CHAPTER FOUR GEOFF MASON AND HIS SONS

Chapter Four - Geoff Mason and his sons

On my wall at work, I have a compliment slip from a rugby dinner I attended in London back in 2015.

Someone said something to me that night and it affected me so much that I wrote it down on this handy slip of paper from the table in front of me and I then asked the individual to sign it.

Yes, I wrote it down, extra admin work on a night off, and I then shoved it back in front of this quite large person and asked him to sign it.

It was that much of a game changer for me.

This was Geoff Mason’ s elder son Christopher, often mistaken for the love child of Oliver Reed and Clarissa Dickson Wright. What he had said (in response to my enquiry as to whether he wanted a pint of Guinness to accompany his large red wine) I felt compelled to write down. This is what he had said: ‘Oh no, Mr Wainwright, you are way off the mark; my days as a bon viveur are well behind me’.

Chris Mason truly did write that to me

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That night he demonstrated that he must have meant they were to cease the following day because he actually ‘bon viveured’ that night until about three in the morning, not that I would know too much about it because some half-wit in London thought it would be funny to put something in my drink at a nightclub and I ended up in A&E. At my age. Why would they do that?

Anyway at least Chris was apparently making an effort, even if on that occasion it was only hot air, to stop living the high life. I was soon to suspect that ‘bon viveuring’, or whatever the noun or verb is, if there is one, might run in his family.

I am actually more acquainted with the elder Mason son, Andrew, and I do know that if bon viving/viveuring whatever was a sport of any stature then the Mason boys would be the hard living equivalent of the Brownlee brothers.

This doesn’t automatically mean that Dad Geoff is the same, but I would have bet he was in his heyday, as I picked up the phone to Andy for the zillionth time to try and get a meeting in the diary.

To save time I had even gone ahead and arranged who I wanted to meet after Geoff and it looked as if my appointment with Peter Bullivant would end up taking place before I ever caught up with Mason the elder.

So back to the plot (and I bet you are wishing there actually was one) I finally do get that illusive first meeting with Geoff into the diary. You will remember that we have just met Barry Owen co-founder of the huge property consultants Mason Owen. Now it was my turn to get an hour with the other half of the partnership: Geoff Mason.

There is no hiding the size of the monster they created. (Mason Owen, that is, not Chris Mason). It was so big they would split it into two big businesses in 1992 and Mason Owen and Mason and Partners are now two large standalone property consultants thriving independently in Liverpool, London and I guess pretty much ‘the world’ .

To get to Geoff’s personal office I have to go along a main open plan section where many people are beavering away. Things are clearly going well for Mason and Partners. They are all happy, smiley people (unless its wind) and the ones that are able to spare a moment from their jobs look up and acknowledge your passing with a small smile and a nod and maybe a little quizzical look :

‘Who can that be who is going into the inner sanctum of the boss’s office?’

Geoff’ s office is at the end of this big area and is large enough to have both his desk and a separate table and chairs in it.

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I have another tale about large offices, but I will leave that to the chapter on rugby presidents.

His son Andrew is based next door (Chris runs the London office) and he strolls in wearing jeans and a baggy shirt to join us for the chat. A shirt is doing well to be baggy on this chap, he is certainly quite a unit.

The reason for Andy’s attendance at the meet up is allegedly that Geoff’s memory is ‘not as good as it used to be’ . Ironically, I find him to be full of facts, figures and names from the 60s, 70s and so on up to current times. Maybe he's just a bit paranoid about it as he is 72 now and it doesn’t quite roll out as quickly as it did and as it does still with Barry.

The first thing that strikes you about Geoff is that he is looking very fit. He immediately says that he cycles often along the Wirral way. I make a mental note to do more cycling, it’s clearly good for you. There doesn't appear to be a pick on his upper body, and this is, to be very honest, in sharp contrast to his son Andrew who, if he wasn't a property guru, you would probably hazard a guess that he was a brewery rep or a food critic (in maybe the Wigan area).

