The mind behind the BT till

THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW : ONE THING you should know about Galen Weston: he was the first to introduce avocados to Ireland, 40…

THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW: ONE THING you should know about Galen Weston: he was the first to introduce avocados to Ireland, 40 years ago, when ham, tomato and lettuce still constituted a salad, writes Kathy Sheridan

He also brought balsamic vinegar to the Canadian masses. So it's hardly surprising that, amid a calamitous global recession, the lanky Canadian is cheerfully introducing such recession-conscious brands as Cartier, Tiffany and Theo Fennell to Brown Thomas, his fragrant Irish emporium.

He also drops the news that Brown Thomas is planning two new green-field stores in Ireland, one ear-marked for Galway, the other possibly for Limerick or Dublin's northside. All will be achieved with no bank borrowings, he says. A slice of the cash will come from the brilliantly-timed sale of the A-Wear chain yielding the €70m dividend announced a few weeks ago.

He merely says modestly that "a private equity group came along saying it wanted to take the management team and the business to England and do what we did with Penneys . . . we had to decide either to go big in terms of taking it abroad or let it go."

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But surely the arrival of Cartier et al is catastrophically ill-timed?  Well, no. Listen up, because Forbes counts this man among the world's 100 richest people. "My vision has always been that at the top end. You have some protection because people at that end are able to hold on to some of their money. You're such a small part of the marketplace generally that it's a safer place to be. And it's a nicer place to work," he adds cheerfully, noting that brands such as Louis Vuitton, Fendi and Dior are up 15-20 per cent on last year. But "the real money," he stresses, is at "the lower or discount end, which of course is where Penneys, Primark and all my work in North America has been . . . It's the middle market that is hurting now."

The discount end sits rather incongruously with the image of a tribe often dubbed Canada's royal family. Then again, Galen's grandfather, George, the son of a Cockney immigrant to Canada, who began as a baker's boy in Toronto, once opined that "people will eat horseshit if it's got icing on it". And George went on to make such a success of his own bakery that he off-loaded the business for about a million dollars in 1911.

The simplified version of what happened next is that three further generations of Weston men (all with names beginning with "G"), seamlessly progressed to build a food-and-fashion empire on George's million. But that would be misleading.  George's son (and Galen's father), Garfield, was a Methodist with a Puritanical streak, who made a pile from mass-producing biscuits after discovering them in England while serving in the first World War; fought bankruptcy by embarking on a buying spree of Depression-hit food companies; introduced an Irishwoman into the tribe by marrying a Coleraine woman called Reta Lila Howard; moved his nine-strong brood from Canada to England; found the time to serve as a Tory MP; and, inter alia, bought up Fortnum Mason (the queen's grocer) for Reta to run.

"He was a hard-ass. He was great but he learned to be tough with his children from his own father," says Galen, the youngest of his three sons, candidly. "My grandmother fell out with him as did both my brothers. That's why my two brothers took off." They scattered around the world, Grainger to become a rancher in Texas, the shy, Harvard- and Oxford-educated Gary to found Associated British Foods (Twinings, Ryvita, Ovaltine), a business now run by his son George.

"After they took off, I decided I'm not gonna fall out with him, I'm just gonna go . . . His attitude was 'you will work 90 hours a week and all that stuff, you will start in the bakery and carry the sacks of flour and you will work on to something else and then you will be in the supermarket division and by the time you're, oh, 35, you'll be able to - maybe - afford a child," he finishes with a hearty laugh.

"They were very tough on money, very tough on money. And I said 'thanks very much, you've given me a great education, I'd like to do my own thing'. And he said, 'well, you're not getting a penny.'" At which point, the Northern Ireland granny, Eliza Whalley, whose husband made his money in saw-mills, "stood up and said 'I've got a hundred grand for you here'. She said, 'If you want to start somewhere, you start in Ireland, set up your own business, I will provide the money'." For Eliza, it was about teaching him the value of a dollar.

HE WAS 20 OR 21, HAD JUST FINISHED his degree and headed for Ireland, where he set about becoming a supermarket king. He had been in the country about 18 months and was scouting out property with estate agent Corrie Buckley. Buckley asked him about his love life. "I told him I was quite busy, that I went to the Metropole on a Saturday night. He said that was ridiculous and he'd try and organise something."

Just then, Weston spotted a leggy young model on a billboard, sporting hot pants and Sheer Dynamite stockings. "She looks pretty good," he said.

The model was Hilary Freyne, just 18 years old and still under the protection of her formidable mother. Buckley pulled off a blind date and the pair were married three years later, in 1966, "in a Klondike-themed ceremony at a family estate on the Thames," according to the Canadian Globe Mail. "So raucous were the celebrations, a guest fell overboard from a steamer rented for the occasion."

