Taking stock of bygone Oldham

Retired stockbroker Ken Mills

MARTYN TORR MEETS... Ken Mills
THERE are many things about this grand old place that is Oldham which excite and infuriate in equal measure . . . and many historical facets which not only set us apart from our neighbours, but also many bigger and supposedly better places across the UK.

One such fact is that Oldham used to have its very own Stock Exchange, which met every day at noon in the old Priory Buildings in Union Street.

Up to 1965, Oldham published its own weekly Oldham Stock Exchange Official List, with 20 members listed. Way back in 1929, the Oldham Official List recorded more that 50 members.

Ken Mills, Oldham’s last stockbroker — please don’t conjure images of Tom Cruise in the film “The Last Samurai” here — is a proper, refined gentleman of the old school. And he remembers those days with a keen fondness.

He even has a fragile copy of the Friday, November 22, 1929 Official List — a genuine piece of Oldham’s industrial history.

Dynasty
Ken represents the middle third of a family dynasty of stockbrokers who plied their trade in Oldham from the boom years when cotton was king to the fading of the light.

For the past 18 years — since quitting at 55 — he has lived in genteel retirement, now ensconced in sleepy Grotton with his second wife Andrea after many years in Delph.

“The winters simply became too much,” he said of his former residence in Delph.

“I had three weavers’ cottages knocked into one property and they were in a beautiful, serene spot, but the access was so steep that when the snow really fell even our four-wheel drive Subarus couldn’t get up and down.”

As we spoke in the lounge of his spacious home, surrounded by well-manicured gardens which are his pride and joy, Ken cast back his mind to those bygone days but though I suspect he might hanker for the times when he would attend the noon call-over at the Stock Exchange, he doesn’t miss digging his way out of deepest Delph. Memories, like the best wines, are selective.

Yet this man who remains a link with Oldham’s venerable past, when the borough had a place on the world map, never intended becoming a stockbroker.

“I always fancied going into hotel management,” he confided — a revelation I suspect even close members of his family are unaware of.

But at 17, when he left boarding school in North Wales, his father Granville needed help in the brokerage and Ken’s future was secured. Not that he has any regrets, none at all.

Boarding school in Clwyd valley was a necessity born of Ken’s early health issues. He suffered from asthma and eczema and the climate in Snowdonia was better than Oldham. Not too many mill chimneys in the Welsh foothills.

For in his formative years young Ken lived with his parents in Coppice. But the very thing that made Oldham prosperous, wealthy and the envy of the industrialised world, also made our Ken distinctly unwell as the vapours pouring from the myriad of mill chimneys affected his breathing.

On his return from Wales, Ken had little time to dwell on health issues. The office of Granville Mills, above the Northern Cigarette Service shop in Union Street, was a bustling hive of activity in 1951, especially when Granville and his long-time office manager and confidant Harry Wilde went for the shares call-over and Ken was left in the office with two girls.

“I would answer the phone — in those days it was one of the plug-in types when a call came through — do everything that was needed to run the office. And I learned a great deal.”

I was anxious to learn about Ken’s first day on the trading floor, about the rising excitement, the sheer sense of adventure of his first day trading stocks and shares in the company of his father. But it was a low-key affair.

“I was the only son who joined his father in the brokerage business. There were six or seven other brokers in Oldham in those days and I distinctly recall that the brokers were kind to me.

“They were, of course, much older than I and it was a competitive business, but they would offer advice gladly and did not try to take advantage of my youth or inexperience. I have to say, looking back, that the exchange wasn’t as busy or as exciting as I had hoped it would be.”

In 1958, proposed by his father, and aged just 24, Ken became a fully-fledged member of the Oldham Stock Exchange and “my father handed out cigars to all present by way of celebration — after the vote, of course, certainly not before.”

As the cotton boom drew to its inevitable close, brokerages started to close and the Government of the day issued an edict that single-partner firms could no longer trade, a form of protection for investors.

Granville Mills joined with a Rochdale firm — Rochdale didn’t have its own exchange — and Mills Dutton Ltd, came into being. Arthur Scholes joined Granville and Ken. Shortly afterwards, a third partner, Gordon Andrew, became part of the firm.

“With the cotton industry by now virtually wiped out, equipment being shipped to India and the Government offering compensating mill owners, we began to trade in industrials — ICI, BP and Shell spring to mind.”

Very soon the daily call-over in Oldham was abandoned, Mills Dutton Ltd relocated to a large property in Queens Road and all local activity was conducted either by telephone or, on rare occasions, on the floor in Manchester.

In the mid-1970s Mr Scholes retired, and Ken and Mr Andrew merged the business with Bell Houldsworth in Manchester, retaining Queen Road as the Oldham office — literally, the last stockbroker in Oldham.

I suspect my good friend Nigel Mills, Ken’s son, will take umbrage at this statement but the fact remains that the majority of Nigel’s career has been spent in Manchester and though he remains in practice to this day, working from home in Saddleworth, he is associated to a Blackburn firm so my description of his father holds good.

Ken is proud that his son joined the business, and became a broker in his own right, and that three generations of the Mills dynasty have kept alive a tradition which once put Oldham on a par with the city of Manchester in having its own exchange.

I sensed a smidgen of regret that the fourth generation, Nigel’s son, is unlikely to follow in the Mills’ family footsteps but didn’t pursue it.

These days Ken watches events from afar. The Bell Houldsworth business became the northern office of Fairmount, a brokerage which was part of the giant Legal and General empire. Ken was one of four directors, the firm having 120 staff, in the days when industry was booming and Ken had clients in far-flung reaches like South Africa and Ireland, although the majority were from Oldham.

By now, Mr Andrew had retired, the Queens Road property had been sold and Ken was enduring one of the “worst times of my life” — having to lay-off 30 staff as the recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s began to bite.

He retired in 1990 aged 55 and candidly admits making “one of the worst decisions of my life” to take on the — supposedly — one-day-a-week role as non-executive chairman of Futura Holdings Ltd, a slipper-manufacturer in Stalybridge.

For three years he strove to keep the business alive but poor investments in property, long before he took the reins, left the business short of cashflow as the property boom collapsed and the bank foreclosed.

Having extricated himself from that unholy mess, he took to the quiet life. A keen table tennis player in his youth, having represented Oldham Lyceum and later the kings — certainly in my playing days — Royton Cricket, he kept himself fit with his favourite game for as long as possible.

Time at Saddleworth Golf Club proved immensely rewarding and his handicap reduced to 16 — I can only dream of such ability — and one of his major regrets concerning personal circumstances which prevented him becoming captain of the Mountain Ash club.

These days, his fertile brain is kept active with bridge and his garden, but keeps a keen weather eye on world events.

“It is all too easy to talk yourself into a situation that makes things worse than they actually are, like our current situation. The banks have a great deal to answer for. People have not properly been called to account.”

With those words I could envisage Ken on the floor of the Oldham Stock Exchange, airing those very opinions, before the noon call-over . . . echoes of a bygone Oldham age which ring true today.