CHAPTER FIVE PETER BULLIVANT

Chapter Five - Peter Bullivant

I will always raise a glass to the star of this next chapter as well.

Peter Bullivant is the solicitor that we have mentioned a few times before and I have known of him for many years. Back in the early years I was only a minion and wasn’t involved in the important conversations, I was just working for the big noises at the top. That would also have been the relationship back when Iceland floated on the stock exchange for example.

Since then, I have been in his company in professional circles and maybe not even realising it half the time. After the flotation and when I worked at Iceland as an auditor, he was the main solicitor for the company and has been ever since to the best of my knowledge. Like I mentioned before he was involved in all the work for that flotation, but I was just a gofer.

Iceland did some big stuff back in those days (buy Malcolm’s book with the change you will have after buying mine), and you will be spellbound.

As a mid-page, postscript, I have just finished reading his son, Richard’s book, The Green Grocer, and it too is an excellent buy.

So now I have given you a dilemma and you will have to decide which one to buy with the change.

At one stage the company bought a much larger frozen food rival called Bejam. A mackerel eating a tuna. In another year, it floated of course and in another it bought Bookers. It did a lot of extraordinary things and Peter was always one of the main professional advisors to Malcolm and his team, pretty much throughout all that time.

It wasn’t until many years later that we met each other properly and got to know each other a bit more. My eldest children were pals with Peter’ s grandchildren. Peter’s son Ralph Bullivant (another lawyer) and his wife Andrea became our pals and hence we met Peter and his equally lovely wife Klazein at parties socially.

I have probably spelt Klazein wrong but she won’t mind, I think she would forgive anyone almost anything.

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Do you know, on the subject of personality, I cannot imagine Peter ever being flustered or stressed. I am quite sure there are people that know him that might counter this but personally I just can’t imagine it: he seems totally unflappable.

Like ‘Stainless’ who we spoke of earlier, I can’t imagine him swearing or even ogling the fair sex, other than very discretely. Classy, professional, and charming.

On top of that, he is always so immaculately dressed and, as I mentioned in the first chapter when talking about Jim Davies, even when he wears scruffy, mismatched clobber he still somehow looks smart and affluent.

I recall the episode of Fawlty Towers where Basil thinks he has met such class in the form of Lord Melbury. In that instance he is mistaken but I’m not here: there are no bricks in Peter’s briefcase: he is the real deal.

And he can’t half drink, not that that’s a talent as such.

At Andy P’s fiftieth birthday party in a chateau in France in about 2008, Peter got embroiled in a bit of a late drinking session with a bunch of us. The banter was so good that the time soon disappeared. I remember going to bed at around 3am thinking that having the largest frame out of all the gathering, being also a rugby player (hence used to continual heavy drinking: it’s part of the training and is needed to keep your body weight up) and also the youngest, I should be the brightest at breakfast.

In actual fact it was such a heavy night I couldn’t imagine many others would actually make breakfast at all.

The next morning when I finally made it downstairs, only about five hours after going to bed in the first place, he was already sitting there chatting to his aforementioned lovely wife: with toast and English breakfast marmalade in one hand and a well-thumbed Daily Telegraph in the other.

He was wearing a bright red jumper, country check shirt, mustard trousers (what else) and brown brogues. He looked fresh faced, clean shaven, bright eyed, and in sharp contrast to me.

How on earth? Does he have a twin?

‘Wainwright, how the devil are you?’

‘Not as well as you, apparently, old boy!’, I blathered.

Indestructible.

He should have been knackered after the night before, but then so many of his generation are simply bullet proof.

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Anyway, I needed to get sat down with that man Peter and have a coffee and/or a bite of lunch. I will telephone him as I need to thank him at the same time.

My wife Alison and I had a great time at a dinner party at his house very recently. He had some of his old chums there and they were very good company and all of the same mould as Peter.

One of them had only known Ali about ten minutes when, well into his seventies by the way, I could hear him plotting to elope with her as soon as they could arrange the logistics. After all she was ‘a cracking bit of totty’ and she ‘could do much better than me.’

This is straight out of ‘Doctor at Large’ or the ‘Carry on’ films and I think it’ s classic and of that age: part of our history now.

So, back live, I call Peter on the telephone. It’s been about nine months since he said that he would ring me the following week. But at 70 plus I guess you can be excused for forgetting trivia like me and my bestseller.

