A Vineyard in the Dordogne - How an English Family Made Their Dream of Wine, Good Food and Sunshine Come True. Jeremy Josephs
In charge of a platoon of petrol tankers and with a staff car at his disposal, he would often venture away from his base camp and out into the desert on his own.
‘One day I drove off of the beaten track and sat myself down on a sand dune. And I thought to myself, right, Ryman, what are you going to do for the rest of your life? As I sat there it was like looking into infinity. I remembered the wonderful taste and smell of the only wine I ever tasted as a child, Château d’Yquem, which my mother had introduced me to, and considered to be the finest sweet white wine in the world. I thought too of my travels around France with my father. And I decided there and then, whilst sitting on my private sand dune, as I call it now, that I would like to buy a small vineyard and to live at least some of my life in France. It was just a private thought that flashed through my mind. But I do remember how very powerful it was.’
And certainly easier to dwell upon than to achieve. However, having completed his national service and returned to the family stationery business, Nick suddenly found himself taken to one side by his father. Desmond had likewise been summoned for a quiet word.
‘Right,’ Jack began. ‘It’s now up to you two boys. Either you make it or you break it. But from now on I’m going to run my life looking after my county council, my urban district council and my fire brigade. I’ll be much happier to leave you two to do whatever you think fit with the business.’
Nick and Desmond Ryman needed little reminding of the fact that they were the joint heirs apparent to the Ryman business. The deferential attitude of many staff members, some of whom had been in the firm’s employ since the early days with H. J. Ryman, drove that message home almost daily. But aged only twenty and twenty-two respectively, neither Nick nor Desmond ever envisaged taking control so speedily. With his father’s words still ringing in his ears, Nick’s mind raced ahead. If he rose to the challenge then there was surely no reason why his dream should not lie firmly within his grasp. The formula was quite straightforward: make enough money first.
‘I thought that I was extraordinarily lucky to have found myself in this position, with such a bright future ahead of me. But that meant that we had to work hard and make the business bigger and better. My brother and I had a little head office where we used to sit and plot and plan together. We were both ambitious. Not that we were terribly scientific about it, mind you – we just did it by the seat of our pants. Some of the old shops were looking a bit run-down. We knew that we had to modernize and get out of London if our plans were ever to come to fruition. It was Desmond, though, who always took the lead, and I followed. I always looked up to him, ever since I was a child. My contribution might have been to question if we could afford something; whether or not it was likely to prove profitable, and so on. But he was the driving force of the business without any question.’
‘Absolute nonsense,’ Desmond retorts. ‘I don’t know why he talks down his own role so much. We were joint managing directors. Nick was not the junior partner in any way, shape or form. I might have been the ideas man, but he had the key role of trying to keep the firm’s finances together.’
Whatever their respective talents, it was clear that the brothers complemented one another. Wherever they went, whatever they did or decided, it was invariably together. Not that this constituted a dramatic departure from the past, for Nick and Desmond were always to be found playing together as children on Chorleywood Common, and spent long hours challenging each other to rounds of golf from the very moment each boy had learned how to swing a club. Twenty years on they remained inseparable, travelling into town on the same train, with Desmond getting on at Chorleywood, Nick at Moor Park, two stations nearer London, only to arrive at work and share the same office – and with hardly ever a cross word between them. Nor did the close of the working day signal an end to their intimate involvement in each other’s lives, for there was a large circle of mutual golfing friends in England and family holidays were spent together at their shared seventeenth-century farmhouse just inland from S’Agaro on Spain’s Costa Brava.
If there was indeed some special chemistry between them, then it was soon put to good effect. The brothers opened up branches in the Midlands, Manchester and Scotland, often buying out existing businesses en route. By the late fifties they had manoeuvred themselves into a position whereby they were able to go public by taking over Dudley and Co, a small and struggling company listed on the London Stock Exchange. As their firm flourished, the programme of expansion continued apace. Within twenty years turnover increased sixty-four fold, from £250,000 to £16 million per annum. Over seventy new sites were opened, either through acquisitions or the establishment of new premises. With shops prominently positioned in high streets and shopping centres throughout the land, Ryman had become a household name.
For both brothers, good business became synonymous with good living. Nick had an endless succession of expensive cars – Ferraris, Bentleys and the like – and enjoyed an equally extravagant and luxurious lifestyle. He became an adept helicopter pilot and an active member of the Helicopter Club of Great Britain. So too did the energetic Anne, on one occasion winning much admiration by successfully landing a Hughes 300 helicopter on the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle. Each of their three children, privately educated at the best schools, was given a horse as they grew up: Tiger for Hugh, Champagne Perry for Corinne and Knocky for Camilla, born in the summer of 1967. For those looking in from the outside, the Rymans were unquestionably the epitome of success.
Despite his hankering after France, Nick’s nature remained quintessentially English, especially his stiff upper lip. In the world of commerce his reluctance to express feelings of any kind had not hindered him in the slightest. On the contrary, his cool and distanced disposition had helped to make him a most effective negotiator. Not so, however, at home. He was a strict and non-communicative father with all of his children but most particularly with his son, and this apparent inability to demonstrate love or affection of any kind was already having a very negative impact on Hugh, Corinne and Camilla alike.
Not that Nick was sensitive to any such shortcomings in his behaviour. He had other matters on his mind. He could see that with the arrival of the first supermarkets in England the whole concept of retailing was changing. There appeared to be a general move away from traditional counter service, with everything stored away in drawers, and into the brave new world of self-selection. Sainsbury’s had detected this and adapted accordingly. But for Ryman the key question was whether or not what was good for groceries was going to be good for stationery too. The brothers judged that on balance the answer was likely to be yes.
It was a high-risk strategy. But when the first Ryman self-service shop opened in New Bond Street there was an immediate and overwhelmingly positive response. It was deemed to be so avant-garde, in fact, that it prompted a leader article in The Times. One by one each shop was scheduled for its refit, and one by one the elegant, hand-made mahogany counters and fittings which had graced the first Ryman shops during the latter part of the reign of Queen Victoria were chopped up and burned. Whatever would the firm’s founder have made of that?
Other ideas dating from the ancien régime were in due course dispensed with too; the Ryman brothers determined to brighten up their shops both inside and out. Filing cabinets were sprayed in bright yellows, reds and whites; box and lever arch files were now sold in blues, greens and pinks. The aim was to get away from the grey image of the past, and it proved a commercial triumph for the firm. And when, in 1967, Nick and Desmond acquired the Conran group, Terence Conran’s input gave still more flair to their work, propelling the Rymans into the forefront of the ever-changing world of design.
Success was the watchword. But in the process of acquiring it Nick Ryman eventually came to realize that his thirst for further expansion had been entirely quenched. After the best part of twenty years building up the business, for him the adrenalin of challenge was no longer there. ‘It all became too big,’ he explains. ‘There were so many administrative tasks to do, with analysts constantly coming down to work out how much profit we might have made on this day or that, and boardroom politicking all of the time. I felt that I had seen and done it all. In the end I really wasn’t interested in going into the office any more, or talking about business at all. I just wanted to switch off and walk away.’
But how was he to free himself from his carefully crafted