Chapter 18 (Part 1)  AND THEN THERE WAS "ROCKFREEZE"

Sometime in the 70s I met Edgar.
He was sales director for the Shirt Company Ben Sherman. We met at their showroom in Ganton Street just off Carnaby Street in London. Little did I know that this apparently normal buying trip was going to change my life for the next few years.
Edgar, a South African businessman, had moved to London during the troubled times down there. He was obviously vastly overqualified at Ben Sherman’s and somehow or other we ended up having lunch together and agreeing to meet in Gibraltar. He wrangled a business trip here, during the closed frontier times and quickly sussed out that Gibraltar was virtually a captive market for many commodities. With a closed land frontier, courtesy of Franco the Spanish Dictator and flights limited to just London Heathrow, Gib had to import ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING every town needs, from toilet paper to TVs.
Together. Edgar & I explored various ideas and realising that home freezers had not yet caught on here, we could virtually duplicate what Alpine Everest was doing in UK.  
I had never dabbled in the food business, nor in electro-domestic appliances,  but I saw the wisdom (?) in Edgar’s saying:
“As long as people have a hole in their ass they have to feed the hole in their face” … hhmmm no, not particularly in good taste … oh stop it … no pun intended!

We met up with the late Edmund Serruya in his shop “Remington” in Main Street, opposite Bell Lane. He was the agent for the Italian Home Appliances brand, Ignis. Edgar proposed a contract of buying 25 upright home freezers (never seen in Gib before this) a month for a whole year and that had me shaking in my boots, and Edmund happily giving a very competitive wholesale price for them. From there we went and bought a small pocket calculator that had just come into the market and sat down to do the maths. Rather than admit my ignorance regarding the calculations he was talking about, I nodded sagely and replied with those wise comments:
"Aha.." and "HHmmm..."
….while Edgar wrote down figures and calculations. After a while the penny dropped and I saw the full business plan that had taken him 5 minutes to come up with in his mind.

We were going to market upright home freezers and frozen food to all homes in Gibraltar!
The freezers would be delivered full to the brim with frozen meats, fish, chicken, mutton, fruit and vegetables. Clients would be given loans by a local bank which they would they would pay back to the bank in instalments, while the bank paid us the full whack immediately. That master plan, succinctly laid out, mostly on a serviette at the Rock Hotel dining room (much to Monty's annoyance, he was the Maître de at the Rock Hotel then), was what Edgar left me to put together while he organised the UK end of the business.
This came at the right time because Barclays Bank was keen on attracting new clients and our operation was exactly the right one which the then Manager, Mr Manolo Rodriguez saw as a way to harvest new clients.
We put together a team of about 6 sales people, men and women, who canvassed the town door-to-door explaining about this fabulous Rockfreeze idea. Once clients had their freezers installed, they could top up all the food they required from our shop in Bell Lane …..which still did not exist.
I came up with the trading name “ROCKFREEZE” and it caught on very quickly.
The sales ream that I can remember were:
Anna Maria Martinez (now one of the top managers at local Nat West & top salesperson!)
Toby Tobelem  (He was a manager with me at TEO)
Mesod Benady (Later to become an accountant with ESV Hassan & Co)
Dennis Jimenez (Also working with me at TEO)
And an older gentleman, a Mr Catania who with Anna Maria was also a top salesperson) & possible 1 o 2 others, but this was the main sales team.

To cut a long story, short, the idea took off wonderfully thanks to this very enterprising team of salespeople, as well as the excellent frozen food we were importing from UK. Not only were we selling more than 25 freezers a month, thanks to a couple of GBC TV adverts, we managed to sell 100 freezers just in the month of February of our first year. Neither Edgar nor Melvyn - our UK Purchasing director -  could believe it!

Advertising is something I enjoy doing, having passed an intensive advertising course in London in the late 60s. My great friend Ralph Lima was working at GBC in charge of advertising then. When I laid out the idea for a new advert, he loved it despite GBC not really being that keen on it as it involved an imaginative scene up the Rock. The model was a beautiful young lady, Elizabeth, with long dark hair, tanned complexion and if I may say so, a perfect figure. She was an excellent actress for the part.
It involved a cave-woman. I bought 3 children's rabbit fur coat from a shop called MAYA in Main Street belonging to Mr Purswani, grandfather of Raju of Marble Arch fame. I had them stripped and resewn into what I imagined a woman's stone-age dress to be. It actually looked so right that I am sure Betty Flintstone would have beaten a dinosaur with Fred's club to have it!

We then loaded a 5-foot upright freezer onto a GBC pick-up van, including all the frozen meats fish chicken fruit and veg that could go into the freezer, just as a client would receive it. Also, camera, cameraman and assorted technical equipment which in those days was both bulky and not even a quarter as good as these days. Oh yes, some firewood and a chunk of defrosted meat was needed for the scene. I have to say that GBC (Gibraltar Broadcasting

 Corporation - TV & Radio) in those days, still at Wellington Front, with George Valarino at the helm, was far more amenable to new and exciting ideas than now. It was indeed "television del pueblo" and enterprising sales staff were encouraged to come up with novel ways of selling airtime. Frankly the combination of Ralph and I was about as novel as you could get then!

Up the Rock we went, freezer, food, firewood, costume, model .... all that was missing was The Script.

