Hilary Devey
Award-winning haulage entrepreneur who became the shoulder-padded star of Dragons’ Den
HILARY DEVEY, who has died aged 65, made millions from a palletised freight distribution business called Pall–ex and later established a cult following as one of the expert panellists on the BBC’S entrepreneur show Dragons’ Den.
She joined fellow panellists Deborah Meaden, Theo Paphitis, Peter Jones and Duncan Bannatyne in July 2011, replacing the venture capitalist James Caan, and established herself as the star of the show. With her Cruella de Vil hauteur, arched eyebrows and huge 1980s-vintage shoulder pads (as if “Blanche from Coronation Street [had] run amok in Dynasty’s Alexis Carrington’s wardrobe”, wrote the Telegraph’s Sam Richards) she passed judgment on the variously hapless and visionary with a twinkly sense of mischief – and the down-to-earth commonsense of a northern lass who had come up the hard way.
She was born Hilary Lorraine Brewster on March 10 1957 and grew up in Bolton, historically in Lancashire, where her father ran a heating company which went bust when she was seven years old: “One of my first recollections was having the bailiffs come in and collect all my mother’s furniture – the seats, the sofas, the cooker, the beds – and her just sliding down the wall in floods of tears.”
For the next few years the family moved as her father made ends meet by running pubs. Though her schooling was disrupted Hilary soon learnt the basics of business management – and the value of hard work: “By the age of 11, I could run a bar, close it up, cash it up, stock it up, and reorder new stock. I could take down a letter in shorthand at 110 words a minute.”
But life was tough. In her 2012 autobiography, Bold as Brass, she recalled how, when the family was living in Accrington, she had been kidnapped, aged 12, by a sexual predator: “He kept me there with him all night – the b----- who thought that raping a child was his due at the end of the night. He did it again and again.”
She left school aged 16 and spent a short time in the WRAF, at RAF Brize Norton. When she was 18 her father died of stomach cancer; subsequently she discovered that he had been supporting a secret second family.
In 1976 she married Malcolm Sharples, her childhood sweetheart, but they divorced after two years and she got a job working as a European sales rep for the publishers Leisure Circle.
Returning to the UK, she worked for a clothing company in London’s East End, then at TNT, the logistics company, and fell in love with a Turkish businessman. They moved in together and had a son, but he was violent towards her, and when her child was 18 months old she discovered that, like her father, her lover was already married with a family.
Devastated, she asked TNT to move her away from London and she and her infant son relocated to Leicester, her mother moving close by to help out: “I didn’t want my son to go without so I pushed myself hard to build a life for us. Fortunately, I was always good with numbers and I loved the cut and thrust of business.”
She worked her way up in the logistics industry and in the mid-1990s spotted a gap in the market in international palletised freight distribution. In 1996 she established Pall-ex, raising the initial £112,000 capital by selling her house and car and moving into rented property.
Within two years she had made her first million, but it was hard work: “I drove around at night in my pyjamas to make it happen. I met a lot of misogynists along the way, asking questions like, ‘Can you drive a truck, love?’ I’d say, ‘No, but I can run a business.’” Running a country, she felt, would have been easier.
Appearances on Channel 5’s The Business Inspector and Channel 4’s The Secret Millionaire followed, and in 2007 she was named Ernst & Young UK’S Entrepreneur of the Year. By 2013
Pall-ex had a turnover of almost £100 million, making her one of Britain’s richest women.
Though she claimed to live a frugal life, she bought a large Georgian country house in Staffordshire and had homes in London, Florida, Spain and Marrakesh. She doted on her dogs: “They are very pampered pooches,” she confessed in 2015. “They have aromatherapy massages, spa days and their own little wardrobe. I’ve got two teacup yorkies in the UK, and another teacup yorkie and a cocker spaniel in Marrakesh.”
She paid a high price for her success, however. In 2011 she was quoted as saying that she feared her career had been the catalyst for her son to become addicted to heroin, which he gave up in 2006. After setting up Pall-ex, a brief marriage to Ed Devey “lasted only months but cost me a lot of money”. In 2011, when she joined Dragons’ Den, she was reported to be happily remarried to Philip Childs, a property developer she had met in Spain. Two years later it was all over. Asked in 2015 what was the worst mistake she had ever made, she replied “getting married”: “I spent £14,000 on my wedding dress... That sticks in my throat.”
A one-time chain smoker, in 2009 she had a stroke that left her with a paralysed arm. She gave generously to charity, especially to the Stroke Association, of which she became patron, and she was vice president of Carers’ Trust.
After two series of Dragons’ Den, she moved over to Channel 4 to appear on The Intern, in which she attempted to get deserving young hopefuls a chance to land their dream jobs. It was not a success and in 2015 she was given another show, Running The Shop, in which she was seen persuading company bosses to hand over to the staff for a few weeks.
In 2019 she sold Pall-ex to focus on her charity work.
Hilary Devey was appointed CBE in 2013.
She is survived by her son.
Hilary Devey, born March 10 1957, died June 11 2022