On the 2nd of February 1984, the directors of H C Wall and Co Limited of Worcester all resigned and 4 new directors were appointed me, my father, my mother and Mr Hutchinson. This followed the protracted negotiations when we agreed to buy their company. They operated from a ramshackle shop in Sansome Walk in Worcester. My father was quite keen to be operating from Worcester because he had worked there during the war as a cinema operator.
The shop was clearly unprofitable but by tradition had been kept running and employed two people. One of those was the director, Mrs Wallace who had resigned and there was another lady who also ran the shop. Almost immediately the other lady became ill and it was clearly uneconomic to find somebody else to work at the shop. I concluded rapidly the only thing to do was to close the shop and that meant making the lady redundant. She didn’t like this and appealed to an industrial tribunal. Not knowing any better I rolled up to the industrial tribunal with very little prior preparation, represented the company, and won. I was very proud when during the proceedings the opposing barrister referred to me as his “learned friend”.
The turnover of the organisation was hovering around 150 to 200,000 pounds and that meant it was taking small losses year on year. We were determined to make things better and the key to that was to move to better premises. We looked everywhere but we couldn’t find anything to buy and so regrettably we decided that we would have to buy some land and build our own. This we did on a trading estate called Warndon Trading estate which are the buildings that you see pictured here. I thought then, and still do that they are deeply unattractive.
We wanted to build a single storey building and since the company’s colour was blue we wanted the cladding to be blue. The council decided that for us to get planning that we had to have premises that would be brown with 2 storeys. We had little alternative but to build what they wanted.
Eventually it became apparent that despite my best efforts that we could not sustain the Worcester operation and we sold the premises in June 1998.