Geoff and the Mason boys share a passion of mine for rugby union and Geoff’ s playing days finished at the ripe old age of 52 when he broke his leg in two places.

Birkenhead and Liverpool….

No, only kidding, he sustained a double fracture.

He doesn't tell the story with any element of drama about it at all. It sounds like it was just ‘one of those things’, an inconvenience and I imagine him in the bar afterwards at New Brighton rugby club with a bag of ice on the double break chatting with the lads and laughing about how he winced when they turned his foot back to face the right way, how he argued with the ref about whether he could play on and then how he downed umpteen pints of anaesthetic before a fish and chip supper.

There would probably have been a doctor amongst this after match group, he’ s normally the one that keeps going out for a fag and looks bloody dreadful.

Like most of the characters in this book I also imagine that somewhere on the Wirral there is a wife (the long-suffering Mrs Mason) with no idea where the bloody hell her husband and two sons are, and let’s face it, probably not that bothered to be honest.

She has probably had beef bourguignon on the aga for six hours and is herself on her second bottle of Pino.

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I may be doing a lot of people an injustice here but what the hell, its what is coming into my head – and no disrespect to anyone intended.

Nowadays, Geoff is very relaxed with an open neck shirt and he varies from leaning towards me on his desk looking straight at me from about a metre away to reclining back precariously in his chair with his feet on the desk in a position that you can only describe as completely horizontal and definitely highly dangerous.

I don’t know if he is doing this deliberately for a laugh, to see when I finally crack and demand that he sit up straight.

So, what did he do before him and Barry got together?

Well, he worked for Bevan Son and Maples on about £1.50 a week but he really wanted to be an architect.

On his journey to work in those days he would be sitting on the train waiting for it to move off and he will always remember the familiar daily sound of a young man running desperately to catch the same train as him, often shouting out for it to wait and always late. This turned out to be Birkenhead schoolboy Barry Owen who he was later to spend so much of his life in business with.

(When I had asked Barry about sport, he hadn’t mentioned all this running for the train that he did).

Geoff and Barry ended up working for Bernard Thorpe, a commercial estate agent, the one that Mr Owen Senior was so cross about, (which eventually became part of DTZ). The two of them soon ran the two main parts of the company and they were offered partnerships in the Preston office.

At that time, Geoff had broken his leg for the first time, again while playing rugby, and he had 16 weeks off work. Barry meanwhile, as he was only part qualified, was offered a partnership that they termed would be a ‘cadet’ partnership. Barry found this a little demeaning and he decided he was going to ‘bugger off’ and do his own thing.

They decided to both go and set up together and had soon committed £5 per week for offices in Harrington Street. The rest of Geoff’s history - office wise- is in Barry’s chapter for very obvious reasons.

As Barry did, Geoff regales me with the same tales of the assistants that persevered to work with them. The chat has a couple of what is now deemed non-PC comments about whether they were good looking or not but it’s very clear that he and Barry were and are very good at what they do and had a hell of a lot of fun doing it. They soon undermined the monopoly that had been enjoyed by the London property companies for quite a while and began to expand.

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Barry did a huge amount of work with big ventures such as Ethel Austin while Geoff attracted some very seriously huge clients who all seemed to go on to enjoy highly successful (and in some cases record-breaking) flotations.

He worked for and became good friends with Albert Gubay (and was actually his Best Man) who was the man behind the Kwik Save phenomenon. In 1970, with that chain, they set the record for the biggest oversubscription on a flotation.

Gubay was legendary for his thriftiness. Geoff has a great story to capture this about when they stopped at a motorway service station to order butties and coffees. When they asked Albert what he would have, he simply requested hot water and proceeded to dip into it a tea bag he had bought with him.

He died a few years back and by then he was well into his 80s (87). At his height Geoff and Mason Owen were running all his property acquisitions.

