Calder Mackay connection
Sir William Calder Mackay, the retired chairman and chief executive of the Farmers’ Trading Company, has fond memories of his time spent in the South Island. In 1927 Sir William resigned from the FTC and set up his own store in Christchurch, opening in August 1928. “We took Christchurch by storm. They hadn’t had aggressive retailing there before. “We worked with the accelerator flat to the floor. We didn’t know there was a depression on.” Calder Mackay stores followed in Timaru (1929), Greymouth (1930), Dunedin (1931), and Invercargill (1935).
However, in 1933, FTC’s founder, Mr Robert Laidlaw, wrote to Sir William and offered him the position of assistant general manager with the company in Auckland. Now 88, Sir William first joined the Laidlaw Leeds Company on January 2, 1911, as a lad of 15: “I was only a boy and the company was so small,” he remembers. In 1971 he retired. During his 60 years of service with the Farmers’ Trading Company Sir William formed a unique friendship and business partnership with Mr Laidlaw, between them building the company into the multi-million-dollar enterprise it is today.
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Bibliographic details
Press, 4 June 1984, Page 26
Word Count
189Calder Mackay connection Press, 4 June 1984, Page 26
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