The Chronicle January 2020

7 ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE

the first term that I was never going to become a teacher. But the grant was all in place and I had a room in a shared house, so I carried on. After that, I moved to London. Remember that this was the ‘80s – it was a horrible time, everyone was so greedy. My friends who had moved to work in the City were earning more money in a month than my Dad, who was a parish priest, did in a year. In the end, I became a clerk in the estates department of the Church Commissioners, who are a bit like the Church of England’s civil service. The lovely guy who offered me the job understood the stage I was at in deciding on a career path and he offered me a job for a couple of years, knowing it would be a launch pad to something else. After a year, I decided to train as an accountant, and went to Price Waterhouse. I started studying accountancy and I was absolutely useless at it. I really did not enjoy working at Price Waterhouse. They had put me in the elite squad, the fast track, and instead of doing boring old manufacturing companies, I did all the bank stuff but I failed all my exams. These days, they would have thrown me out. I was unhappy in my work, and I felt disconnected from the corporate goals. I was a drone on the eighth floor of a 25-storey building in London. I didn’t get it. I was 26 and my colleagues were 22. Had I had guts, I might have left, but I stayed until I qualified – perhaps that is the grit bit which was born out of necessity as I faced a dwindling range of career opportunities. I have never regretted having a CV which reads: St Paul’s, Cambridge, Price Waterhouse. I qualified almost immediately after Alison and I got married. I kept saying, ‘We can’t get married until I qualify. Your father will think I have no prospects,’ and she said, ‘That’s irrelevant.’ I had realised by then that working for Price Waterhouse in the City wasn’t for me. As this was just before the start of the second recession in the 1980s I was one of the last people to get out of Price Waterhouse before the collapse of the economy. I moved to a public company called Lex in High Wycombe. It was a relatively large group of companies that were mainly involved in the automotive sector. The thing I appreciated was that the management of each subsidiary had a great deal of autonomy. And you got married just before you qualified?

So I left, and this is where Alison’s supreme wisdom again changed my life for the better. I had envisaged taking six months off but she knew that I would probably spend the entire time lying on the sofa watching cricket – so she encouraged me to apply for the Bursar’s role at Teddies. I didn’t hold out much hope. I remember saying to her, ‘I’ll never get the job. I’m too young, and I’m not a retired Wing Commander.’ Yes, he was a very strong presence at the helm. He was without doubt one of the outstanding Heads of his generation. He was opinionated and quite punchy, and he had phenomenal energy. He set about growing the School and he made the right things happen. He was innovative; he never accepted the status quo. In terms of the way the School ran in those days, it was very odd for someone who’d come from the business world. Normal functions such as HR or IT didn’t exist, and there wasn’t much strategic or commercial thinking – no competitor and market analysis. I spent about 10 years helping to establish the more modern structure we have today. David Christie was Warden when you arrived. Was it an easy decision to send your children here? Yes. They both enjoyed their time here and we are really proud of the adults they have become. Joe was one of the A level pupils in the year that IB was first introduced to the School. He went on to study Medicine at

The success of the Lex Group relied on the successful entrepreneurship of the people running the different companies. I became a group accountant in the leasing division. To begin with, I commuted from London to High Wycombe. We were renting in Ealing and realised we were never going to be able to afford a house there. So we drove down the M40 as far as Beaconsfield (still too expensive), then High Wycombe (didn’t feel like home) and then we got to Thame, which looked nice and we could afford a house there. trajectory of my work life changed. Lex was a public company so they had to do what the public shareholders told them to do and the market analysts told them to sell off some of their non-core subsidiaries. By that stage I was the Finance Director of the smallest subsidiary they owned which was a warehouse management company. It was a difficult investment for Lex to offload, so the four directors decided to buy it. It launched the best time I have ever had in commerce. Owning your own company is absolutely fantastic. I was really lucky to be involved and that it did well. How long did you work at Lex? Ten years. This was the time when the But you eventually left to take up the Bursar role at Teddies? Yes. I’d become frustrated at Lex in the end because we were bought by a large New Jersey-based hardware manufacturer, and important decisions were taken out of the hands of the original quartet of directors.