Lives in Cricket No 19 - Frank Sugg

Except for two years during the war, the company had made a profit every year since 1906. In the latest year, the company had made a profit of £4,107 5s 0d on sales of £68,138 0s 4d. Looking forward, the prospectus stated: ‘The future prospects of the Athletic Trade have never been so bright as at the present time and it is the aim of the Directors to be in the Forefront of Providers for all classes of Athletic Requisites.’ There was no mention of the sale of branches to HHB Sugg Ltd, now a rival in the market. The issue flopped. Only 665 shares had been allotted by 17 September 1920, with dribs and drabs of further allotments in succeeding weeks. The timing of the issue was unfortunate. The collapse of the boom that followed the war badly hit companies like Frank Sugg Ltd which supplied non-essential items like cricket bats and football boots. Competition in the less buoyant market was intense. Nevertheless, to outward appearances the company continued to trade successfully, including through its mail-order business, to publish substantial catalogues and to advertise in the usual places. But the company had over-reached itself. Additional branches it had opened since the war, and in particular its investments in the Netherlands, proved costly mistakes. Like many companies before and since, the Sugg brothers and their co-directors found that it was no easy matter to manage the process of expanding to a much larger scale of business, especially when the total market was not growing. The anticipated profits turned into losses, £4,972 0s 11d in the year to 31 January 1921. The company’s bankers demanded the repayment of loans. In an effort to remedy the situation, a capital reconstruction was undertaken with the Philip Mead Bat Co. Ltd, a business founded in 1919 and incorporated the following year, taking up a majority shareholding and promising additional funding. 105 Herbert Hooper and Edgar Jay of the Philip Mead Bat Company were appointed directors of Frank Sugg Ltd. By these events, Frank and Walter surrendered legal control of the company they had built up. Soon after, Frank Sugg Ltd’s manufacturing operations were discontinued and the Philip Mead Bat Company became the manufacturing arm of the two companies. The head office of Frank 110 Frank’s Business Career 105 Philip Mead, the Hampshire cricketer, was a partner in a sports retail business in Southampton, but had almost no personal involvement in the bat-making business bearing his name, as can be seen in Neil Jenkinson’s full account of Mead’s life, Hampshire’s Greatest Run-maker , published by Paul Cave in 1993. It is not known how the Sugg brothers made contact with this competitor business.