To fans of West Ham United, David Gold and his business partner and co-owner of the club, David Sullivan, were known, indecorously, as “The Dildo Brothers”. The sobriquet was broadly affectionate and a reference to the two men having purchased the club on the back of a fortune made in the pornography industry. Fans of opposing teams tended to chant considerably more ribald names at them as they sat in the directors’ box.
If the combination of soft porn and football seemed like a fantasy out of the pages of Loaded magazine, there was something appealingly British about Gold and his partner owning a Premier League club in an era in which most of the teams West Ham played against were owned by Arab princes, Russian oligarchs or American investment bankers.
What’s more, both were genuine Eastenders, and as a boy Gold had grown up watching West Ham, which when he bought the club with Sullivan in 2010 was heavily mired in debt. To the consternation of some fans who never forgave them, they proceeded to sell the historic Boleyn Ground — which had been West Ham’s home for 112 years — to a property developer. The sale raised £38 million but instead of using the money to build a new stadium, they negotiated a sweet deal on Stratford’s Olympic Stadium, built for the 2012 Games, securing a 99-year lease at a knockdown rent of £2.5 million a year and just £15 milion towards the estimated £323 million cost of converting the stadium.
The results were financially spectacular, if not necessarily matched by similar success on the pitch. According to Deloitte, since 2016 West Ham has consistently ranked among the most valuable 20 clubs in world football and revenues in 2019 were in excess of £200 million. When asked if they would ever consider selling the club, Gold and Sullivan suggested the asking price would be in the region of £600 million, four times what Roman Abramovich paid for Chelsea in 2003 and three times what Sheikh Mansour paid for Manchester City in 2008.
The eldest of three children, David Gold was born in east London in 1936 and grew up at 442 Green Street, around the corner from the Boleyn Ground. His mother was Rose. His father, Godfrey, was a market trader and petty criminal known among east London’s underworld fraternity as “Goldie”. When David was seven his father was sent to prison for five years for his role as the getaway driver in the theft of a cargo of copper from a Thames barge.
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The family was plunged into poverty, and to make ends meet, his mother scrubbed the floors of a local café and took home bones to make soup. “In the winter, I slept in my clothes because we had nothing to pay for the heating and I don’t recall ever having meat for dinner,” Gold said.
At the age of eight he contracted dysentery and then tuberculosis. School was a struggle for the undiagnosed dyslexic. At one point he stopped attending entirely because he didn’t have a pair of shoes. When he failed his 11-plus examination, his teacher took pleasure in telling him, “Gold, you’re never going to make anything of yourself.” Not long after, he and one of his brothers were sexually abused by a step-uncle.
His only source of pleasure was football, mingling with the crowd at the Boleyn Ground on match days and, in the press of bodies, slyly clambering through the turnstiles without paying. At 13 he won a place in the West Ham boys’ team, making 50 appearances for them and graduating to the youth side, but at 16, when the club offered him a contract, his father refused to sign the forms and insisted that he become a bricklayer instead.
Though he dutifully completed his apprenticeship, Gold never forgave his father for denying him the chance to become a professional footballer. Their relationship went from bad to worse when his father turned his back on his family for a pregnant 16-year-old.
Bored with laying bricks for £3 a week, Gold borrowed £700 from a bank and with his brother Ralph took a lease on a kiosk at Charing Cross Station from where he sold science fiction books and magazines. When punters requested more racy material, he began selling such soft porn titles as Health & Efficiency and Spick & Span. From there he expanded to a chain of four shops and he became a publisher and distributor of “art” books, selling pornography to sex-starved 1950s Britain.
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Gold Sr was also a partner in his sons’ burgeoning publishing enterprise and, according to one version, after he tried to take control, the two sons terminated his involvement. “He was just a small-time crook, ready to cheat on anyone, including his own children. I haven’t spoken to him since that day,” Gold said.
His business was regularly raided by the police and in 1972 he stood trial at the Old Bailey on three occasions under the Obscene Publications Act. He was acquitted on each occasion. “We were given a hard time by everyone from Mr Plod to Customs and Excise,” he said. “But we were never uncomfortable about what we were doing. There was a huge public demand and we were filling it.”
In truth, Gold and his brother were always more interested in money than sex and, unlike some of their competitors, they did not take the opportunity to mix with the models who appeared in their magazines. Indeed, they led eminently respectable private lives — they neither smoked nor gambled and drank only rarely.
In 1972 Gold bought the Ann Summers sex shops from the receivers for little more than £20,000. At the time there were just two stores, in London and Bristol, and for a while the business made little headway until Gold’s daughter, Jacqueline, suggested that Ann Summers follow Tupperware’s example and sell its merchandise at hen parties.
He expanded the chain to more than 150 stores in the UK, putting Jacqueline in charge of making them female friendly. By 2003, Ann Summers was making a profit of £9 million on a turnover of £66 million. The Knickerbox lingerie chain was another Gold enterprise. He again put his daughter in charge. The business was losing £5 million a year when Gold bought it. It returned to profit in two years.
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By then he had entered a strategic alliance with his fellow pornographer David Sullivan. They split their publishing revenues, with the Gold Group assuming sole responsibility for distribution. In 1986 the two men launched the soft porn newspaper Sunday Sport. One of their first acts was to employ the out of work England 1966 World Cup-winning captain and former West Ham stalwart Bobby Moore as a columnist.
Gold launched his first bid to buy West Ham United in the early 1990s. When that failed, he joined up once again with Sullivan to acquire a stake in Birmingham City FC. With Gold as chairman, the club reversed a long period of decline while appointing Karren Brady — then a young executive at Sunday Sport — as the first female director of a top-flight British football club. The stadium was renovated and the team won promotion to the Premiership in 2002. The Blues then enjoyed four years in the top flight before being relegated in 2006. Gold sold his Birmingham City shares three years later and he and Sullivan finally bought West Ham, taking Brady with them as vice-chairman.
Unhappy with the commercial services he used to fly in and out of Birmingham airport, he launched an executive aircraft chartering business. Gold Air International was based at Biggin Hill in Kent. Its clients included David and Victoria Beckham, Rod Stewart, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas. He was also a licensed pilot and in 2002 crashed his private plane while trying to land at Birmingham FC’s training ground. Though he escaped with mere cuts and bruises, the Cessna 182 was a write-off.
His fortune was estimated by The Sunday Times Rich List in 2006 at £525 million. By 2020 his value had fallen to £460 million, with The Sunday Times suggesting that pre-Covid there had been signs that the bottom had fallen out of the market for Ann Summers’ libido-enhancing accessories. However, lockdown had “eased performance anxiety” and the Rich List compilers reported that sales of the chain’s sex toys were up 27 per cent year-on-year, with the bestseller being a vibrator called the Whisper Rabbit.
He married Beryl Hunt when he was 21. After divorcing in 1972 he never remarried but is survived by his fiancée, Lesley Manning, and his two daughters, Jacqueline and Vanessa, who both work for the family business.
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He made his home in a Victorian mansion near Caterham, Surrey, surrounded by 55 acres containing a floodlit tennis court, a golf course and plenty of space to park his helicopter and private plane. He named the property the Chalet. Through it all he never escaped the shadow cast by his early years. “No matter how much money you have, you never feel you have enough, because there is always the fear that something will go wrong and it will be taken away.”
David Gold, businessman, was born on September 9, 1936. He died after a short illness on January 4, 2023, aged 86