The fledgling company Iceland Frozen Foods also became a client of Geoff's and when that later floated it was (I think I recall this accurately) 113 times oversubscribed and a new record for a flotation at that time. I worked on that when I was at Ernst & Young as a trainee but I didn’t get to meet Geoff formally as I wasn’t important enough and I was only a lowly number cruncher.

Geoff ran Iceland’s property portfolios for decades and formed lasting friendships and professional relationships with a large number of the stars in this book.

The third of the bigger success stories was Eddie Healey who had a company called Status Discounts which was also a record holder for flotation subscription size. They were involved in initiatives such as the Meadowhall shopping centre.

This is really big stuff and I am both impressed and a little bit speechless. These two were/are such big players yet are so unassuming: so normal and approachable: no airs and graces.

Eddie Hayley’s deal on Meadowhall was developed with Paul Sykes and while they were all really great businessmen, Geoff also has lovely tales about the human side of things.

While doing a development with Godfrey Bradman who did Broadgate in London, Paul and he stood looking at the plans until Geoff finally lost his patience and reached over to turn them up the other way and then physically swing Godfrey around so that he knew what he was looking at and from what direction.

At this point in the chat, for some reason, Geoff feels the need to tell me that his son Andrew has an amazing singing voice; so good that he sometimes signs autographs when sozzled. I can imagine that he does have a good voice so I make a mental note to book him for my next birthday.

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I then lose that note.

I very much doubt though that he signs autographs when inebriated as I know for a fact that he is asleep when he has sampled even the smallest amounts of alcohol.

He has been sitting there mostly mute for the whole interview so far. I suspect he is dying for a nap. As I mentioned, Geoff had said that Andy was drafted into the meeting because Geoff’s memory was apparently failing but this hasn’t been the case so far and Andy’s only sparse interjections have been inaccurate and it seems that it might possibly be his memory that is failing.

To add to his lack of any contribution so far he also refuses to sing. I suppose that with his staff the other side of the glass partition it would not be good for his image and his senior position as the Managing Director.

Do you know what, while we are talking about the enigma that is Andrew Mason, we should mention that this sleeping thing is really quite serious. I have been looking through old photos and there’s another book in there somewhere on this subject alone.

In fact, let’s have a practice run for that.

WE NOW TAKE A LITTLE DIVERSION FROM MY BOOK and please imagine those wavy, dream-like images, as we move back in time to another place entirely.

Let us pause for a while and detour to the possibility of Andy, son of wide-awake Geoff Mason, writing a tour guide to places he has been to. The difference with this guidebook will be, in contrast to other travel or restaurant books, that its writer Andy has fallen asleep at all the venues he writes about. It’s a sort of USP if you like.

This is after all what he does - he falls asleep, and he gleans the feedback on the venues from companions afterwards, generally the next day.

Ibiza

Amazing place, so I am told anyway, as I never made it. I had already fallen asleep, this time standing upright, at the very entertaining Jazz Club. Actually, I don’t remember much about that either as I had been drifting in and out of consciousness on the way there from a Tapas bar. Now that was a good place, I do remember a lot of that. Great food and loads of it (maybe that’s why I became so uncharacteristically sleepy).

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The photo below is of me giving it large at the Blue Marlin -yet another snoozy place. If only they would turn the music up this would never happen.

“Giving it large at the Blue Marlin“

The Tube in London

A very peaceful place to get your head down, highly recommended. I don’t know whether it was the quiet atmosphere in the compartment (coming back from a rugby union international match against Ireland at Twickenham) or the smooth ride (of the fifty year old British Rail old rolling stock with about 400 people

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singing and shouting in each carriage) that sent me off but I do know that it was nothing to do with a full days corporate hospitality at Twickenham that afternoon

On the London tube – after the England v Ireland heading into town.

