Rowing Against the Tide - A career in sport and politics

by Brandon-Bravo, Martin

  It wasn’t all work, for apart from joining the local rowing club, I found myself with a group of men of my age, give or take a year or two, from the Jewish Youth Club, who played cards on a Tuesday evening. We took it in turn to play host, and to provide the food that along with the banter was certainly for me, far more fun than the card game. One Tuesday, in I think the late fifties, the stock market had crashed, and I had been dabbling in small purchases through a local broker. So small were my activities that I dealt with the receptionist rather than one of the partners. I was pretty shattered, for whilst it was only around four or five hundred pounds in shares, it was all I had. Rick Stump assured me that I should not worry, for after all, shares were for the long term and they would recover. The fact that he had also lost a lot was little comfort. We played a game of Auction Solo, and if you bid five tricks or more, you had to cover the kitty in the middle, which on that evening stood at some two pounds ten shillings. I had a good hand, and hesitated to bid and cover the kitty. I’d hesitated so long, that one of the group, Brian Appleby, who later became a Circuit Judge, got on to me, with “the come on, bid or pass, but don’t hold the game up” Thinking of how much I’d lost that day, worrying about the tiny kitty on the table seemed ridiculous and I just had hysterics, and eventually explained to the gang the days disaster on the Stock Exchange. However the following morning I rang the receptionist to see what was happening, and she assured me that whatever had triggered the crash that Tuesday, the market had bounced back to where it had been before the crash. Great I said, sell the lot. She said it would take time for they were all small bits and pieces of holdings. She came back at around three that afternoon, and asked what did I know that the brokers didn’t ? I asked why, she said, “well you’ve lost little more than the costs of selling, and after I was clear, the market had crashed again and was lower than it had been at close on the Tuesday”. I had to explain that I had just finished reading the Lanny Budd series by Upton Sinclair, where in one of the books, the story of the Wall Street crash of 1929 featured, and the concept of the dead cat bounce became notorious. I got out before the cat came down a second time.

  One other card evening that sticks in my mind, was when we were at the home of one of the crowd, Stanley Goldman who ran what we called a “swag” shop. He sold all sorts of small things, toys, trinkets, general domestic stuff, and we used his stock when we ran a fund raising Tombola stall. It was amazing how many small prizes you could get for just ten pounds, to ensure the stall was well provisioned. The room we played in had a large, then fashionable, mirror over the mantelpiece, with another large mirror on another wall.

  We had been playing for a while when I realised that Stanley, and indeed others, could if they took the trouble, see the cards of others in the mirrors around the table. We gave him a lot of stick over what he claimed was an innocent error, but we gathered his long playing records and stacked them across the mantelpiece and along the beading or dado rail round the room, to ensure fair play. I can’t pinpoint the date, but I do remember that Shirley Bassey was the young rising star at the time, and one of the LPs was hers which included Kiss Me Honey Honey, the song that hit the headlines at that time.

  The youth club was a useful link within the Jewish community in Nottingham, and it was frequented by many of the older members, as well as youngsters. On one of my weekends back home in London, my father asked if I’d met any nice people in the community, and I said that of course there were the usual Cohens, Goldbergs etc, but had also met two brothers by the name of Sells. My father thought for a moment and said that I should ask when I met them again, if their real name was either Lopez or Gomez Elzader. If they were Lopez, just shake his hand and say nice to meet you cousin. A few weeks later at a gathering at the club, the brothers were there, the question was put, and they duly owned up to being Sephardic as myself. Now the community in Nottingham were almost entirely rooted in the exodus from Europe in the early 1900s and the thirties, and were Ashkenazi’s. There had always been a little tension between themselves and the much earlier settlers, the Sephardim, and the “Sells” had thought best to keep it quiet. There was quite a discussion that followed, but the biggest laugh was when one of the girls, Valerie Bentley, said that now it was all in the open, her family were also Sephardic. The question promptly was asked, what had been their family name. She brought gales of joshing when she admitted that had her father not changed the family name, she would have been Valeresa de Fonseca de Pimentel.

  Around 1955 or 56, Rick had given me the chance to buy a small stake in the business, and Raymond Usher readily gave me an overdraft to be able to buy the stock he offered. That small stake was the added incentive to stay and help make the business grow. The business did well and in 1970 we sold a majority stake to a major private company Readsons of Manchester. Rick had had a real cancer scare a couple of years before, and sensibly wanted to secure his family’s future, should that scare become a reality. There then followed a reverse takeover by Richard Stump Ltd of a public company Hall and Earl. That gave us extra manufacturing units to take under our wing, a small one in Cwmbran, one in Newcastle a third in Chester le Street, plus a knitting unit in Leicester and a dyeing and finishing company. The largest manufacturing unit was the Durham Company which I visited on a fortnightly basis, but the staff there were surprised that I took the trouble to walk round the factory greeting everyone. What had been the regular routine in our Nottingham units, simply had never happened under the previous Durham management, yet was just the normal and right thing to do if good industrial relations were to be maintained. It turned out that all such matters previously went through the union, and since their representative was based in Loughborough, it was clear why problems took time to iron out. We’d never had such problems in our Nottingham factories, for on the contrary, our staff who were picketed every few years by the clothing and textile union representatives, always asked that I send them away. I made clear they had the legal right to try to sign the staff up, and we would not stand in their way if they wished to do so, but since we had good working relations with all our staff, no one ever signed up. Every six months, we gathered in the factory canteen, and set out where the company stood, what the prospects were, and so forth, and we found we ran a happy ship.

