Twelve Red Herrings Read Free

phoned me
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 realised 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
remit 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 skilfully 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 x2 February x98o 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 per cent 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 98os
the British economy showed continual growth, and by March 984 Cooper’s shares
had topped the fivepound mark, following press speculation about a possible
takeover. Jeremy had advised me to accept one of the bids, but 1 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 x989 the Sunday
Times was estimating that Rosemary and I were