RISE OF THE CLORE CONGLOMERATE

Before the war, Sir Charles Clore, the son of an East End tailor, was beginning to find his feet in the property world.

His efforts varied from developing the Prince of Wales theatre, buying old country estates for their timber, to building ordnance depots and other factories.

Today he is a millionaire many times over and chairman of the British Shoe Corporation which dominates the £500m shoe industry.

Through his Sears Holding group, Clore controls some 2,000 retail shoe outlets throughout Britain.

In this way Sears Holdings has 22 per cent of the retail footwear sales, 8 , per cent of national production and 12 per cent of all retail outlets.

The group itself is Britain's 39th biggest enterprise and is involved in engineering as well as shoes with the ownership of Furness Shipbuilding.

Last year the group's turnover was over £320m and profits almost £40m made from Sears' 59,000 workers.

Known as the takeover king, Clore is always in the news, usually rubbing. another group of capitalists up the wrong way. Last week Sears Holdings' f30m bid for Timpson Shoes was referred to the Monopolies Commission.

The City was extremely puzzled, however, by the fact that a rival and lower bid by United Drapery Stores was not to be referred.

Not surprisingly, UDS's advisers, Hill Samuel, were delighted with the outcome. 'It is just what we have expected all along from the Department Trade and they commented cryptically.

Throughout the 1950s Clore combined the acquisition of shoe firms with the development of his property business.

His technique was to use the devastating combination of sale and leaseback and takeover bids. The essence of the operation was that most of the companies victim to takeover had their properties in their balance sheets at pre-war values and did not have a clear idea of their post-war values, or indeed how to realize them.

In January 1953 Clore bid for the long-established company of J. Sears. They controlled the famous Freeman Hardy and Willis chain of 900 shoe shops.

Sears' directors tried to fight Clore off and told their shareholders that at least f6m could be raised on the company's properties. It was a shock to them all because they appeared in the books at no more than £2.3m.

Clore offered 40s for shares which had stood around 13s when he first began buying. Not even the desperate raising of the dividend by Sears to over 52 per cent could stop the takeover.

When he had won control, Clore promptly sold £4}m worth of the shoe shops and then took back long leases; there was another f4m worth of property left. The money realized from the sale and the leaseback of his own shops was then devoted to his future takeovers.

Before long, another 100 shoe shops were taken into the fold of the newly-created Sears Holding company through the buying up of the Curtess and Philipps Brothers Character Shoes chains.

In 1956 Dolcis and Manfield multiples fell to Clore, giving him at the time 1,500 shoe shops, six important factories and the leading share of the shoe trade.

It was also in 1956 that Clore bought the Park Lane site on which the London Hilton Hotel now stands. It cost him £550,000 and was something of a bargain. The seller needed the money to pay off family death duties.

By the time the hotel was finished it had cost f5}m and was worth f7m on the market.

With the arrival of the 1960s, Clore began to move against more rival shoe firms. Here he also formed one of the most unstable property relationships ever known with Jack Cotton's City Centre company.

First Clore began buying shares in an important competitor in the shoe field, Lilley and Skinner, which had some 500 shops.

Then he approached Saxone with a plan to merge the Bro Sears' subsidiary, group with his own creation, Shoe.

On the property side, the merger of Cotton's City Centre with Clore's City and Central produced a company worth, said the stock exchange, £65m.

Clore's personal slice was worth over £14m and represented what he had made out of property between 1945 and 1960.

The marriage proved completely unworkable. As time wore on Cotton developed a sort of megalomania, encouraging the image of the greatest property man of all time.

In 1961 Cotton spoke about a t/0m plan to build an office complex above a railway station in Chicago - a deal which never came off. He once remarked: 'Someone once referred to the three C's - Cotton, Clore_ and Colombus. I like that. I feel fine. It is how I feel.' Perhaps the most remarkable of Cotton's plans were those to move all the hospitals out of central London and to redevelop the valuable sites.

Cotton died in March 1964, shortly after resigning his position on the board. And eventually City Centre Properties was swallowed by Sir Harold Samuel's Land Securities to form a property company worth more than £325m.

Now the shoe industry is entering something of a crisis, with foreign competition already accounting for nearly 32 per cent of the domestic market.

William Timpson, which Clore wants to take over, has just shut down its Maltby, Yorkshire, factory, later selling it to a travel goods company, and closes others this month at Kettering, Northants.

Production in Britain was 200.8 million pairs of shoes in 1968, but in 1970 it had fallen to 190.5 million and to about 185.7 million last year.

With Common Market entry a few weeks away, the trend towards rationalization and mergers already so predominant in the British shoe industry will undoubtedly accelerate.

And it cannot be long before Clore follows other British capitalists and takes the road to Europe in a direct sense, moving capital out of Britain for the purpose.