I
would like to use the opportunity in this month’s blog to pay tribute to my
father, Barry Riley, who passed away in August.
He
had been involved in the UK surface finishing sector for six decades and was a
well-known figure in the industry. He was also a much-loved father and
grandfather and will be greatly missed by all our extended family.
Our
company’s origins go back as far as the 1940s, when Barry’s father founded a
general industrial machinery merchants known as Lambert Smith & Co. This
company was to forge a profitable association with a large, Birmingham-based
copper/nickel/chrome electro-plating supplier to the automotive industry. He
bought their redundant plant and machinery and resold it to jobbing shops
around the city. This allowed the Riley family business to develop its
important speciality serving the coating and finishing sectors.
In
1966, Barry himself picked up the baton by starting Barry
Riley & Sons. The company began life by renting a small
unit from British Rail under the archways near Snow Hill station in central
Birmingham, later re-locating to the famous Taylor & Challon industrial
complex on Constitution Hill close to W.Canning and Birmingham’s world-famous
jewellery quarter in Hockley.
During
the great nickel shortage of the late 1960s, the enterprising Barry Riley
developed a lucrative service buying excess nickel stock from the Pianoforte surface
finishing company and delivering it by flatbed Ford Transit to the many small
independent electro-plating companies that were around at that time. This
provided the working capital for the company to become a stockist of used plating
and finishing machinery, which it began to trade all over the UK.
Riley
Industries, which became the company’s trading subsidiary, enjoyed successful
growth throughout the 1970s and 80s, eventually re-locating to Perry Barr, near
Aston Villa football stadium and the 60s monstrosity of ‘Spaghetti Junction’,
the hub of the UK motorway network. I joined the company after attending
engineering college in the early 1980s, taking over as managing director in the
mid-1990s.
Barry
subsequently became chairman of the company and was fully involved in a
strategic role up until his death. He was instrumental in moving the business
to our new location in Aldridge on the outskirts of Birmingham in 2006, seeing
the potential in a new factory that offered greater floor space, easier vehicle
access and improved proximity to the M6 toll motorway.
He
could be a hard taskmaster, who was not afraid to challenge business decisions
and actions that were not to his liking. Although he did not belong to the
tech-savvy generation, he was the first person in the early 2000s to identify
the need for a fully interactive and internationally focussed website as the
best way forward for the company, a decision that has been vindicated many
times over.
It
is my belief that, due to the solid foundations laid by my father, we are now
seeing the development of Riley Surface World into a global force in the
surface finishing industry, with a wide marketing reach and a hard-working and
dedicated support team.
I
know that he was very proud of the progress we had made, and optimistic about
the future prospects for the UK finishing sector. He could see that, after a
difficult few years, conditions were starting to approach what they were over
40 years ago, when Birmingham was the world centre metal finishing. The best
tribute that we can make to him is to carry on doing what we do best, not just
for the benefit of Riley Surface World, but for the UK industry as a whole.
