CHAPTER NINE JOHNNY PRESTT

Chapter Nine – Johnny Prestt

I know Johnny (JP to many people) is a reputable property professional but I want the conversation to start on the subject of his adventures and travels. All the others so far have blocked my writing with their excess modesty. This man is a legend so surely, I can get some good honest boasting out of the man?

We are sitting, just the two of us, in Piccolino in Liverpool yet again and the lovely Emma, the restaurant manager, has felt very sorry for us and has given us a coffee half an hour before she actually opens up. That’s on a busy day just before Christmas so a big thank you to her, and she deserves a mention.

I have to confess that we have to meet up again at Starbucks a couple of weeks later because, as when I met with Barry Owen, the notes I took were just not substantial enough. The guy has so much to tell that you simply can’t take it all in. It also seems somehow inappropriate to scribble notes as we talk.

He was also very happy to let me look at his photo albums which was an experience in itself. I felt like I was getting a one-to-one meeting with Thor Heyerdahl.

One moment though, before I move away from Emma’s exemplary customer service,

I would just ask what is wrong with people these days (and I will try and answer that myself in a minute). I went to try and have a business coffee recently with a pal in the delightful Oxton village and we couldn’t find one place that would serve us.

There was one new establishment nearby and a young lady was in there milling around, but the sign on the door indicated that she didn’t have to open for ten more minutes. I have to ask if you turn the two of us away? I know I wouldn’t in her shoes, yet for some reason she did. It’s simple really.

She knew we were standing there, and we knew she knew, but she did not desist from her mopping and did not give in and look up. I wasn’t going to stop staring in, hoping she would break. She didn’t.

I finally began an elaborate and exaggerated waving act that she couldn’t not see but possibly might still ignore.

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She came the few steps to the door, expressionless, and pointed at the back of the opening times sign on the door and returned immediately to her mopping. I didn’t even have time to try my sad St Bernard puppy dog look on her as that would almost certainly have got us in.

The answer is obviously that this person doesn’t own the business, so she doesn’t care. Yet Emma cared, even though she didn’t own the business, and that is why employers need to look for Emmas and that is also why we went back for our office Christmas lunch to Piccolino the following week. To prove that customer service works.

In business, you must never assume that employees will ever have the same passion you do about things but if they do you must make sure you look after them.

I have a related tale and it involves my great pal Alistair Buckley (legendary water polo player for many years in the GB team and former 100m freestyle British record holder) who found himself in Germany one dark, wet, dreary evening with a bus load of thirsty and hungry water polo players.

They came upon a country inn or whatever that might be called in Germany. He and one other from the group knocked on the stout wooden door hoping to find drink and sustenance. Does this sound like a carol?

The bus was out of site around the back of the building at this stage.

‘Can we get a beer and some snacks please?’ Ali said as the door creaked opened.

In typical British style, Alistair had asked the German gentleman in stilted English in an attempt at a German accent.

‘I am sorry, vee are closed’, he replied apparently mimicking Alistair in his own best version of ‘hallo hallo’ German.

Alistair paused for a few seconds and decided to add more information in case he could talk the innkeeper around. He gave up on the slow talking English.

‘There’s 32 of us, and the rest are in a bus around the back’,

A millisecond later the reply arrived in a surprisingly deadpan and unaltered tone:

‘In that case, vee are now open’.

Now that’s how to run a business. If I owned that inn and 32 thirsty water polo lads were in a bus outside my premises, I would postpone my own wedding. (Sorry Alison).

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Anyway, back to the tale and I am determined that I will start matters off with JP in a sort of ‘This is your life’ tone.

‘Johnny Prestt, round the world yachtsman, swashbuckler, Don Juan maybe?’.

As I do this, he interrupts me to correct my pronunciation of the Spanish Lotharios name and I think to myself that maybe this means he has often been called it. I actually did know how to pronounce it but I didn’t want to sound pretentious. He, however, does it like a native Spanish speaker.

He’s not multi-lingual as well, is he?

From then on, he modestly tries to downplay everything I mention, again and again. They are all like twins in this book.

‘Oh, hold on now, I never sailed all the way around the world!’ he pleads.

It appears to have all started sometime around the oil crisis in 1974 when he was working at Mason Owen. The crisis had meant that a big client of theirs, Telegraph Properties, was having a hard time. JP hadn’t been with Mason Owen that long and he feared he might be one of the first ones that would be shown the door.

They call that ‘Last In First Out’ or LIFO. With this scenario facing him, JP jumped ship before he was pushed. He had also been to see some friends in the Canaries and had thought how much fun they were having messing about on boats and he realised he really should try some of that! I don’t blame him.

