Sir Ken Morrison: a personal tribute.
I first encountered Sir Ken - or "Sir Ken" as we were allowed to call him - back in my boyhood when my parents Cuthbert and Queenie displayed the full extent of the affection they nurtured for their firstborn son and sent me as a permanent boarder to St Arkwright's Academy for the Slightly Retarded, Wibsey.
Thus it was that, cap in hand, I approached with trepidation the austere portals of Sir Ken's tripe research centre that long-ago summer, a June hailstorm playfully stripping the skin off my cheeks. Sir Ken emerged, bedecked in the lamé flat cap and ferretskin stole that even then served as his badge of office, looking me up and down in a contemptuous manner. "Thou'll do, if there's nowt better," he finally muttered. My career in retail had begun.
I worked all that summer exercising the Morrisonian whippets while Sir Ken devoted his energies to perfecting the merchandising skills that would in time transform a dowdy Bradford pie stall into an even dowdier national pie retailer. His bluff, gruff, rough, tough and rather duff Yorkshire manner won him adversaries and enemies alike, but little did he care for southern affectations like central heating, flushing toilets or using a handkerchief.
Sir Ken came to look on me as something of a personal lackey, passing on much of the wisdom of his even then advanced years, such as how (and where) to stuff a Yorkshire pudding, and even some of the basic moves of Ecky Thump. And now I fondly reflect on the final words he spoke to me, his eyes twinkling as he slipped a tanner into my pocket and cuffed me playfully across the bridge of the nose. "A reet little shit, thou art," he hissed. "Now piss off". A tanner? The miserable sod. It was 1977.
I first encountered Sir Ken - or "Sir Ken" as we were allowed to call him - back in my boyhood when my parents Cuthbert and Queenie displayed the full extent of the affection they nurtured for their firstborn son and sent me as a permanent boarder to St Arkwright's Academy for the Slightly Retarded, Wibsey.
Thus it was that, cap in hand, I approached with trepidation the austere portals of Sir Ken's tripe research centre that long-ago summer, a June hailstorm playfully stripping the skin off my cheeks. Sir Ken emerged, bedecked in the lamé flat cap and ferretskin stole that even then served as his badge of office, looking me up and down in a contemptuous manner. "Thou'll do, if there's nowt better," he finally muttered. My career in retail had begun.
I worked all that summer exercising the Morrisonian whippets while Sir Ken devoted his energies to perfecting the merchandising skills that would in time transform a dowdy Bradford pie stall into an even dowdier national pie retailer. His bluff, gruff, rough, tough and rather duff Yorkshire manner won him adversaries and enemies alike, but little did he care for southern affectations like central heating, flushing toilets or using a handkerchief.
Sir Ken came to look on me as something of a personal lackey, passing on much of the wisdom of his even then advanced years, such as how (and where) to stuff a Yorkshire pudding, and even some of the basic moves of Ecky Thump. And now I fondly reflect on the final words he spoke to me, his eyes twinkling as he slipped a tanner into my pocket and cuffed me playfully across the bridge of the nose. "A reet little shit, thou art," he hissed. "Now piss off". A tanner? The miserable sod. It was 1977.
No comments yet