Strong Woman: The Truth About Getting to the Top. Karren Brady
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myself into a project like a school play, when I’d put myself up as the director. It wasn’t that I wanted to be off drinking or doing things I shouldn’t, it was just that I couldn’t do what I wanted, whatever that happened to be.
What Poles Convent School did give me, however, was resilience and a belief in God that didn’t come from the hundreds of masses I attended, but from another experience. My friends and I were late back to school one afternoon, so I decided we’d tell the nuns that I’d hurt my ankle and we’d had to walk back very slowly. I was a good actress and laid on the pain very thick. So much so that the nuns decided to take me to hospital for an X-ray. I braced myself for a row, but at the hospital, after they’d done the X-ray, the staff told me my ankle was broken. I ended up spending that whole Easter in a cast. I realised that God moves in mysterious ways!
Divine intervention couldn’t get me out of that school though. I knew I had to spend years there and that all I could do was endure it. Even now I do things I don’t want to do because they need to be done. School taught me to stick things out.
Poles didn’t have a sixth form – thankfully! – so when I was 16 my parents had a rethink. Even they could see that Poles had left me without any life experience, and they looked for something a bit different. They sent me to Aldenham School in Elstree, a boys’ school that had been founded by a brewer some 500 years ago and took girls in the sixth form. It was quite a transition: from being surrounded by girls I went somewhere where I’d be spending all my time with boys.
I had some of the best times of my life at Aldenham and, looking back, I would say that was where my confidence began to build, with the sense that I could be whatever I wanted to be. Aldenham was a much more mature school than the convent, which suited me. You were given a lot of independence. You were expected to behave responsibly, so you did. In that respect, it was the opposite of Poles. At Aldenham I went from having no real experiences, never knowing any freedom, straight into this university-style school that had its own pub, allowed you to go out, and provided an environment for personalities to develop and adapt.
It’s interesting that two other successful businesswomen, Martha Lane Fox and Nicola Horlick, went to boys’ schools. All my friends at Aldenham were boys, and after Poles, it was a breath of fresh air. It suited me to be in a less emotional atmosphere. There was none of the jealousy there had been in my old school. Things were just simpler.
I made friends with four boys who were a year above me and we were like the musketeers – we did everything together, went everywhere together. People thought it was strange that we were a group of one girl and four boys, but those men are still my friends today – they were at my wedding, my children’s christenings and they come to my house to visit.
Living alongside them taught me a lot about where boys are coming from, and it’s pretty basic stuff. I think girls are like cats – we like our independence, want you only when we want you and like to be left alone sometimes. When we want something we’ll come to you, but most of the time we don’t want anything. Boys are like dogs – they need lots of exercise, lots of food and lots of pats on the head. To me, they’re simple creatures, very easy to work out. None of them tried to dominate me, something you might worry about if you pitched a girl into a school full of teenage boys. Mostly they seemed to want to look after me, but I didn’t need looking after. They all had their own little problems that I helped them with. I never really had any problems because I was quite happy with my life. And if I did have a problem, I never felt the need to discuss it.
So Aldenham taught me to hold my own, and it also provided a real insight into how to conduct myself around men. I learnt when not to be one of the lads. There was a real culture among some of the girls of matching the boys pint for pint, and that wasn’t me at all.
Still, much as I preferred Aldenham to the convent, I had a difficult year when my four friends left. I didn’t know anyone in my own year very well and so spent twelve months waiting for time to pass and school to finish. Another lesson in endurance: grit your teeth and get on with it.
I did the minimum amount of work for my A levels, but I used my initiative to help me through. In history, three subjects always came up, so of course I learnt those thoroughly. However, when I picked up the exam paper, there were questions only on two, leaving me a subject short. I had absolutely nothing to fall back on. But one of the other questions was, ‘Does a good history book make a good novel?’ I invented a book about the Second World War called My Struggle to fit the bill and wrote reams about it. I knew a little bit of German, so threw a few words in. Then the examination board wrote to the school asking for a copy of the book. There was a hairy moment when my housemaster asked me, ‘Does this book exist?’ and I insisted, ‘Of course it does!’ In the end, I said it was at my grandmother’s … and ended up with a B! If I’ve got to find my way around something, I will. I’m very resourceful.
And I do think boarding school, despite the frustrations and restrictions, was the making of me. It taught me to keep pushing the boundaries and showed me my strengths and what I was good at. I might not have been academic, but the challenges helped me realise I had valuable qualities: pride, a relentless drive, the capacity to make the best of difficult situations and self-reliance.
I left school at 18, having decided that I didn’t want to go to university. University was and is a great place to become a professional – a dentist, a lawyer, a doctor – but not necessarily for someone interested in marketing or sales, which was more my line. I wanted to go straight to work and start making money. To get on that road to independence.
I’d already had Saturday jobs, even though I’d been turned down for the first job I’d applied for, at Waitrose in Enfield. I’d gone in wearing a typical 16-year-old’s get-up with a pair of high-heeled white cowboy boots, and the guy said, ‘You can’t work here! You’re far too glamorous. You wouldn’t like it.’
‘No, I really want to. I need the money and I want to earn,’ I said, but he wouldn’t employ me. I have never set foot inside a Waitrose store since that day.
Instead I’d got a job in a hairdresser’s, working on the reception desk. By the end of the first day I had completely reorganised it. I’d reworked the rotas, changed the opening hours, reset the till and redone the pricing. I was even advising people on what they should have done with their hair. I think the staff were a bit shocked – ‘You can’t do that, you don’t know anything about hair’ – but I said, ‘Well, you can tell red hair’s not going to suit that person.’ To me it was just logic; there was no real art to realising that someone should go dark instead of blonde. And once they got used to me they appreciated me and were sorry when the holidays ended and I had to go back to school.
By this point, Dad was saying to me, ‘What are we going to do with you? What job are you going to get?’ He had a friend who worked at an estate agent’s, so it was sorted: ‘You can be an estate agent.’ Logical, like me. I did go for the interview but then I thought, What am I doing here? I don’t want to be an estate agent. So I refused to take it any further. That great drive for independence was tied to a determination that no one was going to tell me what to eat for breakfast, let alone what to do with my life.
Fortunately, Aldenham had laid on lots of careers days where different companies came in and talked to us, including Saatchi & Saatchi, and LBC, the London radio station. Lots of people were interested, but whereas everybody else thought maybe they’d write to them at some point, I made sure I had all the right details before the people left and the next day I was on the phone making appointments to see them. I wasn’t going to leave things to chance.
And both companies I was interested in offered me a job. I chose Saatchi’s, leaving school on the Friday and starting work there the following Monday. Even though I was only 18, Saatchi’s put me on their graduate programme – I guess they saw something in me. I don’t think that would happen today, which is a shame.
The ’80s was a really interesting time to work at an advertising agency and I loved it. It always amazed me how people moaned about their jobs. I loved getting up and going to work, and Saatchi’s was a really free and creative environment. There was no mould – you didn’t have to be a certain person from a certain