ERRAND BOY BUYS £100,000 HOTEL

Rotorua Morning Post, Issue 5287, 27 December 1946, Page 3

ERRAND BOY BUYS £100,000 HOTEL

A 9s a week grocer's boy was delivering tea at an hotel in London's West End. "I'd like to have pcsh place like that," he told a friend, jingling the -3d "capital" in his pocket. And now, 40 years after, Mr. Arthur McKenzie, one-time grocer's boy, milk roundsman, "hash-slinger" in a Canadian restaurant, and English shopkeeper, has bought the 150 bedroomed Green Park Hotel, London, W., for £100,000. In his mo-destly 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 £100 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 "Lavells was bankrupt and the one-time grocer's boy started from scratch ag-ain. With £200 saved and a brilliant idea, he opened 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 anan has bought the dream of a boy. Mrs. McKenzie is a co-director.