I imagine that when we have that long awaited coffee at the Village Hotel in Bromborough he will simply want to talk about everyone else like all the other old buggers in this book and resist any attempt to talk about him.

I will try and get some decent stuff out of him though, come what may.

If you want to learn a lot about Peter’s career and how he is seen in the business community at large and in the North West in particular you should read the oration by Professor Frank Sanderson when introducing Peter as the recipient of an honorary fellowship to Liverpool John Moores University. It really says a lot about the man.

You can look that up yourselves, but I am arranging a meeting at the Village Hotel in Bromborough, to ascertain Peter’s no doubt modest take on his career in the legal profession and on his life so far.

For some reason I am thinking of Ranulph Fiennes as I write this. I have met Sir Ranulph. I was invited by a friend of mine (John Greaves: ex MBNA director, then Homeserve) to hear Ranulph talk and field questions at Chester Racecourse.

The way Ran (I’m pretending we are mates now but he wouldn’t know me from Adam) understates things reminds me again of Peter and the others in this book.

They are all modest and self-effacing and they play down absolutely everything. In Ranulph’s talk he mentioned an expedition he was on where they were planning to float on an iceberg for three months or so to prove that some race had made it across some piece of water in days now gone. Sorry I didn’t take the detail in.

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In the event, there were some complications and they ended up drifting for six months but only had the food for three months.

Ranulph called this ‘inconvenient’.

Bloody hell, I wouldn’t like to try and print what I would call it, but it definitely wouldn’t be inconvenient.

Ranulph’s wife Ginny was the same as him. When he came around from a heart attack, in his sixties at the time, she told him that she had great news, he was going to climb Everest next.

After one of his expeditions, he was annoyed that his frostbitten fingers kept catching on things, so he chopped the ends off them with the garden shears.

Back live, I have that date in the diary with Peter Bullivant and we agreed to meet for that coffee. I’m there early and he is there at exactly 10 AM. We order a couple of coffees and then dither for a while about whether or not we want a biscuit. He cuts matters short and decides for both of us on millionaire’s shortbread. Very nice indeed and the next hour absolutely flies by.

Product placement for the Village Inn there and Starbucks: we will discuss money, or shortbread, later.

It was as I predicted. Talking to Peter reminded me so much of the other meetings: so modest. Many young people are not like this at all these days and instead boast about their qualities: qualities you soon find they actually don’t have.

‘I can’t understand what you could possibly find of interest in my dull old life story’, he muses.

He actually does seem a bit worried that there might not be anything interesting for him to think of and sits wracking his brains for me while simultaneously insisting that his memory is terrible.

It’s not, but I do find out during the get-together that Peter is actually in his late seventies. I had absolutely no idea. I thought he was about 72 and only because I have a vague idea of how long he had been around Liverpool and I have met his mates.

It was the big 80 not so far away for him.

We talk about everybody else that is in the book first and I tell him some of the better stories that are in it to get him warmed up.

We laugh but then we try and get down to something a bit more serious:

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‘When did you start your own practice?’

Peter had done his legal training with Weightmans having always been a Wirral lad and in 1970 he basically set up on his own: PW Bullivant, along with one assistant.

In around 1973 he was joined by Jim Davies and Guy Wallace who became partners in this venture. They eventually left and not, it must be noted, on any bad feeling, but to set up on their own. (You know that story because they became DWF).

I say there was no bad feeling because it was clear that the two of them leaving had big ambitions whereas Peter wanted to keep things small and controlled.

One of the great step changes for Peter was the arrival of Pam Jones in around 1971/2 as a clerk and she subsequently became ‘one of the best lawyers that he has ever come across’. That’s fair praise indeed coming from him.

I’m not sure whether I should be trying to contact her but I decide to stick to my theme of old blokes, shooting and fishing.

So far I have included just blokes I have been out and about with so it’s not sexist. Back in the old days you didn’t come across rugby playing women (they are amazing at it now) and they didn’t do much cricket, golf, shooting and so on.

Anyway, Peter can’t speak too highly of her and their partnership flourished. They together became Bullivant Jones in 1978.

Pam and Peter had a variety of big clients and the names come thick and fast, just like in the meeting with Geoff and with Barry before.

For example, Michael Weeks: he was also a friend and client of Barry and Geoff. Back in these heady days they jumped a flight to New York to watch an Ali fight.

Those were the days!

