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John Sands, northern pub entrepreneur

‘Mister Pubmaster’ transformed an ailing British company into one of the largest in the country

Olivier Holmey
Monday 18 September 2017 19:09 BST
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Sometime around 1991, a worried seafood supplier from East Anglia rushed into his local pub to ask for his prawns back. The establishment belonged to Brent Walker Inns, a large pub-owning company prone to false accounting and undergoing serious financial difficulties due to its £1.2bn pile of debt. The supplier was concerned that Brent Walker would go bust – as indeed it soon did.

At that point John Sands, who has died aged 69, had just been made managing director of the company, in charge of handling the mess. “Running a business without any money is a great learning experience,” he later said, with typical stoicism, of that time in his career. “Every Friday I’d sit down with the treasurer and decide which suppliers would get paid that week.”

Eventually, the creditors took ownership of the business and relaunched it as Pubmaster – again with Sands at the helm – and it was he who drove the firm’s recovery and expansion, making it one of the largest operators of public houses – or “pubcos” – in Britain. Run from Sands’ native northeast, in Hartlepool, Pubmaster demonstrated that the country’s big businesses need not be headquartered in London in order to thrive.

The son of a clerk at the ministry of pensions, Sands was born in Newcastle in 1947 and went to school in Whitley Bay, a nearby seaside town. In his spare time he played bass guitar in rock band, The Spirits, which seemed aptly named in retrospect. He met Susan McCulloch, his future wife and a fan of the band, through their gigs, and went on to study at Rutherford College of Technology (now Northumbria University). “I was caught up in Harold Wilson’s ‘white hot’ technology,” he would say, jokingly, remembering that Prime Minister’s call to science.

Leaving university, Sands soon realised that the only expertise he had acquired, in the polymer melamine, left him with few job prospects. He first worked at tyre-maker Dunlop, then was headhunted by the Barclay Brothers in 1980 to join Camerons Brewery, their pub and brewing business, in a training and development role. That gave Sands his start in the world of pubs.

He rose through the ranks, even as the company was sold on to Brent Walker, and by 1989 became managing director of what was now called Brent Walker Inns. Experiencing the turmoil of running an ailing business, Sands came into his own as a manager.

Once Brent Walker had gone under, he moved from crisis management to more ambitious goals. He set out to expand the business he was placed in charge of, adding hundreds of pubs to the roster he had inherited and making Pubmaster the biggest private-tenanted pub company in the country. Focused on food and character, he would often say: “We sell ambience, not beer.” Under his leadership, Pubmaster managed its pubs at arm’s length, letting them retain their distinct traits rather than having them adopt a homogenous brand identity.

Not everyone wanted to be under Sands’ authority, however. In 2001, when Pubmaster launched a relatively cheap bid to take over Wolverhampton & Dudley Breweries, an engineering foreman for W&D said of Sands: “If he came in now, I’d tell him to get on with running his own pubs and keep his hands off our company.” Another employee, Tom Collins, said: “I’m not a lover of John Sands.” Worried about employment prospects if Sands’s bid were successful, Collins added: “If Pubmaster succeeds, it would bugger up the rest of my life.”

Sands was not averse to shedding staff, once telling a journalist: “I can fire people, I have no problem with that.” Still, he was viewed by many who worked with him as a congenial boss who knew how to stay calm in the face of pressure.

Phil Mellows, a journalist who has written about pubs for more than three decades, told The Independent that Sands was approachable, good humoured and straightforward. Mellows, who first met Sands at the launch of Pubmaster in 1991, and last interviewed him in 2014, added: “He was a genuine pub man. You could imagine him having a pint with the regulars at one of his pubs, and you can’t say that about the boss of every large pubco.”

A rotund man who smoked and drank heavily and had a lifelong passion for Newcastle United – a relationship that he described as “Jekyll and Hyde” in nature – Sands would look at ease nursing a pint of real ale and munching his way through a steak and ale pie in one of his many pubs. But he was also a wealthy man, who enjoyed fine claret, owned a house in southern France and whose idea of the perfect holiday was sailing round the Mediterranean on one of his power boats. He did not quite come from the bottom, either. In his first job, as a bingo caller on the Whitley Bay seafront, locals failed to understand what he was saying because his accent was “too posh”.

In 2003, the rival pubco Punch acquired Pubmaster for £1.2 billion – exactly the amount of debt that Brent Walker had accumulated 12 years previously. It was said that Sands had embarked on an acquisition drive to fatten up Pubmaster, with an eye to selling it. And indeed, while only a small shareholder in the company, he made more than £5 million from the sale. However, he was not the only one to benefit from the deal: more than half of Pubmaster’s staff also pocketed payouts.

After a brief break, Sands returned to the pub industry, co-founding Wear Inns in 2006, then becoming the non-executive chairman of the board of Admiral Taverns in 2014. He also took part in the formation of a corporate finance consultancy in London. He is survived by his wife Susan and their four children.

Reflecting on his career ahead of the sale of Pubmaster in 2003, Sands said: “I only wanted to stay in the pub business for two years. But somehow I never got round to leaving.”

John Sands, northern pub entrepreneur, born 8 October 1947, died 7 August 2017

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