Stanley Kalms: one of the great success stories of the twentieth century - The Jewish Chronicle

Lord Kalms of Edgware, who died on 30 March at 93, was a Titan not only of business and Anglo-Jewry but of Britain itself. Most of the obituaries and tributes which have followed his passing have understandably focused on his business success. A retailer of genius, he turned a north London camera shop into a £5 billion high street institution.

But Stanley Kalms was also one of the great Jewish success stories of the twentieth century. The legacy of his involvement in the Jewish community, philanthropy and politics runs deep, from the lives transformed by his sponsorship of schools – he described his “greatest single success” as setting up Bradford Technical College in 1988 – to the cadre of business leaders he nurtured and his early understanding of the threat posed by Islamist radicalism and his determination that it must be countered.

Kalms left school in 1948 at 16 to work in his father Charles’s photography studio and camera shop in Edgware. Within months he had transformed it, realising that selling cameras was far more profitable than taking portraits. Using the proceeds of a clearance sale to buy new stock, he immediately doubled the shop’s profits. “It was all about buying…I was a good buyer and worked at getting merchandise.” Buying well was a maxim that stayed with him throughout his career.

Within three years, Dixons (the name had been bought by Kalms’ father as an off the shelf company) had become the leading camera shop in Britain. But post-war difficulties in securing stock meant there was a limit to its growth until, on a business trip to the Far East in 1958, Kalms spotted the potential of Japan as a supplier. Tripods were available at a quarter of the price distributors were charging in Britain, so Kalms arranged to buy directly from the manufacturer, which became his favoured modus operandi. The golden combination of increased supply and reduced costs enabled further expansion so that by 1962 there were 16 Dixons on the high street. The company’s subsequent flotation then turned Kalms into a millionaire in his early thirties.

Kalms saw that Dixons’ real future lay more broadly in electronics, and it soon became the go-to shop for hi-fi and gadgets; what he called “electronic toy shops for adults”. Not only was he years ahead of his business rivals, he effectively created a new retail sector, with Dixons the first to offer affordable electronics on the high street. Although himself wary of computers and other gadgets, he had a near-flawless instinct for spotting what would sell – computers, laptops, video recorders, microwaves, game consoles, mobile phones, digital cameras and such like – and what would not. His chains (Currys, PC World, The Link and Dixons) dominated the sector with over £3 billion of annual sales. He also saw the potential of the internet, launching Freeserve, the first free ISP, in 1998 – and it immediately became the most popular provider in the country and was later sold for £1.6 billion.

Kalms’s story was inspirational to the generation of Jewish business leaders below him, and a notable aspect of his success was his encouragement of the so-called ‘Stanley’s Boys’. One of his most notable proteges was Ian Livingston, hired by Kalms as a 27-year-old before making him the youngest FTSE 100 finance director at the age of 32. After the sale of Freeserve in 2000, Livingston joined BT and became its CEO in 2008. In 2013 he too was ennobled on his appointment as trade minister by David Cameron. And in a rather neat full circle, he became chairman of Curry’s in 2017.

Kalms was the model of the successful Jewish businessman in that alongside his professional career his Jewish values led him to devote time and money to the community – both Anglo-Jewry and beyond. And just as Kalms spotted and nurtured talent in business, so too in the Jewish community. He could see that a brilliant young rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, left his peers so far behind intellectually that he should replace the departing chief rabbi, Immanuel Jakobovits – despite a feeling in some quarters that Sacks had not sufficiently served his time in the rabbinical trenches. Kalms’ support eased Sacks – a fellow old boy of Christ’s College, Finchley – into becoming the unchallengeable front runner for the role. Years later, Kalms told the JC that he was “an enthusiastic patron of his [Sacks], against the advice of many. Lord Jakobovits was extremely cautious. He recognised Jonathan's shortcomings. He wanted someone of his own model...

“Jonathan was a rabbi at Golders Green and through my influence he became the principal of Jews' College and we had our international conference that put him, overnight, right in the forefront of the thinking, modern rabbis who had a contribution to make, morally as well as intellectually. I just created the publicity and the opportunity. When a candidate had to be chosen the United Synagogue honorary officers were in a dilemma. They just didn't know how to deal with it. They had to make a decision and there was no other candidate – by a long way.”

Kalms was attracted not just by Sacks’ outstanding intellect but that he “made outstanding speeches, spoke about inclusiveness with a passion, about Israel with a passion, about moral values.” This sense of inclusivity was key to Kalms’ outlook; the idea that Jew might fight Jew was anathema to him. In 1991 the

United Synagogue had asked him to examine every aspect of its work. His report was, as the JC columnist Geoffrey Alderman put it, “the most comprehensive exposé of financial mismanagement in the history of British Jewry.” Damning as he was, his report was pivotal in turning the US from a moribund body heading for oblivion to an organisation capable of coordinating mainstream Anglo-Jewry. Not just his report, mind: Kalms put large amounts of his own money into ensuring its future, as well as bankrolling the Office of the Chief Rabbi.