  Rick was a true entrepreneur, and when it was clear that knitted fabrics were coming more and more into fashion, and knowing that yarn and knitting had been part of my textile studies, it was a case of my finding a firm of commission knitters, buying yarn, and producing our own fabrics to offer M & S. To make sure M & S bought into those plans, he bought a small company in London who specialised in knitted dress-wear, and on the basis of their range showed we could supply them with both woven and knitted garments. That purchase took us into the typical West End Fashion World, and by 1964, when I married my wife Sally, she was able to go down to London during the showing time, and model the range for us. It had a double benefit, for the samples having been worn, or rejected for whatever reason, they could not be sold, and she had first choice of whatever she fancied. I’m sure my friends in Nottingham were convinced I’d married an heiress, for she certainly was one of the best dressed around, and bear in mind Nottingham was reputed to have the best looking girls in the country!

  We’d met in the most odd of circumstances at a Jazz Night at the Trent Bridge Inn, in the autumn of 1962. M&S had recently persuaded us and a number of their dress manufacturers to handle a very small and uneconomic contract of upmarket garments for a selected number of top stores. It was the brainchild of a daughter of one of the directors, who could not be denied the chance to show what she could do, and we as manufacturers were in no position to refuse. The fabric allocated to us was great in appearance, but an absolute nightmare to handle. It was an American foulard using an artificial Arnell fibre, so woven that it frayed the moment it was cut. We feared that from cutting room to machine floor, the garments would be one or two sizes smaller than planned. Our engineer solved the problem by se
tting a hot wire into the edging machines, so sealing the edges that we could avoid fraying until the garment had been put together. Because of the length of our cutting tables, we were always left with cloth lengths quite suitable for single dressmaking, and we had regular sales to our staff at a tiny fraction of cost, for whatever it raised, and it raised quite substantial sums, it was better than having to either dump it, or try to sell it to market traders. On this occasion we were only too pleased to sell as much as we could to our staff, even if that meant we only delivered 70% of the contract. The cloth was so distinctive, that when I saw this young slip of a girl sitting with a crowd of hairdressers I knew, all I could say was “Where the hell did you get that cloth”. The girls rallied round and told me not to be sharp with her, after all she was relatively new at their salon and she was only 18. She explained that one of my cutters, instead of giving her a tip each week, bought some of our remnants and every month or so gave her a dress length instead of a tip. The girls all worked for the biggest hairdressing salon in Nottingham, with no less than a staff of 50. We reckoned they were the best looking bunch in town, and we lads used to queue up outside the salon to collect our girlfriends at closing time. I apologised, offered to drive her home, and the rest as they say is history.

  Sally in 1968

  No computer would have put us together, for she was from a farming family, a real county set, and Church of England. I was a Jewish dress manufacturer from the East End of London, so our backgrounds could not have been more different. Yet we hit it off, and after about a year, I did the proper thing and asked her father if we could get engaged. He wanted the weekend to think about it, for clearly there were problems to consider, but having asked if I would wait a year until she was twenty one, I agreed, and the following week we sealed it by choosing a beautiful sapphire ring. We had to face the fact that we could not marry in a Church or Synagogue, so we had a civil wedding in September 1964 in Oundle near to Fotheringhay where my in-laws farmed. Sally understood that over the centuries, if you were born Jewish, whatever you might or might not believe in after that, you would always be known as a Jew. Even Disraeli who was baptised at the age of eleven, was always known as our first Jewish Prime Minister.

  For both of us, our wedding wasn’t just the expected happy day, but a great giggle, for the mix of guests gave us much to laugh about long after the event. The mixture of our families, my business friends and some executives from our various businesses, together with the rowing fraternity and the county set, gave us much to chuckle about. Two of our Jewish directors in one of the subsidiaries that manufactured for Mothercare, could never have been on a farm before, and were confronted by father-in-law’s enormous Hereford bull. They stopped transfixed by the giant equipment the bull had, and were heard to remark, in a way only Jewish people can say it “You can make a living at this?”

  Two views of our house in 1966 (above) and in 2011 (below)

  At that time the Tom Jones black bow worn in the hair by many women was all the rage. When my boss Rick and his wife Lily and daughter Wendy arrived, he parked the car, whilst the two women walked to the house. Mother in Law, just assumed that the black bows indicated they were a couple of the waitresses they’d booked and sent them to the back kitchen. They took it in good part, and had a good laugh, though mother-in-law took some time to get over the embarrassment.

