“Hydraulics. Check.” “Collective switch. Check.” “Twist grip. Check.”

David Gold is hunched forward in his business suit, perring intently at the illuminated control panel of a Eurocopter 120. Outside, snow continues to fall and the gleaming black helicopter begins to rock and shake as it powers up.

The whir of the rotors grows louder, but the steady breathing of the Ann Summers owner is audible over the headphones as he concentrates.

He reaches down and eases up a large lever in the base of the aircraft. The leaves on the lawn ripple away and, suddenly, we are floating gently above the frozen ground.

For a man who grew up in Dickensian poverty in the cramped streets of the East End of London, it is a remarkable flight. As a penniless young boy, Mr Gold was told by his teacher that he “ain’t going to amount to nothing”. Now as we rise, his Surrey estate sprawls out below, revealing a tennis court, lake and 19-hole golf course.

As he pirouettes the aircraft through a tree-lined avenue, Mr Gold explains how he learnt to fly helicopters seven years ago when, after a lifetime flying fixed-wing aircraft, he went looking for a new challenge. “When you’ve got an aeroplane airborne you can push in the auto pilot and the pressure is reduced massively. On a helicopter that’s not the case,” he says.

Earlier, sitting in the living room of his spotless mansion and sipping cups of tea, Mr Gold elaborates on how he came to fulfil a lifelong “craving”,”It’s not what people think, it’s not an indulgence,” he says. “They really are very, very practical for business.”

His earliest experience of flying was an unhappy one. As a teenager, he was a member of the Hornchurch Air Cadets and was taken up for a 15-minute flight in a Tiger Moth. “It was an experience in terror,” he laughs. He finally began taking lessons 20 years later, though he was forced to sneak them in because his young wife, Beryl, had an extreme fear of flying.

After getting his license in the early 1970s he quickly began flying friends abroad and using it to visit wholesalers and printers up and down the country.

After a while Mr Gold, who built his initial fortune printing and distributing soft-porn magazines, began to enter competitions. He recalls his delight at winning the Malta Air Rally in 1980 and 1981. “Wow, that was exciting,” he says, later pointing out a photo of himself dressed in a suave white suit as he collected his trophy. “I won the air rally twice, and on the third time…” His voice trails off. After a pause, he continues, explaining how on the day before the results were announced he had lunch with the wife of his co-pilot, Mark Campbell.

As they watched from the balcony, Mr Campbell went past in a plane flown by another man, Teddy White. “I saw them kill themselves,” Mr Gold says. “I was sitting on the balcony [and] I saw them as they came by the hotel. I could read the word ‘Firestone’ on the tyres. All the pilots are around the swimming pool and he’s coming in and he’s banking, seriously banking. And I’m thinking ‘my God’. And they crashed and were killed.”

A year later, another friend died along with six passengers when he crashed while coming in to land at Stornoway airport. They survived the crash but drowned in the Atlantic. It would be a decade before he decided to regain his licences.

The break in flying coincided with a dramatic transformation in his Ann Summers chain. In 1981 his daughter, Jacqueline, now chief executive, came up with the idea of Tupperware-style parties selling sex toys and lingerie to women in their own homes. It proved revolutionary. When Mr Gold bought Ann Summers in 1972 it consisted of two run-down sex shops. There are now 150 stores and the company has an annual turnover of nearly £120 million.

When Ann Summers launched, it scandalised Middle England and shopping centre owners. Now, in an era when Boots is offering loyalty points to buyers of sex toys, it is a transformed marketplace. “I think Ann Summers will always be the innovators. There’s no boundaries as far as we’re concerned. We follow customer demand.”

Mr Gold bristles at the mention of criticisms of the source of his wealth. “You will be hard pressed to find anybody on this planet that says Ann Summers ruined my marriage, or Ann Summers ruined my life,” he says. “I can name you ten titled people who run cigarette companies, which is, if you think about it, outrageous. And yet people question the morality of Ann Summers.”

At 75, and with a fortune estimated over £340 million, he has no interest in retiring and his joint ownership of West Ham United, with his long-term business partner David Sullivan, marks the fulfilment of a lifelong dream. “Why would I want to retire?”, he says. “What I do is a pleasure, my life’s a joy.”

For purposes of full disclosure, the author was a competitor in the competition.

There were six teams of year 11 students competing to win; with strong competition from all. Each team had to create a snack product suitable for sale in a supermarket or independent store, there were no other restrictions on target audience or price; each team was allowed to innovate freely.