His relationship with Sacks became complicated later on as Kalms believed Sacks was too beholden to the dayanim. Again, it was the failure to be sufficiently inclusive that angered Kalms:

"I recognise the successes and the failures, and his lack of ability to bring the community together. Today, the left-wing, the Reform movement and modern Orthodoxy, are antagonistic precisely because of the history of Jonathan's period of office. It is an obscenity in the world today. One of the things that Jews have to do is be collective and that has not been the skill of Jonathan's ministry." In an earlier article published while Sacks was still in post, Kalms wrote that the chief rabbi had become a “shuttlecock” between the “fundamentalist right and the radical left.” Despite these public differences, Kalms and Sacks remained close friends.

Kalms stood down as chairman of Dixons in 2002, not least because he had begun to see a formal role in politics and had been appointed as Conservative Party treasurer by Iain Duncan Smith in 2001. Kalms was one of the cadre of Jewish business leaders (such as Jeffrey Sterling) who became close to Margaret Thatcher and who exemplified the best of Thatcher’s Britain, with a dynamism and entrepreneurial flair that created many jobs and inspired others to follow them. She repeatedly described him as one of her favourite businessman, and he admired her commitment to enterprise, capitalism and personal responsibility. “Capitalism has lots of warts,” he said, “but you mustn’t clip its wings and prevent it functioning.”

Kalms was no free market ideologue, and years after her fall he reflected on her success as prime minister that, nonetheless, “I don’t think [she] gave enough thought to the consequences of adopting the market system. The system works but it is very crude…We have to find a better way of helping those who cannot make the adjustments necessary.”

He was knighted by John Major in 1996 and then in 2001 Iain Duncan Smith (whom Kalms described as “a great patriot”) handed him one of the most difficult jobs of his career – treasurer of the Conservative Party at a time when Labour had just won a 165 seat majority. The problem was not just raising money for a party that looked unelectable; it was that the party was spending money it did not have. He imposed a series of swingeing cuts which, although they made him unpopular in some circles within the party, were essential in restoring sanity to its operations. But his relationship with the Conservatives soured. He had little taste for David Cameron’s modernisation project and in 2006 he was – like many in the Jewish community – deeply angered by what he called the “ignorant” criticism by the then shadow foreign secretary William Hague of criticism of Israel’s military action in Lebanon.

Core to Kalms’ politics was the idea of a strong, sovereign Britain – and the preservation of pound, which was a major issue at the time. By the 2009 Euro elections he had decided that meant he needed to vote for UKIP, and he made this public with the statement that he was treating the vote as “an opportunity to vote for personal priorities”. His involvement with the Conservative Party ceased.

Kalms’ political philanthropy had for many years been focused on the Conservatives, but increasingly he had also been supporting individuals and organisations focused on specific issues he believed important – above all, community cohesion, which was his leitmotif, both within the Jewish community as we have seen but also beyond.

That was one reason why he saw education as being so vital and why he spent vast sums supporting many Jewish and secular schools. The two he felt closest to were Immanuel College – formally known as The Charles Kalms, Henry Ronson Immanuel College – and Bradford Technology College, of which he was rightly proud. As his eldest son, Richard, put it in his hesped at his father’s levoyah, “he believed in giving future generations the tools to think critically and live purposefully.” Bradford was the exemplar of this, taking children from many different ethnic backgrounds and giving them the equipment needed to find jobs and a common ethos of hard work and personal responsibility – and also demonstrating in the clearest possible way the ability of capitalism to do good, using the wealth generated by enterprise to pay for a college to instil the skills that would then generate more wealth.

Another aspect of this commitment to cohesion was his understanding of the threat to it posed by radical Islam. Perception of that threat is now mainstream, but Kalms saw the issue long ago. In 2007, for example, he helped establish the Centre for Social Cohesion under Douglas Murray at the Civitas think tank. Its work on radicalisation and extremism was instrumental in putting the issue on the agenda, and Kalms remained close to Murray for the rest of his life.

The list of people and organisations supported by Kalms is a veritable A-Z of important causes. He was on the board of the Centre for Policy Studies, the think tank established in 1974 by Sir Keith Joseph for Margaret Thatcher, was a governor of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, chairman of the King’s Healthcare NHS Trust in south London, a member of the Funding Agency for Schools, helped establish a chair in business ethics at London Business School, a centre for ethical studies in Jerusalem and a foundation to aid the study of Jewish culture and values – and much more. As his eldest son, Richard, put it: “He lived with an extraordinary sense of responsibility – not only to his business, his Jewish community and his country, but especially to his family.

“Yes, he had strong and often difficult opinions – anyone who ever tried to debate him in his study or around the dinner table knows well. But his conviction came from a place of deep thought, fierce loyalty, and intellect and an unwavering desire to see the people he loved – and the causes he believed in – thrive.”

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