Reo Stakis: a rags-to-riches success story
Hotel tycoon Reo Stakis died last week, aged 88, after suffering a stroke in June. He was one of the great hoteliers in 20th-century British hospitality. David Harris looks back at his career.
Reo Stakis was an immigrant entrepreneur of the first order. As a rags-to-riches stereotype, he remains hard to beat. The famous episode of his arrival at Victoria railway station, aged 14, with a suitcase full of his mother's lace, which he had to sell to raise money for his family in Cyprus, is a story you would expect to find in a novel.
It was 1928, and the station was clearly already a gathering place for petty thieves. Stakis had his suitcase stolen and, if not for an alert railway security man, would never have got it back.
The man who had been born Argiros Anastasis in 1913, but decided to change his name to the shorter Reo Stakis, could have had a very different fate.
As things turned out, Stakis proved to be a remarkable salesman. Travelling around the country on an AJS motorcycle, then in a Morris Cowley car, he was, by the 1930s, taking home sums approaching £1,000 on his trips back to Cyprus. That was a small fortune in those days.
His success was partly fuelled by an audacious ability to offer his wares to anybody. In Edinburgh he even wrote a personal note to Queen Mary, wife of George V, and delivered it to Holyrood House, the royal couple's residence in Scotland. The result was an order and a £13 cheque signed "Mary". Stakis never cashed it.
The money he made from his salesman's talents provided Stakis with the stake for his first restaurant in Glasgow. It had 40 seats and Stakis called it Victory, because it opened at the end of the war.
Still in his early 30s, Stakis showed himself to be a businessman in a hurry. He opened another restaurant opposite the Victory, called the Acropole, and followed it with a string of others, including the Ivy, L'Aperitif and Princes restaurants.
Like many business people before and since, Stakis discovered that banks were not the only place from which to borrow money. The Younger brewery became an important partner and financier.
Stakis was willing to take calculated risks and, mostly, they paid off. By the 1960s he had a chain of 30 eating houses, hotels and bars throughout Scotland. Casinos were then added and have remained an important part of the Stakis company since.
The group made an unsuccessful attempt at flotation in 1971, because the market was less than enthusiastic, but Stakis recovered to make a successful float the following year.
By 1991, when Reo Stakis retired, his group had an annual turnover of £150m with pre-tax profits of £30m and 8,000 staff. But flotation had other consequences, and two years ago the family lost control of the company Reo Stakis had founded and it was bought by Hilton.
Regardless, it cannot take away from the achievement of Reo Stakis in the 20th-century British hotel business.
That achievement was formally recognised in 1988, when Stakis was honoured with a knighthood during the time of Margaret Thatcher's government. It was granted not for his support of the Conservative Party, but for the jobs his company had provided and the boost he had given to the hotel industry in this country.
A man who had started his life as the son of a farmer in the Cypriot village of Kato-Drys was to end it as a pillar of the British establishment.
In addition to interviews and material from Caterer's archives, this obituary is indebted to Stakis, by Jack Webster, the biography of Reo Stakis, which is published by B&W Publishing of Edinburgh.
