How to Make a Million – Slowly

Chapter 3

Early days: a brief personal journey

I was born in 1942 to a general practitioner father and a child psychologist mother, growing up in the Manchester suburb of Davyhulme. We lived above and alongside my father’s surgery and I remember padding across the road to our local post office to buy National Savings stamps, using pocket money augmented by pennies from occasionally helping out with a milk delivery round – the start of my capitalist journey. When I was 12 we moved to a larger house and here I first became aware of something called ‘the stock market’.

My father had taken over one of the larger downstairs rooms for his library/office and I remember him sitting rather uncomfortably on the floor, pipe in mouth, wading through ...