Rowing Against the Tide - A career in sport and politics by Martin Brandon-Bravo Read Free Book Online Page A

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