My father, Horace Lord, who has died aged 92, transformed his family’s ironmongering firm into a nationally renowned business during the second half of the 20th century.
Horace entered the family firm of the High Wycombe-based ironmongers, Isaac Lord, in the early 1940s, when the furniture industry was a hive of activity in Buckinghamshire. The business, which had been set up by his grandparents, Isaac and Elizabeth Lord, in 1892, supplied parts to the local furniture factories and tools to the workers. But when Horace eventually took charge he expanded its operations, forging strong links with European manufacturers and bringing in new ideas from the US. His son Alan and grandson Matthew then built the firm into one that gained national awards as a tool dealer, despite fierce competition from DIY warehouses and online traders.
Horace was born in High Wycombe to George and Alice, and attended the town’s Royal Grammar school before going on to Bishop’s Stortford college in Essex. After having joined the family firm, he spent the rest of the second world war as a draughtsman at the Vickers-Armstrongs armaments factory in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he was also in the Home Guard and where he met his future wife – and my mother – Betty Dodds, a seamstress and nurse, at the Methodist church in Benwell. After the war he returned to Isaac Lord and took the business from strength to strength.
On Sundays Horace was a Methodist preacher, walking and cycling to local churches, sometimes with his violin, to serve small congregations in the High Wycombe area. When he retired to Swanage in Dorset, he was a vital member of Swanage Methodist church. He supported numerous charities and in his 80s ferried “older people” to the local hospice. In the Methodist tradition, he had a streak of radicalism based on a strong sense of social justice.
Horace was very much a family man, and was a loving husband to Betty until her sudden death in 1991. He then found happiness again with Joy (nee Ivens), whom he married in 1999. His many young relatives loved to visit him by the sea, enjoying not only his company, smile and quiet nature, but games of cricket in the back garden at “Lord’s”.
Aside from myself and Alan, Horace is survived by his two other children, Robert and Marion, by Joy, eight grandchildren, and 13 great-grandchildren.
