SON OF SUFFOLK: Paul Rackham is a countryman at heart

It’s a gripping story: the tale of a humble Suffolk thatcher’s son who built several large companies – two of which floated for millions on the stock exchange – and who is still excited by hard graft and the sniff of a deal in his 70s. STEVEN RUSSELL is exhausted just hearing about it

LIVING THE AMERICAN DREAM . . . IN EAST ANGLIA: Paul Rackham - a self-made man

YOU’D need a book or two simply to scratch the surface of Paul Rackham’s life, but as we’ve got less than 3,000 words here, please prepare for something of a gallop. Paul’s story is an ongoing adventure that begins in the Suffolk village of Peasenhall in the summer of 1936 and takes in the building of a successful business empire and the baubles it earned, recovery from a nervous breakdown, breakfast in Newmarket with Lord Lucan, a property crash that left him £1million in the red, and the creation of the UK’s largest waste management firm.

Even today, the thought of putting his feet up holds no appeal. Paul Rackham’s day invariably begins at five or six in the morning and ends at seven in the evening: dominated by his beloved East Anglian farming estate that stretches to 2,000-plus acres and a brownfield-site recycling business that makes a million quid a year in rental income and could spark into serious life when the economy improves.

He used to pass Manor Farm, near Thetford, when he was a teenager on his way to market to buy live rabbits and chickens. Dreams of becoming a farmer and owning a place that like seemed pie in the sky to someone who had only shillings and pennies. But it came to pass, several decades later.

“I still feel guilty if I’m not working,” he writes in his frank and readable autobiography Paul Rackham – No Time to Waste.

STILL ON THE GO: Paul Rackham, pictured with wife Sheila, is up early to work on the farm and tend to his animals

“I’ve always been very mindful that I have to work to provide for my family, and that drives me on, even at my age. Similarly, I feel guilty if I’m not setting an example to the people who work for me; I still don’t like to ask the chaps to do things that I wouldn’t do, although now there are certain jobs that I can’t physically manage.

“I have had to cut back somewhat in recent years, now that I’ve entered my seventies, but life remains hectic and I can’t bring myself to take my foot off the accelerator.”

Paul was born at Peasenhall, near Saxmundham, but within months of his birth the family moved north to Walpole, where father Basil had grown up. The Rackham men had been in thatching for more than 300 years. Paul’s mother, Minnie, had been a nursing sister at Halesworth Hospital.

The youngster showed an interest in farming from an early age and school never held much appeal.

DREAM: Paul Rackham on his farm on the Suffolk-Norfolk border

Life was pretty austere. “What little we had was hard earned – a fact of life that not only instilled a strong work ethic in me at a very early age, but also nurtured a hunger to achieve something more, to take on the challenges that life could throw up and to overcome them,” writes Paul.

The family moved to Barnham, where Basil became resident thatcher to the Duke of Grafton on the Euston Estate.

“Mother taught us that everything in life is a challenge. There are always opportunities out there, but you have to go out and find them, you have to have ambition and fierce determination, and that, I like to think, is what she gave me.

“By the time I was ten years old, I was out there looking for my own opportunities. Wherever I could I picked up odd jobs around the village, whether it was milking the rector’s cow for a few pence or chopping up kindling and firewood to sell to the neighbours.”

SHE'S MY ROCK: Paul Rackham pays tribute to wife Sheila and other members of his family for supporting him during his career

Shooting and selling rabbits and pigeons, and catching moles whose pelts he sold to a furrier, raised money to buy a small number of chickens that could later be sold up for a profit.

“Buying and selling animals suited me perfectly. It gave me the chance to get involved with the practical side of life and I was never happier than when I was with the livestock, whether it was rabbits, chickens, pigs, cattle, horses or whatever. I always found them much easier to deal with than people. I still do.

“In truth I’ve always been a bit of a loner. Generally I preferred my own company when I was a child. I was always nervous, always very shy. Still am.

“Throughout my life I’ve struggled with public situations, particularly situations in which I’m expected to make a speech . . What I have always had, however, is an inner confidence in my own abilities or in my will to succeed.”

