ROBIN CLAY - BIOGRAPHY
I come from a family that repeatedly makes and loses a fortune!
My ancestors have, over the centuries, made and lost repeated fortunes and I seem to be destined to repeat their experiences! Clay Cross in Derbyshire is either named after my family, or the family took its name from the place - I don't know which. All I know is that once we were very rich coal mine owners in Derbyshire but somehow lost the lot about 175 years ago!
Late in the last century the family had again become very wealthy trading as Liverpool cotton Merchants, but, whilst my grandfather was on a three year business trip to South America, his partners swindled him and he returned to find himself a pauper!
So my father and his brother went to Kenya early in this century to restore the family fortune and became coffee farmers. After great adversity through the long years of the depression they eventually succeeded with the help of the great boom in coffee prices after the 2nd world war, but like previous family fortunes it was destined not to last!
I see another family fortune vanish!
I am a member of the last generation that was raised to rule an Empire and spent the first half of my life in Africa. With the war still on I was conscripted into the army straight from school, was commissioned into the Royal Engineers and spent 3 years as a soldier. On leaving the army I found that the Empire I was destined to rule was rapidly being dismantled and so I became a farmer.
For a brief few years I lived the ideal life on a beautiful farm 9000 feet up on the edge of that Great Rift Valley in Kenya with its wonderful 70 mile views over lakes, volcanoes and mountain ranges. At that altitude on the equator the climate is probably the most perfect in the world with warm days, cool nights and free from mosquitoes, snakes or other such unpleasant African residents! Sadly it was not to last.
The Mau-Mau rebellion broke out and I spent the next 7 years as a part time farmer and part time policeman in the Kenya Police Reserve. Sometimes flying a light aeroplane doing supply drops to anti-terrorist patrols in the mountain forests, and sometimes in the forest on patrols myself. Eventually the terrorists were defeated but the UK Government decided to speed up the dismantling of the Empire and Kenya was made independent.
The beautiful farm we had built, with its cattle, sheep, pigs and crops became almost worthless. There were no buyers. No one any longer wanted our livestock. With the greatest difficulty we managed over a two year period to dispose of all our assets for a pittance. My Uncle had managed to save a very considerable sum of money from the coffee boom only to lose it all by investing it with a swindler called Bernie Cornfield who ran an investment racket under the name 'Fund of Funds'. And so the latest family fortune - probably worth a couple of million at today's prices, was lost and I arrived in England with a wife, 3 small children, a mother in law, no job and nowhere to live. Our total assets with which to rebuild the family fortune was £5000!
Rebuilding the family fortune
Armed with our £5000 we rented a house, borrowed lots of money and opened a dry cleaning shop in Bexhill. The business developed over time into a small chain of shops in the surrounding towns. Like all businesses expanding rapidly the biggest headache was finding qualified staff. We solved this problem by starting an Employment Agency. This required very little capital; all that was needed was an office with a telephone and a couple of bits of furniture and a brilliant salesperson on the end of the phone! Judged by return on capital the employment agencies proved to be by far the most profitable business we ever touched. After 10 years Sketchley came along and offered to buy our dry cleaning business for twice its real worth - an offer we accepted with alacrity!
I write a backgammon book and lose £100,000!!
It was at this time - the seventies - that the backgammon craze spread from USA to England. Every shop in the land was crying out for stocks of backgammon boards. Seeing another business opportunity I launched a mail order company based on selling backgammon boards imported by the container load from USA. As a result of my advertising I was approached and asked to write a book on backgammon. The publishers wanted to cash in on the latest craze so it was rush, rush, rush. I was given 8 weeks in which to write the book.
This was before the advent of desk top publishing and computers were still in their infancy, so I had to type the book on an old typewriter and draw all the illustrations manually. I was instructed to produce a book about 175 pages long and told to cover back games, running games, blocking games etc. The shortage of time and strict guidelines made it very difficult to produce anything resembling a masterpiece! It was about this time that I read that most authors are lucky to make more than £200 on any book published. (I now wish I had never read those words) because it set me thinking that as an unknown writer hardly anyone would want to read my book. As a consequence I sold the rights for a lump sum of £750 - thinking at the time that I was being clever to earn over 3 times the average return. Selling outright turned out to be one of the greatest mistakes of my life!
The book came out under the title "Teach Yourself Backgammon", and it has sold and sold and SOLD. As I am not entitled to any royalties I do not know exactly how many copies have been produced, but it has been reprinted about 15 times in the UK. There is an American version the first print run of which I know was 10,000 copies and it has been reproduced in about 8 other languages. I have no idea how often it has been reprinted in these languages. The book is now close to 25 years old and yet it is still selling and selling. What a gold mine it could have been - at a guess it must have sold at least 150,000 copies (perhaps much more) and there would have been good payments each time a foreign publisher acquired publishing rights.
This seems an appropriate place to insert the first selection of Robin's publications, "Teach Yourself Backgammon".
Why did it sell so well?
In the case of this book I cannot claim that the contents made it a best seller, (there are many better books on the market). There are only two reasons for its success. Firstly is the subject matter. The game has been played for thousands of years, and no doubt will continue to be played for thousands more to come. The changes in the way the game is played are so few and far between that the books on this subject never really go out of date.
