MR Blobby, Noel Edmonds and Sonia.
No, they aren’t on my bucket list of celebrities I’m desperate to meet.
But they also weren’t people I expected to be talking about with an eminent Yorkshire businessman.
However Keith Loudon OBE isn’t your usual entrepreneur.
The words “legend” and “veteran” are bandied around far too often these days, but I think it is fair to say both apply to Keith. Having turned 90 earlier this year, Keith is now Life President of Redmayne Bentley, the national stockbroking firm which was founded in Leeds in 1875 by John Redmayne, who left Yorkshire Bank in City Square “with a sharpened pencil in his pocket” and which Keith’s father Gavin joined in 1923.
Keith joined the firm in the 1950s after National Service and, despite suffering a stroke some years ago which has confined him to a wheelchair, he still takes a close interest in the day-to-day workings of the business he stewarded from a small firm with a handful of people doing deals on the then Leeds Stock Exchange to the national player with offices in towns and cities across the country.
With their vast coffers and global operations, banks, stockbrokers and other financial institutions rarely earn a reputation for being on the side of small investors and firms but, thanks to Keith, Redmayne Bentley is still seen like that.
Having hit 90, Keith decided to write a book telling his story and ‘A Long Road’ written with the support of writer Eugene Costello, has recently been self-published.
Keith isn’t selling copies, but sending them out to friends, colleagues and contacts in exchange for a donation to Alzheimer’s Research UK, the charity which conducts research into the condition which his late wife Betty suffered from.
The photograph above was taken a few years ago when Keith walked miles across Leeds to raise money for the charity after Betty was first diagnosed with the disease.
Keith is still as sharp as a tack and when I called round to his house in Leeds earlier this week, he reflected on some of the stories he tells in the book about his life, not just in business but in civic roles as a Conservative city councillor and Lord Mayor of Leeds.
That’s the only way you can go from the Governor of the Bank of England to Margaret Thatcher to Mr Blobby in less than an hour.
I know you are only interested in Mr Blobby.
Keith was recalling his time as Lord Mayor of Leeds and one of his jobs was turning on the city’s Christmas lights.
He is the only person to have done it twice, stepping in for Lord Mayor Ronnie Feldman, who was Jewish.
The two stars brought in to help switch on the festive lights were Mickey Mouse and the Liverpudlian pop star Sonia.
“I didn’t have a clue who Sonia was, I thought she was with him and I said I thought Mickey’s wife was called Minnie!” recalls Keith with a chuckle.
“Apparently she was a pop singer but she looked like she could do with a good bath,” he says with his typically blunt but wry turn of phrase.
She insisted Keith join in singing a carol with her to the packed crowds of Christmas shoppers lining the city street.
“I can’t sing! So I switched the microphone off and no one heard me sing – and they haven’t since!”
When he became Lord Mayor in 1994, TV presenter Noel Edmonds was brought in along with his gunge tank and spotty pal Mr Blobby to celebrate the Christmas lights switch on.
“We went to visit children in the local hospital before the lights were switched on and Mr Blobby was a total disaster.
“The kids were all scared of him and he wanted to nip the nurses’ bottoms.
“Noel was doing a countdown to gunge local sports stars in his gunge tank and they thought it was for the lights and switched them on too soon.”
As a politician Keith bridged the party divide working across the political spectrum and earning the respect of his peers for a matter-of-fact and ego-free approach that not all in politics are blessed with.
He remembers chairing an employment tribunal for the first time where the Labour leader of the city council, Albert King, helped steward him through the complex process.
It was a memorable tribunal in which an employee at a local abattoir had been sacked for threatening a colleague with a meat cleaver.
Keith approached business like he did politics – with common sense, a sense of right and wrong and favouring collaboration and partnership.
He has always seen himself as on the side of the small investor, those people who first dipped their toes in the stock market for the first time during the privatisations of the Thatcher era in the 1980s.
The respect he earned in the Square Mile was in evidence when his two business partners, Allan Collins and Bob Howe, decided to step down from the firm at a similar time.
With a few phone calls to City contacts like Brian Winterflood, founder of Winterflood Securities and the driving force behind the creation of the Alternative Investment Market and Derek Riches of Smith Brothers, he secured the funds to buy out his partners rather than having to sell the firm.
“I called them the two godparents of Redmayne Bentley, those two!” Keith reflects.
He understands the value of good publicity and brand awareness and points to the early promotion of OXO on posters on every railway station in Britain.
Certainly that awareness was in evidence during my time as business editor of the Yorkshire Post.
Keith would call with story ideas when he knew we’d be short of copy – so on a Sunday or bank holiday Monday when you had very little ‘live’ material to fill the following day’s business pages.
For a man who helped float supermarket group Morrisons on the stock market in 1967 and whose letter to Eddie George was read out by the then Governor to the court of the Bank of England, it is other achievements that Keith values more.
He was responsible for the creation of a plaque in Leeds Town Hall commemorating the men from the city who fought and died in the Spanish Civil War.
“Nine died in Spain, 17 came back. They were the old fashioned Marxist-Communists who fought in the International Brigade from 1936 to 1939.
“I want to get one of the universities to find out where these lads are buried,” he says.
Perhaps it is a perfect reflection of the man that he counts this memory as a special one: “I never queued to put my coat in the cloakroom at the Queen’s Hotel. When the attendant retired he wrote me a letter and thanked me and said I was the only one that spoke to him.”
Keith’s memory is amazing.
Growing up in Horsforth, then a village on the outskirts of Leeds, he enjoyed his childhood but puts his “lack” of academic ability down to missing a year of education because he didn’t start school until he was aged six because of the outbreak of the Second World War.
“I can remember war being declared. Kirkstall Forge had the biggest steam hammer in Europe and if it stopped you knew German bombers were within 50 miles,” he remembers.
For a man whose mind never stops coming up with new ideas, Keith is already planning a follow-up to his book.
He says he has been “blessed by the people I have worked with”.
“When I look back on my life I think I can say I have always been straight and honest and always spoken as I think.
“After my political career, I’d bump into people from Labour or the Greens who would always say, ‘We admired you, you always spoke as you thought’.
“And if that were to be my epitaph – ‘Keith Loudon, a man who always spoke as he thought’, I wouldn’t be unhappy with that.”
:::
OTHER than writing another book, I asked Keith if he has any other ambitions left in life?
“Well, if they ever sell off any fixtures and fittings from the Harrogate Club, the old gentleman’s club which is still going, then I’d like to buy the scoreboard in the snooker room – [Sherlock Holmes’ creator] Conan Doyle won the billiards competition two years in succession.”
Ever the man to spot a great investment opportunity.
Have a great weekend.
If you have enjoyed reading this blog please feel free to like it and leave a comment.