Member in Profile...

Mr Colin Towell is a long standing member of the club and always has something of interest to pass on.

 

I left the Dixie Grammar School at Market Bosworth with six fairly standard O levels, I also took and passed a GCSE in social and economic history as a mature night school student.

My first job in 1961 at 16 years of age was as an accounts clerk and cashier at the former Leicester Temperance Building Society, now Santander. I worked at the head office in Charles Street but also quite often at the Wigston Office.

In 1965 I moved to Chemstrand, part of Monsanto. I was a purchase ledger clerk and each month we worked late into the evening to finish the monthly accounts (part computerised) which were then taken by train to London, sometimes I had this pleasure. The office closed when the accounts department was transferred to London. I needed a job as I had just taken on my first mortgage and so spent a short time at Wolsey in the sales ledger office, this was very boring and they still used Burroughs accounting machines.

In 1967, I moved to BXL Cascelloid (now demolished) in the cost accounting office, standard costing and punched cards. The factory made fairy liquid bottles and the like. Here I got my first experience of the payroll, doing time sheets and counting the cash for pay packets and taking the punched cards to a computer centre in Nottingham for the cards to be processed. The first calculators came in at this time.

Then in 1971 I moved to Drury and Co at the Grange in Wigston (within walking distance of home) working in the cost office on housing contracts for local councils. Very interesting but no computers or calculators at first. But frequent visits to the Huddersfield office sometimes driving the boss’s 4.2 Daimler automatic! The firm, now named Quinroy, folded.

In 1980 I started at de Montfort Housing Society Ltd as Finance Manager. We were just finishing 150 flats in Elizabeth House near the train station and were about to start on the much bigger 15 storey block opposite the LRI. I left in 1995 and moved to Foundation Housing Association Ltd as Director. Foundation was a smaller not for profit association housing people from the African Caribbean community.

In 2005 the Foundation was merged with the much larger East Midlands Housing Association and I was again out of a job at aged 61. However, I found a very satisfying one day a week role as Accountant at Launde Abbey, near Oakham. Over time I increased my days to four per week carrying out all the finance jobs from petty cash to final accounts and payroll as well as numerous admin roles. During my nine years there we had two major renovations costing several million pounds and raising a million of this by an appeal for donors.

All in all a very satisfying career.