Hugh and his wife Ricki have lived in Battersea since 1991. For the three previous years, they lived in Bangkok, where Hugh was General Manager of the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather Thailand and their eldest child was born in 1989.
Since moving to Battersea, their second and third children were born at St. George's Hospital in 1992 and 1997 respectively.
Their older two children went to Honeywell and the youngest to Belleville.
Hugh and Ricki have been lucky enough to afford private Secondary Education, but they are selling their house in Bennerley Road and downsizing to another house in Battersea in order to pay for these school fees.
From personal experience, Hugh knows only too well about the appalling dilemma facing Primary School parents in Battersea and the shortage of Secondary School options available.
He is also concerned about the legacy his generation are leaving for their children.
How will they get onto the 'property ladder'? Once there, will the increase in property prices enable them to pay for private education for their children? Or will the state schools in London be good enough for them not to feel they have to?
With the closure of the Bolingbroke Hospital, Hugh is convinced that here is an absolutely ideal location for a new Secondary School, right by the sporting fields on Wandsworth Common.
With an advertising agency background (see below) Hugh, along with his old friend Anthony Stileman, formed The Salmon Agency in 1999.
In 2000, the agency moved to 33-37 St John’s Hill just up the hill from the Clapham Grand opposite Clapham Junction. Clients included The Bahamas Tourist Office (with whom Hugh worked for over 10 years), Balls Brothers of London (restaurants and bars), the City newspaper Financial News and the publisher Hodder Headline.
In 2005, alongside the former Marketing Director of Hodder Headline and another industry contact, Hugh co-founded the internet business Lovereading which has expanded to include Lovereading4kids, Lovereading4schools and Lovewriting. Lovereading Ltd was incubated in The Salmon Agency offices in St Johns Hill.
At around this time, Hugh began to suffer from chronic back pain leading to major surgery in 2005, followed by two further operations in 2007 and 2008.
So, from 2006, Hugh converted The Salmon Agency into a smaller strategic marketing and innovations consultancy which still operates today. In 2007, the St John's Hill lease expired so Lovereading Ltd and The Salmon Agency moved to 70-72 St John's Road (above Waterstones). In 2009, the businesses diverged to three new locations.
During this period, two local Battersea students benefited from work experience at Lovereading, helping them move forward their careers at University and in business.
I was born into a different world, in Hong Kong in 1956 and I am the oldest of four brothers. From the end of the Second World War until he retired, my father worked for the P&O shipping company.
In those days, ‘expatriates’ worked on three-year contracts with six-months ‘leave’ every three years. I am old enough to remember coming back to Britain from Hong Kong by ship.
I remember the zoo in Colombo. One of my brothers tried to get into the rhinoceros pen and lacerated his neck on the barbed wire.
I remember Port Said on the Suez Canal where young boys in tiny boats threw souvenirs tied to rope up to us on our enormous ship – and we would tie the money to the rope and chuck it back down to them. Distant, happy memories.
As part of my father’s expatriate salary package, boarding school in England was included so, at the age of nine, I was sent back to a strict Roman Catholic school in Nottinghamshire. No happy memories there, I am afraid.
I think this background led to an unusual decision in my late teens. I failed the Oxbridge entrance exam and then decided not to go to University at all. I wanted to live my own life and be independent (just like I am now!).
So I got various jobs in London. I was a van driver, I cleaned cars and I worked for a firm of accountants. I completed a single-seater Formula Ford motor-racing course. I even taught water-skiing in Corfu.
Then I had a lucky break. After four years in the ‘University of Life’, I had worked out I wanted to be in advertising and I was taken on by the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather (O&M) as a graduate trainee – in exactly the same year as all my age-group were leaving university anyway.
This was the beginning of my career. And those early years at O&M in The Strand were among the best of my life.
My full CV can be found here, but these are some of the highlights of my career:
Two years after joining O&M, through the experience of working on the JVC account, I had the idea that the information in music magazines like NME and Melody Maker would be better conveyed on things called cassette tapes and listened to on a great new invention called the Sony Walkman.
The idea became a music magazine called SFX (industry jargon for ‘Sound Effects’).
O&M were incredibly supportive. They offered me office space so, for a period, in their fancily furnished Reception the Managing and Marketing Directors of companies like Shell and Unilever would rub shoulders with bands like, Madness, Echo and the Bunnymen and Aswad!
Sadly, we struggled to make money out of the concept, although we had a lot of fun and achieved a cult following. To this day, issues of SFX come up for sale on eBay.
Anyway, I had to move on. I joined another American ad agency called FCB and then, when I was 29, the ex-Managing Director of FCB invited me to join him on the board of a smaller, local ‘creative hot shop’ called Kirkwoods.
Two years later, in 1988, O&M invited me to rejoin the company as General Manager of O&M Thailand. By now I had proposed to my wife and we moved to Bangkok and an exotic start to our married life together. Our oldest child was born there in 1989.
In 1991, after my Thailand posting, I returned to O&M London to oversee the Unilever account. And I moved to Battersea.
Then, in 1992, I was head-hunted in true cloak-and-dagger style to become Managing Director of a London branch of an international advertising agency called CM:Lintas. I have included a fuller version of the story of what happened after that here.
In 1999, I founded The Salmon Agency with my good friend, Anthony Stileman, and we moved our offices to St. John’s Hill, just up the hill from Clapham Junction. At the time of writing the pink salmon that was our logo is still above the door of numbers 33-37.
That brings me to ‘Living in Battersea’ and back to the beginning again!