The second reason is the brilliant marketing of the 'Teach Yourself' books by the publishers. Somehow they have made the 'Teach Yourself' books well known and have stock in almost every bookshop. As a result anyone wanting to learn a new subject almost always tries the 'Teach Yourself' series first. With rare exceptions it is not the contents that matters - just make sure you are dealing with a publisher that can market your book efficiently and, if possible, select a subject that will never go out of date!
More attempts to restore the family fortune - mail order fails
Suddenly the backgammon bubble burst, the country was flooded with backgammon boards. I diversified the mail order into other products but found I did not have that elusive talent of being able to select items that everyone wanted to buy! The products that I thought would be good sellers were often a failure and frequently an item I had not expected to sell in quantity proved to be very popular. The advertising in newspapers and magazines had to be booked months in advance. Then a wild guess had to be made as to the quantities of goods that would sell and orders placed, again months in advance. It was a very tricky business, some years made a modest profit and other years it turned into a loss with unsold stock being written off. Luckily the family Employment Agencies thrived over this period and kept the wolf from the door.
Communication and computers - a bread and butter business
About this time two new opportunities swam into view. It was at this time that the personal computer was born so we acquired our first computer, a word processor, for what now seems an astronomical price of £10,000. At the same time we spotted a local need for a telex service. So the mail order company was switched into these new fields. The telex service thrived and quickly became very profitable.
Mastering a computer took a little longer but we were very fortunate in that we had bought a machine used by many major businesses in the UK, and we were able to persuade them to subcontract work to us. Our customers included GEC, Marconi, Racal, City and Open Universities, Johnson Fry (stockbrokers) and many other well known businesses. As the years went by this business was adapted to the changes in computing and was moved into desk top publishing, type setting and printing. It was a good bread and butter business - but not one that would restore the family fortune.
Glass sun roofs - a real fortune restoring opportunity!
My oldest son spotted a new craze that was suddenly sweeping USA - glass sunroofs fitted to cars. So we took the plunge, advertised in the motoring press and flew them into the country by the container load. It was an instant success. We appointed and trained fitting centres throughout the country and were flying in container loads weekly.
The demand was so high that we decided to manufacture our own range of glass sun roofs with the intention of selling at lower prices and so keep ahead of the competitors who also began to import from American manufacturers. With the aid of a specialist design firm we finalised our designs for 3 different models and applied for patents on some of their unique features.
By selling the imported product we had proved the demand, so it was with great confidence we embarked on the manufacture of our own product. The lead time to get this type of operation going is some 6 months. We had to estimate the quantity we would be able to sell and then order huge quantities of extruded aluminium frames and 50,000 pieces of each of 3 different shaped toughened glass panels; design and make the moulds required for the plastic parts. We also had to reserve space on the production lines for our follow-up orders for glass and aluminium.
The cash flow from the imported sun roofs enable us to finance the manufacturing operation. Six months later our own product began to flow off the production line. We had managed to get a three month lead on our rivals who were also setting up manufacturing operations. Demand was enormous and sold as fast as we could make them with orders not just from the UK but from many countries in the world - our most distant customers being in New Zealand.
Disaster strikes!
For a short while it looked as though we had at last found the way to restore the family fortune - then disaster struck. One of the plastic brackets holding down the front edge of the glass sun roof started fracturing with accompanying danger that the glass sheet would be sucked out by the wind and fly across the road with obvious nasty consequences. Production had to be halted whilst new moulds were designed and made to produce the brackets in a stronger material. The whole operation took 3 months.
Tens of thousands of shaped toughened sheets of glass and miles of extruded aluminium piled up in the warehouse waiting for the new brackets before production could resume - and - it all had to be paid for within 30 days. The nice friendly bank manager suddenly began to develop high blood pressure and became overexcited about the state of our overdraft! The overdraft was rising at about a quarter of a million pounds each month and the bankers made it quite clear that they would tolerate no further rise.
There was only one way out of the problem, we had to find a wealthy buyer to take over the whole project. There is nothing more difficult than selling when you are in a position of weakness and the buyer is a large tough multinational corporation. The Swedish Axel-Johnson group with a capital of a thousand million behind them were ruthless. They took over the business and all liabilities but we ended up with absolutely nothing. So wiser, and saved from immediate bankruptcy, I returned to our other more modest businesses that were still thriving.
The second backgammon book
About this time Hodder and Stroughton, the publishers of "Teach Yourself Backgammon", asked me to write another backgammon book for their "In a Week" series. Being somewhat wiser in the ways of publishers I negotiated a much better contract based on the maximum advance payment and royalties for (I hoped) years to come. I also suddenly woke up to the fact that it was possible to negotiate with the publishers to typeset the entire book and deliver it to them on disc ready for the printer. Because of the large number of diagrams on almost every page the typesetting payment was twice as much as the advanced payment! Sadly the book did not sell by the million. Shortly after it came out Hodder and Stoughton were taken over by Headline who decided to scrap the "In a Week" series. So book number two failed to produce an income for the rest of my life!
