Heartbreak of life without the kindesT woman in Britain
Together they fostered 90 children and used their shoe repair empire millions to help others. But two years after his wife’s death, and with a touching sorrow familiar to so many widowers, Sir John Timpson laments the ...
SIR John Timpson and his wife Alex had grand plans for the retirement chapter of their life story. They wanted to see the world, a deux, in blow‑the‑budget style.
‘We were going to do a big geriatric gap year,’ says Sir John, the 74‑year‑old chairman of the eponymous shoe repair and key‑cutting chain.
‘We were going to go to all the places our children had been on their gap years, but at a more leisurely pace, flying first class, staying in nice hotels.’
Who could blame them? Worth over £150 million, they certainly didn’t lack the funds.
The other luxury they had was freedom. Few couples could lay claim to the family commitments these two had had during their 48‑year marriage. At the time they were planning their grand tour, they had clocked up five children (two of them adopted), eight grandchildren and an astonishing 90 foster children.
Family holidays were chaotic, to say the least. Once, he admits, Social Services begged the couple to take in two children when they were flying to Portugal the next day. Most would have simply refused, these two — natural ‘fixers’, with a mission to give others a leg up in life — simply booked two more flights. ‘That was a nightmare with the travel company,’ he chuckles. ‘They did not understand.’
Little wonder Sir John was looking forward to some time alone with his wife. He and Alex made a start on their adventure, enjoying a no-expenses‑spared trip to the States. ‘Then Alex got ill,’ he says. ‘And that was it.’
After a 15‑month battle with cancer, Alex died in January 2016, at home, with her loved ones at her side. She was 69. They held the funeral service in a giant marquee in the garden, because no churches in the area could accommodate the crowds predicted.
Around 1,000 mourners came, blocking the roads for miles. In addition to their immediate family, the great and the good were there (one son, Edward, is the former Minister for Children), but so, too, were many children they had fostered, along with the social workers who had become friends.
‘It showed how many lives Alex had touched,’ says Sir John.
Now he reels off places they’ll never see together. ‘We wanted to go to South America. Back to Australia. So many places.’
And no, he won’t go on his own. ‘Where would the fun be in that?’ he says.
‘I have been on holiday since. Immediately after, I was convinced to go away on a trip we had already booked, taking some friends. I’ve been away with the family, too. But it’s not the same, is it?’
Holidays are one of the hardest things now, he concedes.
‘What you notice is all the other couples going for dinner, having each other to talk to, taking each other for granted. They have no idea how lucky they are.’
It is striking that he, perhaps the ultimate fixer of other people’s lives, who has accomplished so much professionally, financially, publicly, has no idea how to fix this one.
Two years on, his grief remains quietly expressed, but all‑encompassing and devastating. The pair had always slept in adjoining rooms (‘because I snore’), but three days after she died, Sir John moved into his wife’s bed. Now he always sleeps on her side. It only provides so much comfort, however.
He’s not entirely sure what stage he is at in the grieving process, or even what stage he should be at.
‘ The thing I have found most surprising,’ he admits, ‘is that it doesn’t get any easier. I thought after two years you’d get more used to it. You don’t.
‘I mean, I don’t think you realise, to start with, that she is never going to come back. But when you do, you think you are on your own now. You are left to make the decisions she made. I find that difficult.
‘I ask myself: “What would Alex do?” But the thing about Alex is that she always surprised me.’
What an extraordinary man Sir John Timpson is. In the business community he is an oddity, as lauded for his kindness and his decency as for his boardroom skills. Still a family business (it was Alex, he points out, who stopped him floating the company on the stock market), Timpson are not just cobblers, but cobblers with a social conscience.
There is a quaint feel to the company. Not for them modern hashtags or slogans. They specialise in services you cannot get online: shoe repair and key‑cutting. Their latest foray is into barbering services.
Their ethos is about giving everyone that leg‑up. They employ exoffenders. They offer free dry‑cleaning to the unemployed attending job interviews. They give ‘colleagues’ (never employees) autonomy.
Sir John calls the approach ‘upside down management’, although he confesses today that it could also be known as ‘common sense’, and the principles should be applied ‘ in places outside the business world, like in schools and even in the NHS’.
PUBLISHERSlove his advice, and he has written business titles and guides for adoptive and foster parents. I tell him his next book of advice should be how to cope when your spouse dies. He looks baffled.
‘Am I coping? Do you think I am coping?’ he asks. ‘I don’t think that’s a book I could write. I don’t know what you can say because everyone just has to get through it in whatever way they can.’
He may have been a world famous CEO, but it’s blindingly obvious that Alex was the CEO at home.
‘My biggest fear was “I can’t cope”, ’ he says of the day he realised she was not going to get better.
‘Before she was ill, Alex used to joke about what I’d do without her. I didn’t know how to run a house. Alex did everything — all the children and grandchildren — I only did 10 per cent of that. She’d sit in the same chair at the kitchen table, phone beside her and a big notepad and she’d rule the world from there.’
He only ‘got into the fostering and adoption’ because of Alex. She drove everything, including, he laughs, a series of quad bikes and a canary yellow Morgan sportscar.
She was his moral compass, his cheerleader and pivotal in the success of the business.
Their mansion near Tarporley in Cheshire with its swimming pool, games room and 16‑acre grounds might seem big for a widower but he is rarely alone.
