How it All Started

Published: 30/07/2023 By Allan Fuller

We are coming up to the 40th anniversary of the founding of our company.  So, this month I thought I might give a little background to how it all started. 

I have to blame someone, so for this it is my father. He was a surveyor, summer school holiday when I was 15 he told me it’s no longer the time for you sitting around the house making plastic kits of cars and planes. I’ve found you a holiday job through someone I know who is a director of an estate agency, you start Monday at Hawes & Co in East Sheen.

That is where it all started, I was  as an Office Boy making tea for everyone, printing brochures on a ghastly wet ink duplication machine and doing the post.

The one thing I could never master was the telephone switchboard which could transfer calls between people, you might think it easy, but the  illustration I have found should prove you wrong! The process  involved pulling wires in and out and I managed to get is wrong most of the time!  

The mail part I enjoyed was at the end of the week getting a brown envelope with a whole Five Pounds in it! I lasted 5 weeks, and thought that would be the end of my time working in estate agency. 

Hawes & Co did survive my tea making and the phone calls I lost, in fact they offered to employ me when I left school, that is another story. They still exist in Wimbledon but eventually closed the Sheen office (nothing to do with me I promise).