The Successful Businessman

I knew I should never make a good businessman when a boy at school sold me his clockwork car and I found that it didn’t work. When I complained to him, he merely hissed, “Caveat emptor. You should have tested it before you bought it.”

So, after I left school, I trained to become an accountant. And I have worked for several very successful businessmen in my time, but none as successful as Bobby.

Bobby came from humble origins in the East End of London. He started off with a small hardware and ironmongery shop near King’s Cross. By the time I began to work for him as his internal accountant he had a chain of five shops in various parts of London and a portfolio of rented-out residential properties. In some ways he was the typical self-made man. He affected a smart suit and tie and spoke as though he’d had elocution lessons over the top of his Cockney accent. Unlike many successful men he was not a womaniser. He had a rather elegant wife—who, it was rumoured, was the daughter of an archdeacon—and two children, a boy and a girl. He controlled his family very much in the same way as he controlled his shops, and he expected them to do well! His wife was an “area organiser” for the Red Cross—if I’ve got that right—and his children were successfully “crammed” so that the boy got into Eton and his daughter into Benenden.

It was while I was working for him in his “head office”, as he called it, over the top of one of his larger shops in Holborn, that I had the opportunity to observe his business methods. He never talked about them, but they became pretty clear to me as time passed. They were: (1) always be at work before everyone else—it sets a good example; (2) always try to buy everything as cheaply as possible and sell it for as much as the market will stand; (3) keep a total grip on all financial matters through weekly accounting and reporting; and (4) be nice to everybody but also firm, if necessary.

And it all seemed to work. He developed a reputation as “one of the nicest people you could wish to deal with”, “fair but firm”, “always looks after his staff”.

I think I knew in advance that he had set his sights higher than opening more hardware shops and buying more houses.

“Got a new banking arrangement, Brian,” he said to me one day. “I’d like you to come out to lunch and meet my new bank manager.”

I suppose I was good “window dressing”; having a chartered accountant on the staff, looking after the accounts.

The lunch took place at the Savoy. Thomas, the new bank manager, looked rather like Bobby. They were both about forty-five, expensively suited, with neat haircuts, and both running slightly to fat, no doubt because of too many business lunches at the Savoy and similar places.

“Bobby, you know that idea I mentioned to you?” Thomas whispered confidentially once we’d ordered. “I think it’s a starter. I talked to the two old boys yesterday and they definitely want to get out and with cash. They have had enough. They want to retire. They say their business was also their Pension Fund.”

“Don’t they want to stay involved at all?”

“No. They want out completely.”

And so, Bobby’s first big deal started. There were many details to be dealt with and it took some time. I think I helped a bit, although he did employ a firm of chartered surveyors and towards the end of the negotiations a large firm of accountants as well to help with the tax problems. Bobby first closed down the ironmongery shops and auctioned off all freeholds, which were owned by his property company. At the same time he disposed of all his residential properties to a property dealer introduced by Thomas, the bank manager. I had a feeling that Thomas was personally well rewarded for this, but any payment was definitely “off the books”. And then Bobby used the proceeds of these sales to buy the shares in the property company run by the “old boys”.

I met the “old boys” once towards the end of these dealings, which of course took several months. They were two brothers who had arrived in England in 1939 from Berlin with what they stood up in and had worked hard over many years to build up their property company, which really was an excellent mix: a small hotel which was let under some complicated management agreement to a hotel company which ran a chain of hotels, a block of up-market flats in Mayfair, and a very decent office block in the City. Thomas’s bank provided a loan to help with the purchase of the shares, which covered the shortfall from the sale of all Bobby’s properties. Even allowing for the interest payable to the bank for the loan, I worked out that Bobby was getting a return of about 10 per cent on his investment at a time when interest rates were about 4 per cent.

Everyone said he’d done a very good deal and that the two “old boys” were delighted to have sold to one purchaser for cash. I was invited to the dinner to celebrate the finalisation of the deal with the “old boys” before they went off to live in the Bahamas with their elaborately dressed wives.

After the dinner, Bobby, still looking very pleased with himself, took me to one side and said, “Brian, you know that there really isn’t going to be the same job for you with me any more. I plan to keep on the existing managing agents and we must have a big firm of accountants to do the accounting and audit with a company like this. What I am going to do is to make over to you some shares in the company, just as I am going to do for my wife and children, and I’ve fixed it so that if you like you can become a partner in the firm of accountants that I had in to advise on the tax and who will deal with the company’s accounts from now on.”

