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PAUL APLIN explains how tough it is at the top of A C Mole & Sons.
WHEN I BEGAN researching the firm's centenary history - we notched up our first hundred years on 1 October - I steeled myself for tales of arcane and long forgotten battles with the taxman and of appeals lodged as the seconds ticked toward midnight of the thirtieth day. Instead I found more than a little humour. Although the eponymous A C Mole appears to have been a serious-minded man, not everyone who followed was in the same mould.
PAUL APLIN explains how tough it is at the top of A C Mole & Sons.
WHEN I BEGAN researching the firm's centenary history - we notched up our first hundred years on 1 October - I steeled myself for tales of arcane and long forgotten battles with the taxman and of appeals lodged as the seconds ticked toward midnight of the thirtieth day. Instead I found more than a little humour. Although the eponymous A C Mole appears to have been a serious-minded man, not everyone who followed was in the same mould.
A C's son, Horace, joined the firm in 1926. His irascibility was legendary. There was a threadbare path around his desk caused by constant pacing. Outraged by the amount of time staff wasted drinking tea, he called everyone into his office and stood on a chair to demonstrate that a cup of tea could be downed in seconds as long as it had first been allowed to become tepid. He could not abide lateness and one articled clerk who had arrived late for work was discovered in the office next day in his pyjamas having slept under his desk to avoid a repeat of his failure.
Horace had two physical infirmities. He was blind in one eye (though this did not deter him from filling and lighting his pipe while driving) and suffered from impaired hearing. He owned a huge early hearing aid. This took the form of a large box, which had to be pointed at the sound source, and an earpiece. Attending a tax lecture one day, he fiddled constantly with the box, pointing it at the speaker as he moved around the stage. Deciding that it was not worth the effort, he switched it off with a flourish and set it on the floor, leaving the lecturer utterly crestfallen. When capital gains tax was introduced in 1965, Horace announced that he would have nothing to do with it - and promptly retired.
Horace's articled clerk (later a partner) also had his idiosyncrasies and I remember taking him a file just after I joined the firm. 'OK, lets phone her with the queries' he said, and then proceeded to call the (obviously female) client Roger throughout. The reason only became clear when he terminated the call with 'Roger, over and out'.
There is a tradition of practical jokes. One partner received a deputation complaining about the new office timesheets. These required staff to record tax work in units of five minutes (in green ink) and all other work in units of fifteen minutes (in blue ink). They said it was unworkable. He agreed, and pointed out the date: 1 April. The perpetrator became adept at forging official notepaper. The senior partner was horrified to receive a letter from the golf club to say that it would be closed henceforward on the very afternoon he always played. Another year, the partner opening the post became indignant when he read an Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales press release about the introduction of stamp duty on inter-spousal transfers. He had failed to notice that the envelope had been carefully opened and the contents changed before being resealed and put back through the letterbox. A letter purporting to be from Taunton Tax Office asking agents not to use staples as removing them damaged Inspectors' fingernails evinced a 'whatever next?' before it was initialled for circulation.
John Evemy forgave me (well, you had probably worked out who the culprit was) for the golf club letter and once asked me to review one of his. It was the final letter in a long and acrimonious correspondence with the Inspector. I suggested two changes: The substitution of 'tax due' for 'pound of flesh' and 'high' for 'utterly and completely outrageous'. The suggestions were accepted with a resigned 'hmm, thought you'd say that'.
So, at the end of our first century, does a sense of frivolity still reign? I think I will rest my case with Sausage the battery operated flying pig who hangs from the ceiling of my room. You can see a video clip on our website www.acmole.co.uk/sausage.htm together with his vital statistics. The most pertinent perhaps is '120 flaps a minute - more than a tax practitioner in January'. Which reminds me…
Paul Aplin is a tax partner with A C Mole & Sons.
