* Duple president
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The news that Duple is well advanced with plans to transfer all coach manufacture from Hendon to Blackpool and substantially to increase production of luxury coaches reminds me that the Group's founder, H. R. White, must, at a hale 91, be British industry's oldest president.
• Mr. White, a widower, who lives at Hove, until quite recently played nine holes of golf regularly and enjoyed a swim during his annual West Indian holiday.
He founded the business in 1919 based on his own invention of a convertible body which could quickly be changed by the owner from a four-seater car to a van and back again. Hence the name Duple.
Even earlier, at the time of the outbreak of the 1914 war, Mr. White was building a light car named the Bifort, which is now the name of a Duple glass-reinforced plastics subsidiary company at Blackpool.
Mr. White moved to the large Hendon factory, where sales and service activities will continue, in 1927. His son, Gerald White, is the present group managing director and a substantial shareholder.