I apologise here, and I know I’m beginning to sound like a very large version of the late great Ronnie Corbett but the LIFO thing reminds me of a story which I now share with Johnny and which will interest many accountants reading. There should be quite a few, as they don’t have any hobbies.

Back again when I was auditing with Ernst & Young I was sent to one of their larger clients, the famous Cammell Lairds’ shipbuilders and repairers.

As part of our studies, we had learnt that clients could value the stocks they held by using various methods. They might assume that the more recent items they bought were sold first (last in first out-LIFO), a bit like JP above. Imagine if you bought apples and put them in a barrel, you would have to take the ones you bought the most recently out first.

There was also FIFO or First in First Out and this might be used if you had a massive tank and the tap to it was at the bottom.

Still with me?

I bet the accountants are all probably getting quite excited at this stage.

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Anyway, that’s enough free accountancy tuition, but there were other methods too and I found myself armed with probably only that smattering of knowledge when I knocked on the Managing Director’s door to ask how he valued bolts or something or other.

‘Oh Jeez, an accountant, one up in the food chain from a bloody solicitor’ he greeted me with.

He clearly liked me, and everything I was doing to add joy to his day.

‘Bloody solicitors are top’ , he continued… ‘the scum of the earth. And accountants! Leaches, all of them.

“What the hell do you want anyway I’m really busy’. (He didn’t actually say ‘really, he used another word).

‘I do apologise’ I bleated, ‘but it is my task to find out your stock valuation methods for several different types of stock that you have………’

He interrupted me in mid-sentence:

‘FOFO’

I was totally flummoxed. I hadn’t heard of this one and I wished instantly that I had finished the chapter on stock valuation methods the night before instead of popping to the rugby club.

‘Er…..I’m not familiar with………’

‘Fuck Off and Find Out’, he again interrupted.

Charming.

Sorry Mum, for the language, but that’s what he said. And sorry dear readers, as my Editor has removed most of the bad language, but even he agreed that we needed to keep that in (technical accounting jargon, he said), or the story wouldn’t have worked.

And, so back to JP.

He started taking some sailing lessons from Milo Parry who was a Navy officer for Blue Funnel. Back in those days it was all the basics, as there were no electronics, depth sounders, fish finders, GPS and all the modern-day gismos. You were taught how to navigate a boat from first principles using a sextant, the stars, the sun and so on. The depth finder was a lump of lead on the end of a piece of string.

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They acquired a 34-foot sloop called the Viatic which came from Pwllheli and they set off from Abersoch towards Gibraltar. In Gibraltar they experienced some bad weather which brought them very close to meeting their maker. However, they managed to land there safely.

It’s all coming thick and fast now, and they are next in Tangiers where they meet Mario, a famous eccentric architect who had a piano on board his own boat just to prove his eccentricity.

They sailed through the Canaries, the Caribbean and on to the east coast of the Americas.

Just look at him (the one with the beard):

After the stint on the Viatic he went to the Mediterranean where he started a charter business delivering yachts for rich clients.

He was a party to what was the first ever flotilla in that region. You nautical chaps will know what that means, I haven’t a clue!

After that it was back to civilisation for a short period of time. He ventures to ask Barry Owen if he could go to the office party back at Mason Owen and there, he met Julia who is from the Watson Prickard family, the gentlemen’s retailers that used to be on the corner of North John and Victoria Street in Liverpool. When he mentions that store it takes me back decades!

The two of them jumped on board Smuggler and spent two years on that and travelled around the Mediterranean, the Canaries and the Caribbean before getting married back on dry land. What would Julia’s parents have thought, with their

Wrestling a giant lobster

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Johnny, Archie and Julia

daughter off on a boat with a mad pirate who wrestles giant lobsters! Actually, JP isn’t a massive man so that might be just an average lobster.

I did relay to JP that is certainly one way to find out if you get on with someone: spend two years on a boat with them. I had done something not half as daring as that after I met Alison (my wife of a zillion years) when we spent six weeks in a six-berth camper van with seven people.

Does that mean I could actually have married any of the people in that bus on that basis that we all got on? No, surely that’s not how it works is it. But we managed to get on very well. Can’t say I see much of the others these days so maybe I was a pain. I can’t tell but probably.

Anyway, when JP arrived back on dry land a bit more permanently, he was on £3k per annum and that was in 1978. It was a wonder he knew what to do with all the money as he had been on £12 a week in 1972.

What about the salty sea dog beard, when did that appear? He still has it, now styled in a different shade.

Well, he told me that he has had that since 1972 but has paused to have a shave twice since then; both times for charity. Nowadays he sports it cropped or designer stubble as they now call it and its bright white and very distinguished.

JP has been on some adventures with Malcolm Walker, partly due to his sailing skills, and partly as once again, these fine fellows just so much enjoy each other’s company.

