History

David Webster was born to be an entrepreneur. As a child during the war years of food shortage he bred rabbits and grew vegetables to supply to friends and neighbours and after the war frequently spent Sunday mornings and school holidays working at his uncle Frank’s new company Bell and Webster, breaking reinforced concrete by hand to recover the steel.

David went to work full time at Bell and Webster initially as a junior office clerk and then, after about 6 weeks, as general foreman which effectively left David in charge of the works. At that stage the works employed around 20 men, all bigger, older and wiser than him. He grew up quickly, but acquired their respect by efficiently allocating them the work that enabled them to earn the maximum amount of money they could.

David fulfilled a number of roles in the rapidly growing company, but his move into the lighting industry proper came when he was appointed manager of the newly constructed concrete column spinning factory. David was always one to make a virtue out of a problem and when a delegation from Herts CC was showered with concrete slurry during a demonstration of concrete spinning, he merely used it as a vehicle to be remembered in their minds.

As a result of the move into this column manufacturing, he attended his first Lighting Engineers Conference in 1958 and subsequently attended every one after that up to and including 2005. In 1959 the column erection division was started and found a rapidly expanding market.

David soon had to make a choice between the installation business and the manufacturing business and chose the former. By 1960 Bell and Webster had become Eleco, a public company and in a scenario replicated many times over in public companies it had decided that column erection was “non-core” and not profitable enough. In July 1961 during a meeting at which David was attempting to get a higher salary out of Frank Webster, Frank allegedly said to David, “If your department is so profitable, why don’t you buy it and work as our sub-contractor?”.  David did just this.

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