The event was structured in a similar fashion to the business TV programme Dragons Den, where each team must make a sales pitch, persuading the judges that their business idea is the best. At the end of each presentation, each judge would give their feedback and advice on how to improve their concept. The judges considered the range of resources used, the quality of the presentation and the business strategy the team had in place to reach their verdict.

The aim of the event was to display some of the business acumen within the school and to give students an insight into how businesses develop competitive products.

From my perspective, as an insider, there was a lot of work that went into cultivating the concept. Our team, like any other, spent many hours on our concept, market research, product design, branding, advertising video and PowerPoint presentation. In my estimation, every competitor gained valuable experience about the way in which products are developed today and how it requires synergy (collaboration among all those involved) to bring a vision into fruition.

Students at John Fisher School will face a trio of West Ham United Football club chairman David Gold, Chairman of House of Fraser Don McCarthy and the founder of Moma Foods Ton Mercer as part of a young enterprise event.

The panel, with an estimated net worth of £500 million, will grill the Year 11 Purley pupils over their ideas before offering their wealthy of experience on how to take the concept further.

Mr Andrew Dean, Head of Business and Enterprise said: “The Young Apprentice series has been a real success, capturing the imagination of the boys and encouraging them to be enterprising”

The Dragon’s Den-style evening will see six teams of six given ten minutes each to pitch and answer questions from the panel.

The finalist were picked after knock-out rounds from an original 14.

Mr Miller, Head of work related learning, – who is stepping into the compere role said: “This will be a great opportunity for the boys to present their ideas to some of the top businessmen in the country.

“Everyone who has made it this far in the completion will pick up knowledge and skills that they will be able to bring to their business studies at the school.”

Prizes are an executive box, containing ten seats, at West Ham’s Upton Park, House of Fraser vouchers, books and smoothies.

The event is free and open to the public, from 7pm in the school hall on Peaks Hill, Purley.

He’s hoping Spring doesn’t come too early as he’s expecting his grounds to be covered by carpets of tens of thousands of daffodils and he’d love you to come and see for yourselves – http://www.ngs.org.uk/gardens/gardenfinder/garden.aspx?id=21803 – for further details

http://www.itv.com/london/a-touch-of-gold59844/

The co-chairman of West Ham United relates this story with the timing born of a thousand tellings. He is engagingly candid about his late father’s petty villainy, no matter what ammunition it offers to those who feel that the apple never falls far from the tree, or at least who feel that there’s something not quite respectable about a self-made multi-millionaire who owes much of his fortune to girlie magazines and sexy lingerie. Only last month The Sun was speculating that if and when West Ham move into the Olympic stadium, it will be renamed the Ann Summers Stadium. But if people have a problem with the source of his wealth, they’re welcome. He is proud of his business empire.

Moreover, pretty much everyone I have talked to who has worked closely with Gold, in and out of football, sings his praises. Decent, generous, respectful and yes, respectable, are the adjectives I keep hearing. Certainly, the staff at his Surrey estate, from his housekeeper to his greenkeeper (he has his own golf course), seem to hold 75-year-old “Mr David” in genuine affection. And many West Ham fans, while evidently less than smitten with his partner David Sullivan, and not exactly blowing bubbles of rapture in the direction of vice-chairman Karren Brady, have embraced Gold as a kindred spirit, who, after all, played for West Ham Boys in the 1950s and was even offered professional terms. They’re satisfied that his veins run claret and blue, and that he appears willing to underwrite his sentimental attachment to the club with hard cash.

Nonetheless, I have some challenging questions with which to disturb the serenity of Gold’s handsome drawing-room, and the first of them concerns Avram Grant, whose disastrous season-long tenure as manager ended in relegation and whose appointment in June last year no longer looks, to put it mildly, like the act of two astute businessmen.

“We’re human-beings, we make mistakes,” says Gold. “In my life I’ve employed over 100 managers, of whom four have been football managers, but if you’re picking a manager for your print works in Bournemouth, or your distribution centre in Leicester, you’re still looking for the best man available. What I’ve learnt is that just interviewing them is never enough. Looking at their CV is not enough. Nobody gives you a CV saying ‘I’m useless’. But you can’t do more than interview him and look at his cv. So you think, ‘do I like this man? Is there good chemistry between us?’ Well, Avram is one of the nicest men I’ve met in football. He interviewed fantastic, and maybe with a fairer wind he would have been a success. But we should have acted sooner (in letting Grant go), there’s no doubt.”