  We decided to honeymoon in the Holy Land, Israel, and did that both as our preferred choice, and to appease my mother in law, who to be fair had only ever met one other Jewish person before, and was staunchly Church of England. She had a very narrow view of her Christianity, and could never accept that Jesus was a Jew. She insisted he couldn’t have been, after all he was a Christian, and no explanation of the history of those times was ever going to change her mind. Over the next couple of years, Sally undertook a period of study to convert to Judaism, for we were determined to be a united family with no religious divisions. We also agreed that if we had children we would bring them up in the Jewish faith, giving them so to speak, a hook to hang their hat on, and what they did when they were adults would be up to them. As it turned out we have two great sons of whom we are justly proud, Paul born in 1967, and Joel in 1971. Both the boys have great families, and we have enormous pleasure and joy in seeing our grandchildren growing up. Our eldest Paul, with an environmental honors degree, after spells in a few jobs and one with RBS, decided he would never work for a corporation again, and is happy running his own gardening business. The youngest made it to Oriel - Oxford - and after a spell in the music industry is now the CEO of the UK branch of Travelzoo, a highly regarded online company in the travel and entertainment business.

  I’d never been overly religious, but going to Israel at that time, certainly gave me a feeling I’d not experienced before. The bible became a history book, rather than just a religious tract, and I read it through on return home. At that time, I believe on a Sunday evening, was a TV programme where a very Jewish sounding David Kossoff, a brilliant actor, sat in on large high backed throne, with children gathered at his feet. He read from his version of the Bible, telling the story of those times in his own way, as perhaps only he could. It became reading for our boys whenever I was around at bedtime, which sadly I confess was not as often as I would have wished.

  I recall standing in the center of Be’er Sheva by the well in the centre of the old town. The Israelis appeared to have policy of leaving the biblical towns untouched, and building the new alongside the old town, which also carried the old biblical name. Looking down we realised you could not have moved this central well from place to place, and this therefore would have been the same well as had been there since back in biblical times. That sense of history came through in a way I had never experienced, even when visiting old churches or monasteries at home or in Europe. We visited all the well known biblical sites, and down to Elat on the Red Sea. In the desert just north of Elat was a kibbutz, home solely to West German youngsters who felt that helping the desert to grow was in some way helping to put right the evil their elders had committed during WW11. One thing struck us was that on a hill just south of Jerusalem and looking west to the sea, we saw row after row of young trees growing, helping to restore the land from a desert to the land of milk and honey of yesteryear, whilst looking east towards Jordan it was just barren. Sally of course planted the traditional tree that all visitors did, I recall for the equivalent princely sum of seven and sixpence. Many Jewish people from around the world pay to have a grove of trees planted to commemorate someone in their family they may have lost, and an appropriate plaque would be fixed to a tree or rock. However I cannot say that some of the plaques weren’t moved around when it was convenient to do so.

  Tel Aviv, which was our base, was of course a largely new town, but walking to the adjacent Jaffa took us back centuries. Caesarea, Galilee, the place of the walking on water, the site of the Sermon on the Mount, Nazareth and above all Jerusalem were places where you just soaked up the history of that tiny country. The narrowest part of the country at that time was the site of Latrun, where from the eastern border to the sea was just ten miles. At the southern end of Lake Galilee sits one of the earliest Kibbutz; Degania. At its entrance is a burnt out Syrian tank from the 1948 war, left as a memorial of that conflict, and to show that it was the closest the Syrians got to that settlement. In Jerusalem in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre which was part of the old city and sat on the border, illustrated the problem that still faces everyone today. The “churchyard” to the rear of the church was accessible to us, but at the rear was an archway with a notice forbidding further access since we would then have been in Jordan. We inevitably had to have a photo of Sally standing right on that border. Worse was the sight of the Mandelbaum Gate crossing, with barbed wire across parts of the road, again distinguishing between Israel and Jordan. Whatever the hoped for outcome of any peace agreement, I cannot see anyone wanting or agreeing to see the City of Jerusalem divided in that way again. Of course there has to
be proper recognition of the rights of Palestinians and other Islamic people being able to visit unhindered their holy sites, just as Jewish people must also be free to visit the Western Wall. At a later trip to Israel, when I put the point to Shimon Peres, he remarked that a vaticanisation of Temple Mount had always been on the table.

  Just in the north of the country we were invited by a young Arab boy to enter his garden and join him for some tea. He had a patio overlooking his field, and there was a donkey walking slowly round and round a central pole, dragging a steel sheet behind it. It was an ancient way of threshing corn. He was happy to be an Arab Israeli, and at that time some 250,000 Arabs had remained within those 1948 boundaries. I have never understood why it is OK for Arabs to be able to live in Israel, and not the other way round, for there is no reason why people of differing faiths cannot live in peace with one another in the same patch of land. People will recall, that when the West came to the aid of Kuwait, the troops had to obtain special dispensation to be able to hold a Christian service, in what are claimed to be the exclusive lands of Islam. These are just some of the stumbling blocks to peace in that part of the world.