On cue, an extract from Robin's second book, "Backgammon In A Week".
A most painful law case - I am sued for £60,000 plus endless costs!
Suddenly, some 10 years after getting out of the sunroof business I was sued for unpaid rent on the sunroof factory. (Under UK law the original tenant can always be sued for rent unpaid by subsequent tenants.) Knowing that we had watertight guarantees from the powerful Axel-Johnson group that they would be responsible for every possible liability, I wrote to the UK subsidiary asking them to discharge their responsibilities. Two weeks later I was informed that the company had suddenly gone into liquidation. Luckily we had covered this risk by getting the parent company in Sweden to add their guarantee to the agreement.
A letter was sent requesting them to honour their guarantee. In due course we had a cunningly worded letter from a firm of lawyers that gave the impression that that company had also ceased to trade. The position looked hopeless. By pure chance I recalled a very small item I had seen in the financial press a year or two previously that the Axel-Johnson group had sold some of their subsidiary companies to a large Swiss corporation called Sandoz.
As luck would have it Sandoz was one of our customers in our communication and typesetting business. I asked our Sandoz contact if he could find out what had happened to the Swedish Company, and thanks to his help we found that though two companies had been merged in Sweden they were still responsible for the merged company's guarantee.
It turned out to be a most difficult situation. They denied liability so we had to start a case in Sweden. Before the Swedish court would accept the case thousands of pounds had to be paid into court to cover all costs if the case was lost. Then it was necessary to hire Swedish lawyers. The costs were growing at an alarming rate and if we lost the case we would become responsible for all the other parties costs as well as our own. There is nothing more uncertain than a law case.
A rich and powerful opponent can afford to hire teams of lawyers and drag the case on for years with appeals and other legal methods of destroying the small man fighting for justice. So, by now getting close to retirement age, I decided that I just could not carry the risk. I instructed our lawyers (by now consisting of a Solicitor, a Barrister, the Barrister's junior and a Swedish lawyer!) to see if we could reach a compromise. This was finally achieved (almost 2 years after the start of the case) and we ended up with a deal that cost me some £20,000 but freed us from all further claims.
If I had been a rich man I would have fought the case to the end, I am sure we would have won the case, but nearing retirement it was a risk I could not impose on my long suffering wife.
A tame baby ostrich was to introduce me to my future wife!
Strange though it may seem, our first meeting at a very early age (I seem to recall we were around 6 or 7) was actually due to a tame ostrich that was given to my wife soon after it had hatched. As children we spent many of our holidays at the coast as a change from the high altitudes at which we lived, and it was on one of these holidays that our unusual meeting came about.
Like all birds, they 'imprint' on the first person who appears to be their mother. So the ostrich became her constant companion, even sleeping on her bed until it grew so big that it kept falling off! At that time I had an Alsatian dog that used to chase her ostrich along the beach. So we met and fell out over my dog harassing her bird! Some 20 years later we married and have now been married for almost 50 years.
I have been very fortunate in my choice of wife. She not only worked in the businesses in which I was involved but also started and ran several of her own. Her first independent venture was a slimming clinic which she sold after several years and then started her own employment agency. At a later stage she manufactured a range of confectionery which she supplied to London outlets such as Harrods, Selfridges and Fortnum and Mason, as well as making beautiful wedding and celebration cakes. Today in her retirement she has become a very successful artist. She has been elected a member of the Botanical Artists Society and her flower sculptures in porcelain and alabaster sell through a major London gallery as fast as she can make them; many being exported to USA and elsewhere.
The third backgammon book
Having passed the age for retirement and tiring of the struggle to restore the family fortune, I disposed of all our remaining businesses with the intention of leading a peaceful life. A couple of months later I felt the need to have something to do. I approached Macmillan's and sold them on the idea of publishing a backgammon book. As I was by now much wiser in the ways of publishers I managed to negotiate a really first class contract. A large non-refundable advance payment, royalties that escalated every time the book was reprinted, and a hefty payment for the typesetting. The agreement had numerous other features to ensure that I benefited from every conceivable situation from foreign rights to television, radio, film and dozens of other possible situations almost all of which will of course never happen!
On completion of the book and with a bank balance swollen by the Macmillan payments, my wife and I were able to spend 3 months travelling over North America, the Pacific Islands and New Zealand. We returned home just as 'Backgammon Winning Strategies' came off the printing press hoping to see it generating regular royalty payments for the years of retirement. Guess what - Yes you are right, - sales have been poor and still have not covered the advance payment!
And finally, the last insert, this is from Robin's "Backgammon - Winning Strategies".
A plea to all BIBA members
I have several times pointed out to Hodder Headline that the Teach Yourself Backgammon book is very out of date and offered to revise it. They have so far declined my offer. Perhaps if every BIBA member phoned them (0171 873 6000) and complained to the Director of the Educational Division that it is out of date, and suggested that they should ask me to revise it, they might take notice and I would finally earn royalties for the revised version!
Robin Clay (September 1999)
Sadly, Robin died without seeing his treasured 'Teach Yourself' book updated.
Michael Crane
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