Michael Broadbent interviewed by Mark Bilbe, An Oral History of the Wine Trade, 2003-04, catalogue reference C1088/08. © British Library Board.

Transcript

If you can’t make up your mind about something, it’s amazing, you can’t even choose a tie, you know, you can’t make up your mind about anything, and I had a most dithery summer not knowing what to do.  And my mother came to the rescue, yet again, and spotted an advertisement in The Times from a man called T A Layton, Tommy Layton, who, as it happened, had written a few books on wine, so she said, why don’t you write to Mr Layton - he was advertising for a trainee.  So I wrote, and to my surprise, I was taken on, and I joined Tommy Layton at the beginning of September, 1952.  I was twenty-five, but he was only about forty-something and he seemed to be an old man to me, he terrified me.  But for the first time in my life I felt terribly relaxed, I really had a job to do and I was earning a tiny bit of money, but I felt, I got on a bus thinking, oh, how marvellous, I’m actually doing something positive.  It’s cheap labour, of course wine training is cheap labour, and I got paid £300 for my first year of labours.  And he was, more than eccentric, he was mad as a hatter, actually, but he was very, very good in many ways.  And he had a wine bar, one of the first wine bars in London, in Duke Street, Manchester Square.  And he had retail wine business, small one, and a cellar, and he had a wine restaurant.  So I looked after the cellar.  Mainly in my first year there I swept the cellar and drove the van, delivered the wine, took the orders, typed the orders.  He’d got a small office, he’d got a manager there, and a secretary.  Had a very strong-minded Irish cook, who took greatly to me because she made sure I was fed, so at least I had decent lunches.  [laughs]  I learnt later, because Tommy Layton produced a, wrote a book called Wine’s My Line, and one of the chapters was headed ‘Broadbent’.  And it was then reading that I discovered he only took me on because he liked my handwriting, because I had rather nice, neat architectural script, I always say, when I lecture – I do a lot of lecturing and things.  I’d never get taken on for my handwriting now.  But I learnt a terrific amount from him.  Oh, I remember one friend of the family in Wilmslow, and they were solicitors or something, in some professional business, quite well off, and the wife said to my mother, ‘Oh, Hilary, I’m so sad that your boy’s going into trade’.  

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Michael Broadbent (Mother came to the rescue - joining T.A. Layton)

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