Albert Gubay was also a client, and Peter played a big part in their success.

Graham Walker started his career as an accountant at Coopers and later started North West Vintners, a large and very successful business. This is one I know myself as I visited them again on the audit team with EY when I was training. It’s the same Graham Walker that went on to back attempts to win the Americas Cup. He went with Jim when he left to be a client of DWF.

Alan Birchall gets a mention. I’ve heard the name and recall that he had a fine singing voice and once blagged his way into singing live at an NFL game in the States.

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He set up the hugely successful Coleman meats. I wonder to myself whether he is as good a singer as Andrew Mason and would I be able to get the two of them together (while both awake).

It’ s an impressive list and I’m not sure if I have written down the right names against the right businesses and the right anecdotes but next thing you know I have asked him about his rugby union days as I’m not managing to get down everything he is telling me and I want to slow him down.

Peter actually stopped playing rugby in his thirties. For some reason I was thinking he was one of those nutters that carry on until close to their sixties, but I was probably thinking of Geoff Mason again.

My very own dad Tony used to have a good tale of a rugby mate of his who played until he was 60. He had been advised as a lad to take up rugby to keep him out of mischief and had hence played the game for 45 years. On the day of his sixtieth birthday and his last game for the Old Edwardians in Birmingham he scored a try that was the third one he had scored during his career. Like the other two, it seemed he had been pushed onto the ball when it was over the try line, probably in this last instance as a sort of retirement present.

This tale is in one of those ‘strange facts of rugby’ type books. Eric Jones, I believe his name was.

I don’t know if it also adds in the book that Eric held a raffle at the Old Edwardians club house and the first eight drawn out of the hat were to be his coffin bearers when he died.

I like that. Can you imagine if the draw produced some of the extremes of size and shape that you find at all rugby clubs and the chaos that would ensue when they tried to lift and then keep a coffin level (and keep the contents in it!) while all drunk in charge.

None of that nonsense for Peter, he gave up the game at a sensible age. He was a wing forward and I would imagine that he was quite a handful to play against.

Did you have any claims to fame?

‘Well I did play against the Springboks (South Africa ) if that’s of any interest?’

If that’s of any interest?!

I wonder whether he would have told me this had I not asked a direct question that meant he had to mention it?

It was back in the very difficult days where sport and apartheid clashed. South Africa were to play in Ireland but that game was put under a lot of political 55

pressure and was eventually called off. As a result they (SA) were looking for a fixture and New Brighton, who were due to play Trinity College Dublin on that day, proposed a combined game. Peter played in it. I resolve to find proof of this and plan to head to New Brighton Rugby Club to see if I can find a photo of him in his heyday. I fail but I do get a New Brighton programme on eBay.

Peter also mentioned playing against Abertillery and against the legendary Welsh player Haydn Morgan who played 27 times for Wales and for the Lions.

The fixture list that New Brighton had back then was a very serious one indeed and they were one of the best clubs in Britain as were their neighbours my club Birkenhead Park.

Thinking he is probably holding some other great feats back I ask him straight:

‘Come on Peter, what else have you done?’

‘Well, I sailed across the Atlantic in around 2000? (He sounds almost apologetic?).

I sounded as if I was going to fall off my chair!

It had originally been proposed to do it quite a few years before but when suddenly Barry Owen was hit by his brain haemorrhage they felt they had to call it off. In the end he did it years later with Richard Walker, Malcolm Walker’ s son, amongst others.

There he is at number 6.

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‘What about the art Peter, how did you get into that?’

I ask Peter this as we, Ali and I, have been over to the gallery that he has in the outbuildings at his Farm in Cheshire. If you’re interested do check out www.gorstellagallery.co.uk.

At the outset they just wanted to make use of the buildings there. In 1990 they stripped and painted the walls and asked eight local artists if they would like to exhibit their works there. It proved a success and it has been going ever since. When Peter felt like packing it in, his daughter Bridget and her husband took it over.

They now send out very sophisticated brochures every three months or so to a database of contacts and the paintings are then exhibited and on sale for a few weekends. It’s a lovely day or out and very well organised. If you drag the kids with you they hate it and it’s a great way of getting revenge for them ruining your life. It promotes art and is a great experience.

My last question is, “Where did he meet your lovely wife?”

On a gay nudist beach in Spain, he says with a wry smile.

No further questions, your honour.

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