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Personality
Page 44
Page 45
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of the Week
Job
fewson
IS immaculate shirt, elegant tie and sharp gaze irresistibly recalled pictures of Inman and Davis, those redoubtable billiards and snooker players, challenged by many and beaten by few. But there was no billiards table, nor nearby cue, for I met Jack Hewson in a room, furnished in the contemporary style, in London's Mandeville Hotel. All the same, his appearance was by no means deceptive so far as billiards is concerned—for he is a player to be reckoned with. Being unfamiliar with the game myself, his breaks conveyed little to me; but the figures he mentioned seemed astronomical. His ability in a game demanding the highest skill was as good a clue to his character as I would be likely to find, I am sure, in many a longer interview with him than I had that day in London.
His love of home and distaste for London (as a Londoner born and bred I forbore to remind him of Dr. Johnson's dictum that the man who is tired of London is tired of life!) are also a pretty fair indication of his character and point of view. He loves the people he works amongst, he respects the industries out of which he has, over the years, built up his business, and the East Riding wolds mean a world more to him than the stony deserts of Oxford Street.
The Hewson career opened in a branch of the "store on which the sun never sets,"—do they still use that slogan, so familiar '55 years ago, long before young Jack donned his grocer's apron?—Lipton's. To him the grocery trade meant just one thing, a job. He had to start work somewhere, and Lipton's providing an opening, it looked just as good as anything else. He had no aspirations in the trade, though no doubt had he remained in it he would have made his mark just as legibly as he has in the haulage industry. Not, let it be added hastily, as an assistant. Most certainly a chain of Hewson's Grocery Stores would by this time have been well established in the East and West Ridings.
But fate, in the form of an unannounced successor in that Lipton's branch, took him clean out of the business at a couple of days' notice.
So he turned, purely by chance as it happened, to the haulage business. The Boothferry Bridge at Goole was in process of construction and materials were needed on the spot. With a considerable degree of optimism, not to say effrontery, Jack Hewson presented himself and his Model " T " Ford for any haulage contracts that might be going, and nor did he seek in vain. So, together with his brother who ran a coal business, be entered on that career which has shown steady progress right up to 1962.
How did he manage to wrest a living from an ancient £40 Model "T "? The answer is he didn't. In those days several irons warmed in the Hewson fire. His father, who had been a diver, became, like Mr. Pickwick senior when he retired from his metier, a licensee. For a. long time Jack carried on the pub. He made it thrive, he made more friends and influenced more people, and at the same time added slowly to his haulage fleet. He also made a book, not of the literary variety but that kind which normally turns out to be a tot more profitable to the author. The "silver rings" of racecourses,in many parts of the country became a familiar haunt of his. So, what with one thing and another, the Hewson fortunes prospered; but all the time those eager eyes of his were wide open for prospects of advancement. He did not tell me so, but I infer from other remarks that in those days he did not disdain anything that looked, however remotely, like grist to the Hewson mill. I say " infer " advisedly, for Jack is a master of what stage folk call the "throwaway line." You think the con versation is getting nowhere when he outs with a sentence pregnant with implication and then gives you an amused glance, such as billiards opponents who missed their shot must have become very familiar with years ago.
In other words, his story—a success story—is typical of many a Yorkshireman's. In those small towns of the West and East Ridings there used to be, and maybe still is, plenty of scope for a man with initiative and willingness to turn his hand to anything. But one must be a Yorkshireman to succeed in this special context. One must speak the language. Up there they will have none of your la-di-da London ways. Even Lancashiremen are regarded as effete. I speak of the small Yorkshire towns set in the midst of agricultural wealth, of course, not the alien cities—not of Leeds, Bradford. Huddersfield and their like, but the rolling, windy wolds, the friendly remote dales, the broad-smiling acres of the Plain of York.
Is it possible today to start as Jack did? He does not think so. He believes in transport licences and regulations because the economic scene has undergone a complete change; but he agrees that all the paraphernalia of boards, committees, authorities, and so on, means little scope for enterprising young chaps with the modern equivalent of a £40 Model "T."
Yet, conceding the necessity of regulation in 1962, it is reassuring that people like Jack Hewson are taking a deep interest in the industry's affairs. With them around I cannot see youth's enterprise, imagination and initiative being stifled to death. in the exhausted air of officialdom.
He is interested in local affairs as a Councillor on the Howden Rural District Council. In the road haulage sphere he is on the National Council of the Road Haulage Association and was on its National Executive for some 10 years. He was as naturally chairman of the R.H.A.'s Agricultural Committee as a member of the Hull Area R.H.A. He was in that right from its formation and was chairman for six years.
What happens to the business when, reluctantly, he leaves his beloved Yorkshire for the Metropolis? Why his wife keeps her eye on affairs. And don't think that that means only Hewson Bros. (Howden), Ltd. There's a shop, too. Did Lipton's exercise a lasting influence, after all? H.C.