MEL STRIDE, 57: SMOOTHIE-DRINKING CITIZEN KANE FAN
Family: Married, three daughters – ten, 12 and ‘early 20s’. ‘They’re great fun. I’ve really enjoyed having girls.’
Typical day: ‘I start work the minute I wake up – between 5 and 6am. But I work from my bed so I tend to spend the first hour reading the papers – which you can get on your telephone, (I don’t have someone coming in saying “Your morning papers, Sir”), and answering emails.’
Breakfast: ‘Sometimes I have a sort of smoothie thing that my wife makes me. You can normally tell
what’s in it by the colour – if its orange it’s got a lot of carrot in it. If it’s green, it’s broccoli and kale. At other times I have a cooked breakfast.’
Favourite book: Catcher In The Rye. ‘I’m a sucker for American authors. I used to read everything going.’ Film: Citizen Kane.
Career: Worked at Morgan Grenfell in the City for two years then set up his own exhibitions business.
Big break: ‘I had an idea which was to promote industry to bright young people at universities. So I just took a day off work one day and I phoned up the chairmen of the top 50 industrial companies in the UK – this was in the mid-80s, about 1986. It happened that Shell was at the very top and the chairman of Shell actually phoned me back. He sent a car round to pick me up from work and we went to the Athenaeum Club and went through everything and he said, “I’ll support you.”
‘Through him I met the chairmen of IBM, Marks & Spencer and all the rest of them. I stopped my job with the bank and spent the next eight or nine months creating this exhibition which was a showcase to demonstrate that industry wasn’t all about doing manufacturing and nuts and bolts and going down coal mines and things like that. It’s about cutting-edge stuff.’