A landmark for the new millennium 6 страница

Philip and Michael

Philip Masters was a millionaire now. A22 ______, everyone in the club was aware that he had built up his own business from scratch after he had left his first job as a kitchen salesman. “Ready-Fit Kitchens” had started in a shed at the end of Philip’s garden. Later, he A23 ______ in building a factory on the other side of town that employed more than three hundred people.

Ten years later, the financial press speculated that Philip’s business was worth a couple of million. When five more years later the company was taken over by the John Lewis Partnership, Philip got seventeen million pounds. A24 ______ businessmen were as lucky as he was.

Philip was married for more than twenty years. He had fallen in love with Sally at first A25 ______. Now Sally was chairman of the regional branch of the Save the Children Fund. Their son had just won a place at St Anne’s College, Oxford. Michael was the boy’s godfather.

Michael Gilmour could A26 ______ be a greater contrast. On leaving school, where Philip had been his closest friend, he A27 ______ to find a permanent job. He started out as a trainee with Watneys, but lasted only a few months. Then he started to work as a reporter with a publishing company. He drifted from job to job. A28 ______ Philip, he married his childhood sweetheart, Carol West, the daughter of a local doctor. They had a daughter. Michael seemed to have settled down at last

My company

In 1978 I was chairman of Cooper’s, a company which ran 127 vehicles of various weights and sizes. We A22 ______ in transporting goods by road.

My father had founded the firm in 1931, starting out with three vehicles – two of them driven by horses. By the time we became Cooper & Son in 1967, the company had A23 ______ in obtaining seventeen big trucks and delivered goods all over the north of England.

My father insisted that I leave school the moment I passed my O levels. “I’ll teach you more about the real world in a month than you’d learn from any of those university types in a lifetime,” he A24 ______ to say. I followed his advice and never A25 ______ it. I left school a few weeks after my sixteenth birthday. The next morning I joined Cooper’s as an apprentice, and spent my first three years at the depot under the watchful eye of Buster Jackson, the works manager. He taught me how to take the company’s trucks A26 ______ and, more important, how to put them back together again.

After graduating from the workshop, I spent five years in different departments. When my father retired in 1977 – at the age of seventy – I took over as chairman. Then I began to set in motion some ideas I’d been working on for the past decade, A27 ______ I knew my father didn’t approve of them. I never A28 ______ him, but Europe was only the beginning of my plans for the company’s expansion.

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