Virgin King (Text Only). Tim Jackson

Melody Maker, and was enthused. He knew nothing whatever about business, but Simon Draper had pronounced tastes in music. Working with his young English cousin, he decided, might not be so bad after all.

      Encouraged to confide in Draper by the family connection, Branson revealed to him over lunch that the Virgin empire was soon to become a great deal larger. A postal strike was threatened, which would if it took place immediately starve Branson of his mail-order financial lifeline. So Virgin would open a record shop as a substitute. But that was by no means the only plan up Branson’s sleeve. He had already planned a fully fledged music empire, encompassing not only retailing but also an artistic agency, a chain of recording studios, a management company, a music publishing business – and a record label, for which a logo had already been designed. ‘You can start my label,’ said Branson.

      Draper was at first tempted to be dismissive. The empire by the end of January 1971 would consist of a small and rather shabby shop in an upstairs room in Oxford Street, and a mail-order firm that was doing no business. His cousin’s ambitions seemed a little fanciful, to say the least. But Draper’s interest was tickled; he liked the look of the group of new friends whom he would meet if he came to South Wharf Road; and he loved the idea of turning the music that was his life’s great enthusiasm into a way of making a living. He agreed to start the following day, but refused to commit himself on how long he would stay. It would never have crossed Simon Draper’s mind that he would work for Richard Branson for more than twenty years.

      Caroline Gold had required some persuading to work as Richard Branson’s secretary. At twenty-one, she was a year older than him when she answered the ad in the Evening Standard. She had been to art school, and was married; and she had not been at all sure after her interview with this ‘gauche, studenty type’ that this was the right job. The crypt in which Branson had his desk was dark and damp; and the salary, at £12 a week, was significantly less than the £20 that her talents might have commanded elsewhere. But she had accepted the offer – intending, with the blithe confidence of someone brought up in an era free of mass unemployment, to find something else if this job did not work out. But Branson’s mixture of simplicity and guile had charmed her, and the typing he had asked her to do on her first day at work was more interesting than she had expected. Instead of a stack of commercial correspondence about widgets and settlement dates, he dictated to her a string of letters to famous contributors to Student, thanking them for the articles they had sent in and apologizing for having been unable to use them. To her relief, she discovered that his dictation was so hesitant that she had no difficulty keeping up with shorthand. Then he took her across to the Albion Street house to meet the others. It was only when she knew and liked Richard Branson better, that Caroline Gold got around to wondering whether he had saved up some exciting letters just to impress her.

      Branson surprised her with his ability to get things done. One example was the installation of new telephone lines when they were needed. In those days, ordering a new telephone was a major project that required correspondence with the General Post Office, and usually a delay of several months. But Richard Branson had found a shortcut. He had befriended a local telephone engineer, who made himself available around the clock to serve the needs of the growing business. Whether Branson paid anything for this service or not, Caroline Gold never discovered; but the middle-aged engineer once boasted to her that he was allowed to use Branson’s houseboat on the canal at Little Venice for secret assignations with the women with whom he had affairs. He once approached her with the news that Branson had been forced to turn him down because of a prior engagement, and asked whether he might borrow the next-door boat where Caroline lived with her husband Rob. The answer was a polite no.

      Branson had an uncanny knack for negotiation. On one occasion, a man telephoned to offer the nascent mail-order firm a load of bootlegged, or illegally copied, Jimi Hendrix records. The caller was told to come around to the Virgin offices in South Wharf Road, where Mr Zimmerman would discuss the transaction with him. At ten o’clock the following morning a shifty-looking character appeared, and duly asked for Mr Zimmerman. Branson explained that Mr Zimmerman was just around the corner, and would arrive in a minute. An hour later, Branson explained to the waiting caller that Mr Zimmerman was around the corner at the Riviera Café, and suggested that he should go and meet him there. When the angry bootlegger returned at twelve, complaining that there had been no Mr Zimmerman at the Riviera even though he had waited at least half an hour, Branson looked at him innocently.

      ‘What did you want to see Mr Zimmerman about?’

      The man opened the boot of his car, and replied that he was going to sell him some records.

      Branson looked inside doubtfully. ‘How much did you agree to sell them for?’

      The man replied that he wanted £1 each for them.

      ‘I’ll give you 50p apiece,’ said Branson. Within half an hour, the records had been stacked on the shelves inside South Wharf Road; within another few days, they had been sold by mail-order at £3 apiece to fans of Jimi Hendrix.

      It was the purchase of the Manor, however, which made Caroline Gold and her husband realize that Branson was an entrepreneur whose powers of persuasion had to be taken seriously. He may have been only twenty-one at the time; he may have climbed over the wall of Shipton Manor with Tom Newman; but he was now beyond doubt the owner of a charming country house, complete with its own croquet lawn and swimming-pool. Including its attached cottages, the Manor had cost Branson £30,000. Some of that sum had been lent to the young entrepreneur by an aunt. The rest, however, came from Coutts Bank. Dressed in the pinstripe suit that Caroline Gold had taken him to buy, and in the black shoes with which she had advised him to replace his brown ones, Richard Branson had been given a mortgage of £22,500.

      Soon after the purchase was complete, the sound of footsteps alerted Caroline and Rob Gold to the fact that they had a late-night visitor to their boat. It was Richard Branson, pale, shaken and extremely distressed, and he was in an appalling state. At first, he could say nothing but ‘Oh no, oh no.’ Only gradually did his story come out.

      Rob Gold’s younger sister was married at the time to a man called Andy, who owned a Transit van. Branson had received an order to send some records to Belgium, and had asked Andy to deliver his consignment in his van. Somehow, in the course of the deliveries, the two men had discovered a loophole in the customs procedures at Dover. When you passed the customs post, your papers would be stamped so that you would be able to prove that the records had been exported and thus reclaim the purchase tax you had already paid on them. But there seemed to be no proper arrangements for checking the records, or for making sure that they really had been exported.

      Here, surely, was an opportunity for a young businessman. Instead of exporting the records that your documents showed you were carrying, why couldn’t you fill in the paperwork and reclaim the tax as normal, but sell the ‘exported’ records in London and instead take to Belgium some old deleted records, picked up for a song from a company that was about to throw them away anyway? Come to think of it why bother to go to Belgium? The system at Dover seemed to be based entirely on trust; nobody was there to see if you simply drove around the docks and then came back to London without even getting on to the boat. Better still, there was no need even to go to the trouble of buying the old records; to a dozy Dover customs officer, a vanful of record sleeves with nothing in them would do just as well.

      As Branson made trip after trip, revelling in the ease with which he was increasing the profits of his mail-order business, he never stopped to consider that the customs men might be less dim-witted than they seemed. But they were. The Transit van had been tailed; and the records he had been selling in London instead of exporting had been marked with an ‘E’ in fluorescent ink. An anonymous tip-off gave Branson a few hours in which to try to hide the evidence. But he was arrested at his houseboat, taken to Dover, and charged with producing fraudulent paperwork under the Customs & Excise Act 1952. The following morning, after a night in the cells, he was committed for trial. His mother, to whom the tearful Branson had relayed the news over the telephone the previous evening, came up by the morning train and offered the family house as surety for his £30,000 bail.

      To his enormous relief, Branson discovered over the course of the coming three months that dealing with Her Majesty’s Customs