It has been a happy union. He regularly drops Hilary's name into the conversation, whether in reference to her looks or her "deep involvement" in building up the Irish and Canadian businesses.

His first shop in Ireland was a Power's Supermarket in South Great George's Street, taken on a rental basis while he was a lad in his mid-20s - and clearly a precocious one, since it was right beside a Dunnes Stores outlet, at a time when old Ben Dunne was in his pomp. "Old Benji was looking at me through the window and I was looking back at him while he was having his lunch," he laughs. "I learned a lot from Dunnes. I always say to Margaret [Heffernan, Ben's daughter, who took over as head of the company after her brother Ben was ousted] that her dad was the greatest teacher I ever had. I was taking my trousers off at every turn," he says with a roar of laughter. "Every afternoon he'd have done something . . . It was fantastic. I was foreign; he was local. He used every trick in the book."

Power's grew into a chain that became Quinnsworth (for whom Maurice Pratt became the public face and is now a board member of Brown Thomas), and later was sold to Tesco.

He also managed to entice away some of Dunne's key men, in particular one Arthur Ryan, who was 28 at the time and remains among the top three people who, says Weston, "have all been from Ireland and really have held me together in terms of the business side". Paul Kelly was the second to join up, coming with the Brown Thomas package that included three young fashion shops called Gaywear (swiftly renamed A-Wear); he now runs Selfridges of London for Weston, a store whose appeal Weston's daughter and creative director, Alannah, puts down to "latte, laser, Lanvin" (or a one-stop shop for fabulousness). A third key man is Dalton Phillips, the son of Weston's Co Wicklow neighbour, who is now number two to Weston's own son ("G2") in the €300billion (€235.7bn) Weston empire in Canada.

But Hilary, he says, is the unacknowledged story, the "great seamstress" who could make all her own clothes, who ran the cut, machine and trim business that stocked the first Penneys store in Mary Street. "That was Hilary's operation, that private label. That's where Primark got its original name and the brand," he says proudly.

When Brown Thomas came on the market, he paid under £300,000 for it, "lock, stock and Paul [Kelly]," he grins. He balks at the notion that he bought it for Hilary as a wedding present. "Yes, it's true . . . I did buy it for her but it was as a place for her to work. She loved the merchandise and knew a great deal about it. My father had bought Fortnum Mason for my mother who brought all the foodstuffs into it, and that's pretty much what happened with Hilary and me. She left Penneys and got stuck into BT with Cecily MacMenamin. Arthur was then on the board of Penneys and he just went hell for leather . . . I really want to get that on the record, the great success Arthur has made of the business and the great relationship we've had."

But again, it was no seamless progression. While family money had underpinned the development of Quinnsworth (which by now boasted up to 80 stores and 30 per cent of the market) and Penneys/Primark, and the market was such that he had been picking up shops for under £20,000 (£3,000 for the forerunner of Penneys in Naas), he had also branched out on his own as a property developer.

It was that personal investment that came crashing down in 1972. "I lost most of it . . . There was an Irish recession, and real estate absolutely crunched." Leases were the problem. "I had leases at that time and it was tough to find the money to do all the other stuff and pay the landlords off - and that's what people were doing and what is creating problems for them now. So I was very glad I had that experience in 1972-73, because I lost half of what I had at that time. I lost Dún Laoghaire [where he was developing the shopping centre], and had to sell it for 50 cent in the dollar. I lost Phibsboro Shopping Centre which was the first thing that was done by me personally, and a whole bunch of other stuff. I was 30 and I was going to lose everything . . ."

THAT EARLY LESSON has endured. He is undisturbed by the current economic earthquake. "From a corporate standpoint, my early days in the 1970s kept me from borrowing a lot of money to do things that seemed really good." In a handwritten note prepared for this interview, under the heading "Philosophy", he lists three points: "Own all real estate possible (hate sale and leaseback). Low debt levels - cash always king in long term. Family work ethic strong - deeply [involved] in business including Hilary."

Under "People", he writes: "Key success - long service: Arthur Ryan and Paul Kelly. New generation: G2, discount supermarkets, Canada. Alannah Weston, luxury goods, especially Selfridges."

Back then, however, it was the family business that provided an anchor. His father had grown old and mellow and had bought Barretstown Castle (since endowed to the Irish State), to be near his infant grandchildren - "Irish twins, Alannah and Galen Jr, born 10 months apart in 1972" - living across the mountain in Roundwood Park, a 17th-century castle, in the Wicklow hills.

