The Rise and Fall,,,and Rise Again

My father opened his first jewellery shop in 1949, which also happens to be the year I was born, and as my mother worked in the shop while she was pregnant with me, I think I can claim to have been born into the jewellery trade. It is in my blood, and that makes it almost impossible to talk about my family and childhood without also talking about the business - in my mind the two things are inseparable. And that, of course, is what made losing the business all those years later so much harder. I didn’t just lose my job, I lost the only job I’d ever had, and the only job I’d ever wanted. If you’ve never worked in a family business, it can be hard to understand, but I loved the business like it was part of the family, and in some ways the business was a bit like having a third parent or an extra sibling.

My parents had met in India during the war, when my father Leslie was stationed there. On Fridays, local Jewish families invited Jewish soldiers to participate in the Sabbath with them. One of those families was my grandmother’s. She had fled to Bangalore from Iraq with her 11 children to escape persecution of Jews after a coup had brought a pro-Nazi leader to power. Call me cynical, but I’m pretty sure my father was invited with the sole intention that my grandmother would be able to marry off one of her daughters, and as it happened my father fell hook, line, and sinker for her eldest, Rachelle. He was a very impulsive man, and the fact that my mother had a daughter from a previous marriage didn’t deter him at all.

My parents were to remain utterly devoted to each other for the next five decades, but their marriage caused friction between my father and his family. When he returned to their house in St Albans after the war, they were appalled.

‘What have you done?’ they asked. ‘Not only is she divorced, but she’s not even English!’

They turned him away, and from that day on, my father never got on with my grandfather again. It wasn’t much of a welcome home for a returning soldier, and my mother was left in no doubt about what her in-laws thought of her. I’m sure this made my parents even closer.

While he’d been in India, a friend had given my father some Persian carpets to sell as they’d fetch a better price in England. He used to tell me he was demobbed with 10 shillings and a packet of cigarettes, so he was very motivated to get a good price for these carpets. He went round to my grandfather’s rich neighbours with the rugs on his shoulder, selling them door to door. By all accounts they were amazing carpets, and when he got on his hands and knees and rolled them out, people had never seen anything like them. He was supposed to wire the money straight back to India, but with a wife and step-daughter to think of, he used the cash to open his first shop, which was in Richmond, West London. The fellow in India kept asking for the money, but my father kept stalling him until he had sufficient cashflow. It was very naughty of him, but I imagine that my mother was somewhere in the background, egging him on. She always told me that she was from a very good family, and I get the impression she was a bit shocked at her economic status in post-war London. At the time my parents were living in two rooms above a dental surgery in Richmond, down the road from the shop. Before long they’d be sharing those rooms with their first child together, my sister Juliet.

It could have been any kind of shop - I’m sure my father would have made a success of any trade he’d gone into - but he chose jewellery because his father had once been a watchmaker, so I guess he felt he had a bit of grounding in the industry. It wasn’t a great business at first, but it paid the rent. A few months in though, he had a stroke of luck when one of his contacts supplied him with gold lockets from America that transformed his business. Lockets were hugely popular after the war, but the only place you could get them in West London was Ratners. As soon as the stock came in, it went out again. Then, just as now, a single line can turn a business around.

My half-sister Diane stayed in India until my parents could afford to support her, and by the time I was two, we had moved from the rooms above the dentist’s to a detached house in Hendon. The business was expanding quickly, and Diane joined us not long after; and as my parents were so involved with the business, Diane practically raised me and Juliet.

I think it’s fair to say that my mother really pushed my father. She had aspirations and spent a lot of money on things like mink coats and spin dryers that the neighbours would be impressed by. She used to borrow a lot of money too, and so my dad had to work even harder to pay the banks. She encouraged my dad to drive a Jaguar, albeit a second-hand one, because she wanted to show off. These days you need a yacht and a plane to show off, but not a lot of people had money in the Fifties, and if you had a fur coat and a spin dryer then your stock really went up, and that’s what she wanted.

We usually ate as a family, even though my mother was a pretty lousy cook. All those years in India and all she’d learnt about spice was how to tip far too much curry powder into a stew! She really wasn’t a woman suited to domestic chores, and found the business much more exciting. So whenever we sat down to a bland meal of meat and two veg, the conversation would inevitably turn to the business, which always made up for the spice lacking in the food.

At some point when I was quite young, my father had merged his shops into a business with his father Philip and brothers Jack and David, who also ran jewellery shops. They had a chain of about 13 when they joined forces, which gave them more purchasing power and streamlined overheads. Although my father was the major shareholder, my mother still felt Jack and my grandfather had too much say in how the company was run. As a young child, I sat at the table listening to the gossip about the business, how David had got the shop fittings wrong, or where they should open the next branch. It was quite clear that my mother thought my uncles and grandfather were a waste of space, so I learnt early on that running a family business always involves a fair amount of feuding. From about the age of 10 onwards, I was always asked for my opinion on things like who deserved promotion or what lines we should discontinue. I was so involved that I really felt like I was part of the company, even though I was still at school.

My father seemed to have the solutions to most problems, and I began looking up to him from a very early age. I absolutely adored him, and when I was taken to the shops I’d be so excited to see him that I would run into his arms. I worshipped him and even as a young child looked at him as a great success. He was a wonderfully kind man as well, and very generous to his family and staff. He started a scheme to let his managers borrow the deposit for a home so that they could get a mortgage, and this only add ed to the respect and loyalty he inspired. He really cared about everybody, and genuinely got upset if anyone was in difficulty. He had the most incredible personality; he only ever wanted to talk about you, and he encouraged all his family and his staff to do their best.

While all my parents’ talk about the business inspired and excited me, looking back, I can see that it created problems too. In my young mind, I believed that the most important thing was to make money, and that to please my parents I had to be successful in business. It was drummed into me the whole time, and I was given examples of other people who were successful; they were called ‘menches’, people like Charles Clore and Isaac Wolfson who were the big successes of their day, and they were gods in our house. You didn’t look up to a great poet or musician or writer in our house - they were not even mentioned - that’s how focused the family was on business and wealth. That’s not to say we were wealthy. We were not even particularly well off in comparison with some of our neighbours, and the arrival of my younger sister Denise in 1956 added to the monthly expenses.

When I got a bit older, I used to spend as much of my summers as I could at the Hendon Hall Hotel, where there was an open air swimming pool. All the local kids hung out there and I seemed to know everybody. I guess I showed a bit of early business promise by arranging to work there so I didn’t have to buy a season ticket. I was only young - probably under 10 - but I worked the turnstiles and in the café. In those days, you used to get a penny for empty glass bottles, so I had a nice little sideline saying to the swimmers, ‘Have you finished your drink? Let me take that away for you.’ Those pennies added up, and I enjoyed having a bit of spending money.

One season I got the job of painting the swimming pool blue. I got a bit of paint on my shoes, and for some reason I thought it might show less if I painted the whole of my shoes and trousers blue too! My logic was that it would somehow be better and wouldn’t look as bad. Needless to say, my parents never forgot when I returned back to the house for lunch completely covered in paint. They relayed that story to friends for years, often comparing it with a time when I had turned blue for real: according to my parents, when I was a baby I had been left in the garden in my pram during a thunderstorm and had been hit by lightning. By the time they remembered me, I had turned blue, but my father put me in a bath of warm water and I came back to life.

Each year, for 11 years running, the Ratners went on holiday on precisely August...