MY STORY: Paul Rackham's book

At 14, Paul won a place at the new Norfolk School of Agriculture, running his own business in the evenings and at weekends, buying and selling livestock. It went so well that he opted not to go back to college for his last year. “I was eager to get out into the world and to make some money.”

He explains: “By the time I turned twenty, I was turning over more than £100,000 a year, no small sum back then.” Then, in 1956, illness meant his entire stock had to be slaughtered.

“The swine fever outbreak didn’t just leave me broke, it left me with a sizeable deficit. I owed money to a number of different traders, and it would take me the best part of six years to pay off my debts, which I did down to the last penny,” Paul writes. “Now I view the episode as a blessing in disguise. It taught me some valuable lessons about success and failure, and pushed me in new, challenging directions that would build progressively over the coming years.”

He needed a job and got one in earthmoving, working on jobs such as the new M1, a runway extension at RAF Lakenheath and Luton Airport’s new concrete runway.

Early in 1960, Paul started his own operation, RA Contractors Ltd, and landed an earthworks job for the fast-expanding London overspill town of Thetford.

Business boomed. “We grew rapidly and by the end of my first year I had a trading profit of £5,000.”

That year, Paul married West Stow girl Sheila Murrell, then a 19-year-old hairdresser, at Bury St Edmunds Register Office. Business-wise, his fleet grew and grew. There was work on big housing estates, and jobs in Kent and Oxfordshire, as well as hauling aggregates to the Sizewell nuclear power station building site.

At home, the 1960s brought daughters Jane and Sara. Paul also got into construction, buying small plots of land and building houses, factories, shops or offices.

In 1964 the firm built 28 bungalows and houses around the green in Badwell Ash. “They weren’t so easy to sell,” he reveals. “They were three-bed roomed properties put on the market at £2,500, but nobody would take them at that price. So I decided I’d raise the price to £2,900 and give each buyer a free Mini car with each house or bungalow. That got them away.”

In 1962 Paul had his first foray into waste management. “I set up a company called Mobile Clearance Ltd and began offering a skip delivery and collection service, the first in East Anglia. It rapidly grew, and within three years I’d acquired a stock of 200 skips and six skip lorries.”

In 1965, he opted to sell it, for £28,000– “my first big sale”. That same year, son Paul was born.

“We’d gone from little or nothing, a couple of newlyweds living in a caravan in a garden with £80 to their names, to a family of five living in a brand new detached house . . .,” he reflects in his book. The various business strands were doing nicely, thanks to hard work, vision; entrepreneurial zeal and the hunger to succeed.

“There was an element of fearlessness to that period that I’ve perhaps since lost, the kind of attitude born of starting from nothing. Whilst I was always quite a shy person socially, when it came to business I would never throw the towel in lightly. I used to go in where angels feared to tread. I certainly wasn’t easily intimidated, which is very important in making a deal.”

Trusted and loyal colleagues were also crucial to success – and the support of wife and family. “My family made sacrifices because of the way I relentlessly pursued a challenge and because of the time I spent working.”

The mid-1960s were something of a blur: at least 12-hour working days, often seven days a week, and a thriving social life, ranging from dinner parties to shooting and trips to the football World Cup finals of 1966. That year Paul’s business strands – in earthmoving and construction, welding and insurance – were put up for sale and went to the Caister Group (which had leisure chalets in Hemsby and Great Yarmouth) for £200,000 – “not bad considering I’d started out with virtually nothing only six years before”.

Paul writes: “The acquisition of wealth has never been my prime motivation in life or work. True, I was always chasing a buck, driven by the long-term goal of buying my own farm and also by the sense of achievement that doing a good deal brought, and still brings – and a good deal is also often a deal that earns you money – but the accumulation of money has always been secondary to the challenge of building something – for my children or grandchildren.”

He admits there was “certainly an element of my character that enjoyed playing the country playboy”. Part of that period included buying his first racehorse and hooking up with Arthur Freeman, who trained horses for a number of owners, including Lord Lucan.

“We used to meet Arthur at his house in Bury Road, Newmarket, before setting off to a race meeting somewhere in the country. Our routine was simple: eat some of Newmarket’s famous Musk sausages for breakfast and then hit the road.

