My father, Cyril Shack, who has died aged 99, was a characterful “Yiddish cockney” whose East End roots, self-fashioned ingenuity and natural charm took him from being an office messenger boy to owning his own company supplying jukeboxes to pubs.
The business, originally Phonographic Equipment and later renamed Associated Leisure, diversified into pinball and fruit machines and was floated on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) in the mid-1960s, transforming his fortunes. Though he left the business not long afterwards, he continued with various more modest entrepreneurial interests up to his retirement.
Cyril was born in London to Polish parents, Avigdor Shakowitz, a milkman, and Annie (nee Gastfreund), who ran a corner shop in Whitechapel which later became a family enterprise. At home the lingua franca was Yiddish, which Cyril continued to use as much as he could throughout his life.
After leaving his local secondary school at 13, he emerged on to the streets with an impressive native wit, beginning as a messenger in Blackfriars before picking up other skills, including driving a truck so that he could collect supplies for the shop and acquiring some basic knowledge of accountancy despite flunking exams at night school.
His turning point came in the 50s when, with a steady career running his own greengrocery in north-west London, he branched out with a friend, Gordon Marks, to buy jukeboxes for leasing to coffee bars, eventually even providing the featured machine on the Saturday evening TV show Juke Box Jury, on which Cyril once appeared as a panel member.
After the business had diversified and arrived on the LSE in 1964, an unwise investment in a Mayfair casino, with the Hollywood actor George Raft as its figurehead, led to a change in fortunes for Cyril, exacerbated when his newly listed company launched a hostile takeover bid for the holiday camp firm Butlin’s.
During the subsequent public spat, an article in the Daily Mail appeared, at least in Cyril’s eyes, to insinuate that the bid for Butlin’s might be a spearhead for US organised crime interests. As a managing director he took the lead in suing the newspaper for libel, but the court found there was no specific reference to the company and the case was lost.
It was a devastating outcome for Cyril personally, as he was eventually forced out as a director and major shareholder. Typically, however, he later befriended the trial judge, Sir Frederick Lawton, regularly visiting him in his retirement and nurturing a slightly incongruous friendship.
Following the court case Cyril used the money he had taken from his shareholding to set up and run various other businesses until retirement, albeit on a much smaller scale.
Outside work he got much enjoyment from landscaping his garden and cultivating young rose trees, while he also helped friends by designing and project-managing the construction of kitchen extensions and external log-cabins, all free of charge.
In 1953 he married Brenda Robins, and she survives him, along with their two sons, Jonathan and me, two grandsons and two great-grandsons.
