CHAPTER THREE BARRY OWEN

So, after two or three forewords and two preliminary chapters, I decided to kick off this blockbuster with the aforementioned Barry Owen.

He had first told that story about Mark Knopfler and that was when the seed of the idea of the book came into my spinning head.

He had been saying for quite a while that we must meet up and do lunch or a coffee and we hadn’t got around to it. When I stepped out of my previous employment (totally broke) as a part owner of a restaurant in Liverpool in about 2008, I had done some work for him and it was a pleasure, even though the circumstances were difficult.

It was not a nice time for him, nor indeed for the business in question, as the banks had turned on him (and many others) and were simply ripping the poor bugger and his team off.

Let’s pause for a moment to explore how they did this.

Barry’s business in this case was a huge property company. He is also the Chairman of Mason Owen, a business he co-founded years ago, but more on that later. This property company owned many properties and had loans against quite a few of them. The business had arrangements with many different banks and most of those banks, having caused the economic crisis of 2007/8 in the first place, now turned-on businesses like his to try and make their money back using a type of what could easily be termed legalised theft and/or extortion that went roughly like this.

In Barry’ s case, he (or the company) might have a loan with a bank and that loan was being paid off in monthly instalments and funded quite nicely by the rents paid by tenants of the property. So to undermine this status quo, the bank would revalue the property and find that, because of the recession they had caused, the particular site was now worth less and has hence now breached the terms of the legal arrangement they had once made (the covenant).

In other words, its revised ‘loan to value’ ratio is now too high. The values’ relationship to the amount being borrowed is not large enough under the small print of the agreement. It’s still exactly the same property though, with exactly the same rental income.

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Stage two, they have to put up the interest rate, as the small print again says they should because of this loan to value issue. This sets off more contrived alarm bells because under the original ‘never looked at before’ agreement, the interest is now too big in relation to the income. (Not surprising really, as they have just increased it).

Hey-ho, they then have to sell the property off, which was the banks aim right from the start. It then gets the windfall income, from further additional charges, it needs into its accounts which makes them, as individuals, look good.

Job done. Bonus time, drinks on me.

In fact, at the time of the crisis the banks wrote off many loans and blamed their predecessors and made themselves look good when they got some money in from any subsequent sales. They could take the credit for any income they clawed back in the way I just outlined. Incoming Prime Ministers do a version of this.

At the time, I helped Barry (in a very small way I have to say) to try and fight some of these cases and it was a real learning curve for me. I had always thought banks had codes of conduct, but that was not the case. I spent a few months there and I was amazed that he managed to stay positive. They were destroying a business (and ultimately succeeded) that had thrived for decades and for no justifiable, honest or decent reason.

In the case of Barry’s business at the time, the rents always covered the loan repayments, so what was the problem? Self-interest must have been the problem as there were actually very few real cash flow issues.

Anyway, that’s me black-balled for life with the banking sector but I had to give you some background as to how the solid relationship with Barry began.

Barry was very grateful for my efforts as I did manage to get a couple of results against the odds. If this was a business book I would be advising you that the only way I got these results was by getting in front of the people but it’s not that sort of book.

The saga had left Barry bitter and it always comes up when you meet him, but despite all that he still has an indomitable spirit.

Now, however, we could finally get that coffee.

That should be easy shouldn’t it?

Our first attempt to get together was great but not quite what I had expected. We arranged to have lunch at the restaurant Piccolino in the centre of Liverpool but Barry, out of the blue, invited two colleagues along to join us! Simon Bland and Jamie Moffatt. Great company of course but I was not able to have the chat I 28

needed to start drafting chapter three, and in fact get this book off the ground and we had so much wine I wouldn’t have remembered much of it anyway.

Turns out that the two of them are his side kicks and one of them, Simon, is also his son-in-law at the same time. I don’t think anyone but Barry could get that to work out.

So, unabashed, we re-arranged a coffee in his office for a couple of weeks/months later and that was again to be our starting point. Good luck I now hear you saying.

Barry was ten minutes late for that as I sat in his downstairs boardroom. Like most people these days, I played repeatedly with my emails and texts on an iPhone, wasting a huge amount of time.