“I can remember my wife and I sitting in Arthur’s kitchen eating sausages with Lord Lucan and his wife, Veronica . . . He was an interesting guy to talk to, Lord Lucan, and at that time he was just another of the high rollers in London’s gambling set. He didn’t have the notoriety, that would come a couple of years later.”

Paul became master of the Suffolk Hunt in the 1970s and there were nice cars, such as Mercedes, an Aston Martin Vantage, Jenson FF Interceptors and a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow.

Things were hunky-dory on all fronts – and then he had a nervous breakdown and his confidence disappeared overnight. Paul had electric shock treatment. “Within 18 months I was back to my old self, the inner confidence having returned, and I’m pleased to say it hasn’t really left me since, despite some very testing times.”

We’ll have to concertina time here and skip past deals to build warehousing on land at the fledgling Felixstowe docks, the buying of a couple of East Anglian stud farms, and the arrival of third daughter Rachel.

Paul started a company called Roeday Properties Ltd in partnership with a merchant bank. It went swimmingly – a shopping mall on Ilford High Road was a huge project – and by 1973 the partners were lining up a deal to sell Roeday Properties Ltd for £6.25 million.

Then we had a banking crisis, a sudden drop in property prices and a credit squeeze that dried up the flow of money.

The intended sale fell out of bed. Roeday Properties went bust. Paul didn’t get his anticipated £3.25 million. Worse, he was left with a million-pound deficit because he’d borrowed money personally.

“It was going to be a fight for survival.” Fortunately, he was able to treat it as a challenge. His bank agreed to being paid back over three years, rather than making him bankrupt.

Assets had to go: horses, the studs, a house at Southwold, property interests in Sardinia, a condo in the Bahamas.

“My greatest concern was the effect it might all have on the family. They didn’t find it easy because we had to go pretty rapidly from a decent level of prosperity, and all the things that brings with it, to a fight for survival.

“We went from a Rolls Royce and a Mercedes Benz to a Morris Marina. There were times when I didn’t know where the next penny was coming from.”

Paul says it took two or three years to get his head above water, rebuilding on a modest scale.

He’d had an interest in the waste management industry since buying a Cambridgeshire landfill site in 1966, and after the Roeday Properties debacle considered a return to that business.

It was obvious that recycling was going to be the big thing. In 1983 he launched two new Thetford-based companies: Waste Recycling Ltd and Anti-Waste Ltd. To cut a long story short, things went very well.

“Ten years after we placed the first eight bottle banks with Breckland District Council, Waste Recycling was operating near on 2,000 glass collection bins around the eastern region for 23 different councils, serviced by five lorries working in shifts,” writes Paul.

“Similarly Anti-Waste, with its collection of landfill sites, was thriving. We were processing 150,000 tonnes of waste a year.”

The enterprise earned a million pounds annually. In 1994 the two strands were brought together under the umbrella of Waste Recycling Group plc (WRG) and it was floated on the London stock market with a capitalisation of £8,100,000.

Everything was run from a new base – Manor Farm, at Bridgham, near Thetford, that had been bought as a family home five years earlier.

WRG was in the vanguard of the waste business and it grew rapidly, making acquisitions. Paul loved doing the deals.

Trouble is, as it grew, “we were shifting, inexorably, towards a corporate democracy”. A “civil service style of management” didn’t sit well with Paul’s entrepreneurial soul. He decided to sell up and capitalise on two decades of hard graft. In 2003 WRG was bought by Terra Firma for £531 million “and I was out of the waste recycling business”.

It was time to develop his love of farming. Today, the Manor Farm estate amounts to more than 2,000 acres.

A beef unit developed over the past 15 years is one of the biggest in the UK. The cattle side alone turns over £5 million a year. Meat is sold mainly to Waitrose and Morrisons. Arable operations account for about 75% of land use. Paul is very hands-on. He explains that his book isn’t meant to sound as if he’s boasting about his career. “Rather, I hope to inspire; to show what can be achieved if you’re willing to work and if you’re streetwise.

“Don’t be discouraged by a lack of qualifications; nor deflated by the setbacks that you will inevitably encounter. Learn from your experiences and act accordingly next time.”

n Paul Rackham – No Time to Waste is published through Thorogood Publishing Ltd at £16.99 (www.thorogoodpublishing.co.uk).