CHAPTER EIGHT JIM DAVIES

Chapter Eight -

Jim Davies

OMG.

At last, I have managed to pin down Jim Davies for a coffee and it turns into a full cooked breakfast at Home restaurant in Oxton Village. Bit of a free plug there, so before I publish, I will call in and check what freebie I get for the mention, otherwise I will need to remove it and say we dined elsewhere.

To be honest, I am absolutely exhausted after the encounter with James Davies OBE. He rushes from one subject to another, one anecdote after another, just like a road runner doing standup.

He co-founded DWF the now huge multinational legal stock market quoted law firm. You could easily forgive someone who had done all that if they then were to talk about themselves all the time, but he won’t. Same old pattern with this lot.

For much of the meeting he raves about other people and doesn't want to talk too much about himself. He hones in on how marvellous Barry and Geoff are and Peter Bullivant and actually everyone else in this book.

It’s hard to drag out from him stuff about Jim Davies himself though. That is truly remarkable really for a man who is ten weeks into being the High Sheriff of Merseyside for a year

There he is, being installed as the High Sheriff of Merseyside. What an honour for me as well as I was actually there! He has also been awarded the OBE for services to charity and industry. I get to find out a little bit about Jim and DWF but only Jim with his charming wife, Shirley really that it was started in 1977 from where we digress very quickly on to Liverpool's first win in the European Cup against Borussia Mönchengladbach. Oh, does Jim love his football! What doesn’t he know about it and who from the football community, doesn’t he know?

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He recalls the tale of flying out to the game just mentioned with a gang of other UK business fellers with Sterling Airways and one of the wags on board organised ‘a whip round for the drive’.

By the way, ‘wag’ carries the old meaning of ‘gentleman who thinks he’s a rather amusing wit, but really isn’t’, rather than the modern version of ‘wives and girlfriends’ and I’m pretty sure there were not many of the fairer sex who accompanied these fellows on overseas football trips.

The pilot that night must've been slightly bemused to be handed a bag of £90 in notes and slummy together with a few friendly pats on the back and

‘There you go old chap, have a drink on us, well done’.

Jim is clearly very fond of his mates and loves to tell stories about them and particularly, it must be said, Barry.

Here comes one: Barry arrived home one night after an office party so late that it was actually nearing 6 o'clock the following morning. As his trousers were half down (probably with change flying everywhere) Mrs Owen awoke and sat up asking him what on earth the time was. He replied very quickly, while now pulling his trousers back up:

‘Not to worry , darling, I’m just getting an early start at the office’.

Apparently when he did arrive in the office (he had to go there, obviously once he had said that, didn’t he) he couldn’t last any longer and the cleaners were very surprised to see the boss with his head down on the desk fast asleep.

Jim tells me how back in the day the Mason Owen parties were legendary. I find that funny as when I met both Barry and Geoff they never mentioned anything about wild parties choosing instead to paint a picture of a wholesome family friendly company. I was getting images of Jane Austin’s’ drawing room when I talked to Barry, but now, as I talk to Jim, it's more like Caligula or Up Pompeii that I’m getting.

Maybe I'll pop back and see Barry and Geoff and give them a second chance to come up with the juicy stuff.

‘Oh, there's another belting story’ begins Jim again.

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This one is about a judge friend of his who is taken ill and is diverted into a hospital in Liverpool on his way to a function. The scouse nurse takes his particulars as he sits on a trolley bed still in his dinner shirt. He had actually been on his way to celebrate being promoted within the legal world, to the next level of judge as it were, so it was a shame that he probably wasn’t going to make it to the event.

‘Name?’ says the (very scouse) nurse.

‘Address?’

After a couple more questions he is getting impatient as he imagines the predinner drinks ending and the guests trundling through to dine.

Then she asks him his profession. He doesn’t mind answering this one. He is very proud of his recent promotion within the judge world and announces voluminously: ‘Circuit Judge’

‘Yer Wha?’ she retorts, to which he responds even more clearly:

‘CIRCUIT ……… JUDGE’

She pauses for a minute, pen floating over the form, trying to digest what the chap from Downton Abbey is trying to say.

She can’t be sure but thinks she gets the gist of it.

‘OK, tell yer wha, I’ll just put electrician for now’.

This is Gold Dust I'm thinking, up there with the Mark Knopfler tale, more please Jim but can we also talk about you and your achievements very soon.

They just keep coming thick and fast and Jim doesn't seem to be running out of tales at all. I'm regretting ordering the full breakfast as I'm having to eat all the time while trying to take notes.

I’m failing miserably. He has long finished his bacon sandwich and tells me I must make sure that people like Dave Ramsey get a cameo appearance and of course I must definitely include the Artists Club (the AC) as so much comes out of there.

And don't forget to ask Barry about Willy Gilbertson Hart. At the rate I'm going here, this book is going to run to two volumes.

Actually, I already know Dave Ramsey. I’ve met him quite a few times at rugby stuff and at the Artists Club and on a ski trip about 15 years ago. I decide that I’m on a deadline now so maybe I’ll give him a call and ask him to preview the book before I publish it. That way I can loads more material for the book! In the event I can’t get hold of him and have to stick with the material I have.

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On the subject of the AC I think Jim is quintessentially what that institution is all about.

