ISAAC NEWTON SAID, “IF I HAVE SEEN FURTHER IT IS BY STANDING ON THE SHOULDER OF GIANTS.” At five foot one, my grandmother wasn’t a conventional giant. But she’s helped me see further, and better. And helped me in my own way to make better decisions.
MY GRANDMOTHER, ZENA NEWBY, WAS BORN IN 1917, GREW UP WITH LITTLE, WAS FORMED BY THE GREAT DEPRESSION – AND HAD THE STORIES TO BOOT. Early-morning dashes to the toilet in the back yard. A girl in the school playground so poor she’d ask Zena for the core of her apple. In home economics lessons, potatoes were peeled with precision – and the peelings were weighed – to ensure minimal waste. My Nan lived all her 95 years in Grangetown, a short walk from Cardiff docks. She married in August 1939 and, on the final day of their honeymoon in Torquay, Britain declared war on Germany. My grandad worked for the Port Health Authority in a ‘reserved occupation’, which made him exempt from military service. But he was having none of it. “If my brothers are fighting, I am too.” And off he went.
CHRIS BACON
Chief Executive
Newly married Zena didn’t see him for three years. She spent the war-by-day as a shorthand typist; she spent the war-by-night as an air raid warden, enforcing blackouts and sounding alarms. At some point towards the end of the war, she contracted tuberculosis. After months in a sanitorium, there seemed no hope of recovery. Her family moved her to a home a few streets away that had (only from the front bedroom, and only partially, and only until the builders started work opposite…) a view of the sea. This was to be the long-term spot for her long-term convalescence and limited mobility.
Yet Zena had other ideas. She volunteered to be part of a trial testing “a wonder drug from America”. The drug was streptomycin… and the rest is (oral family) history.
Zena made a full recovery. The war ended. Her husband returned. But starting a family proved an easier thing to want than to do. After the pain of many unsuccessful pregnancies, my mum was born, in 1954.
Jump ahead to the early 1980s, and two grandsons arrive – my brother and me. Two boys for Zena to spoil rotten with Welsh cakes and pikelets and Cadbury Twirls. Two boys with central heating and inside toilets who’d never hungered for apple cores. Two boys who, in her phrase, “don’t know you’re born”.
“THIS IS ABSOLUTELY THE WORST CAREER DECISION YOU COULD EVER MAKE.”
I moved from London to Cardiff in 2008. Zena was 89 then, and had lived for a decade alone. My mum, an only child, and an alcoholic, died aged 40, when I was 12. Four years later, my grandad also died, of what we all knew to be a broken heart.
(There’s a mask of a paragraph, one that doesn’t touch the edge of the suffering. And there’s a word – alcoholic – that would be unprintable if Zena were alive, because of the pain-shame complex, a complex that left much understood but unspoken.)
So it’s 2008. I’ve bought my first house, with my New Yorker wife, in a city a long way from Kansas. We’ve got two young kids, in a season of life full of nap times and teething and beakers and car seats.
On the plus side, we’re now just a few minutes’ walk from Zena, and from her home that had long since lost its view of the sea. Less good – we’re 156 miles from my work, which is a three-hour walk-train-tube journey away, in the City of London.
“His comment was meant well; it sounded wise and right. And like a lot of career advice, it turned out to be totally wrong.”
Every Monday, I’d be up at 4.25am to reach a distant desk by 8.15am. Every Thursday, I’d return, catching the first super-off-peak train from Paddington, arriving home hours after the kids were asleep. Fridays, I had special dispensation to do something then-wacky, called working from home. I lasted 15 months. Yes, Nan, I know – it was much easier than dodging the Blitz, and I should be glad to have a good steady job, and to be home every weekend, and with enough left over after paying the mortgage. But I married for love, and I like the kids, and it’s too much apart.
My boss at the time was a chief investment officer, based in Zurich. Our conversation went something like this: “I can’t keep going like this.” “Well, Chris, we don’t want to lose you.” “OK, here’s my suggestion…”
And at the end of the meeting, he said: “I’m happy to support you. But before deciding, know this is absolutely the worst career decision you could ever make.” His comment was meant well; it sounded wise and right. And like a lot of career advice, it turned out to be totally wrong.