HISlife these days is run by Rachel the gardener, Jackie who organises his house and Christine his PA. They provide ‘ hot meals with vegetables’. Left to his own devices, he says, ‘ the whole thing would collapse’.
‘When Alex was ill, I did go to the supermarket a little. I cooked for her, but she never felt like much, poor thing.’ Was she stoical about death? ‘She kept saying: “I’m fine. I’m fine.” She wasn’t.’
His children are constant visitors, with their broods. Shelving in one corridor contains nothing but swimsuits and goggles, neatly arranged.
His grandchildren ( nine now; another one arrived last year, a very bittersweet moment) ‘ ping in and out’. So, too, do the children who officially left his care years ago.
‘We had some live wires,’ is his way of describing the ones who had them tearing their hair out, stealing their cars. One — ‘ dear Ollie’ — drove them to distraction. ‘ He is 42 now. Doing very well.’
Another former foster child lives here on and off. ‘It’s her sort of base,’ says Sir John. ‘She moved here when she was 15 or 16. I never quite know whether she is coming or going.’
Another is staying, ‘ but she’s in London doing a secretarial course’.
The sense is that this is still a home for whoever needs one. How many millionaires have hearts as big as their wallets?
Every surface offers evidence of children treasured. He fetches a photo album the family had made for Alex’s funeral, a record of her life. He struggles with names, and misses Alex coming to his aid on that score: ‘Every child she ever met, she remembered the name. Even the children of her friends.’
In one photo Alex is surrounded by a tiny army.
‘That was in Romania,’ he says. ‘She wanted to adopt two more, but it was too bloody difficult.’
She sounds like a gem. She was, he says, the antithesis of the Cheshire housewife, eschewing not just designer handbags but any handbag (she kept her money in her bra, and her arms free to sweep up children). Yet she threw the best parties. ‘We had big marquee parties. I mean, not ridiculous. We never had Elton John performing, more The
Searchers — that was our era. We socialised a lot. But to be a lady who lunched, no. That wasn’t Alex’s thing.’
Her extravagances were ‘eccentric’, he says. ‘For our 25th wedding anniversary she booked [Sir Richard Branson’s] Necker Island. We went four times. There are cheaper ways to holiday.’
Then there were her racehorses. (When she died, she had 12. Sir John still visits them weekly. ‘They lose me a fortune,’ he jokes). And the time she convinced him to buy a pub to provide jobs for needy youngsters. ‘She didn’t do rules. She operated on instinct.’
Often her instincts were spot on. He doesn’t believe Timpson would have dared to take on ex-offenders without her.
‘My son James is in charge now and he is evangelical about it. Without his mother’s influence, I don’t think he would be. He came home having been impressed by one prisoner and offered him a job. Alex said: “Well, if you can do it with one, why not more?” ’
Sir John was more sceptical. ‘I’d just handed over to James. I thought: “Let him make his own mistakes.” But I was wrong. It was brilliant. We now employ 600 exoffenders, and they are amazing. Give people a second chance and they will seize it.’
Alex was three years younger than him so it never occurred to him that he would outlive her. ‘It is unfair,’ he agrees. ‘It’s unfair to me, the one who is left. But it’s also unfair to all the people that she would have gone on to help.’
She was diagnosed with bile duct cancer.
‘It was palliative care from day one, pretty much, although she did have chemo. Everyone tried,’ he says.
She was in a wheelchair towards the end. He smiles as he remembers trying to push it through mud at her beloved Cheltenham Races.
‘We did get the best person in the country looking after Alex. There was one possible treatment abroad that seemed to be an option, but in the end she wasn’t strong enough for it.’
The book is open at a picture of them on their wedding day. ‘Best decision I ever made,’ he says.
It saddens him she wasn’t there when he got his knighthood last year. ‘She never got to be Lady Alex. She’d have laughed at the idea of anyone calling me Sir John.’
And now, what? He has vowed to continue their work with children. He has set up a charity in her name that supports families involved with the care system, offering breaks at a Timpson holiday home. But his experience has convinced him problems need to be tackled ‘at source’. One of his passions is the message about the psychological theory of attachment disorder and its link to difficult behaviour in children. Understanding why disturbed children behave as they do was key to their success with foster children — and their own sanity.
‘It was Ollie who inspired it. We were at the end of our tether with him when we went to a one-day course and the penny dropped. We realised that we’d been seeing evidence of attachment issues in most of the children. They weren’t being naughty because they were bad. They didn’t need more discipline. They needed a hug.
‘They had missed that vital bonding with an adult.’ THE
pair changed the way they dealt with their young charges. ‘Alex was much better than I was. She would never get anywhere near losing her rag with these kids. She saw each one as a challenge but knew instinctively how to get their confidence. But once she knew about attachment disorder, it became so much easier. We started to see patterns.’
He’s convinced society gets it wrong and tours schools to advise staff on behavioural issues.
He takes me to the boathouse built in his wife’s memory. It had always been a part of their garden plans, but ‘we never got round to doing it’.
It is a perfect declaration of love, ‘very Alex’. Benches could seat dozens of children. Two boats bobbing in the water are named Charles and Camilla. The view over the lake beyond, and on to the gardens Alex loved, is breathtaking.
‘We threw a party when it was finished. We scattered some of her ashes on the water. We had a treasure hunt and everyone had to answer questions about Alex. I had them all guessing where she had her tattoo.’
Where? ‘She didn’t have one. She was always saying she was going to get one,’ he laughs, as he wipes his eyes. ‘But time ran out.’