HOTEL BOUGHT FOR £100,000

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 64, 18 December 1946, Page 6

HOTEL BOUGHT FOR £IOO,OOO

ONE-TIME ERRAND BOY’S SUCCESS-

OPENED FIRST WEST END SNACK BAR

A 9s a week grocer’s boy was delivering tea at an hotel in London’s West End. ‘Td like to have a posh place like that,” he told a friend, jingling the 3jjd ‘capital” in his pocket.

And now, 40 years after, Mr Arthur McKenzie, onetime grocer’s boy, milk roundsman, “hash-sling-er” in a Canadian restaurant, and English shopkeepei’, has bought the 150 bed-roomed Green Park Hotel, London, W., for £IOO,OOO. In his modestly furnished home in Hampstead, Mr McKenzie, now in his 56th year, told a Daily Mail reporter how, as a penniless milk roundsman, he determined to go to Canada. He saved, and sailed to the New World there from counter assistant in a small town restaurant he rose to be manager.

When the first world war came he sailed to England to join the army; but there was £IOO in his pocket, the capital for which he had longed, and when he was demobilised in 1918 he bought a small confectionery business in London. In ten years the little shop had become the 75 branches of ‘•Lavells,” with country-wide repute.

But the way was not to be as easy as that. In the 1933 slump Laveils was bankrupt and the onetime grocer’s boy started from scratch again.

With £2OO saved and a brilliant idea, he the first West End snack bar, in Great Windmill Street.

Now, head of a limited company, with • an annual turnover of £500,000 and owning a string of six of the most popular West End restaurants, including the Chicken Inn, Haymarket, the man has bought the dream of a boy. ' Mrs McKenzie is a co-director.