My father Peter Hick was a toweringly (6ft 3in) popular figure in the timber trade in the 1970s and 80s – a former president of the Timber Trade Federation and chairman of TRADA for several years. He was known as “The Poet” and was a much sought-after after-dinner speaker at every regional dinner and brought the house down many times at the national dinner with his incisive and observational wit. He was much loved by Scandinavian Ambassadors for speaking totally fluent Swedish (and pretty good Norwegian and Finnish). He famously knew more Swedish drinking songs than most Swedes having lived and worked in sawmills in Sweden for a year in his early 20s.
Peter was the fourth generation to run the family timber importing and merchanting business, Beecroft & Wightman, established in Bradford by his great-grandfather John Wightman in 1864. By the end of the 19th century, it was one of the biggest timber businesses in Yorkshire and in 1898 opened a substantial sawmill and storage yard in Hull (ultimately covering some 20 acres). By the 1970s, Beecroft & Wightman Holdings Ltd was a substantive group employing several hundred people via eight subsidiaries, including joinery manufacturers Tait of Hull and RG Fowler.
Arundel & Co coated every lighthouse in Britain and in 1895 my great-grandfather Charles John Wightman backed a man called Davenport who had registered various water engineering patents. The first Cooling Towers in the world (12 of them) were built entirely of timber (140ft high) at Bradford Power Station in 1897 and Davenport Engineering went on to build and maintain all the curved concrete cooling towers (375ft high) in UK coal powered power stations. It also had a substantial water-cooling business in the US.
Peter Wightman Hick was born in Bradford in 1934 and, after national service as a second lieutenant in the Green Howards, he was sent by his uncle Charles Wightman to run the Hull operation, becoming group managing director in 1965, a position he held until the business was sold to May & Hassell Plc in 1984.
He was development director of Hunter Timber until his retirement in 1990. In his heyday he spent six weeks a year touring Scandinavia and Russia buying timber direct from his many friends in the trade.
He was a good cricketer and golfer and an extremely well known and popular figure in the Hull and East Yorkshire business community – captain and president of Brough Golf Club (1898), co-founder and chairman of Hull and Humberside Round Table, president of Hull Literary Club and master of its Annual Yuletide Revels which attracted a sell-out crowd of 500 guests to its yearly Christmas dinner, where Dad would write and direct an hour’s worth of songs and sketches as a revue/review of the year with a cast of 10 (including myself) and a small orchestra. It was the highlight of the business social year.
