A Vineyard in the Dordogne - How an English Family Made Their Dream of Wine, Good Food and Sunshine Come True. Jeremy Josephs
love affair with France was nothing new. It could be traced back at least to 1946, when his father decided that they should attend the French Grand Prix at Reims.
‘I don’t know whether it was the garlic or the Gauloises, but I fell for the place right away,’ Nick recalls. ‘I got this waft as soon as we landed in Dunkirk and it was heaven. First of all we stopped at Soissons, and we then went on to have one excellent meal after another. I admired the attitudes in France. The racing drivers left Reims from the garages in their houses and headed off towards the racetrack, with all the gendarmes telling everybody to get out of the way. It was most exciting – the food, the wine, the cars. To my young mind that excitement equalled France – and I became determined to try to live some part of my life there.’
This was perhaps a rather grandiose ambition for a fifteen-year-old boy barely out of school. He had fared rather well in his School Certificate, true enough, but he hardly had an impressive list of qualifications to his name. Yet he was adamant that he would pursue his studies no further. But how would his father react to his unilateral declaration that the formal period of his education was now complete? Evidently with no great concern, for he simply said, ‘Very well, if that’s your decision then come into the warehouse on Monday.’
Having himself left school at the age of fourteen, ‘Ginger Jack’ Ryman knew that he was not in a strong position to argue the case for a prolongation of study. Besides, it had always been his hope that both his sons would one day follow in his footsteps by entering into the family stationery business. And now they had.
When this trade feature appeared, H. J. Ryman Ltd had already been in business for over thirty years.
A busy branch of H. J. Ryman Ltd in London’s Mayfair before the Second World War, and one of the company’s business cards.
It was his own father, H. J. Ryman, who had started the firm shortly before the turn of the century, in 1893, the publishers Collins having partly funded the venture. To begin with the business was based entirely in the West End, the first shop being situated at the Oxford Street end of Great Portland Street. H.J. Ryman then proceeded to expand, opening branches in Victoria Street, Brompton Road and Albemarle Street, and before long shops appeared in Watford and Harrow, much further from the centre of town. By the time Nick and Desmond’s grandfather died in 1931 he had succeeded in expanding the business into a highly profitable group of eleven retail outlets.
H. J. Ryman clearly had a knack of getting his own way. Not even the First World War could deter him. He considered that his son Jack had served England honourably enough, first in the Westminster Dragoons, where he had learned to ride, and then as a lieutenant in the machine-gun corps. Unlike many Jack had somehow managed to survive that carnage. To his surprise, when still stationed in France, he was suddenly called before his commanding officer and informed that no further military duties would be required of him. The hand of H. J. Ryman was not difficult to detect. He had taken it upon himself to write to both Lloyd George and bureaucrats alike that his son was now required to run the family business, and urgently at that. Against all the odds it had done the trick.
Jack’s heart, however, never really lay in the world of paper, pens and pencils. He was more of a committee man and he saw to it that he was never short of a meeting to attend. For not only was he chairman of the local council at Chorleywood for thirteen consecutive years, but also managed to find time to chair the planning committee of Hertfordshire County Council, sit on the bench as a magistrate at Watford, act as a special commissioner for income tax in London and assist in the administration of the board of the local fire brigade. Little wonder, then, that the firm of H. J. Ryman Ltd saw virtually no expansion during his time at the helm. Not that it was easy to keep any business going, however well-established, during the Second World War. The head office was entirely burnt out during the Blitz and one shop front in the Strand was blown out so many times during almost continuous German bombing raids on London that Jack Ryman could think of no better solution than to replace the windows with hinged wooden boards, so that every time they were blasted they would simply flap back again. With paper strictly rationed and fountain pens difficult to come by, he showed much initiative by diversifying into the supply and sale of map flag pins, which family and friends would make and bag up by the hundred during the evenings at their homes in and around Chorleywood. His firm was soon supplying most of the map rooms both in Whitehall and elsewhere. Lloyd George would surely have been proud.
It was into this environment of blotting paper, ink, ledgers and staples of all shapes and sizes that Nick Ryman stepped, full of energy and enthusiasm, at the age of fifteen. In consideration of his labour in the firm’s central warehouse in Clipstone Street he received a wage of £3 5s 6d per week. The young boy who had found school boring and who could hardly wait to step into the adult world of work suddenly found himself spending the greater part of his waking hours in a dingy, dusty and undeniably dirty warehouse in central London, selecting and packing up bulk stock in order to dispatch it to the firm’s various branches around the capital and elsewhere. And as he did so, young Nick knew that he had never been happier in his life.
Born on 15 November 1931 in Chorleywood, Hertfordshire, Nick Ryman had spent his formative years on the family’s four-and-a-half-acre estate named Sunshine House, once a home for blind babies before the building burnt to the ground. This was rather embarrassing for Nick’s father, who happened to be in charge of the local fire brigade at the time. Amid the ashes and remains of Sunshine House, however, he had been able to detect a potential for development and promptly proceeded to purchase and reconstruct the entire site. But with the Rymans as its occupants the house did not always live up to its cheery name. For while Nick enjoyed an easy, relaxed relationship with his father, with whom as he grew up he shared an active interest in cars, things were altogether more strained with his mother.
This enduring tension was almost entirely attributable to the fact that she suffered acutely with rheumatoid arthritis – so much so that shortly before the outbreak of war in 1939, at the age of forty-one, she retired to bed, and seldom budged from it again. One attempt was made to correct by surgery a hip which had been troubling her, but since the operation was not particularly successful, she vowed that she would never again subject herself to such an ordeal. There was a wheelchair to hand, although it came to be used only sparingly since it always required an enormous amount of effort to get her in and out of it. The consequence of all this was that she remained bedridden until her death just a few months before her eightieth birthday.
‘It therefore wasn’t a normal, happy upbringing,’ Nick remembers. ‘You went to see mother every morning and evening. She wasn’t a very happy or healthy lady. But I did inherit from her two things: a great sense of humour – in spite of her illness – and one hell of a temper.’
Outside of the home, though, there was much happiness to be found. Especially during the summer months when, together with Desmond and their sister Judith, Nick would set out to explore the sandy beaches of Dorset’s Studland Bay. The family’s network of prime commercial sites in central London could also occasionally confer the odd and unexpected advantage. One such was a ringside seat in the Whitehall branch, perfectly placed for the boss’s five-year-old son to view the coronation of George VI in May 1937.
Thirteen years on it was Nick’s turn to serve King and Country. By then his C.V. could at least refer to some work experience – almost three years in the Ryman’s warehouse plus a short spell behind the counter in their Great Portland Street branch – but it still made far from impressive reading. Perhaps national service would give him a new sense of direction. In fact it took him off to Egypt. And before he could think too deeply about the wisdom of having opted for Africa, he found himself whisked far away from the Clipstone Street warehouse to the remote location of El Kirsh, situated in the canal zone between Port Said and Suez. Thriving on the discipline meted out by the army, he soon rose in rank from private to second lieutenant, with some thirty people under his command. He enjoyed himself enormously, responding well to the military’s brand of man management and insistence