How Wilko survived WWII bombs to become £1.1bn giant – before troubled years under heir Lisa Wilkinson & tragic collapse
WHEN James Kemsey Wilkinson and fiancée Mary Cooper tied the knot, they were back behind the tills of their little hardware shop within three hours.
After marrying at St Peter’s Church in Highfields, Leicester at 8am – before opening time – the couple hurried back to their little store at 151 Charnwood Street in the city, with its pots and pans hanging outside.
It was October 1934 and Hitler had just become Fuhrer of Germany. The Second World War was still five years away and Britain was finally emerging from the worst recession in history which left one in five unemployed.
But James, known as JK, and Mary knew that money was still tight and were determined to give their customers the best deals.
It was an ethos which grew a multi-million pound business and Wilkinson – which later changed its name to Wilko – remained a family firm for almost a century, until its collapse last month.
More than 1,300 staff find themselves cut adrift as Wilko’s cut-price rival B&M bought just part of the ailing business for £13million.
Lisa Wilkinson, JK’s granddaughter, defended the company’s decision to dish out £77 million to shareholders as the bargain store lost cash.
Quite what JK would have made of the move is anyone’s guess.
Shoppers are mourning the loss of the high street store, where you could buy everything from pick-n-mix to wallpaper, photo frames and mops.
Despite decades of success, Wilko had humble beginnings.
JK was inspired to open his first shop in Leicester by brother Donald who had four stores in Birmingham.
In the early days Donald helped JK and Mary stock their first store, which had the distinctive hardware smell of paraffin and firelighters.
But within six years the couple had six shops – including two they had ironically taken over from Donald.
Despite their business rivalry, the brothers always remained close and Donald was brought into the company as a director until his death in 1997.
Secure that their business was well underway, JK and Mary welcomed son Tony in 1937.
Wartime woes
With the outbreak of World War II, JK signed up to the Royal Armoured Corps and volunteered as a Bevin Boy – one of the conscripted British men sent down the mines to keep the country running.
Throughout the war, the family shop managed to stay open to keep families’ air raid shelters and converted cellars stocked but three shops in Leicester had to close after being bombed out.
As the conflict came to a close, Mary fell pregnant with the couple’s second child, a daughter Barbara.
With two young children to support, JK and Mary worked hard to expand their empire and the 1950s’ explosion of home decor and DIY saw their business boom. Eleven more shops were opened and the firm enjoyed an annual turnover of £300,000.
Daughter Barbara joined the family business aged 16 in 1956 as secretary to her dad, while Tony joined four years later as a branch manager before becoming the firm’s first personnel manager.
The swinging sixties saw even more shops open and, in the year of decimalisation in 1971, a giant warehouse was opened in Nottinghamshire and Wilkinson’s started producing its own products – the first being paint.
The following year Tony took over from his dad JK as chairman – and oversaw a 30-year period of massive growth as the company stopped selling bulky lawnmowers and greenhouses and concentrated on items that can be ‘taken home in a bag’.
Bargain boost
By 1987, it was selling 13,000 products to 24 million customers.
Tony said the original idea to give shoppers value for money remained.
He said: “Our customers have been able to trust us to deliver merchandise of the right quality at keen prices in a welcoming environment.”
The 100th store opened in 1992 and when Tony retired in 2005 he had an estimated worth of £252 million, making it onto the Sunday Times Rich List in 2019.
He and sister Barbara went out in style after Wilkinson’s reported a record turnover of £1.1billion that year.
The third generation to take the reins were Tony’s daughter Lisa Wilkinson, then 37, and Barbara’s daughter Karin Swann, 41 at the time.
The whole company was given a rebrand five years later with Wilkinson becoming Wilko with a new, peppy strapline: ‘Where there’s a Wilko, there’s a way’. The firm even had shops in Delhi and Istanbul and prided itself on its treatment of staff.
But the success would not last as other discount stores started to copy Wilko’s tried and tested approach to keeping costs low.
In 2014, Karin suddenly sold her family’s 50 per cent holding, worth about £68million, to Lisa.
While the pair insisted the split was ‘amicable’ industry sources suggested there could have been a fall-out.
Meanwhile, the other side of the family were struggling to keep Wilko profits up amid stiff competition.
Since its collapse last month, Lisa Wilkinson has come under fire for taking £77million out of the business over the past 10 years.
Even last year, as the firm struggled, a £3million dividend was paid out, but Lisa said “it wouldn’t have made a difference” as Wilko faced a sad demise.
Lisa, who stepped down as chairwoman in Janauary, told The Times: “Hindsight is a great bedfellow and I like to think we did all the things we should do when we paid dividends.
“The board checked that we’d got profits or reserved profits, there was sufficient cash, we went through the right governance, the auditors checked it off.
“Is there a bit of me lying awake at night saying I wish we’d never taken a penny of dividends out? Well, genuinely, would it have made any difference to where we are today? It might have made us survive a couple of months longer. What we have taken out really wouldn’t have made a difference.”
Lisa said “everything” had been thrown at the company to keep it a success.
She spoke of her devastation at the firm falling out of family hands saying: “JK was my grandpa and was not a mythical figure — he was my actual grandpa.
“He and my dad would talk about the business and we would go to the warehouse and around the stores, and often my dad’s car would have stock in it — all the normal stuff of growing up with a family business.”
But the family were accused of failing to stick by JK Wilkinson’s original low-cost model.
Gordon Brown, who was managing director from 1992 to 2007, said: “’Wilko was a convenience store where you went to buy bits and pieces for your house for a low price.’
But he said the management team under Lisa “got into a situation where they were not following their successful model of low price, low cost”.
He added: “They paid consultants who helped them bring about a new format for stores.
“But they were less aggressive on pricing and their approach on the shop floor.”
Bargain hunters headed to Wilko this week said they have been left disappointed by empty shelves.
And scammers pretending to be Wilko are setting up fake online shops offering deals such as air fryers for £8.
Experts at Martin Lewis’ MoneySavingExpert.com issued the warning in the hope to prevent more Brits losing their hard-earned cash.
It’s a tragic ending to a once-proud family business started by a couple with big dreams.