Prater: Leave the Financials to Me

By John Haynes

Frank Prater served as a British army officer throughout World War II, a commission granted by His Majesty King George VI due, in part, to his university degree, a Bachelor of Science. Major K. F. Prater married Rose Haynes, whose brothers ran a large furniture manufacturing company dating back to the early twenties. He began working for the Haynes brothers family firm around 1946 and soon became financial director, which is where his financial escapades began. The story covers five of his several financial adventures spanning the period 19461975.
Frank Prater was a clever man who possessed a good knowledge of the law that enabled him to pick out any laws weaknesses and ruthlessly exploit them. He was an arrogant man who would invest a few minutes assessing an adversary in order to identify weaknesses and shortcomings before using them to mercilessly crush his opponent. Any proposition that was put to Prater, when the presenter had not done his homework, was ruthlessly and publicly rejected leading that presenter in search of an alternative career or better, to ensure that he never repeated that omission.
He did not doubt his ability to raise millions of pounds at any time of his choosing; indeed, that is exactly what he did. The way he set about it is the entertaining part of the story.
Whilst it is accepted that he fell foul of the law, he engendered loyalty and a strange kind of love from those around him. Ironically, the independent onlooker would always find himself wishing Prater to succeed yet eagerly awaiting his inevitable downfall.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Apr 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481789523

John Haynes

John Haynes was born in East London in 1939 and became acquainted with some extremely interesting people before deciding in his mid thirties to make use of an education acquired at one of the most prestigious Grammar schools, Parmiter Foundation. He worked for a well known merchant bank until 1989 since when he spent fifteen years as a company director and still runs his own business today. He has taken a decision to write of the escapades of his friends, relatives and himself during his early adult life in a poor area of London because the violence and criminal activities can have a humorous aspect.

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Table of Contents

Foreword

Family Business

Airplanes

Casinos

The Hosiery Business

Airline Tickets

Accountability

Conclusion

This book is dedicated to my Aunt Rose and my two cousins, Sandie and Jacqui – Frank’s late wife and two beautiful daughters.

Foreword

WHEN CHALLENGED TO DESCRIBE a man one has known closely for more than fifty years, one rarely refers to that man’s appearance. The description usually centres on the man’s character and demeanour. Such consistent descriptions of character help the writer to accurately portray such a unique and multitalented man, a man of arrogance and strength of character, Kenneth Frank Prater.

Whilst others took time taking stock of the obstructions to and ramifications of their proposed actions, Frank took action and dealt with them. An action man can be dynamic but, a highly-educated action man takes all before him and can be dangerous. Frank was dangerous, because what the normal man would see as a fear-inspiring minefield, infiltrated with pitfalls, he regarded as the mere trivia that besets every businessman every day, nothing that would mar his onward progression towards his aims and acquisitions.

Frank experienced several periods throughout his working life when the financial well ran dry; however, these were interjected by phases when he had millions of pounds at his disposal. Amazingly, his character and personality remained unchanged on his journey through these highs and lows, and he never looked backwards. Discussing last year’s successes will never pay this year’s bills, he believed, and so he always chose to look forward.

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings,

And never breathe a word about your loss:

Kipling’s poem ‘If’ was not written with the character of Kenneth Frank Prater in mind; however, this short excerpt makes a glancing touch upon his personality and strength of will. His surviving former adversaries may find it difficult to understand the writer’s obvious admiration and love for Frank, but it is hoped that the reader will empathise with the character that Frank undoubtedly was.

The reader is invited to understand that when the badly educated write up laws, the well educated will undoubtedly use them. Frank Prater said, ‘Never fear a law that shows no fear of you.’ His lack of respect for the law and lawmakers led him to cleverly devise courses of action that, whilst intended for deception, extraction, and concealment, frustrated and beguiled incompetent law enforcers. He would never embark on a financial escapade without a study of the existing statutory laws designed to criminalise and therefore eliminate such an escapade. Badly written law is unenforceable law and makes little or no allowance for the educated, who will use it to enhance their power.

Powerful men are not trained to be powerful; they simply are.

Family Business

IT WAS LUNCHTIME IN the City of London on a bright summer’s day in 1979. Hundreds of thousands of people were briskly walking in thousands of different directions, all with a common purpose – to visit a cafe or sandwich bar to buy lunch, which they would eat out or whisk back to their desks and devour during the continuation of their work. A sandwich lunch, sent out for and eaten at one’s desk without cessation of work, was thought to be a credit point accumulator with the office manager, which probably explains the growth of the number of sandwich bars in the city at that time. I emerged from the one of my choice with the sandwich of my choice, ham with a sliced hardboiled egg generously coated with English mustard, and was about to quickly return to my desk at the offices of S. G. Warburg & Co. Ltd. to sit down and eat, when I suddenly saw a familiar face.

