Olden Life: What was Cyrilawn?
Google ‘artificial turf’ and you will find scores of companies offering a range of products that look like grass but are usually made of polyethylene. They wear well and fulfil their purpose admirably – quite unlike one of the first of them that came to market.
Cyrilawn, launched to a tremendous fanfare in April 1967, proved an abject failure that set its creator on the slippery slope to bankruptcy.
Cyril Lord was an ebullient Mancunian, born in 1911 to a family involved in the then booming textile industry. As Lancashire cotton declined, he diversified into mass-produced tufted carpets, made at a factory in Northern Ireland that, when it opened in 1957, was the largest of its kind in Europe. He invested heavily in television advertising. In those early days of commercial TV, the ads were very different from today’s sophisticated mini-movies. They simply heaped praise on the product and then launched into a catchy jingle. If you mention Cyril Lord to oldies, they will more than likely burst into song: ‘ This is luxury you can afford By Cyril Lord.’ The ‘…ord’ in ‘afford’ was elongated and sung at a higher pitch than the rest of the ditty.
Lord used direct marketing as a means of distributing his product, hiring agents,
usually women (similar to the ‘Avon Ladies’), to sell to their family, friends and neighbours. One of my cousins was a Cyril Lord agent and sold me a large expanse of bedroom carpet when my wife and I moved into our present house 52 years ago.
For a while, the brand was immensely successful, but Lord was restless and ambitious and sought to expand into pastures new. In 1966, he travelled to Texas to look at the revolutionary artificial grass – later known as Astroturf – newly installed at the Houston Astrodome, an indoor basketball arena. On his return, he set about producing a British version and named it – characteristically – after himself.
In April 1967, he hired the ballroom of the London Hilton and covered the floor, end to end, with Cyrilawn, converting it into an indoor tennis court. Four hundred guests were invited to the launch event, the Cyril Lord Tennis Ball, featuring exhibition matches between celebrities from the worlds of politics, sport and showbusiness. Among them was Dan Maskell, the veteran tennis pro and popular Wimbledon commentator.
When some of Maskell’s memorabilia were sold in 2007, fifteen years after his death, they included a silver dish inscribed ‘First to play on Cyrilawn, Thursday 20th April 1967.’
First – and, as it would soon transpire – one of the last. After the ball, Lord presented the artificial court to the prestigious Queen’s Club, which laid it outdoors. Within weeks, the bright green tufts had turned blue, and the surface became slimy and hazardous. The material had not been adequately tested before manufacture: the entire production run of 100,000 square feet had to be written off.
He and his company never recovered from the setback, coinciding as it did with other failed enterprises fuelled by his overweening egotism and unquenchable ambition. The following year, his health failing, he was forced to step down and the company collapsed a few months later.
Lord retired to Barbados, where he died in obscurity in 1984.