Helen died on the night of September 14, 1964, giving birth to our son, Tom, who himself only survived a week. I thought I would never get over it, and I’m not sure I ever have. After her death I didn’t so much as glance at another woman for years, putting all my energy into the company.
Following the funeral of my wife and son, my father, not a soft or sentimental man—you won’t find many of those in Yorkshire—revealed a gentle side to his character that I had never seen before. He would often phone me in the evening to see how I was getting on, and insisted that I regularly join him in the directors’ box at Elland Road to watch Leeds United on Saturday afternoons. I began to understand, for the first time, why my mother still adored him after more than twenty years of marriage.
I met Rosemary about four years later at a ball given to launch the Leeds Music Festival. Not a natural habitat for me, but as Cooper’s had taken a full-page advertisement in the program, and Brigadier Kershaw, the high sheriff of the county and chairman of the ball committee, had invited us to join him as his guests, I had no choice but to dress up in my seldom-worn dinner jacket and accompany my parents to the ball.
I was placed on Table 17, next to a Miss Kershaw, who turned out to be the high sheriff’s daughter. She was elegantly dressed in a strapless blue gown that emphasized her comely figure, and had a mop of red hair and a smile that made me feel we had been friends for years. She told me over something described on the menu as “avocado with dill” that she had just finished studying English at Durham University and wasn’t quite sure what she was going to do with her life.
“I don’t want to be a teacher,” she said. “And I’m certainly not cut out to be a secretary.” We chatted through the second and third courses, ignoring the people seated on either side of us. After coffee she dragged me onto the dance floor, where she continued to explain the problems of contemplating any form of work while her diary was so packed with social engagements.
I felt rather flattered that the high sheriff’s daughter should show the slightest interest in me, and to be honest I didn’t take it seriously when at the end of the evening, she whispered in my ear, “Let’s keep in touch.”
But a couple of days later she rang and invited me to join her and her parents for lunch that Sunday at their house in the country. “And then perhaps we could play a little tennis afterwards. You do play tennis, I suppose?”
I drove over to Church Fenton on Sunday and found that the Kershaws’ residence was exactly what I would have expected—large and decaying, which, come to think of it, wasn’t a bad description of Rosemary’s father as well. But he seemed a nice enough chap. Her mother, however, wasn’t quite so easy to please. She originated from somewhere in Hampshire, and was unable to mask her feeling that, although I might be good for the occasional charitable donation, I was not quite the sort of person with whom she expected to be sharing her Sunday lunch. Rosemary ignored the odd barbed comment from her and continued to chat to me about my work.
As it rained all afternoon, we never got round to playing tennis, so Rosemary used the time to seduce me in the little pavilion behind the court. At first I was nervous about making love to the high sheriff’s daughter, but I soon got used to the idea. However, as the weeks passed, I began to wonder if I was anything more to her than a “truck driver fantasy.” Until, that is, she started to talk about marriage. Mrs. Kershaw was unable to hide her disgust at the very idea of someone like me becoming her son-in-law, but her opinion turned out to be irrelevant, as Rosemary remained implacable on the subject. We were married eighteen months later.
Over two hundred guests attended the rather grand county wedding in the parish church of St. Mary’s. But I confess that when I turned to watch Rosemary progressing up the aisle, my only thoughts were of my first wedding ceremony.
For a couple of years Rosemary made every effort to be a good wife. She took an interest in the company, learned the names of all the employees, even became friendly with the wives of some of the senior executives. But, as I worked all the hours God sent, I fear I may not always have given her as much attention as she needed. You see, Rosemary yearned for a life that was made up of regular visits to the Grand Theater for Opera North, followed by dinner parties with her county friends that would run into the early hours, while I preferred to work on weekends and to be tucked up in bed before eleven on most nights. For Rosemary, I wasn’t turning out to be the husband in the title of the Oscar Wilde play she had recently taken me to—and it didn’t help that I had fallen asleep during the second act.
After four years without producing any offspring—not that Rosemary wasn’t very energetic in bed—we began to drift our separate ways. If she started having affairs (and I certainly did, when I could find the time), she was discreet about them. And then she met Jeremy Alexander.
It must have been about six weeks after the seminar in Bristol that I had occasion to phone Jeremy and seek his adv
ice. I wanted to close a deal with a French cheese company to transport its wares to British supermarkets. The previous year I had made a large loss on a similar enterprise with a German beer company, and I couldn’t afford to make the same mistake again.
“Send me all the details,” Jeremy had said. “I’ll look over the paperwork on the weekend and call you on Monday morning.”
