Write Your Autobiography Today

  I remember the house very dimly, and it now looks tiny by today’s standards. Lyn remembers it better than I do, as a pretty brick and flint detached cottage with a kitchen, lounge and dining room. Upstairs there were three bedrooms (they must have been very small) and space for a bathroom although all this only ever consisted of was an Elsan toilet, the contents of which Dad had to lug downstairs each week, lift the manhole cover and pour the contents into the drain.

  Dad had grown up in Speen, between High Wycombe and Aylesbury in the Chiltern Hills in Buckinghamshire, and Mum in the next-door village of Lacey Green. That’s how the art of courting (as they called it then) was carried out to a large extent for the majority of people – you met and married locally by and large (unless you went to war and met an exotic sweetheart). Dad had left school and was drafted into the Royal Air Force for the Second World War and served in South Africa before returning home and joining the police, though that was quite brief. His later working life was dictated by the quickly failing health of his father who had been the village baker in Speen for many years.

  So far as I understood it, Dad had no real wish to follow in his father’s footsteps. It was very hard work and there was very little money in it. But Fred Martin (who I never knew as I was only months old when he died) was to get lung cancer – probably smoking and flour dust, a bad omen as it turned out. Dad felt he had little choice but to take over from him to keep the business (and his mum and brother, Uncle Geoff) going.

  My second recollection was visiting the shop in Great Hampden a year or so before we moved there. Mrs. Ward was an old lady who ran the village post office. I recall her very Victorian appearance, being fairly stout, dressed in black, with grey hair tied back in a bun, a little bit austere to look at, but kindly nonetheless. What I remember the most is her collection of stuffed animals and birds in her living room, all in glass cases, including a fox and an owl. They were a bit scary to a small child, but fortunately they were gone when we moved in.

  Great Hampden was essentially a forestry estate (now I believe overseen by the Woodland Trust) and quite a few of the men of the village worked in estate-related jobs. At one point it even had its own blacksmith. It must have been a very simple and self-contained community. We had the primary school and the church, and of course the pub (the Hampden Arms) and a village hall next to the cricket pitch, plus our shop and Post Office. I suppose the total population of the village would have been around a hundred. 

  What my parents did there was a bit of a revelation at the start, I imagine. While Mrs. Ward had basically run just a post office and sold a few essentials, Mum and Dad built a proper shop onto the existing house (with an additional bedroom on top) and added a bakehouse on the back. I am not sure if Dad’s intention was to transfer the bakehouse in Speen there, but in the end it was used more for storage than for baking, though I believe the odd wedding cake and fancies were produced there. With the help of an organization called the Association of Private Traders (which helped small shops by buying goods in bulk) they started a proper grocery for Great Hampden. I think what made this doable was that the APT allowed Dad to buy goods on account and pay for them after they had started trading.

  In around 1980-81 I was asked by the Belgian government to manage a barter agreement in Iran on their behalf. In order to get around the low price of oil at the time the Iranians asked Austria, Sweden and Belgium to enter into such agreements. The Belgian government declined to do this themselves but asked one of the leading Belgian groups of companies to undertake it on a private basis, with me appointed to manage the programme. The idea was that Iran would supply oil in exchange for goods needed urgently in their market. I broke this down to batches of goods worth $50 million, equivalent to one large cargo of oil.

  This was immediately after the Iranian revolution in 1979, and not unsurprisingly it was very difficult to deal with the new government there. On my first trip I met with officials who had been appointed specifically to oversee the barter deals.  Their leader was a charming man, but others were much more difficult to deal with.                It soon became clear that one of the reasons that these three countries had been chosen was that each of them could supply a large quantity of military hardware and weapons. I made it abundantly clear from the beginning of our talks that I was not prepared (nor authorised) to supply any military equipment, whereas it appeared that the other two countries would probably turn a blind eye to it. I insisted that we could only supply manufactured goods or essential equipment from their list of items required, which was finally agreed.

  The Iranians curiously insisted on knowing which oil partner we would choose to lift the oil, and asked me to make arrangements for the first cargo to be bought. I could not do it that way, as I wanted to have letters of credit opened for all the goods to be supplied and then we  would immediately order a cargo of oil. As a result the first meeting did not go too well, but at least we agreed the mode of operation for the barter arrangement.

  I already knew that Shell had been one of the main purchasers of oil from Iran and who was in charge of this operation for them. I met them in London and they agreed to lift the oil as long as we opened letters of credit for them. They also mentioned that they had a secretary who had run their office in Teheran but who was now looking for a job. They said we could totally rely on her if we needed office staff there.  I was very pleased to know that she might be available potentially to run our office once we opened in Tehran. I immediately got in touch with her - her name was Loretta - and we agreed to meet on my next visit. 

