Curzon Street Miscellany
Sir Gordon Hobday Chemist and inventor
At one time 43 Curzon Street was home to the Hobday family whose son Gordon was to become world famous.
In 1939 Gordon Ivan Hobday lived with his parents and younger brother Colin at 43 Curzon Street, the family having moved there from Sawley in 1928.
Born at 33 Harrington Street, Sawley, on 1 February 1916, Gordon was the son of Alexander Thomas Hobday, a lace Jacquard card puncher and Frances Cassandra, née Meads. He was educated at Long Eaton County Secondary School (later Long Eaton Grammar School) and graduated from University College Nottingham, with a first in chemistry, before joining Boots as a research assistant in 1939 on a salary of £275 p.a. During the Second World War, he worked on the mass production of penicillin.
Hobday made steady progress from laboratory bench to chairmanship with one sudden promotion. In August 1952 , while he was head of patents at Boots, his immediate boss, Sir Jack Drummond, a food scientist and former scientific adviser to the Ministry of Food during the war, was murdered in Provence along with his wife Anne and ten-year-old daughter Elizabeth when the family was camping near a roadside.
Hobday took over from Drummond as head of research and re-purposed the department to find treatments for ‘diseases of civilisation’. It was under this mind-set that the department looked for an alternative treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, owing to the toxicity of aspirin. The programme came up with ibuprofen, which was patented in 1961. During the 1970s it became the over-the-counter pain killer Nurofen and the World Health Organisation put it on its list of ‘essential medicines’.
In 1968, Hobday became deputy managing director of Boots, then managing director in 1970 and chairman in 1973. He oversaw the acquisition of the Timothy Whites chain and Crookes Laboratories and favoured further expansion of Boots. In 1972, he launched a £400m bid for a merger with GlaxoSmithKline. As chairman, in 1973, he made a £225m offer to buy the House of Fraser stores, including Harrods. Both these bids were rejected by the Monopolies Commission.
During Hobday’s chairmanship, Boots acquired Rucker Pharmacol in the United States in 1977 and in 1986 it expanded US operations with the £377m purchase of a division of Baxter Travenol. It also bought two chains of drugstores in Canada and expanded into Spain, West Germany and France.
After retiring from Boots, Hobday became chairman of Central Independent Television from 1981 to 1985. He was also chancellor of the University of Nottingham for 13 years and Lord Lieutenant of Nottinghamshire from 1983 to 1991. He was granted an honorary doctor of laws degree by the University of Nottingham for his services to science, the pharmaceutical industry and the university. He was made a Knight Bachelor in the 1979 Birthday Honours.
Gordon married Margaret Jean Joule on 5 October 1940 and they had one daughter, Anne. In 1995 Margaret died and in 2002 Gordon married the author Patricia Cooper, née Birge.
In 2010 Sir Gordon and Lady Patricia visited his old school, the former Long Eaton Grammar School, at the time when the school celebrated its centenary. He drove his car, at the age of 94, from his home in Newstead.
Sir Gordon died on 27 May 2015, in Kings Mill Hospital, Sutton in Ashfield at the age of 99. He was survived by his second wife, Patricia and Anne Sheard, his daughter from his first marriage.
No. 66 – Curzon Street’s Lost Son
Harold Coomber was born in Hallam Fields, Ilkeston, in 1892. He was raised as the youngest son of Thomas Richard Coomber, a dairyman, and Amelia Ruth, his wife. Thomas and Amelia had moved around the country, presumably following work, to give their family the best possible start in life. They already had 8 children when Harold came along, named as their son in some records, but he was born to their eldest daughter Annie, aged 17, living and working as a servant in Stanton by Dale. Harold spent his childhood with his grandparents, who I imagine loved him as their own.
By 1911 they were probably celebrating a job well done. Annie was married & had her own brand new house, and Harold had turned 18 and was living with her, growing his career as a butcher. Their lives must have been so full of optimism and hope. I can absolutely imagine how Annie, her husband Lewis, and Harold lived; because the house they lived in is now my house. Annie & Lewis would have had the front bedroom, and I guess Harold would have had the second bedroom, ahead of you when you get to the top of the stairs – the room which now belongs to my 21 year-old son. When I walk across the Minton tiles to the front door, I know they walked across those same tiles on their way out into the world each morning. I know they opened the same front gate, and wonder whether it squeaked like it does today, letting loved ones know they were home at the end of the day. I listen out for that gate when I know my boys are coming home from their travels and I imagine Annie listened out for it too. On 26th August 1914 Harold picked up his kitbag from our hallway, went out through our front door, opened the squeaky gate, and headed off to war. I wonder if Annie stood at the gate and watched all down our road; or if she went with him to the station like I often do with my boys, and waved him off from there. It was going to be over by Christmas, did she really believe he wouldn’t be gone long? I don’t know if Harold came home on leave, to be honest, I doubt he had time. I am sure Annie longed to hear the front gate squeak & clank, to know her boy was home. I imagine when he moved in with them she’d felt overjoyed to finally have him living safely in her home. The agony of knowing the danger he was in now must have been hard to bear. By April 1915 Harold was in the thick of it in the Balkans. I wonder how often he got to write home, and how joyful Annie must have fełt when those letters came through our letterbox; seeing his handwriting and knowing that when he wrote that letter he was alive. She must have waited for those letters and longed for the day he followed them back through our door.
On 15th Sept 1915 Annie’s waiting ended. Harold died at Gallipoli, aged 23. I wonder how long it took for the news to arrive that he would never again clank that gate, drop his bag on our tiles, and shout out ‘I’m home’. I think of my boys as they bustle through the door, so full of life, bursting with promise & brimming over with adventure. I think of Harold in that little corner of a foreign field that is forever Long Eaton. I imagine the pain of losing him, and the chasm in Annie’s life that would never heal. I wonder if Lewis knew that Annie was Harold’s mum. I wonder if Harold knew. Did she bear that terrible grief alone? I don’t know how long they stayed in this house, and what the rest of Annie’s life held; but I wish I could tell her that a century on we brought her Harold’s memory home. His Long Eaton Remembrance Rock has pride of place in our garden, and I think of him most days. At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, I do remember him. Rest in peace Harold x
Phillippa Buchanan, 2021.