Barry Riley. An obituary.

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.