Legacy by Thomas Harding (William Heinemann, £25)
You are showing your age if you can fondly remember Lyons Corner Houses, teashops with “nippy” waitresses, and Lyons Maid ice cream.
The hugely popular Lyons Red Label tea was available until more recently, if memory serves me right, but is now only to be found on Irish supermarket shelves, and J. Lyons and Co, the once mighty food conglomerate that was a household name for a century and more, is one with Nineveh and Tyre.
The best-selling author Thomas Harding, a grandson of former Lyons chairman Sam Salmon, has now written the history of the firm and the family that ran it so brilliantly for so long — and a gripping read it (mostly) is.
Most of Lyons’s customers didn’t realise it but this is a Jewish story from start to finish. The company was originally the creation of Samuel Gluckstein, born in Prussia, who arrived in London in 1843, aged 22, and set up a cigar manufacturing business without any previous experience of the trade.
In booming Victorian Britain, it prospered as a family business, particularly after Samuel took on his son-in-law Barnett Salmon to help him run it. By the mid-1880s, the firm of Salmon & Gluckstein was making, importing and selling cigars and tobacco via a 60-strong chain of tobacconist shops throughout the country.
Salmons or Glucksteins ran it thereafter: Joe Lyons, a non-family member, gave his name to the business but the power lay elsewhere.
The company was blessed with a series of far-sighted leaders, none more so than Samuel’s son Monte. He was not only a creative businessman who led the firm into the catering trade which would make their fortune, but also a thoughtful figure who set up an institution which held the family together as long as the Lyons empire lasted.
Called simply The Fund, it was a sort of communist closed shop co-operative for capitalists, under which the family members pooled all their income and resources in return for the same guaranteed annual payout and perks (such as cars and drivers) for life.
It somehow worked, probably because the rewards were so generous thanks to the success of the business.
Harding tells the story of both family and firm with great skill, though some of the family details might have been pruned. The catalogue of barmitzvahs, weddings and funerals reads like a Jewish Jennifer’s Diary at times but no matter, the account of the rise and eventual fall of the firm more than makes up for it.
There were extraordinary episodes along the way, such as the creation during the Second World War of a secret armaments factory in Bedfordshire at the request of the War Office.
Such was the efficiency with which the family approached the task that they delivered five million mortar bombs to the Army, as well as blockbuster bombs to be dropped by the RAF on Germany.
The firm was eventually sold to Allied Breweries in 1978 for a relative song after an ill-advised acquisition spree which loaded it with debt it couldn’t repay. Perhaps it was divine retribution for the post-war invention of the unappetising Wimpy Bar. More likely, family firms like Lyons eventually run out of steam, and great business minds. But what a business it was while it lasted.
Robert Low is a freelance writer and reviewer
