so I asked him to give me another quid and I’d take him home, somewhere up Lea Bridge Road.
Thanks to Mr Shuster, that deal paid off very nicely, though Mum was not a happy bunny. In fact, the whole TV venture came to a sudden end due to Malcolm’s lack of ambition and me getting a flea in my ear from Mum.
*
In my travels around London working for Henson, I always allocated Thursday as my day to do the City. On Thursday lunchtimes, I would pull up at Liverpool Street, where Ann worked, to meet up with her for half an hour or so. This became a regular routine. Ann worked in a first-floor hairdressing salon and when she came out to the car, the other girls would chuck hairclips out the window and we would hear them bouncing off the roof.
One Thursday, unusually, one of Ann’s colleagues came downstairs from the salon and knocked on my car door. I opened the window and she gave me an envelope. It contained a Dear John letter. It was from Ann, telling me that she wanted to break off our relationship. My heart sank. I wondered what I’d done wrong.
A few moments later, Ann came down and sat in the car with me. She looked embarrassed and nervous – there was no real eye contact. She said she was sorry about the letter, but that’s exactly what the position is. She said something like: ‘We’re getting too serious – we’re too young to be tied down.’
I drove off gutted. I don’t remember where I went, but I know I didn’t do any work that afternoon. The whole thing had come as a bolt out of the blue. I tracked down one of my friends, either Geoff or Steve, to tell them what had happened. I wondered if maybe Steve could find out from Sandra whether there was a deeper reason behind this.
There was – but it’s amazing how oblivious I was at the time.
4
‘Who is Going to Pay You on Friday?’
The A M S Trading Company
1966–8
Throughout our early courtship, I spent a bit of time at Ann’s house, getting to know her family. Johnnie Simons, Ann’s father, was a very tall man with an air of authority – you wouldn’t want to get into an argument with him. He was very domineering and overpowering. This was in stark contrast to Ann’s mother, Rita, who had a really soft nature. She was a wonderful, supportive wife and went along with whatever her husband said. My early conversations with Ann’s father usually revolved around religion. Johnnie would lecture me on how religious the family was in general; how they observed all the Jewish traditions of running a kosher home; how he attended shul (synagogue) regularly on Saturdays and observed every Jewish holiday.
In fact, whereas most people chat about their football team or their hobbies when making small talk, Johnnie would talk about religion – I think it’s fair to say that was his hobby. The problem was that if you didn’t comply with his religious standards, then you were effectively a pleb. There’s no other way to describe it. I obviously fell into that category because he would ask
questions like, ‘Does your mother keep a kosher home? Do you go to shul? Do you go regularly?’
Being Honest Al, I would reply, ‘Well, not really. My mum buys kosher food, but to be honest we don’t go to all the trouble of separate knives and forks and all that stuff. And no, the last time I was in shul it was for someone’s wedding. I don’t go. I find it boring. In fact, sorry to say, I don’t believe in God.’
I believe we’re right to be proud of our religion and traditions, but people should be able to choose the level to which they comply. In hindsight, my responses to Johnnie’s inquisition were quite mature, especially bearing in mind that there are plenty of even stricter Jews who would think that Johnnie was a heathen. However, my answers went down like lead balloons.
There were occasions when I felt I was being frowned upon due to my inability to debate kashrus. It’s not as if the Simons family was anything special. They were people who came from the same place as my family did – from the East End of London – but they were part of the circle of Jews who wanted to try to elevate themselves and, as such, maybe felt they were somewhat superior.
Sometimes, when I visited Ann’s house, other family members would be there. Johnnie had many brothers and sisters. Uncle Sammy and Uncle Alf were really nice fellows. They used to play the game of being ultra-religious, but still managed to be down to earth. You could have a laugh with these guys – they didn’t project themselves as something they weren’t. It was quite funny when the family got together. It was like watching a pub quiz, seeing them argue over which Sedrah (portion of the Jewish law) was going to be read this Saturday.
On the other hand, three of Johnnie’s sisters felt they were a cut above. When you spoke to them, you could be forgiven for thinking you were talking to royalty. I’m afraid that Johnnie also sailed close to the royalty bracket. He’d broken free of his old East End values and, as I said, Rita would faithfully go along with him. In some of my conversations with Ann’s wider family, I would have them laughing at my carry-ons, and get them arguing over my views on religion. I remember on one occasion, I apologised for being hoarse and explained that I had a sore throat. Rita heard me and chimed in. ‘Froat?’ she asked. ‘Is that how you say throat – froat?’