What You See Is What You Get: My Autobiography (18 page)

Harold said, 'Yes. Alan's explained everything clearly - there's no problem. He'll pay off the monthly payments. He's earning good money.'

This embarrassed my dad into turning up on Saturday and signing the HP agreement for the car. I fully understand his mentality and I can appreciate his hesitation. That said, at the end of the day, he
did
back me.

*

Ann and I had two engagement parties. The first, organised by Ann's parents at their house, was for close family only. The second, I organised myself in a small community hall in the flats, so we could invite our friends. An engagement party was traditional, but in my eyes it was a bit of a waste of time, not to mention money. A low-key event was best, as far as I was concerned. I've long since realised that parties are not for me, particularly if they're in my honour - I find them a bit embarrassing and intimidating.

Ann and I were married on 28 April 1968 in Great Portland Street Synagogue. Johnnie pulled out all the stops and laid on a wonderful wedding reception in the Tavistock Rooms, catered by a gentleman named Bert Barnett.

Again, while I'd have to say it was a memorable and wonderful occasion,
I couldn't wait till it was all over. Ann didn't share that view. As a bride, she was very excited. In fact, on the morning of our wedding, she woke up with a howler of a sore throat and couldn't speak. It must have been nerves, as she didn't do too badly later in the day.

At the end of the evening, I shook Johnnie's hand and thanked him very much for laying on a great wedding. Then Ann and I shot off to the Hilton where I'd booked a room for the night.

The next day, just before going on honeymoon to Cala Mayor, Majorca, we popped in to see my mum (Dad was at work). Mum seemed a bit depressed, and I couldn't quite work out why. Looking back now, I think it was the reality hitting home that her last baby had left the nest.

We spent two weeks in Majorca and were treated very nicely by the other hotel guests, who realised we were honeymooners. However, by the end of the first week, I was running out of money fast, having underestimated just how much I'd need. There were no credit cards in those days and certainly the Spanish weren't going to take a cheque.

I phoned Daphne, long-distance, reversing the charges. In those days, it was a nightmare - you had to pre-book the phone call to get a connection. I was stuck in the hotel room for about four hours before the connection was put through. Daphne was concerned at my predicament and she took a risk and stuck PS20 in an envelope, sending it by airmail to our hotel. It turned up about three days before we left and got me right out of jail.

Just before we got married, we'd seen a house we liked in Marlands Road, Clayhall and bought it for PS4,700. We got a mortgage with the Hearts of Oak Building Society with repayments of PS32 per month, or PS8 a week, as I was still thinking in those days. The house needed some renovation, including a brand-new kitchen.

Izzy, who had loads of grandchildren, had made it his policy to pay for their bedroom suites whenever one of them got married. He did the same for us as his wedding present. What's more, he made sure he was there to scrutinise the work of the poor sod who fitted it.

While all the refurbishing was going on, we stayed at Daphne and Harold's, not far away. They made us very welcome, but Ann was keen to settle down in our own place. Eventually, we moved in. Ann was delighted to be there and I was quite proud of the fact that we had our own house, considering this was not the norm for young married couples at the time. The house was semi-detached with a small front garden and a large garden at the rear which led to a small private road that serviced the houses with garages, all of which were located at the ends of the adjacent gardens.

Ann often jokes with me about my attempts to put into practice some of the bricklaying and building skills I'd picked up at Brooke House School. In a mad moment, I decided one day that I would make a concrete path running down the centre of the garden leading to the end, where I planned to build a garage. I spent a whole Sunday digging it out and putting in broken bricks as hardcore. Then, later in the week, a cement mixer came along and poured in a load of concrete. Ann named this path 'the M1' because I'd made it about 5ft wide! Considering the width of the whole garden was only 25ft, the path stood out like a sore thumb.

