39 YEARS AT THE HELM
In case there was any doubt about the origin of the name, Anchorage Hire has a big one right outside the front door.
Graham Halliday has spent 39 years in the hire industry and the last 12 as owner of Anchorage Hire Centre. Dan Jenkins went to meet him.
T
he origins of the name Anchorage Hire Centre (AHC) are impossible to miss –
in fact they are staring you in the face when you arrive. Three formidable anchors are arranged outside the shop frontage. AHC is one of the tenants on Anchorage Lane, a commercial estate tucked at the northern end of the high street in the market town of Northallerton, North Yorkshire.
“The family which owns this estate were into
shipping and brought a bit of that heritage with them,” says AHC founder, Graham Halliday. “They add a bit of colour but they’re also our ram raid deterrent,” he quips.
“The anchors have been here as long as I can remember and only one of them has ever been moved. A guy had a fall-out with a neighbouring business and it escalated. He hitched the anchor to an ex-US army truck and dragged it in front of the workshop gates
to block them. It made a right mess of the road; we could see where he’d driven as the tip of the anchor had scored a giant ‘S’ in the tarmac.”
Like all small businesses, AHC reflects its owner’s personality. Graham’s is a combination of frank openness with Yorkshire pragmatism and wry humour – no more evident than when he describes a near-death experience. “In 2014 I went home after work and by the following day I’d had three heart attacks and four bypasses,” he says. “I was watching the football results when the first one happened and I did wonder if I’d died and gone to heaven, as Leeds were winning three-nil.”
The Anchorage Hire Centre team.
Two weeks after his heart operations Graham was back at work, and this October he marked 39 years in the hire business. However, he started his working life in a very different arena. “I trained as an industrial chemist, working on creating brick wall coatings. They spun off a wall coating business and made me director, we had 140 employees applying wall coatings on RAF air bases up and down the A1.”
18 Executive Hire News - Nov/Dec 2022
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