Father and son struck a deal at a time when the question was whether Loblaw, the family's run-down, money-losing grocery, should be sold or salvaged. "The deal was that I would take on a division and make it work . . . I had a year to do it." The son embarked on a dramatic boardroom clear-out, replacing the old crew with a bunch of young mavericks. By the late 1980s, Loblaw had become destination shopping. One Canadian dollar in four is now spent in a Loblaw store.

In the mid-1970s, the family gravitated more towards Canada and he bought up the Brown Thomas-style Holt Renfrew chain of department stores, which has grown to 11 stores. While the Westons' earnest streak is constantly stressed in the press cuttings, a hilarious image conjured up by one report is of Galen swanning into George Weston Ltd's head office in Toronto wearing a floor-length fur, flanked by two Dobermans (well, it was the 1970s, to be fair).

A glimpse of their lifestyle may be gleaned from the fact that when the IRA tried to kidnap Galen in Wicklow in 1983, he was actually playing polo in Windsor with Prince Charles, close by the Westons' own Windsor home, Fort Belvedere, where Edward VIII signed his abdication papers and which they had bought in a neglected condition for £300,000 in the early 1970s.

When Don Tidey, chief executive of Quinnsworth, was kidnapped, it must have felt like a very threatening time? "When you think back, it was a big deal, but at the time, it's well, how are we gonna give 'em some money and get him out, because Tidey and I were very close. And of course there was the dilemma about handing over money [to which Margaret Thatcher was implacably opposed]. What resolved it - or didn't - was that the Thatcher boys [special branch] lived with us - Hilary and me - and all the senior executives for 21 days. We couldn't make a phone call for 21 days. There was somebody standing behind me, or sitting, or recording all our phone calls."

So was the money paid over? "It was said that there was never a ransom paid," he replies as though it all happened over his head. "It seems a big deal now but it really was just one of many things that were going on in one's life. This was bad and traumatic, but, except for the boy who was shot, no harm was done to anyone in my family or Don's family. He still lives there, and wouldn't be anywhere else. It never really occurred to us to leave Ireland or that we'd be any safer in Germany or in Canada," he says, referring to the activities of the Baader-Meinhof gang and the fact that Canada at the time was swamped with "a tremendous amount of IRA guys and Ulster volunteers."

In the meantime, they had become the closest thing that Canada had to Grace and Rainier, an image enhanced by the famous Weston philanthropy, dispensed through the W Garfield Weston Foundation. Personally, the family is said to dispense over $10 million per year, making major gifts in recent years to the British Museum, the Nature Conservancy of Canada, the Ontario Science Centre and the Royal Ontario Museum. When Hilary assumed the role of Ontario's lieutenant-governor, basically the queen's representative, from 1997 to 2002, there was a brief flurry of controversy about cronyism but few doubt that she took to her role with great earnestness or that Galen played gamely along with the ceremonials.

When Hilary celebrated her 60th birthday in 2003, the big party was in Fort Belvedere, where they hosted the likes of Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Princess Caroline of Monaco.

THE PENCHANT FOR royalty was further demonstrated when the couple bought an island off Florida's Atlantic coast 22 years ago, "a mini Palm Beach", and named it Windsor. This was a serious real estate venture, says Weston, overseen by Hilary who has a veto on who gets to build or buy a property (yours for between $1 million (€786,000) and $10 million ($7.86m) if Hilary approves). Security is enhanced with the help of the crocodiles on either side of the causeway. That streak of puritanism has served the family - in which the children were reared as Catholics - well.

They provide little material for the gossip mills and it has been noted in the Canadian press that the children have demonstrated none of the bad behaviour often seen in billionaire offspring.

Both have had their quietly clever bohemian years. In London, Alannah hit on the bright idea of persuading the vendors of grand houses to loan them as art exhibition space in the period between viewing and sale. She spent a few years as a reporter at the Telegraph, before becoming the creative director of Selfridges. Before marrying architect Alex Cochrane, son of Sir Mark and Lady Hala Cochrane of the drinks family, she dated the pop star Seal, and was seen in the right places often enough to make Tatler's most-invited list.

Galen Jr's great first love was theatre and he staged plays in Toronto, New York and London, though remaining canny enough to always use investors' money rather than his own, says his father proudly. Meanwhile, he also managed to pick up a BA from Harvard and an MBA from Columbia. In 2005, he married Alexandra Schmidt, of the Bata shoe empire family, in a Provence château and in a Toronto Loblaw warehouse decked out with orchid chandeliers and waterfalls.

In recent months, Alannah has begun a new generation in the form of Maia, Irish-born like her mother and great-grandmother. Her grandfather is duly besotted.