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Malcolm commissioned the build of an Oyster 70 which he christened No Rehearsal. He had never sailed before, so quite an apt name and they set off across the Atlantic in 1998. They are both still here to tell the tale so they succeeded but that must have been quite an adventure.

In some ways, emphasise that word ‘some’ -adventurers get it easy these days.

I have been reading about the extraordinary, some might say possibly lunatic, adventurers from the 60s and 70s who set off on what now seem crazy trips and had what would be termed these days as ‘zero back up’.

In the yacht races of that era in particular, the loved ones left behind would have no idea where their hero was at all. He or she might report in once a week maybe sending telegrams or using dodgy radios or making contact when they were on land for repairs or food. Sometimes they could get word home after meeting up with a bigger boat and often meeting a bigger boat could also be a possible disaster for the smaller craft.

One incident took place in a round the world yacht race in the sixties. One of the sailors called Donald Crowhurst was in financial difficulties when he set sail and he immediately struggled as the boat was very new to him. The event was a massive and very novel thing in those days, was reported all over the papers and the news and Donald had sponsors that were relying on him to get them some decent publicity in return for their investment in his business and in this sailing venture.

There is a lot of speculation about what actually happened, but it is generally agreed that he was able to falsify his logs and give the impression that he was still in the race for months on end, actually leading it at times, when in fact he was hanging around in the ocean somewhere and was going to try and take a ‘short cut’ .

The investors needed to see some return on their investment, and he must have felt his family wanted a hero, so he must have thought they were getting that and when he took that short cut no one would be any the wiser.

He probably meant to put things right when his deceit initially started but it must have eventually become clear to him that his plan wasn’t going to work and, in a poor state of mind, it is believed he stepped off the back of the boat to take his own life. He must have been in a very bad way psychologically at that stage. This was such an amazing tale and it has been made into a film with Colin Firth starring as Crowhurst (2017: The Mercy).

The winner (and only one to finish I believe) was Robin Knox-Johnston and I recall that he gave his winnings to Crowhurst’s widow, which was a magnanimous gesture typical of the chivalry of that period.

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They were made of stern stuff back in those days. I think one French competitor decided to sail off into the distance and not return, instead deciding to settle somewhere like Tahiti for the rest of his days.

Knox-Johnson also rowed the Atlantic with John Ridgeway. I remember seeing a photo of another one of that breed, John Fairfax, sewing a large wound up on his arm after he had jumped into the sea to attack a shark that kept bumping into his boat and ‘annoying him’.

I am telling you all this because this is pretty much how I see JP, doing this sort of stuff and that photo before convinces me I am right. When you set sail it was literally you against the elements, real adventure. Get it wrong and it could be the end.

I get the impression that if you challenge JP to any form of physical contest then you are looking at best at second place, though I’d like to see who would win between him and the girl serving the Bloody Marys back at Brigands.

He’d also been a gymnast. From 1966 to 69 he was in the British gymnastics team under coach Nick Stuart who was a friend of Queen Elizabeth.

He went to Kingsmead school where he continued his gymnastics and then the family picked Wrekin College for their son for his further education because of the strong links with that sport.

Dad was a doctor and Mum was a radiotherapist and JP was brought up in Oxton then Bebington, both of which are on the Wirral. After school he went to the College of Building where he got a Diploma in Estate Management.

He still sails today.

I didn’t get around to ask him how old he is, though he has kids ranging from 26 to 34. He also shoots, shotgun and target, has played rugby, has swum competitively and was a good sprinter especially over his preferred distance of 220 yards.

As well as that, in the school CCF, he was a Non-Commissioned Officer.

JP showing his gymnastic skills.

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That has to be enough. Bloody hell, this guy had Duracell batteries before they were invented.

I steer him towards work. He spent almost his entire adult career working for Mason Owen and looking for lease and freehold properties for Iceland and other clients. He has long lasting friendships with Malcolm and most of the others and is without doubt the definitive property guru I mentioned at the start. JP has retired now and still does the main sports that I mentioned before.

Did I forget to mention that he used to scuba-dive and once speared sharks for sport.

Hold on - has he made all this up and he was actually head librarian at Bebington Library?

By the way, his dog Archie deserves a chapter of his own.

So, that interview was exhausting, but hugely rewarding and it turns out that JP has missed loads out.

He was the President of the Artists Club in 1993. I am sorry that I missed that year as I think I joined in 1995. Nowadays he does a lot for the Wirral Hospice of St Johns at Clatterbridge.

Lastly, hats off to Julia, for chasing this Jack Russell of a man around the globe patiently for all those mad years. I bet you have some tales to tell as well.

I bet you once said “I am sure Its left here Johnny2 and you gave in and turned right only to end up in the wrong part of the world.

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