This was all typical of Bobby, as I later came to realise. He’d done a wonderful deal and come out of it with everyone feeling happy. I was now one step removed from his day-to-day business activities but I saw him frequently, as he always wanted me to be “on hand”, as he put it, when he was buying a new property.

“I think you’re my lucky mascot, Brian,” he used to say.

And I was pleased because it gave me a certain amount of clout with the firm of accountants I was now working with. I suppose also that Bobby was something of a father figure for me. I was only in my early thirties at the time.

Bobby never did a bad deal. He seemed to have the knack of almost smelling out someone who wanted to sell cheaply because they were in financial difficulties. But gradually he also developed a reputation with both my firm of accountants and his solicitors of being very mean about their fees. There was a ridiculous joke among the accountants I worked with. “Here comes Bobby in his car. He drives a hard bargain you know!”

He was always kind and pleasant to me, but greed is an insidious thing and it seemed to me that he became meaner and meaner about how much he would pay for any new property. In spite of his success, he was never satisfied.

I suppose it was because several of his friends at Rotary were honoured by the state with OBEs or MBEs that Bobby gradually developed an obsession that he himself deserved an honour. It so happened that I was quite friendly with a young MP representing a London constituency and Bobby was always on the lookout for “networking”, as he called it.

“Look, Brian,” he said, “you know that MP friend of yours. Could you perhaps introduce me to him? I’d like his advice.”

I thought it strange that Bobby would want any advice from a young MP who was a socialist. Bobby, despite his origins, was firmly in the Tory camp. Anyhow, I duly obliged.

A few days later my MP friend phoned me. “Do you know what the old bugger wanted, Brian? Advice on how to land a knighthood—and from me of all people, who doesn’t believe in the honours system.”

“So what did you say?”

“I told him that in addition to his undoubted business success he had to give a lot of money to charity. That normally worked. Then he said, ‘Well, how much?’ and I said, ‘Massive amounts, I should think, if you want to be sure.’”

By now Bobby had a suite of offices in Mayfair from which he ran his business. He had stopped arriving at crack of dawn, as there were very few people in the office to impress. I seemed to spend more and more time there as he had come to rely on me to “check the figures”, as he put it. Whether he thought someone was trying to swindle him I never knew, but my role became increasingly similar to the time when I had been in his “head office” in Holborn. My firm didn’t mind because I put the time I spent with Bobby on my timesheet and he was charged by my firm accordingly. My frequent presence in the office gave me an insight into Bobby’s schemings to get the knighthood.

At first he was very secretive about it all. But then one day he blurted out to me after one of his lunches at the Savoy, “You know, Brian, I’ve been promised a knighthood! I bet you never knew how people got knighthoods.”

I shook my head and looked bewildered. I didn’t wish to divulge what the MP had told me.

“Look, I’ll show you the correspondence,” he said. “Doris, bring me the K file, would you please,” he shouted down the intercom.

Doris, his mousy little secretary, hustled in with a small file which she handed to him.

“Look, I’ll take you through it.”

And so one by one he handed me the letters. I was horrified. I suppose I’d never thought about such things in detail before. But there were letters from various well-known people encouraging him and saying they would support him and suggesting suitable charities to donate to. Finally, at the end of it all he passed me a list of all the donations he had made. It amounted to a great deal of money, but, in the context of how much money I knew he had made over the years it was not enormous.

“I’m pretty well assured of getting it and hearing soon,” he said confidently. “Any day now.”

It was in fact the next day. I was in his office again because of the new purchase he was making of a large block of flats in St John’s Wood. We were talking when Doris brought in the post. Several of the letters were marked “Private & Confidential” so had not been opened. Bobby rose from his chair, fastened on those, his eyes gleaming, and grasping one he tore it open with his paper knife.

“This will be it!” he said loudly.

As he read the letter he looked stunned. He sank back into his chair and turned the letter face down on his desk, then got up from his chair and started walking up and down the room. Then he went to the desk again, picked the letter up and flourished it in front of my face.

“Look at it, Brian! Read it.”

The letter announced that he had been awarded an OBE.

I handed it back to him. “I’m sorry if you’re disappointed,” I said.

“There must be some mistake. There must be!”

I’d never seen him so upset before and thought it best to say “Sorry” and quietly disappear for a while. As I walked slowly down Curzon Street I felt quite sorry for Bobby. Obsessed with a lifetime of buying things cheaply, for once he’d apparently not paid enough.