In the latter part of the 1960's I was working for a firm of City stockbrokers. One lunchtime I wandered into one of my colleagues offices to see if he wanted to go to lunch. Those were the days when we had separate offices and long, and often liquid, lunches were the norm! Guy Tamplin was on the telephone talking to a client about Marks & Spencer shares. When he had finished he told me, for no particular reason, that his mother had worked in the chairman's office of Marks & Spencer. I said that's a coincidence as my mother had worked in the managing director's office. In those days there was a great pride in working for Marks & Spencer. Hence the reason that we were both aware of our respective mother's work experiences.
As a result we swapped mother's maiden names. When I got home I told my mother, Joan née Isard, the story. I had not expected the response. She told me that Valerie née Hobson, Guy's mother, had been a friend of her's at Marks & Spencer and, more significantly, had been her bridesmaid when she married my father, John Lewis, in 1941.
