What You See Is What You Get: My Autobiography by Alan Sugar Read Free Book Online Page B

a crown.'
    That was it! I was at the races. It was pictures of children and grandchildren for the next few months.
    At school, photography was becoming a fashionable hobby and we had a photographic society whose members included one of the more financially fortunate pupils, a posh kid who used to hold court. His dad owned a shop and everybody looked up to him as if his shit didn't stink.
    When I showed my photographs, he'd sneer at them and look down on me as a second-class photographer. On one occasion, I showed him some negatives I'd developed myself. He observed some smear marks on them and announced haughtily, in front of the society, 'Oh, Sugar, it seems that you dry your negatives by farting on them.' You can imagine the laughter.
    My next scheme wiped the smile off his face, in more ways than one. At that time, he used to be the supplier of photographic materials to the kids and the teachers. Now, at the rear of Mr Allen's shop there was a small film-processing factory. I'd occasionally go and see how the developing process worked and noticed that they discarded the empty 35mm cartridge cases. I wondered what could be done with these seemingly useless items, but at the time nothing came to mind. Until one day I went into the ex-army shop on Chatsworth Road in Hackney. Ex-army stores originally sold second-hand uniforms, boots and other surplus army supplies, but the availability of this stuff diminished in the post-war years, so they extended their stock to anything surplus. I went to buy a pair of army boots (a fashion statement at that time) and noticed some large, round cans that looked like something you would store film in - the type of film you'd see on a cinema projector. I asked the fellow what was in the cans and he told me he'd bought a job lot of unexposed Ilford FP3 film, as used by film studios for the making of black-and-white movies. FP3 was also sold in photographic stores as black-and-white transparency film for around 5s 1d for a 20-exposure roll and 6s 10d for a 36-exposure roll. Now here I was in the ex-army store, with reels and reels of this stuff, each reel with hundreds of yards of film on it, the very same film you could buy in the photographic shops, but in bulk. The vision of the empty 35mm cartridges came out of my memory bank and I asked the man how much he wanted for a reel.
    'What are you going to do with it?' he asked. 'Who do you think you are - Hitchcock?'
    'Never mind that, mate, how much for a reel?' I persisted.
    He was bright, because before he gave a price, he wanted to know what I had in mind for it, in case he was missing a trick. There must have been fifty cans there, so who knows how much he paid for them. I bet he bought them for the scrap value of the metal cans.
    'How much do you want to pay?' he said.
    I looked at the can. The label indicated 500 yards of film inside. I knew from watching the process at the development factory that a 36-exposure film, out of its cartridge, was about two yards long. If I sold the film to the punters and undercut the shops by, say, 50 per cent, it would mean that I'd have to charge about three bob for a 36-exposure film. I quickly worked out that 250 x 3s came to PS37 10s.
    'I'll give you five quid for one can,' I said. After a bit of haggling, the bloke accepted. He was intrigued about what I was going to do with it. Now I had to set up a production line. Although I'd converted my dad's workshop into a darkroom, there was still light coming around the edges of the blanket over the window and around the door frame. This was good enough for developing prints on photographic paper, but not good enough for playing with unexposed film.
    My second darkroom was my bed. Under the bedcovers, I'd open the developing tank, take the undeveloped exposed film out of its cartridge, thread the film on to the tank spool and then put the lid on the tank, ready for the developer fluid to be poured in. I went back under the covers for this bulk film operation.