Under Grant’s replacement, Sam Allardyce, the Hammers sit in fourth place with 10 matches played. Saturday’s draw with Crystal Palace maintained an unbeaten record away from home, and although there have been more defeats than wins at Upton Park, the fans I know seem to think that Big Sam is probably the man to guide the club back into the Premier League. More significantly, so does Gold. “I’d be devastated if this doesn’t work, but also surprised,” he says. “We all knew Sam from the TV, we all knew the remarkable job he did at Bolton. Actually, I was expecting a tough, uncompromising, 7ft 6in northerner, but in fact he’s got charm and humility, which I never saw on TV. I know I can trust this man, because I’ve seen all four corners.”

Trust is important to Gold, and the bedrock of his long partnership with Sullivan. “It’s like a marriage,” he says, and so I invite him to recall their biggest name-calling, crockery-smashing domestic.

A smile. “Bizarrely, in more than 30 years, we’ve never had a cross word. We’re both compromisers, and we both believe in the value of our relationship, therefore we don’t want to damage it.” I tell him I’ve heard that he was keener than Sullivan to keep on Gianfranco Zola, before the Sardinian was sacked last May, giving way to the disastrous tenure of Grant. “No,” he says. “All I can give you is that I would have kept Barry Fry (as Birmingham City manager, in 1996) but David was very keen to bring in Trevor Francis. My brother was involved then, and I lost the vote two to one.”

Gold and Sullivan took over Birmingham in 1993, and sold up 16 years later. Gold’s subsequent relations with the club have not been especially harmonious, indeed he was banned from the directors’ box at St Andrew’s when West Ham played there last season. So does he look at Birmingham now, and in particular at the spectacular fall from grace of owner Carson Yeung, fighting money-laundering charges in Hong Kong, with regret, pleasure or indifference?

“No, I made many friends there, and I was excited to see them win the Carling Cup. We sold the club genuinely believing Carson Yeung and the consortium were wealthy enough to take Birmingham City to the next level. It was on that basis that we agreed to sell, that these were seriously wealthy people. And the fans there always treated me with respect, pretty much, even when we were relegated, which for a fan is the most painful thing to endure.”

Therefore, West Ham’s relegation must have been doubly painful for him. There was a time when almost all chairmen were long-term supporters of their clubs, but now the chairman/fan is a diminishing breed. I ask Gold whether he thinks it’s dangerous when a club is in your heart as well as on your spreadsheets?

“Of course it’s a danger,” he replies. “Pickering at Derby spent millions on his football club. Jack Hayward at Wolverhampton called himself a golden tit (there for the club to suckle on). On the other hand, Jack Walker spent millions and saw Blackburn win the Premier League. The important thing as fans is to understand that if you’re going to gamble, you must gamble with your own money, not the football club’s money. I had a tweet the other day from someone who said, ‘it’s not your club, it’s the fans’ club’. I tweeted back, ‘you’re absolutely right, the football club belongs to the fans, only the debts belong to me.’ But you have to have that philosophy. I couldn’t live with myself if what happened at Portsmouth happened at West Ham.

“So we’ve gambled with our own money. You know, I went to a casino many years ago, for a boys’ night out, and I remember having £200 in my left pocket, and £50 in my back pocket. The £200 was to have fun, the £50 was for my cab fare and my overnight stay in a hotel. Only a fool carries on having fun with the £50 when the £200 has gone. So the money we’re gambling with is not the money for the cab fare and the hotel. It sounds crass to say it’s fun money. I own 150 stores, not 150 oil wells, and there’s a big difference. But it’s not life-and-death money.”

The Gold family’s wealth has been conservatvely estimated at £350m, an unimaginable fortune to most of us but, as he says, dwarfed by the funds available to Roman Abramovich, not to mention the rulers of Abu Dhabi. So what happens if Allardyce doesn’t manage to get West Ham promoted, if they stay in the Championship, and move into a half-empty Olympic Stadium? That £200 could soon run out, leaving only the £50.

“I’m not in the business of risking my wealth, my granddaughter’s inheritance,” he says. “But I will go the extra mile for West Ham. I wouldn’t have come in in the first place if it hadn’t been West Ham.

When I saw the figures, the mess they (the Icelandic former owners) had got themselves into … they had bad luck, with the banking crash, but they were living well above their means, giving out incredible, crazy contracts, pursuing a dream with no plan B, no contingency for relegation …”

He denies that he invested in his boyhood club because he also saw the prospect of a lucrative move to the Olympic stadium. “I swear to you that it wasn’t until we got into the club that we realised the potential,” he says. “At the time it looked like being a pure athletics stadium. Then it emerged that the OPLC (Olympic Park Legacy Company) would consider a football club if it could find a way to retain the running-track.” And how does he get on with Daniel Levy, the Tottenham Hotspur chairman who has not entirely given up on the idea of gazumping West Ham? “He believes he’s doing what’s right. I don’t know that I could do what he’s done and pursue a project with the full opposition of the fan base. But you could argue that he’s a brave man.”