A very fine old-fashioned institution in Eberle Street, Liverpool: a gentlemen only club founded in 1877 and to this day a respectable hideaway for well to do chaps whose businesses run themselves and they enjoy a spot of red wine and banter away from ‘the missus’.

Probably totally out of kilter with today’s new order but it should be left alone: it’s a free country and it does no harm!

Sorry, I’m just saying it how it is, but that’s definitely 50% of my potential market now gone!

The place has been at its current location since 1889. With oak panel walls and original artwork, it has the unique feature of an oil painting of every President since it started, hanging within the club.

It has a snooker room, a small bar and a very large dining area with round tables and silver service. I have been a member there myself for many years now but don't get there as much as I should. I used to get there more when I wasn’t a member. Back in those days I would get invited and whatever the occasion, it would always turn into a fairly heavy drink. I think that’s why I don’t go now, I’m too scared!

The club did have, and still has I feel, a reputation as being a bit of a northern version of the Bermuda Triangle. You could pop in there with the honest intention of having a light lunch with a couple of pals but would emerge bleary eyed and reeling into the daylight at 4:30 pm wondering what on earth had happened.

Your wife or other half would no doubt be wondering exactly the same thing when a shambles of a man somehow returns home.

Twenty or thirty years ago, we would get in there occasionally for a pre-planned celebration and have a tremendous lunch and a few gentle drinks: beers, wine and copious bottles of port. Then we would head into Liverpool to try and stay upright and carry on the theme.

Our chairman from Birkenhead Park rugby club back in those days, Paul Young, not the singer but a famous architect, would be in the centre of all the celebrations with his waistcoat straining under the two or three extra stone he was carrying! He sadly left us at a very early age and the AC always reminds me of our annual trips there with him: clonking gin and tonics and raucous male-only company.

Sorry ladies, this isn’t sexist I promise, but this is just what happened and I’m sure you’re glad it all happened there and not in the general view of the public and decent folk.

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Most of my contemporary pals from Birkenhead Park rugby club loved going there now and again and they would take some of the younger rugby lads as their guests. I ended up in one of those groups several years ago.

The way the AC works at lunchtime is that you fill up the tables as you go.

On this occasion there were nine of us from the rugby club and there was a gentleman intending to have his lunch there who was coincidentally invited to join us at our table as the tenth person.

Poor chap.

There is no other way of putting this but he just got horribly, terribly plastered. He was a shambling mess. He sat next to me and absolutely loved the rugby banter and joined in on all the drinking games until he was helped down the stairs into a taxi singing along on his own to arrangement of: ‘Why was he born so beautiful…..’

Very unusually for me I was there the following Thursday for something else and bumped into him. Immediately I enthused:

‘Hello Peter, how the devil are you?’

I was thinking he would probably embrace me with a:

‘Chris, how the devil are you? I wonder if you can inform me how I got home last week?’

Instead, he said:

‘I'm sorry, do I know you?’

Awkward.

But I’m not one to give up and I hid the disappointment that I had failed to make any mark on his memory, and I reminded him of his afternoon with the rugby club. He was with me immediately:

‘Oh, good lord’ he said, ‘last Thursday! The whole of that day is a complete mystery to me. I'm actually banned from coming down the Artist Club by my darling wife so today she thinks I've gone to the dentist. I just came to see if I had any outstanding bills here’.

As an aside here, all the members for some bizarre reason think their wives are oblivious to reality and that their clever ruses have her baffled, whereas in fact they are just humouring the old duffers and they go to the golf club or play bridge or shop.

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I reminded him of some of the details such as the penalty drinks of Kummel because he was caught drinking with his right hand by mistake and so on.

‘It sounds bloody awful,’ he replied ‘ no wonder I can't remember a single sodding thing’.

Anyway, he then said how rude it was of him and he needed to sort of re-introduce himself:

‘I'm Peter’ he said and he reached into his inside jacket pocket and gave me a card.

The card was one of mine: Chris Wainwright ACA.

It at least proved that I had been there with him the previous week even if I had failed to register an impression!

His Artist Club mates at the bar laughed loudly at him and poked fun at the apparent revelation that he only had that one tatty old jacket in his wardrobe!

‘Bugger Off’, he replied wittily.

I went on a ski trip with the Artists Club in the 1990s but I can’t recall more than one or two events from the entire week. I do remember one Colin Brennand arriving at the first evening’s drinks with his wife and also another couple.

‘Who are they Colin’, one of the group whispered to him when he had the chance.

He whispered: ‘Bloody next-door neighbours - they’re not on the AC trip are they?’

‘Are they Berkshire, we don’t even get on. When we went around this morning to ask them if we could leave a key with them (there’s no one else), they said hard luck they are going on holiday themselves. After a few questions it only turns out that they are also skiing in the Alps and, worse still, in the same resort and then unbelievably the same hotel here in Morzine. In fact it couldn’t get any worse, they are in the next bloody room. We even gave them a soddin’ lift to the airport!’

This caused a lot of amusement.

For a while the other couple seemed absolutely fine but after a few drinks they had a massive row with each other, left and we never saw them again.

But come on Jim, I’ve been distracted here. That was your fault. Tell me about Jim the sportsman, the family man, the businessman. What’s the life story?

He gives it to me in about two minutes.

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I worked for Peter Bullivant, lovely man, and then set up on my own - that’s it!

Towards the end of this chapter, I am feeling like I still need a bit more on the man himself, hobbies sports and so on. I make a note to chase him up for more.

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