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It’s been a long time since venture capitalist Jon Moulton has been back to Stoke-on-Trent, but it’s a homecoming he’s looking forward to.
He had been due to be awarded an honorary doctorate by Staffordshire University in July, but his ceremony – which had been set to take place at the Kings Hall in Stoke – had to be postponed until the autumn due to unforeseen circumstances.
For the teenage Jon, who grew up in Little Chell, near Tunstall, the Kings Hall wasn’t so much a venue for celebrating academic success as a renowned dance venue – where he once had a drink at the bar at the age of 15 with renowned Who drummer Keith Moon.
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While he may have been out dancing and schmoozing with the stars by his teens, he’d spent much of childhood confined to bed due to debilitating health conditions, including tuberculosis, which went undiagnosed for years, and aplastic anaemia – which killed 92 per cent of sufferers at that time.
A pupil of Mill Hill Primary School and Hanley High School, Jon left the Potteries to study chemistry at Lancaster University. He started his career as an insolvency specialist with accountants Coopers & Lybrand before moving into the private equity business during a secondment in New York.
He returned to the UK in 1981 to run Schroder Ventures before moving to Apax Partners – and founded a new venture capital firm, Alchemy, in 1997.
Alchemy made its name investing in troubled companies that needed restructuring, and in 2000 came to prominence as the potential saviour of car maker Rover, as well as being linked to a possible takeover of Royal Doulton in 2001. Jon resigned from Alchemy in September 2009, and founded private equity firm Better Capital that same year.
And, likely inspired by his own childhood experience of ill health, he set up the Jon Moulton Charity Trust in 2018 which funds non-commercial clinical trials to ease suffering – and continue the work of his previous charity, the J P Moulton Charitable Foundation, which was established in 2004.
But despite his wealth, he came from humble beginnings in Stoke-on-Trent, where his father was a master copper engraver who ran his own small business designing patterns for the pottery industry. His grandfather – who ran an engineering firm – was also a huge inspiration and influence on the young Jon, who missed a lot of school due to illness.
Jon, who now lives in Guernsey, told StokeOnTrentLive: “My grandfather, Frank Turner Pointon, was a big part of my life growing up and had a tremendous influence on me. He had dug himself out of the back streets of Burslem and ran a 100-man engineering business called Insull and Pointon in Tunstall.
“He used to take me around to see the engineering sites and I learned a great deal about business and engineering before I was even 12.
“I was pretty unhealthy and my lungs were pretty terrible. In the six or seven minutes it took to walk to school, I used to get black lumps stuck to my shirt. I was pretty unfit and didn’t do a lot of sport, because I couldn’t – but I’m a very fast reader because I spent so much time lying in bed with a book.”
Jon was treated for bronchitis for four or five years before he was diagnosed with TB when a BCG test came out ‘massively positive’.
He said: “It turned out there was a big scar visible on my lung. But TB is a variable disease – not everyone died of it and I spontaneously recovered.”
Although his upbringing was rooted in the Potteries, Jon chose to go away to university and has rarely looked back – although he would like to see the city of his birth see a resurgence in fortune.
He said: “I went to Hanley High which in those days was a pretty good school. The education system was ripped up after I finished – before that people could move up and down the ladder.
“I then went on to study chemistry at Lancaster and had three good years before going into the real world. By the time I had finished university I don’t think there were more than one or two members of my class still living in Stoke-on-Trent. The jobs here were crumby and people just left.
“It’s bloody hard work. I sat on the Regional Growth Fund in David Cameron’s day and there were very few applications for money from Stoke-on-Trent. It’s a bit self-fulfilling and you get into a downward spiral – although there have always been local entrepreneurs like John Caudwell.
“The area needs to do some specialisation – it needs to be known for something. All the distribution jobs are OK but they’re not great and will never generate a lot of wealth. I’d like to see more focus on technical ceramics or advanced ceramics.”
He does have a permanent reminder of the city by his side in the form of wife Pauline, who he met a youth club at Christ Church in Tunstall. The couple have two children and six grandchildren – and when asked about his greatest achievement, he says it’s their 49-year marriage.
And while you can take the boy out of Stoke-on-Trent you can never quite take Stoke-on-Trent out of the boy.
Jon said: “My contact with the area has mostly died away over the years but I’m looking forward to seeing Stoke-on-Trent again. I still regularly eat oatcakes – I like them with cheese, mushroom and tomato. I get them vacuum-packed from High Lane Oatcakes.”
Hopefully he’ll have time to pay a visit to the shop when returns to the city to collect his honorary degree in the autumn.
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