He was as good as his word, and when he phoned, he mentioned that he had to be in York that Thursday to brief a client and suggested we get together the following day to go over the contract. I agreed, and we spent most of that Friday closeted in the Cooper’s boardroom checking over every dot and comma of the contract. It was a pleasure to watch such a professional at work, even if Jeremy did occasionally display an irritating habit of drumming his fingers on the table when I hadn’t immediately understood what he was getting at.
Jeremy, it turned out, had already talked to the French company’s in-house lawyer in Toulouse about any reservations he might have. He assured me that, although Monsieur Sisley spoke no English, he had made him fully aware of our anxieties. I remember being struck by his use of the word “our.”
After we had turned the last page of the contract, I realized that everyone else in the building had left for the weekend, so I suggested to Jeremy that he might like to join Rosemary and me for dinner. He checked his watch, considered the offer for a moment, and then said, “Thank you, that’s very kind of you. Could you drop me back at the Queen’s Hotel so I can get changed?”
Rosemary, however, was not pleased to be told at the last minute that I had invited a complete stranger to dinner without warning her, even though I assured her that she would like him.
Jeremy rang our front doorbell a few minutes after eight. When I introduced him to Rosemary, he bowed slightly and kissed her hand. After that, they didn’t take their eyes off each other all evening. Only a blind man could have missed what was likely to happen next, and although I might not have been blind, I certainly turned a blind eye.
Jeremy was soon finding excuses to spend more and more time in Leeds, and I am bound to admit that his sudden enthusiasm for the north of England enabled me to advance my ambitions for Cooper’s far more quickly than I had originally dreamed possible. I had felt for some time that the company needed an in-house lawyer, and within a year of our first meeting I offered Jeremy a place on the board, with the mandate to prepare the company for going public.
During that period I spent a great deal of my time in Madrid, Amsterdam and Brussels drumming up new contracts, and Rosemary certainly didn’t discourage me. Meanwhile, Jeremy skillfully guided the company through a thicket of legal and financial problems caused by our expansion. Thanks to his diligence and expertise, we were able to announce on February 12, 1980, that Cooper’s would be applying for a listing on the Stock Exchange later that year. It was then that I made my first mistake: I invited Jeremy to become deputy chairman of the company.
Under the terms of the flotation, fifty-one percent of the shares would be retained by Rosemary and myself. Jeremy explained to me that for tax reasons they should be divided equally between us. My accountants agreed, and at the time I didn’t give it a second thought. The remaining 4,900,000 one-pound shares were quickly taken up by institutions and the general public, and within days of the company being listed on the Stock Exchange, their value had risen to £2.80.
My father, who had died the previous year, would never have accepted that it was possible to become worth several million pounds overnight. In fact, I suspect he would have disapproved of the very idea, as he went to his deathbed still believing that a ten-pound overdraft was quite adequate to conduct a well-run business.
During the 1980s the British economy showed continual growth, and by March 1984 Cooper’s shares had topped the five-pound mark, following press speculation about a possible takeover. Jeremy had advised me to accept one of the bids, but I told him that I would never allow Cooper’s to be let out of the family’s control. After that, we had to split the shares on three separate occasions, and by 1989 the Sunday Times was estimating that Rosemary and I were together worth around thirty million pounds.
I had never thought of myself as being wealthy—after all, as far as I was concerned, the shares were simply pieces of paper held by Joe Ramsbottom, our company solicitor. I still lived in my father’s house, drove a five-year-old Jaguar, and worked fourteen hours a day. I had never cared much for holidays and wasn’t by nature extravagant. Wealth seemed somehow irrelevant to me. I would have been happy to continue living much as I was, had I not arrived home unexpectedly one night.
I had caught the last plane back to Heathrow after a particularly long and arduous negotiation in Cologne, and had originally intended to stay overnight in London. But by then I’d had enough of hotels, and simply wanted to get home, despite the long drive. When I arrived back in Leeds a few minutes after one, I found Jeremy’s white BMW parked in the driveway.
Had I phoned Rosemary earlier that day, I might never have ended up in jail.
I parked my car next to Jeremy’s and was walking toward the front door when I noticed that there was only one light on in the house—in the front room on the first floor. It wouldn’t have taken Sherlock Holmes to deduce what might be taking place in that particular room.
I came to a halt, and stared up at the drawn curtains for some time. Nothing stirred, so clearly they hadn’t heard the car and were unaware of my presence. I retraced my steps and drove quietly off in the direction of the city center. When I arrived at the Queen’s Hotel, I asked the duty manager if Mr. Jeremy Alexander had booked a room for the night. He checked the register and confirmed that he had.