The arrangement we came to saw me cut my job in two. I recruited and trained someone for one part of the role. I kept the other part, working on a pay-as-you-go deal. This included a trade that turned out nicely for me: a Swiss-franc-linked income, on a Cardiff cost of living.
I set up an office in Zena’s box bedroom. We’d have lunch together daily, wonderfully content in each other’s company, chatting about life, and things she’d read that morning in the Daily Mail.
My own working time was also split roughly in two. Half was spent on work for my former employer. Liberated from organisational drag, I was free to focus on things I felt made the most difference. Having to submit an invoice every month, and account for my time, provided excellent discipline. My ratio of meetings to impact felt high, and being part-in, part-out of the company gave me a different perspective. With no long-term goals or forward ambition, my work – you could almost call it a career – ascended for the best part of a decade.
With the other half of my time, I was free to explore and experiment. The cost of living was taken care of. So where might things lead?
I like serendipity, autonomy and optionality. I don’t like being constrained. And so this set-up was near-perfect for me. I did some conventional consulting for a mix of clients. I joined a branding agency. And did some teaching. And launched a smartphone app – an app we thought was going to conquer the world, but didn’t even conquer a car park.
“THAT SEEMS LIKE AN AWFUL LOT OF MONEY.”
This being an investment publication, it is now time we come to Zena Newby and an illustration of a concept my friend and colleague Shaheen Zaman loves to talk about: skewness in stock returns. He has the data and charts; I’ll tell you a story.
From the early 1960s, Zena worked as a secretary for British Road Services, later renamed the National Freight Corporation. In 1982, the company was sold to its employees, becoming one of the first of the UK’s state-owned firms to be privatised. My Nan invested some of her savings. And then, for the next several years, she put 100% of her weekly wages into the employee share-ownership scheme.
The company was listed in London in 1989, changed its name again and later merged with a similar firm to become Exel Plc, a logistics business with operations in North and South America as well as the UK.
In 2005, Deutsche Post bought Exel for £3.6 billion, in a transaction that caused a head-scratching smile for a soon-to-be-great-grandmother.
Zena kept all her financial records in a battered suitcase in a cupboard under the stairs, half-hidden by coats. Inside the suitcase were batches of share certificates and paper statements – “it’s too soon to throw that one away” – all recorded in a maroon notebook. The notebook was as battered as the suitcase, with page after page of crossing-out and updating, all tracked in blue biro. Occasionally, she’d use a calculator, but her preference was to do long multiplication in the margins.
Through the 1980s, Zena, my grandad and tens of thousands like them had started buying shares as Britain privatised. Most of their investments began with a B – British Gas, Airways, Telecom, Petroleum – though I remember some Marks & Spencer and Tesco in the notebook as well. Over the years, their share prices went down as well as up; they paid dividends; and over the next few decades, as a group, they produced what Zena felt were decent investment returns.
But one investment eclipsed them all – Exel, née British Road Services. When the letter on the Deutsche Post takeover arrived, she couldn’t quite believe her own maths. Her shares, steadily accumulated 20 years earlier, were being purchased for a sum that seemed to have too many digits. “That seems like an awful lot of money.” The proceeds – to come from Deutsche Post in cash, shares and loan notes – totalled 70 times what she’d paid for her house in 1944, and at least four times what that same house was worth the month the letter arrived.
By temperament, Zena would have been a natural Ruffer client. She loved safety and resilience, disliked permanent losses and mainly wanted to sleep well at night.
In practice, her pattern of gains looked more like those of a venture capitalist or entrepreneur than a shorthand typist – just one investment accounted for the bulk of all her returns.
“LOOK WHO I’VE BROUGHT TO SEE YOU.”
In 2012, my wife was pregnant with our fourth child – a daughter, Cordelia, who’s now the middle child of seven. Professionally, I was living happily ever after. Still enjoying the autonomy and optionality and my lunchtimes with Zena – until her health took a turn for the worse. She went into hospital; pneumonia set in.
Cordelia was born on the first Sunday of that November. We sneaked her into Zena’s ward a few days later, and Zena died peacefully the following morning.
A few years later, Ruffer came knocking. I’d known the firm, liked what I’d seen and the people I’d met. After some good back and forth, I decided to join, mainly because I was curious.
In following that curiosity, I’ve ended up doing a job I enjoy. Doing a role Zena would mostly understand, and quietly be proud of. ⬤