Anyway, here he is at last. The poor bugger has now lost all his hair after chemotherapy for cancer. He already had prostate cancer a few years back for which he sought treatment in the USA and the cancer has now returned this time to his bones. He is as tough as old boots and that’s before we even mention the brain haemorrhage that nearly killed him years before that. The man is concrete.

Despite all this, those blue eyes still twinkle with mischief and the illnesses doesn’t merit a mention. As I did say previously, before the hair loss, he looked like Robert Redford had. He looked after himself and was very dashing and quite the charmer. Now he looks like he had just lost a scuffle with a hedge trimmer but you would not have known that he was ill if you couldn’t have seen him.

The energy!

With all these scrapes with illness that he has had, and ploughed on, you wonder whether the illnesses just had second thoughts about taking him on.

While I had been poking at my phone, I daydreamed that the era that Barry has lived through in his business life was a better one than my own. Before all the modern communication nonsense, I actually believe that things were less hectic. They worked just as hard but these days we live with a contradiction.

All these labour-saving devices don’t save labour.

We have all these amazing gadgets that should make life easier but the opposite is actually happening.

Nowadays we send a text or an email and then watch the phone and wait for a response. We stress ourselves out. We should have more free time but we actually don’t. We are locked on to the new way, and we are prisoners of it.

WhatsApp, text, snapchat, email, bloody hell, and Instagram, and now the kids are shouting Tik Tok at me but I don’t intend to even ask them what that is.

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As I say, when a reply doesn’t come, we start fretting and then text again, maybe text a question mark, or even ring the person. We just worry ourselves constantly and because it’s an instant form of communication we expect an instant answer. Our whole society is instant.

In Barry’s day an exchange of emails would back then have been letters and something that took over a week to exchange. So because we seem to be able to get things done so quickly we take on way too many things not realising that all the other areas of that project take as long as they did in the old days and we have inadvertently over committed our time.

These days we all have gadgets that just make us more disorganised.

Take the process of meeting up. Years back if I wanted to meet up with you we would set a time and place and generally we would be there - simple. We would no doubt have checked beforehand where it was and that the meeting was still on by telephoning on a landline.

Nowadays we often walk out of the office to meet someone and we have to firm up on the detail while we are on our way, even quite often finding out where we are going to be right to that last minute.

We just don’t need to make decent arrangements anymore as we can change them by text and so on en-route. We can use maps to find the place. We can google its address.

A few years back, I didn’t read the detail to a dinner I had been invited to and accepted. The previous two years that I had been invited by the same person it had been in Chester. Luckily this time the pal in question, called Nish, rang me to ask if I wanted picking up. When I said I would get the train, he was very surprised.

The event was in Monaco, and he wanted to know if I wanted picking up from the airport. Anyway, I still went: 63 quid easyJet.

So, and furthermore, modern gadgets make us absent minded and scatty. Well, me anyway.

I don’t think I would miss it if it all went away tomorrow.

And isn’t it bizarre that if someone were to read this in a hundred years, our current communication systems will seem so cute and old fashioned. How on earth I don’t know, but they surely will. We will probably have implanted earpieces and screens installed in our eyes, and oh lord, how hideous.

Anyway, back to the book, and here he is.

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When he comes into the room you can see why Barry tends to be late. He strikes up convivial conversation with absolutely everyone. It must add hours to each of his days.

Take the lovely lady that brings us in a cuppa. We go through her family matters, how is so and so, has her daughter been on holiday, how is the baby, is the nephew still football mad? It’s all lovely, he knows so much about everyone and he genuinely is interested and cares about how things are for them and their relatives and friends.

They in turn are totally chuffed that the head honcho shows this genuine interest and concern.

This doesn’t help my cause of course, getting this best seller finished, but I ask him if he knows all his staff to this depth and, yes, of course he does.

It’s one big family.

I mention Jim Davies in passing, as my intro to the proceedings, thinking we are at last getting started and this leads to him telephoning Jim immediately.

‘Jim, good man, haven’t spoken to him in ages, let’s give him a call’.