  I reported back to the Belgian government on the agreement reached with Shell, including my refusal to include military equipment in the barter, and that I would very soon have lists of goods to be supplied. We made a budget for the next stage of the project so as to get the programme up and running. 

  One Belgian exporter already operating in Teheran was Agfa-Gevaert, who owned an office block in the city.  They offered us a floor of it which was ideal as all the visitors would need to be checked before coming up in the lift. I had agreed that Loretta could dress in a Western style clothing at work  and when the Iranian officials first visited us they were shocked by her appearance.  I explained that this was our office and they would have to accept our rules,  to which in time they did (though reluctantly).

  When the Iranians first supplied me with their requirements for the barter I asked if there were any limitations about Belgian companies supplying goods, and if Société Generale de Belgique might be one of them. They did not have any objections to dealing with Belgian companies so over about 6 months I had identified around 50 of them  and now had to agree each contract with the Iranian authorities. This involved each of the suppliers visiting Iran to go through all the details which took a further 6 or 8 months, and then once agreed the Iran government opening letters of credit. A colleague from Société Generale (the bank part of the group) came to help me in Iran and everything seemed to be going quite smoothly. However, I was under constant pressure from the Iranians to order a cargo of oil by both the Iranian government and Shell, given that the Austrians had already ordered 3 or 4 cargos and the Swedes the same. I would not do it until I had all the other letters of credit in place. 

  Then suddenly the world price of oil plummeted to $10 a barrel and the basis for our barter collapsed. The Swedes and Austrians lost hundreds of millions of dollars as a result, whereas we came out clean because we had not lifted any oil.

  I thought about what he had said, and it seemed to make sense. I developed an idea to take on properties for a number of years in return for a guaranteed monthly rent payable in advance no matter what the condition of the property was. I started to advertise the idea in the Evening Standard and received a few inquiries. My main problem was that if this took off I did not have a base to work from, other than home.

I then received a telephone inquiry from an Iraqi who wanted me to rent a property in Hammersmith. He suggested a meeting at his office in Fulham Palace Road, but when I arrived at the agreed time of 6pm I saw that it was actually an estate agency called Shield Property Services Limited, which made me a bit sceptical. But I thought in for a penny, in for a pound - there was nothing to lose in at least meeting him.

  It turned out that he had been a client of Rafidain bank in Baghdad whom I had known as Abu Haider. We greeted each other warmly and he told me about how he had started up his business. His English was quite poor so we spoke in Arabic, and once I explained my story to him he asked me if I wanted to buy the business from him or go into partnership. I was really not expecting the meeting to head off in that direction and I told him that in all honesty I would not pay him anything for it as neither the premises nor the business that he currently had on his books were worth anything. This did not put him off, however,  and we parted company after he made me an offer to join him as a partner without paying him a penny.

  Two days later he called me again, asking if I had thought further about his offer. I told him that I wanted no partnership with him, but I would take on the property that he had initially called me about and transfer the lease into my name. He pleaded with me to join forces with him, and said God had sent me to him because he was in financial trouble and had a wife and five young children and his bank was threatening to sell his house because he could not pay for his mortgage. His parting shot was to say that he was sure I could run his business with him and make us both wealthy.

  Between our meeting and his call I had asked some Iraqis I knew if they could find out if he was honest and safe to do business with. All of them came back with the same story - he was considered a decent man and he came from a respected and honest family. He had been kicked out of Iraq because his family had originally come from Iran. This rang a familiar bell to me, given Shamiram’s family history. So I decided to give him a try. I contacted my solicitor and asked him to draw up an agreement, and I told him what my terms would be. We would each have a 50% share of the company as directors, but he would have no decision-making or other executive powers. Net profits for the year would be divided between us and paid as dividends, and if the net profits were in excess of a certain figure I could take over the company in its entirety and pay him £150,000 in addition to the 50% dividend for that year.

  His office was in a dreadful state, and they had just the one property on their books (the one he had called me about).  I got rid of all of his staff (one of them went on to become an Iraqi Prime Minister after the Saddam era) and arranged for a builder in to refurbish the office. He asked me to transfer my property portfolio over to the company, which I refused to do. My plan was to take over properties and do them up at our expense and re-let them for 3-5 years at a higher rent.  

  As they say, imitation is the highest form of flattery and other estate agents started to try out the same kind of business because their sales were very slow at the time. The growth of our business was fantastic, exceeding my expectations by far. In 1997 we met the target I had put in our agreement (that if we reached a turnover of £1 million I could buy him out).