Nevertheless, the neighbours were quite impressed by my handiwork. They were even more impressed when I decided to build, from a kit, a garage with an up-and-over door. I saw the kit advertised in a national newspaper. The advert stated that a man and his wife could easily assemble it in a day - they forgot to mention that the wife had to be a twenty-stone Russian weightlifter. First, a concrete base had to be laid - a cinch. Now to build the shell of the garage. I managed to do this myself and, with a bit of help from Daphne's Harold, we hung the up-and-over door. Good job. Again, tremendous admiration from the neighbours.

The reason for building the garage was that I had now acquired a Dor-mobile van. With Harold's help, I racked out the van internally, so that I could carry my stock onboard and deliver the goods - effectively a mobile warehouse. It would have been risky leaving the van parked outside the house with all the stuff in it, so a garage was essential. It was also a requirement of the insurance company.

Before getting the Dormobile, I used to store my stuff in a lean-to behind the kitchen - until one day the whole lot got nicked. The insurance company was not interested - I wasn't insured for running a business from home. When I listed all the stuff stolen, they told me to forget it - they weren't paying. I lost about PS2,000 worth of stock, virtually the net asset value of the company at the time, a real knockback That's what prompted me to get the Dormobile, alarm it up and get insurance cover. But it also put me into debt. Luckily, by then I had suppliers who would extend me credit and I was able to replenish my stocks and get going again, simply by using the cash flow of sales to Peter to pay Paul.

The Dormobile turned out to be a temporary measure, as it was becoming increasingly clear that I needed an office. Having expanded my customer base all over the country, I was spending more and more time sending parcels off. This was something that I couldn't really do from home. Plus, I was starting to get repeat orders without having to chase. Customers would ring me at
home, but I'd be out and Ann would be at work, so I was losing business - there were no mobiles in those days.

Luckily, I was dealing with a gentleman by the name of Freddie Ezekiel, a small-time importer who sold me radios now and again. He'd taken a lease on premises at 388 St John's Street, Clerkenwell, but had soon realised he didn't actually need the whole building. I negotiated a deal with him that allowed me to rent the ground floor and the first floor. The front room of the ground floor I made into a showroom, the back room I made into a strongroom, fully alarmed, and I used the first floor as an office. Freddie kept the second floor.

And who was to be my first employee, to man the station? I told my dad I'd like him to come and work for me for PS20 a week clear. This was a good wage, considering he was earning PS15 a week clear at the time.

Although he could see I had a nice little business and I'd already bought my own house, Dad's cautious nature kicked in. He was hesitant to accept, worried that my success might not last. Eventually, I convinced him and he took the unprecedented step of announcing to his colleagues at the garment factory that he was
leaving
- something no one ever did.

'Why are you leaving, Nat?' they asked.

'Well, I've got a better opportunity that's come my way,' he explained.

At the age of sixty-two, having worked for more than forty-five years in a sweat-shop environment, struggling for money, worrying whether he'd have any work the following week, it must have been a moment of glory for him to be able to tell them, effectively, 'Stick your job where the sun doesn't shine.'

Dad manned the premises at St John's Street, answered the phone and wrapped the parcels. I wouldn't say we were tearing busy, but I was easily able to pay him. And it was useful for me to have him go and open up in the morning while I went out selling with my samples.

Occasionally, we would have customers visit the premises. He would proudly come downstairs and walk into the meeting, as if to say, 'Right, okay, what's going on here?'

The visitors would look up and I would say, 'Yeah, that's my father - he's looking after the place for me.'

There was another great task my father performed at St John's Street. Freddie Ezekiel's wife, who worked with him, was pregnant. She worked right up to the last moment - and I literally mean the last moment: her waters broke while she was on the premises! Freddie was out at the time, so she screamed down the stairs. The only person in the building was my father, who sprung into action and organised an ambulance for her.

Freddie didn't know what had been going on until he got back a couple of hours later. When he heard the news, he rushed to the hospital. Apparently, there were some complications with the birth, but due to Dad's prompt actions, the baby was safely delivered. Freddie and his wife didn't stop thanking my dad for at least a year afterwards. They even bought him a present.