Oh Lord, I mutter!

Thankfully, I can soon overhear that it’s the start of Jim’ s voicemail (which I and many, many people know so, so well):

‘Sorry I missed you etc…’

Barry leaves a huge chatty voicemail, including a mention of what a fine chap I am again and then it’s down to business, 20 minutes of my available hour already gone!

I quickly get stuck into my list via a little intro (again): namely did he mind doing this and had he read my draft of chapter 1?

Of course, he had read it, it was very funny and he didn’t mind at all. He added that he wasn’t sure that anyone would find any of his life that interesting in any way.

This by the way is the beginning of a theme that runs throughout the book, highlighting that his generation are so modest and self-effacing.

So Barry, how did Mason Owen start?

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Well back in about 1963 he had three job interviews arranged for himself after leaving school: Granada TV, J Walter Thompson Advertising and Thorpe’ s Chartered Surveyors.

Now I have to admit, as I am trying to write all this down at this first proper meeting, that I very quickly realised it wasn't going to work unless I could record the interview. Barry has such an encyclopaedic memory for names and events that I knew then that to really capture the Barry Owen interview well I should try and reproduce things in full including the names.

Hence during that first meeting while I was trying to fiercely scribble names and events, I was already planning to arrange yet another meeting and to bring a voice recorder this time.

I did however manage to capture many good tales, events, people etc, and I did need that next meeting, but, with his and my own busy schedule, that sequence of events took months.

Anyway, here we are, months later and this time I am upstairs in a very old fashioned and opulent boardroom.

Barry, leaving on a jet plane

So, back in the old days when Barry finished school, he got himself those three interviews as I said. The last one came first and Barry went up to Preston for it. The guy was so charismatic Barry shook hands with him on the job there and then at £750 a year.

On returning home Barry's father wasn’t too pleased, in fact he ‘went ballistic’ , something along the lines of: ‘you're going to work for a bunch of wretched estate agent spivs! '

Walter Thompson was a famous ad agency and they had an equally famous ad running at the time for Rolls Royce which included the line that the loudest noise in a Roller was the clock. Barry's dad genuinely could not believe that Barry hadn't even taken the second interview there or even tried his luck at Granada but had settled instead spontaneously on a job with estate agents of all people!

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At the time Granada TV also looked to be the future of television and Barry’s father would have preferred either of the other two alternatives to the one route that Barry had single-handedly and so hastily shook hands on.

Anyway, what was done was done and Barry had his first job.

He joined the company on 1 August 1963 (how the hell do you remember that!) and spent three years there sharing an office and lifts to work with a certain Geoffrey Mason who was to become a lifelong friend and business partner (see chapter 4).

Barry bought a house in Formby for £5,300 and thoroughly enjoyed the next three years. Geoff and he soon formed a property company with Brian Calvert and called it Telegraph Properties.

On 1 July 1967 they finally started Mason Owen as partners and found an office for rent at £5 a week inclusive in Hamilton Street. They rented it off Joe Hearn. (Do I need all this detail Barry?)

Initially they had only one secretary who lasted about a week, so they changed to one each: Vanessa Gobi worked for Barry while Geoff had Carol Marks. Then came the first fee earning employee in Tony Glynn- Jones who joined them at their new offices on Harrington Street and off they went onto the next phase of the Mason Owen expansion.

In 1968 they moved to Refuge Assurance House on Lord Street and from there they started to prosper. A company called Waterworths gave them a massive contract involving something like 78 shops to sell. In reality they couldn’t even afford the sales advertising boards so they approached Ian Maiden with their dilemma who promptly offered them the opportunity to pay for the boards when they had sold the properties!

Isn’t that a fantastic story of how things worked back in his day. It doesn’t happen like that now.

Good business sense is sadly lacking a lot of the time these days but then you don’t know if you can trust people anymore.

As I sit there, I sort of lament the passing of his era. I suppose that there were dishonest people then but these days you start to wonder where the honest people have all gone to.