On the lay-by at Middle Gate, on the right, there is a bit of an uphill path away from sight and that is there we set up the freezer, with fishing line attached to the door. While the team helped me load the shelves with food, Ralph found a discreet place behind thick bushes where Elizabeth, our intrepid model, could change into costume. This was in the middle of the day. I do not think Elizabeth had been on screen ever yet, nor had Ralph and his mates any clear idea what I had in mind ...... and if you can keep the secret, nor did I!

(I hope I would not be arrested retrospectively for what I have to say now but......)

We started a cooking fire in the clearing and spiked the chunk of meat on a twig we cut off a tree. While this was going on Elizabeth was getting ready but she was much too clean for a prehistoric, hungry, cave woman!

Make-up!

Using burnt wood and earth mixed with water, we dirtied her appropriately ....L’Oréal it certainly was not! But Elizabeth was a wonderful person to work with. She entered into the spirit of it, as did Ralph and the GBC team, and they laughed their head off when they read The Script which went something like Elizabeth grunting:

"UGH ... UGH UGH .... UGH?:....hhhmmmm UGH !"
(let Google try to translate that!)

OK, OK .... this was the scene ...

A prehistoric woman, sitting on her haunches, trying to cook a chunk of meat on the twig over a small fire.

(Music!) .... we used the opening bars from Stanley Kubrick's film "2001 A Space Odyssey"... know it????  A truly beautiful piece with an amazing crescendo...listen to it ….
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osuD6Kpw2AA

As she is roasting .... the opening bars are heard and at its peak, she looks up and the freezer has landed!

She is scared! (first "UGH!")

She springs back in fear .... (more UGHS!)

She sniffs around the freezer ... (Kubrick used a black obelisk ....so why can’t I use a white upright freezer?)

Elizabethan played the part to perfection!

As she comes from the back to the front, the door magically opens (now you know why we had camera-invisible fishing nylon attached to the door!) and .....as the music reaches its peak .... she sees all the food inside!

(here is where Lourdes went "hhhmmmmm UGH!" in obvious approval!)

It was all done in one single take..... and a million laughs.

Elizabeh and her script spoke to everyone ..... everyone understood the message!

Ralph and his crew loved it too ...in fact, had it not been for Ralph, we could never have git away with all the shirt-cuts from admins that we had to take.

It was a lot of work for a 1-minute advert, but the results came in with sales that had the salespersons, the bank and ourselves very happy. We had 2-3 very successful years, after buying the lease of a shop owned by my friend and true  gentleman: Mr Harold Weisfogel (ex-Attias the Tailor)

And then Edgar did a runner!

I was sending money to his account in London, ostensibly to pay for the food. The freezers I was paying ,locally to Remington’s via Letter of Credit.
But the food was being purchased by Melvyn in UK, on behalf of Rockfreeze Ltd, I was transferring the payments to Edgar in London for each invoice as and when the consignments arrived.
What happened?
You guessed it!
Nothing was being paid!
Edgar was pocketing it all!

Supplies dried upon us and Rockfreeze was left with nearly £20,000 in debt here in Gibraltar.

At this point I must be very grateful to two excellent human beings who were also involved in this mortally wounded business. The first has to be the late Johnny Risso of RESTSSO TRADING through whom all the food was being delivered. I went to him and explained what Edgar had done. We needed supplies in order to continue trading and so, paying, but had no money to buy this.
 I still remember Johnny’s words:

"Te dije que ese es un pajaro, David!"
(I warned you that he -Edgar-was a scoundrel)

But even knowing the financial situation, instead of refusing to supply us, we worked out a repayment system that was incredibly generous of him and this allowed us to keep trading and pay off all our debts. Johnny and I were friends before Rockfreeze, and he proved his loyalty “above & beyond” the friendship bond, on the strength of a handshake and faith in me; no contract, no lawyers required.

The second person was the Lawyer Alfred Vasquez, later Mayor and knighted for his services. He was acting for the various creditors, the Rock Hotel being the most aggrieved since Edgar's stays there invariably included champagne Veuve Clicquot - Luxury champagne, as well as oysters and whatever the excellent restaurant of the hotel was serving to its distinguished clientele. Edgar certainly distinguished himself leaving me with an over £2,000 bill there too.

I went to see Mr Vasquez in his chambers in Cloister Ramp. And with files invoices and other evidence I showed him how the Gib side of the business had been hoodwinked into sending all the funds over to the UK side, thinking they would be used to pay all the suppliers. He explained to me that technically since Rockfreeze was a limited company with only £100 share capital, it could declare itself bankrupt and that would be the end of the story. But he looked me in the eye and told me what I knew to be true. All the credit various companies had given us was on the unspoken faith that I, as a well known Gibraltarian businessman, would always honour the debt.

"Will you honour the debt? Or declare bankruptcy?"

Oh ... the temptation! £20,000 in early 1970s is about equivalent to £290,000 today!

But Mr Vasquez was right.

Whatever the legal loophole was, it was my name on the debt.

In the next part of this chapter I shall explained what my good friend, co-worker, and by then, top Rockfreeze salesman, the late Dennis Jimenez and I, managed to put together to clear the debt.

.... And also, so how we bought...no, no, we bartered Levi jeans for frozen fish, in the middle of the night, from Boris the Bulgarian, in his Fishing Ship …. and Penelope's Night Club.