Lord Noon Kt, MBE of St John’s Wood
An Oration to Welcome Him as Fellow of Birkbeck, 26 th April
2012.
Master, Distinguished Governors, Graduates and Guests.
One afternoon in 1946, a 10-year old boy was sitting in a sultry,
soporific classroom in the Central School in the Mohammedali
Road, Bombay. He was rather more interested in the news he
could hear being called out by the town-crier outside the
classroom than what was happening inside it, when suddenly he
heard the town-crier announcing a death, and recognised with
horror the name of his own father. Only when classes finished an
hour later was he able to rush home to greet his distraught
mother and family and vow that, from now on, he would look
after them in place of his father. It is like the beginning of a
novel, but in fact it marks the moment at which Gulam Noon
entered into the sense of his own independent existence, in the
year before his own country would assume its independence, in
so painful and bloody a birth.
It was not for some years that Noon, as he was always called by
his mother, and prefers still to be called, cordially detesting his
given name Gulam, was able to take over the running of the
family sweets business. I must briefly glance ahead in my story to
remark that when he was receiving his knighthood from the
Queen, he implored her not to call him Sir Gulam, but just plain
Gulam, but she firmly declined the offer, remarking ‘Sir Gulam,
we give these titles, so we had better use them’. Fortunately I am
spared the sovereign’s discomfiture by the fact that Gulam Noon
was subsequently elevated in 2011 to a life peerage, allowing his
title and nickname to be agreeably conjoined as Lord Noon.
The Bombay in which the boy who was still plain Noon grew up
was vividly and generously cosmopolitan, with food a powerfully
connecting force. Raised a Muslim, he was nevertheless appalled
by what he once heard in a madrassa, that a Muslim should
never eat sweets made by a Hindu. Later, he was to change the
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name of the family business from Kamruddin Ebrahamjee to
Royal Sweets, in a successful effort to encourage non-Muslims to
come through the door.
He arrived in Britain on 30th June 1966, on a day when the
country was preoccupied with a certain sporting event at
Wembley that turned out rather well. It was just as auspicious a
day for Gulam Noon as for the England football team, though his
success was to be both longer in coming and more long-lived
when it did.
He began by opening up a UK version of Royal Sweets, cashing
up the princely sum of £68 after his first week’s trading. But
business boomed following the arrival in Britain of large numbers
of Asians displaced from Uganda after 1972. His breakthrough
moment came when he decided to do what no Indian of any
discernment would ever dream of doing, namely to sample a
range of the unspeakable boil-in-the-bag curries that were offered
for sale in British supermarkets in the 1970s. As so often,
invention and enterprise were fuelled by a kind of moral outrage,
that such culinary enormities could be perpetrated on the
digestive systems of British people. He set to work to reproduce
the ingredients and techniques that he had known growing up in
India, his one-room apartment in Bombay an alchemical crucible
of smells and sensations. In 1988, he founded Noon Foods, with
11 people in a small factory in Southall. It must have been a
source of deep gratification to him when he got his first order in
February 1989 from Bird’s-Eye, the very purveyors of the listless,
slithery confections he had encountered just a few years before,
who gave him an order worth £2.7 million.
Since then, his business has grown irresistibly, based around an
insistence on authenticity – those of us who grew up eating
sultanas and apple in our school curries will be eternally grateful
to him for seeing them off – and the innovative use of high
production techniques. When he began to supply meals to
Sainsbury and Waitrose, he found himself having gone from
nothing to a £16 million turnover in 5 years. Today there are over
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1400 employees, who prepare millions of meals every month. He
invented Bombay Mix, and when he renamed the dish known as
Chicken Makhanwala to Chicken Tikka Masala, gave birth to the
nation’s favourite meal. He has been called the ‘Curry King’ and
has himself remarked that, where the British conquered India
with gunpowder, India returned the compliment by reconquering
Britain with curry powder. And through all this, he has tried
always to stay true to the ordinary, domestic values of food. He
advises anybody in the food trade trying to sell a product to make
an appointment at 12 o’ clock when the stomachs of your
purchasers are starting to rumble as lunch approaches.
Lord Noon has known more drama and violence in his life than
one might have thought was his due as a businessman. Once, as
a young man travelling from London to Bombay, his plane had to
make an emergency landing and he was instrumental in securing
the escape of the passengers and crew. Twice, in 1978 and then
again in November 1994, he has seen his business premises
devastated by fire. On both occasions, he simply set to work to
rebuild the business, insisting on the latter occasion on
continuing to pay his employees their wages at a cost of £80,000
a week until he was able to rebuild his factory and take them on
again.
In 2008, he was eating dinner with executives in the Taj Mahal
hotel in Mumbai when he heard gunfire. He barricaded himself in
his room as terrorists went up and down the corridors, firing,
and scouring the hotel for British and American passport
holders. Some hours into the siege, smoke from a fire that had
broken out on the fifth floor began filling his room; it was only
after the fire service eventually caught sight of him waving from
his window that he was hoisted to safety by a crane.
In recent years, Sir Gulam has distinguished himself as a
philanthropist of both generosity and vision. He has been a
supporter of the Prince’s trust since the 1980s, and in 1995
established his own charitable enterprise, the Noon Foundation –
in fact he had established such a foundation, though on a
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smaller scale, many years before in Bombay in 1969. He has
supported a large number of causes and initiatives, including, for
example, the British Library’s Turning the Pages project, that
allowed treasures like the Sultan Baybar’s Qur’an and an
important seventeenth-century manuscript of the Ramayana to
be leafed through digitally by visitors. This kind of philanthropy
is in fact a family tradition, his father having built a hospital with
the profits from his business in Sunel, a hospital provided with a
plaque announcing that it was open to all castes and creeds.
Lord Noon has always had a particular interest in health, being a
founder member of Cancer Research UK and a supporter of the
Marie Curie Foundation. In 2008, he flew back to his home town
to watch the opening ceremony of the Noon Hospital that he had
built in memory of the mother who had been such an inspiration
to him. He has been on the advisory board of Bridges Ventures, a
venture capital firm which invests in socially beneficial projects
in deprived areas of the UK. We have particular reason in
Birkbeck to be grateful for his generosity, for, since 2007, the
Noon Foundation has donated £300,000 to provide bursaries to
Birkbeck students.
He was awarded the MBE In 1996, for services to the food
industry, and, as I have already mentioned, received a
knighthood in 2002 and a baronetcy in 2011. In 1998, he was
honoured by the Asian Business Network’s Outstanding Lifetime
Achievement Award. But this is already a good part of a lifetime
ago, and he has continued working steadily and uninterruptedly
since. He has however pencilled in a date for his retirement –
January 2038, when he will turn 102. So it is not any kind of
surprise that the final words of his autobiography, published in
2008, should read ‘what next?’
There is no doubt much to come for, and from Lord Noon. More
immediately, however, we are glad to have this opportunity to
signify our gratitude for the invaluable support he has given our
students and to honour his achievements by welcoming him now
as Fellow of Birkbeck.