Ernest Shenton

Who is Ernest Shenton?

Ernest Shenton was one of the driving forces behind an embryonic Dixons and brought one-hour photo processing to the high street in the Eighties with his chain of Photo Shop minilabs. The Austrian-born refugee helped the Dixons founder Charles Kalms and his son Stanley, later Lord Kalms, to build the company from a handful of portrait studios into a retail chain and mail-order empire. Dixons, renamed DSG International, is currently Europe's biggest retailer of consumer electronics.

On leaving Dixons, Shenton became a trailblazer in the one-hour retail photo-processing market, building up a profitable chain of 34 shops despite cut-throat competition. He also liked to test the boundaries of architecture and design with a penchant for the ultra modern. The film director Stanley Kubrick wanted to use a log cabin built by Shenton, which was part-suspended over a lake in Stanmore, North London, and decked out in avant-garde furniture, in his masterpiece A Clockwork Orange. Shenton, however, turned down Kubrick's request.

Born in 1930 in Vienna as Ernst Schneck, Shenton was the son of a material buyer and his corsettier wife. When he was 8 he moved to Britain after the Anschluss and was moved from family to family in Manchester and Gloucester during the war. He then returned to London, having secured a scholarship to attend St Marylebone Grammar School, where he excelled in sports.

The British found it difficult to spell his surname so he changed it in 1951 to the more palatable Shenton, which he found in the telephone book. In the same year, Stanley Kalms invited him to join his father's business for the weekly sum of £7 10s after meeting him at a Jewish youth club in Hampstead. Fresh out of the RAF, he proved indispensable in the office as a bright and reliable worker.