If the move does go ahead, then Gold will see his childhood home, 442 Green Street (he’s always favoured 4-4-2, he quips), bulldozed. It would be part of the regeneration scheme for which he yearns, having grown up when the area was one extended slum, indeed it was the discovery that he could sneak into Upton Park under the turnstiles that first kindled his love for West Ham. “I’m seven or eight, my father’s in prison, my mother’s a skivvy, I’m living in abject poverty, so this was a form of escapism,” he recalls.

He then tells me, not with braggadocio but an appealingly wide-eyed expression of pride, that he was one of the guests of honour at  the recent opening of the Westfield Stratford City mall, where the biggest queues were outside the West Ham club store and the Ann Summers shop. “It was amazing, Brian,” he says. “I’ve climbed a mountain that I didn’t think I would ever get even half-way up.

This is doubtless why he still empathises with the working man, and in particular with the working man unable to afford match tickets. “It’s obscene that a working-class guy can’t go to a football match with his two children,” he says. “I feel crummy about that, and it wouldn’t trouble me quite as much if the players weren’t making so much money. I wouldn’t want to control wages, that’s abhorrent to me. However, if we have lower ticket prices, legislated by the governing bodies, there’s only one place the clubs can make up (for the drop in income), and that’s by cutting the wage bill.”

So why doesn’t he put his own money where his mouth is, and lower prices, and salaries, at West Ham? “Because I don’t want to get relegated. You can’t do it in isolation. We all have to sign up to it. We’re all breaking even at best, most are losing money, but I’d feel better about it if we had full stadiums. Football is an industry awash with money, but it’s all being used in the wrong areas.”

Manifestly, Gold is right. And as I say goodbye to this likeable and perceptive man, whom I had expected to be impossibly brash yet is anything but, there occurs to me the perfect metaphor, at least in present company, for a sport which is superficially prosperous, but not at all what it appears. Football is all fur coat and no knickers, and Gold might be just the fellow to find it the right underwear.

Brian Viner – The Independent

The West Ham co-owner has spent £250,000 installing CCTV, a direct phone line to the police… and even a PANIC ROOM.

David Gold and fiancee Leslie

Mr Gold, 74, says he’s been living in fear since being told by police that he was a target of the gang, who have carried out a series of violent raids on rich businessmen.

He was given the warning after a crowbar attack which almost killed Phones4u founder John Caudwell.

Police believe the gang, made up of a hardcore of 20 thugs led by a “Mr Big”, research every aspect of their victims’ lives and movements before striking.

Mr Gold, who is worth £360million, said his friend Mr Caudwell had spoken to him and left him in little doubt about the threat he faced.

He told the Sunday Mirror: “From the information the police gave me, it was a question of when, not if, the gang would try something.

“When I spoke to John Caudwell he told me, ‘you’ve got to take this seriously because this gang is going to kill someone’. I have been terrified.” Mr Gold, who also owns the Ann Summers lingerie firm, has turned a suite of his 30-room Surrey mansion into “panic rooms”.

In the event of a robbery, he will lock himself and fiancee Lesley Manning behind heavy triple-bolted steel doors. Once inside, he has a direct line to the police and can watch any raiders on a TV screen linked to more than a dozen CCTV cameras. Guards patrol the 55-acre estate 24 hours a day.

Mr Gold said he improved security after a near-fatal bout of septicaemia in February. “It made me realise how vulnerable I am,” he said. “I wanted to take ­ whatever measures I could to defend myself and Lesley.

“I’ve done everything I can and I feel much safer now. But I’m still on red alert until this gang is caught.”

Police have been following up new leads on last November’s raid on Mr Caudwell’s Staffordshire home after it featured on Crimewatch. Three men from Liverpool were arrested but later released on bail.

by Gary Anderson, Sunday Mirror 26/06/2011

Since 2005, things have changed and this brilliant autobiography of an East End boy made good has changed too. This is a completely revised edition of Pure Gold, and in an unprecedented move, Gold is offering a serialised version of the book here, completely free of charge. David Gold shifts his attentions away from his footballing successes and tells a much broader, much more human story about his memories of Rags, Riches & Rampant Rabbits.

This totally re-worked edition will be made available here for free, and a new chapter will be added fortnightly. Make sure you check back every two weeks to read the next instalment!

Click here to start reading Pure Gold: Rags, Riches & Rampant Rabbits.

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