success of his company, particularly the desire for “getting on”. His brother Wallace perhaps didn’t share these same qualities, soon fading from the company’s history.
Harold left school at 13 and by his late teens he was working at Bukta, the small Stockport-based sportswear brand that had been manufacturing football kits since 1884. Starting off as a warehouseman, he was also sent on the road selling, but in the immediate aftermath of the Great War times were hard and Harold didn’t enjoy life working for someone else. “I couldn’t see any chance of the advancement I wanted for myself,” he would recall. “I was terribly keen on success, so I started a small retail business.”
Initially trading from a small cupboard in his mother’s pub, the Bull’s Head Hotel in Mobberley, he started by picking up stock in Manchester and selling it to the regulars. “Transport was a real problem in those days and people couldn’t get to the big shops,” he would say. He also taught himself to string tennis rackets – a much in demand service – and although he had initially traded in fashion items, soon he found himself dealing with an increased demand for the sporting goods he was bringing back from the sports shops of Manchester.