The table plan is also available elsewhere on this site and that version is brighter and clearer. Click here to go there. I suppose this is a complete (subject to illness on the day etc) list of the firm's employees, directors, etc. 56 (I think I counted) dinner places, including the Oxford Mail reporter. I am not there, nor are my cousins Paul, Clive and Gillian Bennett, children of my Aunty Olive Bennett (my father's sister). Too young I suppose. I was 15 and five months. My elder brother Michael, age 18 and 7 months is there. And our much older cousins Brian and John Archer (employees of AC&Co) and their wives, and their sister Ann Archer. Well, well. Lots of family idiosyncrasies going on there.
This event was a high-water mark for the firm in many ways as, contrary to what was (of course) said in the dinner speeches, the firm itself was actually going to continue in family ownership only for another 12 or so years (to about 1969). In that year, WGRA died and the firm was sold to Cantays (a 'portmanteau' name combining 'Cannock' from Cannock Chase, Staffordshire, and 'Taylor' a surname). It was a mark of WGRA's control-freakery that the firm could not continue as a family firm without him. He had continued his control of the firm for about 25 years beyond the normal retirement age of 65, and the only way to dispose of it when he became too old to continue, was to sell it. (pba.15.4.2018). (Added later same day): It bears saying that 'control-freakery' or not, on the part of WGRA, the diffeence between his generation and mine (PBA's) is that he left school at 14 or 15 at the latest, whereas I finished my education and training when I qualified as a Chartered Patent Agent in 1974 at the age of nearly 33. The opportunities that this gave me made a world of difference to my life. Whereas Grandpa William (WGRA) had to make the best of his opportunities withint the family - and he did - exploring the businesses of Albert Edwin Reed and George Blake and James Archer, all of whom made it in business in a big way - before he settled for James Archer's offer to him.