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advertising.’ Before they knew where they were, the Showering Brothers, Francis, Herbert and Ralph, and their nephew Keith, found themselves in Jack Wynne-Williams’ office.

      ‘There’s nothing in it, Jack,’ said Mike Masius, when he heard that Jack had taken their business on a fee-paying basis. ‘It would cost you more to go and see them in Shepton Mallet than we’d get from the fee.’ Mike wasn’t often wrong but he was this time. For what the Showerings were wanting to market was perry, a drink made from fermented pear juice – a sort of bubbly, pear-based cider. In those days the traditional pub drink for women was still port and lemon, and in those rapidly changing times it was understandably seen as unsophisticated. Masius took the Showerings product and turned it into magic. They put it into small, dark-glass wine bottles with coloured foil tops, called it Babycham, associated it in advertising and promotion with a loveable, animated baby chamois, and provided the pubs with attractive wine glasses carrying the logo and featuring the claim ‘You’d love a Babycham!’

      It worked like a charm. The girls could now ask for a seemingly sophisticated, champagne-like, modern drink which wasn’t going to cost their man a fortune and which wasn’t going to get them legless. The pubs and Showerings had a high-profit winner; Masius had a client which coined us money and which, in time, led to a flood of new business as the satisfied Showerings family introduced new products. The Showerings had regular board meetings at the agency’s offices and one December they produced a Christmas-wrapped parcel and said, ‘Jack, as a thank you for all you’ve done at Masius we’ve brought you a present.’

      ‘Thanks,’ said Jack, ‘that’s very nice of you. It’s usually the agency that buys the client presents in this business. I’m very grateful.’

      ‘Aren’t you going to open it then?’

      When he did he found it contained a car key.

      ‘And Jack, if you take it to Jack Barclay’s showrooms in Berkeley Square there’s a Rolls-Royce waiting for you to use it in!’

      It was an incredible gesture of friendship and appreciation which I’ve never known to be equalled before or since. Jack subsequently gave me the job of getting a personalized registration number for his pride and joy – JWW 347.

      I was always at my desk in the West End by 8:00 and seldom home less than 12 hours later. My clients were sophisticated, experienced and demanding and although they were all nice people they didn’t permit any resting on the oars. Each week I was at Melton Mowbray, Slough and Kings Lynn making presentations, taking briefs, maintaining contact and generally keeping in touch with the knowledge that not only were they among the agency’s most important accounts, which our competitors would kill for, but that they were also those that were enabling us to expand outside the UK. From the time I joined in 1959, the mother agency in London was following in the footsteps of the Mars and Colgate organizations by vigorously and successfully expanding, first in Europe and then throughout the rest of the world. As the Mars Empire grew so did ours, for they gave us their business in the new countries they entered on the basis that it was better to use an agency that knew them, even if it didn’t currently have an organization in a new territory, than to use another that didn’t know their ways and products. It was marvellous for us, because not only were we guaranteed an immediate income in any new country we decided to enter but we could offer interesting and exciting promotional opportunities with very real prospects to our many good people who might have left us.

      So Masius opened offices in the major European countries – Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Austria – initially to handle Mars and Colgate brands, but which we could use as bases to pitch for other business. Later we added America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa to this list, until we became not only the biggest agency in Britain (bigger even than the long-time No. 1, J Walter Thompson) but an enormously desirable partner or takeover target for the mammoth agencies in America like Interpublic. I was eventually to be visiting most of the Masius agencies outside the UK regularly as my responsibilities increased but meantime I was a very busy part of expanding the business in the UK.

      In 1964, five eventful years after I had joined the agency, Jack Wynne-Williams made me a proposition. The agency had been in existence for some 21 years, Jack was now in total command, but the old guard on the Board weren’t getting any younger. There was a need to look to the future, for young blood to take over. There were four people whom Jack jokingly referred to as his Young Turks, one of whom was me. None of us were necessarily going to reach the top – in the event only one of us did, and it wasn’t me – but Jack had decided that we had enough potential for him to want to keep us all. One by one he had us into his office to give us all the same message.

      ‘I’m going to give you a chance to put your money where your mouth is by offering you an opportunity to buy into the agency. It will cost you £30,000 and Warburg, the agency’s bankers, will lend you the money with an annual interest payment of 10% [very reasonable at the time]. You will be obliged to sell the shares when you retire or leave the agency but in the meantime if we continue to do as well as we have in the past the dividends will cover the interest and, in time, the share value growth should more than enable you to repay the loan with a sizeable profit. But, of course, there’s no guarantee. So it is up to you. Think it over and let me know.’

      Now, ever since I was a boy my mother, who was very good at playing the stock market, had drummed the basics of it into me. With agency bonuses and other money I had built up a share portfolio of my own and hadn’t done too badly, but this was something else. £30,000 then was the equivalent of not far off £500,000 now and putting myself in debt to that extent was not something that appealed to a naturally cautious chap like me. The agency had done and was doing very well indeed, and there was no reason to suppose that it wouldn’t continue to do so, but it was a very volatile business – its assets were its people, who could leave at short notice, while any contracts that existed with clients weren’t worth the paper they were written on and if they lost confidence in us they would be off like a rocket. On the other hand, the whole of life is a gamble and I was never going to have another opportunity like this.

      I talked it over with Elizabeth and in fact neither of us hesitated. The next morning I went back to Jack and said I was on. He told me I’d made a wise decision and he was sure I wouldn’t regret it. I certainly didn’t. From then on there were occasional other share offers as directors retired and sold up, and I bought every one I was offered. My faith and good luck paid off because the agency prospered greatly and everything that Jack had prophesied came to pass. I certainly never made a better financial decision.

      Before very much longer I was elevated to the Agency’s small Management Committee and became a theoretical prospect for Managing Director but for very good reasons that was where my agency progress ended. One of those reasons was the fact that my double life as an agency executive and an increasingly busy broadcaster meant that I’d have to give up the latter and devote all my time to the business and there was no way that that was going to happen – I liked my other life too much. But I also had no illusions about whether I was going to be able to reach the top: it mattered more to others than it did to me. I had a very happy life: a happy marriage, a fine home and a broadcasting hobby where I was making consistent progress and which could go on long after I had retired from the business. Things were going very well for me, and as it happened I was about to make a massive change of direction in my agency life.

       CHAPTER FIVE Goodbye Mars, Hello Wheels

      Masius was booming, with new business pouring in as a result of its ever-growing reputation. The Imperial Tobacco brand Embassy, with its coupons and gift catalogue, was proving hugely successful, Nescafé (‘Coffee with life in it!’) was a major acquisition and so were many others like Aspro, Woolworths, Wilkinson Sword razorblades, Weetabix and the Beecham Proprietaries’ brands Phensic and Phyllosan (‘Fortifies the over-forties!’), which I looked after. But now, after some nine years working on fast-moving packaged goods, it was as though my first love was calling me home.

      Up until

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