Sir Ken leaves £235m fortune to his family
HE WAS the Yorkshire tycoon who built a supermarket empire from an egg and butter stall on Bradford market, becoming in the process one of the county’s wealthiest men.
Yesterday, with the publication of Sir Ken Morrison’s will, the extent of the fortune was revealed.
Sir Ken, who died in February at 85, left an estate of £235m. The settlement of his affairs left £233m.
His estate will go to his third wife, Lynne, and five children, including his adult son William and daughters Eleanor and Andrea.
But his real legacy is Britain’s fourth-biggest supermarket and the more than 500 stores bearing his name.
In the will, written two years ago, Sir Ken asks his trustees to hand personal items as gifts to people named by him in separate memos.
He was long known to be one of Yorkshire’s richest men, and his family fortune had been estimated at £1.6bn. He was knighted in the New Year’s Honours List in 2001 and lived in a magnificent French-style chateau in Mytonon-Swale, near Boroughbridge.
But he was famously careful with money. “It’s simple. If you don’t need it, don’t spend it,” he once said. “There’s nothing sophisticated about that, is there?”
In 2000, before his £3bn takeover of the rival Safeway chain, his family owned more than a third of Morrisons.
When he stepped down from his full-time role in 2008 he reportedly rearranged his £1bn stake, gifting millions of shares to family trusts. In recent years, the family sold shares worth more than £500m, and in 2015, the
rich list reported that falling stock market prices had reduced its stake to £283m.
The sixth child and only son of grocer William Morrison, Sir Ken worked with his father on the family stall in Bradford’s Rawson Market from the age of five. His job was to hold eggs against a flame to check for defects.
He left school at 18 and began to build up the business. When his father became ill, he returned from National Service in Germany to run it, rather than see it sold.
He was married and divorced as a young man and later married Edna, who died of cancer 24 years ago. The Ken and Edna Morrison Charitable Trust last year awarded grants of £144,000 to charities in West Yorkshire.
His widow, Lynne, is a former lawyer 30 years his junior who worked for his company’s legal advisers. The couple had two children together.
In his last decade, he took a back-seat role, farming cattle but never straying far from the company corridors when he felt Dalton Phillips, one of his successors, was taking his old firm in the wrong direction.
Three years ago, he told the group’s AGM in Bradford: “When I left work and started working as a hobby, I chose to raise cattle. I have something like 1,000 bullocks and, having listened to your presentation, Dalton, you’ve got a lot more bull **** than me.”
However he lived to see the group’s renaissance under the former Tesco boss, David Potts, who took over the reins in 2015. At the beginning of this year, Morrisons reported its best Christmas performance for seven years.
It was no coincidence that the Morrisons headquarters remained in Sir Ken’s home city. He seldom brooked criticism of Bradford, and 10 years ago opened a project to study why babies born in the city were so prone to illness. His efforts earned him an inaugural place in the Yorkshire Hall of Fame, alongside Fred Trueman, Dame Judi Dench, Sir Michael Parkinson, the fundraiser Jane Tomlinson and the anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce.