He has a point. In terms of property, he now owns more than he had before the move, swapping a family house in the posh Hertfordshire village of Sawbridgeworth — home to the Beckhams — for a shop and a large house with a cottage stuck on the back, in the tiny town of Clare in Suffolk. As far as the job is concerned, as proud proprietor of Hudgies Hardware, “Ironmonger, Oil and Colourman” (established 1835), the Bank of Tokyo’s former head of corporate banking is working as hard as ever, just in a lower gear.
“I had been doing the usual commuter nonsense for 30 years,” says Sleath. “I left at seven every morning, hoped the train would come, hoped to get a seat. Then I’d spend the day having arguments with people in the office, and later trundle back in the opposite direction. Often I wouldn’t be home until 10pm. That daily commute can grind you down.”
Sleath’s journey from breakfast table to work is now an amble along a creaking corridor and through a door. He relishes his role as purveyor of undercoat, screws and broom handles to the good folk of Clare, and looks positively Dickensian in his brown overall, beaming behind an old wooden counter covered in all manner of useful items, from matches and white cotton, to wind-up bulb-free torches.
It was not, however, a planned career move, and neither has he done it alone. Sleath, who is 55 and grew up in Belfast, lives with his wife, Jenny, 50, and their son, Andrew, 20 — two older daughters had already left home when they bought the shop, just one of the many factors that made it all possible. The prime motivator, though, was being hit four years ago by the third of three redundancies.
“I kicked off my career in the City at the Bank of England,” he says. “That’s where I met Jenny. We both worked in the foreign-exchange control team.”
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That department came to a sudden end after the discovery of North Sea oil, when Britain no longer had to worry about its balance of payments. He was 29. Jenny stopped working to start a family and Sleath got a job with the Bank of Tokyo.
In 1999 he was made redundant. “We had three children at school, one about to go to university, and a mortgage,” he says. “I joined a nice little Belgian bank, where all was hunky-dory until there was a change of strategy ” Once again, in spring 2002, Sleath was jobless. “It was a tremendous shock,” he says.
This time he had had enough. “I no longer wanted to be part of that sordid business, an industry driven by fear and greed,” he says. “I was 51, two kids were through university and Andrew was about to start sixth-form college. I felt young enough to tackle something else with gusto.”
Everything seemed to fall into place. “The plan was to sell Sawbridgeworth, which was costing us money, and buy something that would earn money instead.”
They saw the shop advertised for sale in a newspaper and knew at once that it was ideal: Clare is pretty without being chocolate-box; a charming hybrid of the Midsomer villages and Miss Marple’s St Mary Mead, only without the murders.
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David knew the town through his interest in antiques, and the original plan was to open an antiques shop. Only slowly did he realise that it made more sense to leave it as a hardware store: “You are selling items people need — kettle descalers and garden forks — rather than competing for their discretionary expenditure, trying to flog them another mantle clock.”
The Sleaths sold their Grade II-listed, four-bedroom house, with big garden, conservatory and double garage, for £490,000, and bought the house, shop and cottage for £442,500.
The house, which rambles a bit, has three reception rooms, one with a grandstand view of the high street, and four bedrooms. Andrew gets the biggest and best, with a gallery, so there’s room for his drum kit; Sleath and Jenny sleep in what was once the apprentices’ dormitory.
When the shop first opened as an ironmonger’s, it sold things made by young trainees in the foundry at the back. That foundry is now a separate two-bed cottage; renting it out covers the Sleaths’ living expenses.
Jenny hasn’t the same passion for the shop that her husband has, but she enjoys sourcing the goods they sell, from bird feed and ladybird-breeding kits to shoe polish and a device that lifts single strands of spaghetti from boiling water for testing purposes.
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Turnover has been growing by more than 15% a year, and Sleath says he now earns more than he did in the City, if you include the cottage rent and a small Bank of Tokyo pension.
The secret, he says, is to have a well-stocked shop, “selling the right things at the right prices”. He admits he plays the part of the traditional shopkeeper, weighing things out when he could perhaps sell them in packets, but his business methods are absolutely professional.
He’s a natural. “I was always commercially minded,” he says. “Even as a kid I was trading things in the playground.” What he didn’t realise was that it was in his blood. “When I left the bank, I didn’t want to tell my mother because she was only going to worry.”
Eventually, when the shop was up and running, he called her. “That’s great,” she said. “Your grandfather used to run a hardware business in Kampala.” No wonder Sleath doesn’t like the word “downsizing”: this is a man doing what he was born to do.
Hudgies Hardware, 01787 278 045
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Life change
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