I have been taken for a ride and swindled by more than a handful of people. Even those that I would have counted as great friends before the event. I have lent money to them that isn’t really mine (if you consider I also owe the bank a lot) and they look you in the eye and lie to you. As one example only, one mate

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announced (over the phone) that he simply wouldn’t be giving me it back – ‘he needed it more than me’ .

Anyway – back to Barry.

At the time their accountants were Cook and Co - and the boss there, Clifford Cook, introduced them to a bright young man called Stephen Laing (see chapter 12). Their solicitors were Weightmans and another young chap there did Mason Owen's legal work, the brilliant young Peter Bullivant (he has a chapter too, number 5). It’s like one big family.

Peter Bullivant later formed Bullivant & Co, which then joined what is now the national firm of Hill Dickinson.

You are getting the pattern here I hope: friendships started in the 1960s and still intact today.

It’s sort of quaint, and I think remarkable and almost unbelievable in some ways. I don’t believe it happens as much today and I would actually put that down partly to the new communication methods I was ranting on about before and the disappearance of integrity.

For example, as I look at my ‘iPhone’ right now I have over a thousand numbers listed. Why on earth? Who are they all?

Anyway, Barry quite clearly loves all his cronies. He boasts there and then that he's rung Peter every day for 50 years and Stephen every other day. When I catch up with the two of them I must ask them exactly what that means to them!

Ringing someone is one stage back from face-to-face chat so I suggest that we should try and do more of it. Texting, emailing and so on might all have their place, but I have discovered that going back to ringing people is a better way.

Stephen Laing's nickname either was then or became ‘Stainless’. Barry says that he can't ever remember him swearing once - ‘the odd ‘damn’ maybe’

And he also recalled, still incredulous to this day, that:

‘Stephen was never laddish or coarse. You would never find him commenting on a lady’s ‘assets’ that's for sure!’

I knew what an achievement that was considering the era they lived through. A ‘stainless’ attitude to the fair sex was not something that would come easy to anyone that grew up in an era where Terry Thomas and Leslie Phillips roamed the earth unchallenged.

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Back to the story, and next thing, Barry and Geoff founded ‘Liquorsave’ with one Graham Walker (no obvious relation to Malcolm) and that ended up as several hundred stores only to be sold to Jimmy Gulliver making Geoff and Barry their first million. (You can understand why I had to tape this as it all came out pretty quickly and there’s no way I could have written it down).

Graham Walker was an interesting character and he went on to lead the British challenge in the Americas cup in 1986. There’s some more stuff like that going to come into the book when I get to have lunch with Johnny Prestt (see chapter 9) as he is/was a prolific sailor and adventurer.

He will deny it of course - they all do.

At this point Barry pauses from his recounting of who's who in Liverpool business and asks me if I know where all his money went?

I am a bit nonplussed at this question as I was supposed to be asking the questions. For some reason and for a split second I worry if he is going to suggest I pocketed it all.

However, I take a guess: ‘property?’ I blurt out in the hope it will take his mind off the thought of my potential implication in his loss.

Wrong - he has actually spent it all on school fees.

But as I have now mentioned property, we go full circle back to banks. He shoots off to fetch and present me with a copy of a book called ‘Bad Banks’ by Alex Brummer. The journey out across the thick carpet from the boardroom to his office takes him ages as he has to talk to everyone as they pass. It’s about 50 feet in total, so about ten foot per person!

As I sit rapidly aging in the oak panelled room lined with a vast array of truly amazing art, I can see across the corridor into his office and all the photos around and behind the desk where he sits. Everywhere he goes he is constantly surrounded by friends and family. He has a warm glow about him and clearly everyone loves him.

As he sits at the desk looking for the book the pictures surround him are a bit like a halo I muse:

Saint Barry?

He is back now and back onto ‘Bad Banks’, which he generously signs for me. (Months later I lend it to a couple of young entrepreneurs I am helping, and they never give it back: denying that I ever lent it to them along with my signed copy of John Timpson’s book!).

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He then starts to read the first chapter to me, which is all about a scandal at the Co-op bank. It’s a bit worrying as I don’t really know if he is going to read me the whole book. Thankfully he stops. The main relevance of the start of this book and the scandal at the Co-op is that he was about to move his business from RBS to the Co-op and that extraordinary mess erupted.

