Last working day

After around 5 years of spending a great deal of time together at various work locations in Europe, today was the last time Nigel and I would sit down in an office together.

This was our shared office in the Wienerwald HQ in Munich. In its day a very well known address, a modern, I guess 1970s concrete & glass block housing the business empire of the Austrian born founder, Friederich Jahn. A household name in Germany in the 1970-90 times.

In 1955 he opened his first restaurant in Munich with his wife whose speciality was oven roasted chicken. By 1978 the company was Europe's largest restaurant chain with 700 units alone in Germany and 1,600 worldwide including the USA (even one in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel) employing 30,000 people. The company had expanded to include one of Germany's largest travel agencies, a manufacturer of industrial catering machines and Jahn also ran a few separate businesses in the USA such as Copper-Penny, LOVE'S, Ranch-House, IHOP and LUMS.

The business also ran the revolving restaurant atop the Munich Olympic Park tower where Jahn would according to legend often close it for the then very prominent Bavarian President, Franz Joseph Strauss, to hold meetings with people one didn't necessarily want to be public and Jahn himself would often be involved. Which probably explains the later semi allowed tax evasion scandals which together with seemingly left-wing press reports, lead to the collapse of the company when the banks pulled their support.

In 1982 Jahn was forced into bankruptcy and the chain (including his 880 USA units) were sold. The Bavarian State had control of the German business and sold it in 1986 to one of the Thyssen (steel) family and a friend of Jahn's. He then bought it back in 1987 and in turn in 1988 sold it to Grand Metropolitan plc, which is when my involvement started. with a week-long undercover tour in Bavaria together with a consultant friend of one of the GMplc's board members staying at Munich's finest hotel the Bayerische Hof which features every year as the scene of the Munich Security Conference and it's delegates of heads of state.

On the desk, all those things vital to us, especially the dictionaries - we somehow muddled through with the language. The coffee flask was though more important and Nigel had surrounded himself with maps of the UK on the wall, together with the postcard of the Austrian Emperor he had sent me a few weeks earlier.

No computer screens but a bottle of fluid Tippex. I did have a very snazzy laptop with integrated thermal paper printer and an external 5.25" floppy drive which all fitted in a double case that would not have been allowed on a modern (2018) aircraft as hand luggage. Back then it travelled with us weekly on the plane together with a large briefcase and at least one plastic dutyfree carrier bag.

This Friday lunchtime, I flew back to the UK and started a two week holiday. When I returned on Monday 3rd September, I met Nigel and his wife Liz in the Ratskeller in Munich for the final dinner before taking them the next morning to Munich airport and thereby ending his working stint in Germany.

A resident of Kent since the mid 80's, Nigel is passionate about his birth city Manchester (blue) but considers Munich his second home and luckily for me, he gets over here as much as time and wallet allows. His last visit in August 2017, fulfilled a longtime dream of being in Munich together with his three children, exactly 27 years to the day of this photo.