Every industry needs people with that deep, vast pool of experience which comes from absorbing evolving technology and changing customer needs over a working lifetime. Some such doyens retire and die unsung. Others achieve, often without seeking it, a measure of fame, fortune and the unstinted affection and respect of colleagues, competitors and suppliers.
No-one fitted more readily into this latter category than Roy Lowe. Roy was managing director of Samuel Eden & Sons, Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottingham, the well known UK sock manufacturer when he started work- not even as a yarn boy but “general dogsbody” as he described it- 51 years prior to his death.