We swap a couple of tales about the way the banks behaved during the crisis and we both know the tales anyway as I was of course working for him for some of the time. It was during that time that I really saw how talking got better results than email and text.

Then we are interrupted by a call on his mobile from the MD at Barlow’s of which Barry is a Director.

Not wishing to listen in, I drift off and don’t much hear his exchange on the phone. Surprisingly quickly he is off the call and we are back on track as the call has ended.

Mason Owen has moved to Refuge Assurance House and the staff numbers have multiplied. Then comes a London office, then a property management office and then the move to Dale Street.

In 1968 they buy Gladstone House for £44,500, only to find that the bank would not complete on the deal.

Barry immediately rang up a Jewish client called Jack Beanstock and he not only sorted out the money for them, he also arranged another few bob for them to refurbish it. This all came about through an interview with Sydney Friedland. I hope everyone of these people mentioned buys a copy of the book.

The firm’s early growth continued in strides but at this stage in the interview, I try to turn the conversation to Barry’s love of art and when all that might have started. Barry launches himself into this new topic with typical gusto and all about how he had met the marvellous character Monty Bloom in the early 60s for whom he had managed a property portfolio.

Whenever Barry was at Monty’s’ house, which was heavily adorned in Lowry paintings, Monty would always ask Barry if he liked them. Barry would reply honestly that to him they looked just like the kids had drawn them. This went on for years, until one day Monty asked the question a slightly different way. Which one would Barry have if he had to have one of them?

Barry conceded to Monty that they were growing on him and that he actually quite liked ‘The Assignation’ .

For many years after that exchange there were instructions within Monty Blooms’ last will and testament that Barry be allowed to buy that picture at a very 36

reasonable price should Monty die. Barry did buy that painting and the price was very reasonable.

His love of Lowry’s had blossomed by then and he acquired a lot of lithographs and in fact collected whatever he could from that time onward.

I asked Barry what the tale was about a company accepting a picture to settle a business debt - was that a Lowry and was it true?

Barry switches to this tale, and how Manfred Gorvey took a piece of art to write off a debt. This was another Lowry piece called ‘Going to Work’. What was funny about this was that at the time they too thought it was maybe done by the kids. However, it's worth around £2 million now and it still hangs in their offices in Hans Crescent. Barry never managed to get this one back.

We pause for a while to look around the beautiful boardroom and admire some of the work there. Barry’s Mason Owen collection is wide ranging and he has further works of his own at home.

We then talk for a moment about Andy Pritchard and his growing art collection. Andy has been a mate of mine since 1981 and, as I think I have mentioned, he rose eventually to be the CEO of, and largest shareholder in, Iceland frozen foods.

Only because I left that is, as Malcolm Walker told me.

Several years ago he sold his shares and ‘trousered’ many millions.

Since then, Andy has bought up a lot of art and he loves discussing it with Barry when he can because Barry will chip in with lines like ‘Oh yes, I used to own that one’.

One of Barry's daughters is married to a gentleman from Christies, and he too has helped Andy with advice on artworks. Barry no doubt dreams what he would do with the sort of money that Andy has, rampaging his way through the art world brandishing his cheque book.

Andy has been far more successful in art than many of his other investments. His wine investments were a disaster as for a start it’s a form of investment that you can drink: not a good idea for Andy.

You will all know how Winnie the Pooh never made any money setting aside honey.

So Barry Owen: Family, friends, art - what else is there?

At this question he admits that he has a weakness for motorcars. He immediately mentions an Aston Martin DB2 that he regrets selling that once belonged to Mark 37

Knopfler (him again!). I have heard him say this a few times so it must really hurt but at the time he needed it - for school fees! (them again!)

All his kids have got a house from the bank of Dad as he has always been very keen to get them on the property ladder. We both sit there and wonder at how we work all our lives just to make the next generations lives better!

Well our parents did it, so I guess it’s our lot in life. And it’s fun I guess.

So that’s Barry and Chapter 3, and then we go and have a gin and tonic across the road.

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