As well as being a supplier of mine, Freddie also became a supplier to Johnnie. It was interesting to watch the two of them whenever Johnnie came down to negotiate for stuff. Freddie Ezekiel was an orthodox Jew, so when the pair of them got together they were both in heaven, pub-quizzing on which days they could work and which days they couldn't.

It was at the St John's Street premises that the turning point for A M S Trading Company came.

Learning What People Want and Developing a Bullshit Radar

1969-72

One of my suppliers at the time was K & K Electronics in Roman Road. It was run by Mr Phil Kaplan and another chap called Gerry, who walked about with this air of superiority and called himself Phil's partner. I was never really clear whether he
was
his partner or not. Anyway, Gerry specialised in more up-market items, one of which was something known as a 'plinth and cover'.

Around 1969, the hi-fi stereo market was starting to grow. Instead of buying old-fashioned mono record-players, people were starting to play their records on a stereo system, which comprised a record deck, an amplifier and a pair of speakers. The record deck would be mounted on a small wooden plinth with a tinted plastic cover on top and looked very smart and sophisticated.

The plinth and cover was essentially a lump of wood and a lump of plastic. K & K imported them from Denmark and sold them to me for about PS3 10s wholesale. I was able to sell a few to the smaller retailers who didn't know K & K, but most were buying directly. The margin was really slim and the item was quite bulky - just fifty of them would fill up the whole van - but they were selling well. This annoyed me because I instinctively felt that they didn't cost much to make. I was sure there was something for me in this market.

I was getting pissed off selling stuff and just making a few pennies as a wholesaler. I needed to find a breakthrough where I could make some
real
margin. I decided to investigate making plinths and covers myself. The wood side of things was no problem. I explained to Johnnie and Izzy what I wanted made and showed them a sample. Having spent all their lives in the cabinet-making industry, they said, 'It's easy - it's a piece of nothing. We know twenty people in the East End who can make them for you.'

'How much do you think they'd cost?' I asked.

'That? The plinth section? No more than a pound.'

'You're kidding me. They're charging me three pounds for it.' A total rip-off.

Johnnie took me to see some fellow in the East End. I gave him a sample plinth and sketched on a piece of paper how I wanted it modified - I had an idea how to enhance the Danish design and make it look a bit bigger. At the time, the best-selling record deck was the Garrard SP25 and in order to mount this on the plinth, I gave the cabinet maker a technical drawing showing where to put the mounting positions. Within a couple of days, the guy had made me some samples. I negotiated him down to 17s 6d and ordered 1,000 pieces.

I'd located someone in Highgate who could make plastic lids for me using the vacuum-forming process. This entailed taking sheets of tinted Perspex (which they bought from ICI), cutting them to size, sticking them in a hot rig and, by using suction, shaping them. The cost was 18s each.

So, with a 17s 6d plinth and an 18s cover, I was in business for less than two quid. I started selling loads of them. It made hustling around buying transistor radios from Gulu and others look a bit silly, but I carried on running the two different businesses at the same time.

One of the customers I picked up from Henson was Rex Radio in Kilburn. Rex, the owner of the shop, was a nice old bloke who had two sons, one of whom ran a second shop a few doors away which sold high-quality Bang & Olufsen equipment. I sold his son some plinths and covers. I can clearly remember being in Rex Radio on 20 July 1969, watching the Apollo 11 moon-landing on one of the black-and-white TVs in the shop.

During my travels in the Edgware Road and Tottenham Court Road areas, I bumped into S. J. Robinson, my ex-boss at Robuck, who had taken a new job working for a Russian company based in Praed Street, another place renowned for wholesale and retail electronic items. The company, Technical & Optical Equipment, imported Rega radios from Russia and sold them exclusively to Headquarters & General, a large mail-order and retail organisation, famously run by a Major Collins. I think he called himself Major simply because the name Headquarters & General implied they sold goods of military standard at bargain prices. They sold things like tents, lanterns, army-style boots, anoraks and the like.