The last super home sales guru retires
End of an era as the last house sales guru retires
I hear that Proud ‘Brummie’ Malcolm Anson – the last of a long list of super house sales gurus, has retired as managing director of Kendrick Homes, part of the 135-year-old Kendrick Construction Group of Walsall.
Malcolm, aged 63, began his career in the industry as a trainee surveyor with the William Sapcote construction whom he served for four years before gaining wider experience with various other Birmingham companies.
He went on to work for Millards which was taken over by Hassell Homes for 12 years and then onto Kendrick Homes where he worked for 17 years. During that time the company won various house design awards in the annual competition organised by the Birmingham Post and Mail.
Malcolm’s abiding passion is “messing around on boats”, a hobby shared equally enthusiastically by his wife Sue and has a small cruising boat moored at Salcombe.
An old mate of mine Ken Jackson, formerly of this esteemed newspaper who went on to be public relations guru with Tarmac, tells me that Malcolm follows in a long line of outstanding sales and marketing experts who helped to put Birmingham and the West Midlands on the map.
He referred to such bygone stalwarts who have now passed on such as Ray Wallington of Walton Homes, Jim Bedson of McLean Homes, David Groves of the Greaves Organisation and Frank Selwyn, founder of Maitland Selwayn.
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I find myself in the company of Glyn Pitchford, Birmingham businessman and string puller, and he has the usual assortment of tales to tell.
One of which was how he, Norman Price and David Grove had somehow met up in Figaro, the gentlemen’s hairdresser in House of Fraser.
All of them being somewhat challenged in the hair department, the barber asked them whether they wanted a “cut or polish”.
And quick as a flash Pitchford declared: “I’ll have the polish; the others can have the cut.”
Hair today; gone tomorrow.
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One of my rural Staffordshire correspondents brings more news from the village of Longdon, which is beginning to rival Ambridge for its daily dramas.
Seems Big Kev, the landlord of the Red Lion on Longdon Green, decided it would be great to have some chickens to entertain the kids.
Unfortunately he reckoned without one of the more unruly village dogs who escaped and took himself off to the pub where he discovered that biting the heads off poultry was a great game. Anyone cracking headless chicken jokes will be barred.
