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• Over the Border The colleague who interviewed the SMMT

18th September 1970, Page 134
18th September 1970
Page 134
Page 134, 18th September 1970 — • Over the Border The colleague who interviewed the SMMT
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president Douglas Richards for this week's "Meet" column in CM was fascinated by the family's engineering background, which has been entwined with the fortunes of other wellknown companies in a way that 1 for one had never guessed.

It appears that way back, Douglas Richards' great-great-grandfather was a Highlander who crossed the Border in company with two Lowlanders, Parkinson and Cowan, to set up an engineering business on English soil. But Highland and Lowland ideas seemingly did not mix too well, and greatgreat-grandfather Richards left to continue his engineering career farther south, leaving Parkinson Cowan to continue making meters and appliances and things, as indeed they still do so famously.

Much later, in Douglas's father's time, the family became involved in the carburetter business. His father had been with the Wolf company when it was a general importer of automotive goods, and became managing director. When Wolf began to specialize in power tools, Richards pere left, taking the Solex part of the business with him—but leaving behind his brother Harry, who has only recently retired as chairman and managing director of Wolf Electric Tools. A decade later, in 1936, Douglas's father added Zenith to his carburetter interests.

Although Zenith was a flourishing business when Douglas Richards entered it at 18, straight from school, he was not featherbedded: he started at 30s a week in the works —and tea-making was included in his duties! I have long known that Solex originated in France, but it was only from the Richards interview that I learned, via the aforementioned colleague, that Zenith started in Switzerland and that Stromberg—the third member of the Richards carburetter interests —came from America, and not from Germany as some suppose.