I had not seen my cousin Jacqui Prater for a year or so, and therefore a lengthy chat was justified, ruling out a prompt return to my desk. My sandwich was no less delicious when eaten sitting on a park bench near St Paul’s churchyard chatting to my long since seen cousin and swapping news about various branches of our large family. Jacqui’s mother was my father’s sister Rose, who was married to Frank Prater, Jacqui’s father. Aunt Rose met Frank when she entered a singing competition during the war years and Frank was the band’s pianist. The army had organised the competition and Rose came second; the winning singer was a young lady by the name of Vera Lynn.

The rather unusual name of Prater originates from the Latin word Praetor (Classical Latin: prajtor), a title granted by the government of ancient Rome to a reeve, a bailiff, or an elected magistrate. In Roman oral Latin, the term used when referring to authority was praetorium imperium and the Praetorian Guard, which later provided personal protection to the emperor following the collapse of the republic, was so named with reference to their authority over high-ranking army officers. A more unlikely source of the name is the German advice counsellor, or ‘Rat’ counsellor, that originated from Rath and Rathen in Germany and became known as raters, which became a family name. The Anglo-Saxon movement into Wales would have resulted in the Welsh prefix Ap, meaning ‘son of’. The Welsh pre-Plantagenet rejection of Anglo-Saxon domination that continues to this day would seem to add more credibility to the Roman (Latin) origin.

Aunt Rose had died a few years earlier, 7 December 1973, and Frank Prater now found himself on his own, in more ways than one. He was currently serving four years for defrauding the airlines out of more than four million pounds in airline tickets. In today’s money the total defrauded would have been counted in several millions, which alone merits the section of the book that has been assigned to it.

As the hour allotted to my lunch break neared its end, I suggested to Jacqui that perhaps we could meet for a proper lunch on an arranged day the following week. She had explained earlier that she was contracted to do IT work for a city bank, and as an independent contractor her hours were flexible, so I suggested a day thinking it would be suitable to her.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, John, I can’t make that day,’ she said. ‘I have arranged to take my accounts and VAT return to Wandsworth Prison for Daddy to sign off. On yearend figures he’s very good, as you know.’

As the words left her mouth she realised what she had said, and wry grins appeared on both our faces, for although she loved her father dearly, she was fully aware of all Frank Prater’s faults.

Kenneth Frank Prater was born in March 1916, in south London, to Welsh parents, but his childhood and formative years were spent in Cardiff, where he attended Cardiff University, achieving a BSc. Upon leaving university in 1938, war was imminent and his educational qualifications landed him a king’s commission progressing to the rank of major by the end of the war. It was around this period that he met and married my father’s sister, Rose Haynes. Frank, though barrel-chested, was of slight build, with a gaunt look on his freckled face always adorned by black horn-rimmed spectacles. My first memories of his appearance and demeanour was of a man smartly dressed in a double-breasted diagonal striped suit, somewhat shiny by repeated pressing. He wore highly polished black Oxford shoes and loudly expressed opinions of everything and everyone. The remnants of a ginger mane were always covered by a black Homburg hat, which he continued to wear in the office, albeit pushed slightly backwards. Whenever I think of Frank Prater, this is the image I have of him.

Frank Prater’s marriage to Rose Haynes, although a mismatch in educations, was a true love match, where they both made different contributions to the marital harmony. Frank’s financial misbehaviour in business had little or no effect on their domestic bliss. Being an educated man, he was able to totally eliminate from his home life outside business problems that would have brought down lesser men. However, this marriage introduced Frank into a well-known family in Bethnal Green that had been furniture manufacturers for generations – the Haynes family. Rose’s four brothers were Frank (Big Frank), Albert G. (Bert), Frederick and John A. (Buck) Haynes, who were all directors of F. and A. G. Haynes Limited, one of the biggest furniture manufacturers in London in 1947. My memories of this are quite clear, because I, at the tender age of eight years old, was awarded the paid position of tea boy, which I fulfilled prior to school in the morning and after school in the afternoon. Being Buck Haynes’s son did not afford me any escape or protection from the practical joking of the numerous men employed in the machine shops and polishing shops, such as ordering six kipper sandwiches, twelve slices of toast with marmite on the bottoms, three bacon sandwiches without custard and rock cakes that must be hard. I would write these orders out, but the bastards would telephone the Victory Cafe in Hackney Road, where I would go to collect their refreshments, with their correct orders and then remonstrate with me for not getting them what they had requested. One grows up fast – my revenge was forthcoming and sugary sweet.

