Champion soap seller charmed Miss World
MY DAD didn’t talk about his job much, but one day when I was 12 or 13 he came home and said, quite matter-of-factly: ‘I was out with Miss World today. She’s a nice girl.’
Dad worked for Lever Brothers, the famous ‘Sunlight’ soap manufacturers who sponsored Miss World at the time, and he’d been charged with taking her on a promotional tour around all the department stores in Leeds and Manchester. You can imagine how impressed I was.
Dad was a legend among soap salesmen, and rose to become Lever Brothers’ national sales manager. He was quite modest about it, but once he told us how much soap he’d sold that day: ‘Loaded on to lorries, it would stretch into town,’ he said. He was talking miles! Dad was born in Buckley in North Wales in 1930 and his father worked in the Birkenhead shipyards. When, on his deathbed, he apologised to Dad for his ‘poor’ childhood, Dad objected — to him, there’d been nothing poor about it.
His mother kept a box of ‘treasures’ recording his successes, so all the evidence is there; head boy, distinctions in all his exams, and Grade 8 on the piano.
There is a glowing reference from his headmaster when he left school, and cuttings from the Liverpool Echo detailing his days playing for Tranmere Rovers. Dad went on to do his national service as a PT instructor with the RAF, and would hitch lifts in the back of Lancaster bombers to get home on leave.
Dad was multi-talented: we always joked that he could control a football as well as Wayne Rooney, play the piano like Liberace, and sold more soap in a lifetime than any man living or dead.
He was also skilled with his hands, creating magical presents for us — a garage for me, a dolls’ house for my three sisters.
Even so, I’m not sure we appreciated his talents as we grew up. He used to come in and switch off the TV and start banging away on the piano. We just thought everyone played as well as that.
Later in life, when he’d made a bob or two, he bought himself a Steinway Grand.
There was a fair bit of musical talent in the extended family. One of the photographs in the family album is of me at my Auntie Marjorie’s wedding, standing in front of a man who was introduced to me as ‘your Uncle John’. I was told that ‘he’s in a group and they made a record’.
We laugh about it now, because that was John Lennon. His first wife Cynthia was Auntie Marjorie’s sister-in-law.
My mother Gwyneth idolised my Dad. ‘He’s been a good provider and he’s always been faithful,’ she’d say, forgiving even the time he returned from a sales trip, gave her a box of Black Magic, then disappeared for a game of snooker with his mate George.
Dad always insisted all four of his children were ‘mistakes . . . but the best mistakes he’d ever made’.
He gave us the greatest start in life — not by handing out money, but through his support and encouragement. Dad was always dressed immaculately. I never heard him swear, never saw him the worse for drink. He was a true gentleman and a one-off.
Earl Griffith, born June 30, 1930, died July 7, 2016, aged 86.