Traditional Craft Workshops

Traditional Craft Workshops(TCW)  & Independent Discount Warehouses (IDW).

You couldn’t say that I had the finest start in life, but just the same there were a whole lot of children much worse off than me.

I would have been conceived in October 1939 the month that the second world war began and by the time that I was born in May 1939 my father was dead – wiped out together with his entire platoon in the first couple of months of the war, leaving his wife – my mother – a war widow.

She re-married when I was four years old and my step father a kind man, treated me no differently than he did the three other children in his life – one who came with him from his first wife and the other two with my mother.

I reckon I had a pretty happy childhood in just about every way, all of which is well documented in the first part of my autobiography, however my life changed quite dramatically when I passed my 11 plus exams and went on to continue my studies at The Royal Liberty School in Romford, Essex. That one single element in my life made me into an entirely different person than the one that I might have otherwise become.

From a modest start – getting my feet on to the property ladder, marriage and children - I was soon absorbed in various business affairs. At the cutting edge of the new retailing revolution and my own version of business innovation I was soon involved in the idea of re-cycling and the promotion of artisan crafts.

I personally invented and promoted the idea of Traditional Craft Workshops to the degree of actually setting up a section of real workshops to rent and persuading craftsmen type workers to take them on. 

The idea had a kind of built in sustainability and many of them are still working today just as they were in the beginning. Now promoted by the media and in regular TV programmes it should guarantee success way into the future. Another of my ideas way ahead of the game.