The preservation, maintenance and continuance of the family business were made possible throughout the war years by some strange unofficial government policy that, in effect, placed a limit on the number of combat servicemen that any one family could be forced to provide conditional upon the non-combatants holding protected positions, for example, policemen, firemen and paramedics. Big Frank and Bert Haynes very quickly joined the police force and simultaneously ran the family business from 1939 to 1945, whilst Frederick Haynes served in the Far East fighting the Japanese and my father Buck Haynes served in France and Germany. The preservation of the business provided the availability of immediate paid work for Frederick and Buck when they were demobilised from the armed forces, an advantage shared by few.

Although he was a major in the army, he discovered his rank to be of negligible assistance out of the army, and Rose approached her brothers with a view to finding her husband, Frank Prater, a position in the family business. A positive decision was taken by Big Frank and Bert, who were in effect still running the firm, and Frank Prater suddenly found himself an employee of F. and A. G. Haynes Limited. He soon proved to be totally unsuited for manual work of any description, but Frank was a university-educated man (a rarity in those days) and found himself working in the office with an increasing number of executive responsibilities landing on his desk. To an educated man, as he doubtless was, bookkeeping, payroll, banking, invoicing and general office work were menial tasks that he covered effortlessly. During his first six months working in the family business, he would sit in his office and endure the tedium, but his creative brain broke free from the boredom, and without any consultation with Big Frank and Bert Haynes, the directors of the company, he began a mental re-examination of the operation, the aims, the products and general pricing policy of F. and A. G Haynes Limited. His mental analyses of these different areas led him to the opinion that the business was underperforming. Being an opinionated man by nature, he felt an irresistible urge to express his views. Here he was faced with the problem of his own lack of tact and diplomacy, a disadvantage that forced him to express his deeply felt views in a forthright and arrogant manner, urged on by his sincere belief that he, Frank Prater, had the solutions to all the problems and, even more importantly, possessed the business acumen to grow the company beyond the Haynes brothers’ wildest dreams. He also could sound very patronising when he spoke to people who lacked his education, as the Haynes brothers undoubtedly did.

The other side of this potentially explosive chemical equation stood Big Frank Haynes, without doubt the dominant director of the company, who took great pride in having nurtured the company through the austere years prior to, during, and after WW2. His stoicism and steadfastness, along with that of his brother Bert Haynes, had steered the firm through an extremely difficult period, during which many others had fallen by the wayside. Big Frank, my uncle, would say to me whilst I was a very young boy, ‘If you are still on your feet at the end of a fight, you have won.’ I am sure that he applied that principle to the running of the company, ensuring that it would remain to benefit from the supposedly lucrative post-war years. He was a formidable man, six feet four inches in height, with little control of his temper and would cede nothing to anybody who might challenge his ideas of how the firm should operate. It would have taken an explosive charge to separate Big Frank from his views and opinions on how the firm should go forward. Since it was impossible to market furniture en masse during the war years, F. and A. G. Haynes had specialised in the manufacture of small amounts of high quality items, mostly made to order for specific customers who could afford to pay the high prices that such products attracted. Big Frank Haynes regarded the continuation of this policy as the optimum way forward in the immediate post-war years, not least because it kept the factories in production, his skilled men employed and eliminated cash-flow problems at a time when bank borrowing was virtually non-existent. Overriding all his economic and commercial thinking was his almost boyish pride in the ornate beauty and solid-timber quality of the output of the family firm. I recall a solid-oak table of such size and beauty that was manufactured for the Japanese embassy, built in sections in order to facilitate transfer between the machine and polishing workshops and final transportation to the embassy. When his men had finished work for the evening, Big Frank would walk his brothers through the silent workshops and invite them to feast their eyes on the sturdiness and the seductive beauty of the table sections throughout their various stages of development from the saw mills to the polishing shops. He would draw their attention to the hand carving, the positioning of the natural wood grain and the glass-like finishing of the French polishing, all of which the brothers had learned from their father, and he from his.

Frank Prater felt no such emotional attachment to the quality or beauty of the company’s output: to him, a piece of furniture was simply an item of product to be marketed, nothing more. His ideas and aspirations for the company, which he had begun to forcefully voice, were growth in turnover, mass production, countrywide marketing through national and international advertising and the building of a sales team to cover