When Wainwright is talking at a corporate dinner

I was very fortunate to join a group of very old pals at a dinner at Chester Rugby Club recently where Wainwright was the comic turn (not) and he was interviewing Warren Gatland. Now, Gatland was interesting: Wainwright not so much.

I was less fortunate however to have had lunch that day with one Parminder Basran (he is actually on the last page of this book, being too loud to put anywhere else) so the details of the evening event itself are largely sketchy to say the least.

I remember laughing when Wainwright likened my table to the cast of Cocoon but after that it all went a bit woozy again. I think the aircon at Chester Rugby Club must be on the blink.

Great Night though, my cocoon mates tell me.

The aftereffects of listening to the author in the main book speak

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Award winning Indian restaurant in Birmingham

This again was reported to me the next day to be a truly amazing restaurant. We had spent all that day at a one day test match between England and Sri Lanka and we had slightly over indulged in the hospitality area. Wainwright had a mate who was the Chief Exec of Warwickshire CC and of Edgbaston itself (Colin Povey) and he had offered to come and say hello to Wainwright and his fine guests.

He did say hello, but only from the doorway, as when he took one look at us, any forward movement he had had up to then was halted immediately and instinctively a pressing meeting became necessary anywhere else but in that room. He gave us a sort of ‘checking up on the kids’ look around the door and he was off out and at some speed. Quite nimble for a man who must now be twice the weight he was when he was the GB water polo goalkeeper.

That evening I was transported to this award-winning curry house. I think we were all the worse for wear but yet again it was me that headed to the land of dreams.

The food was excellent, I saw the photos later and read the website, but don’t remember the night. Sadly I was otherwise engaged looking at the inside of my eyelids. I couldn’t find a photo from that restaurant. I was at the back of the shot anyway and I had a tea towel over my head, so it wasn’t much of a photo.

Here is one of me with Andy P and his lovely bride Patricia: Just look at the state of them.

Monaco - This was a truly amazing event.

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Some bugger has poured water over my crotch

Obviously, some bugger has poured water over my crotch in the photo, but the rest of the time was apparently fun. We ………. er…... sorry where was I?

I’m possibly sorry now about introducing that last segment, so let us return to the main event.

There are many more venues that we could write about but we will leave it there for now and leave Andy to decide if he wants to finish the book himself and make his own fortune.

Another few wavy bits, and we are now back in the proper book. Sorry about that.

Meanwhile, we are back on Rugby Union now and Geoff tells me about Colin Carney who was a New Brighton winger and had the nickname ‘skin’ . One Saturday night Geoff found himself in the loos in the Rugby Club standing next to Colin's Dad Alf. In those days you tended to wee at a large often stainless-steel trough and Geoff noticed that Alf had forgotten to correctly extract his tackle and was basically weeing with his trousers still on.

Geoff stood there incredulous as the liquid came out of the bottom of the legs of the poor old bugger’ s trousers while they in turn changed to a different shade of grey. He turned and walked out leaving Geoff with the remark:

‘By Jove I needed that’.

Just like Barry, Geoff’s staff all love him and he also tends to exchange pleasantries with everyone he passes, a habit that makes getting anywhere quite difficult and very unpredictable.

It’s been a rollercoaster with these two in the last two chapters. As I near completion of this tome, neither of them are in great health. They are fighting on but time catches up with all of us, and this was clearly one of the reasons that I started this book off in the first place and the fact that I’m not getting any younger either.

With them will pass an era. In those days if you shook hands with someone, if you made a deal, you stuck to it. I think that’s gone, but maybe I’m unlucky or I’m a bad judge of character in the first place. Back then you paid people back: maybe I’m just unlucky.

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Barry and Geoff built a business on relationships and hard work and now I would query whether modern communication methods are fundamentally changing all that.

Things are done differently now which is why a new generation come along and roll their eyes at our shortcomings, like we did in our day to the generation before us.

Until I no longer can, I will always raise a glass to Mason & Partners and to ‘bon viveuring’.

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