Chris tells of life under bullying boss Maxwell

"What is the man in the street saying about me?" asked Maxwell.

"I found it extremely uncomfortable lying naked in bed talking on the phone to Maxwell. But he was completely oblivious,” said Chris.

Chris, who has been inducted as a new member of Shrewsbury Severn Rotary Club, gave his fellow Rotarians an insight into Maxwell, with whom he worked for two years, in a "getting to know you" talk about his life and career spread over two consecutive weeks.

The talks were at the club's regular Tuesday evening venue, the Lord Hill Hotel on Abbey Foregate.

Maxwell was a flamboyant and controversial media magnate whose business empire was collapsing around him when he died in mysterious circumstances – he went overboard from his luxury yacht – in 1991. After his death it was discovered he had plundered his employees' pensions funds of hundreds of millions of pounds to try to keep his business afloat.

For Chris, the Maxwell era began when the tycoon purchased the cable TV business of Rediffusion.

"Soon after the amalgamation into the Maxwell organisation I was at a board meeting that Maxwell chaired. I was there as deputy managing director at the time and half way through the board meeting Maxwell said 'I am resigning as chairman and Mr Ward-Thomas will take my place.’

“Maxwell got up from the table, tapped me on the shoulder and took me outside while the board meeting continued.

“He said ‘The MD will have to go.’

“He then asked me how much I earned and came up with a figure a bit more than the one I’d quoted and said 'do you want the job?' I went for the slow suicide and accepted his offer and then we went back into the boardroom.

"I wondered what would happen next. Then Maxwell said 'Mr. T has resigned and Mr. M (me) is now managing director. Are there any questions?’ This is how things happened in the Maxwell era."

In another story of Maxwell's often unorthodox way of doing things, he said: “We’d fired our advertising agency and the final account amounted to more than a quarter of a million pounds. This amount required Maxwell’s signature.

"Over the next six weeks I consistently asked him where the cheque was and he said he’d posted it. At the time Maxwell had an excellent personal assistant who was seconded from the Civil Service. This gentleman used to riffle through the tycoon’s briefcase while he was out of the office. And this time he found the cheque for the advertising agency that Maxwell had indeed signed."

The cheque was passed to Chris and the agency received its money.

Chris told a story relating to the chief executive of Littlewoods and Everton FC who told Maxwell there was a damaging strike at the Post Office in Liverpool which was harming his mail order and football pools business.

“This happened while we were eating our starter at a lunch in Maxwell’s office dining room,” said Chris.

“By the time we reached dessert the Post Office union leader had been traced to a remote beach in France, had spoken with Maxwell on the phone and the three-week strike was settled. This was a real illustration of Maxwell’s power.”

He added: "Maxwell was a classic bully, but he did, on occasions, have a sense of humour. I used to give him a bit of lip and got away with it but you had to pick the right moment. I knew there would be a day when he would turn on me, so I took my opportunity to leave with a settlement when Viacom were given a managing brief as part of a deal that gave Maxwell access to MTV.”

In the first part of his talk, Chris had told how he left university in 1968 and joined Rediffusion, a television rental and broadcast relay company.

In 1982 he was seconded to a new division that concentrated on modern multi-channel cable television and in 1984 he was responsible for launching the distribution of the first cable channels in the UK, including the original Sky Channel.

In 1985 Rediffusion’s parent company, BET, broke up the group, selling the TV rental business to Granada, the flight simulator and computer division to US companies and the cable TV company to Robert Maxwell.

After leaving Maxwell, and now working as a consultant, Chris obtained the cable licence for Birmingham on behalf of Windsor Cable. This was followed by work in Ireland on behalf of Irish Independent Newspapers where he obtained more than half of the 32 microwave TV licences issued by the Irish government to cover that country.

He then went on to work for British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB), followed by ITV Digital before returning to the cable television business with a company called Cablecom where he finished his career in TV.

Chris moved to Shrewsbury from Banbury in 2014.