Sir Gulam Noon

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 7 March 2004

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is a businessman who brought authentic Indian foods to our supermarkets - Sir Gulam Noon. An instinctive businessman, he was brought up in a complex family situation with a step-brother and sister who were also his half-siblings and a cousin who assumed a paternal role after his own father died. They were not well off, but they had managed until their father's death when Gulam was seven. After that, it was a struggle and as a young teenager Gulam would spend the evenings working in his family's two sweetshops in Bombay. He had an entrepreneurial eye and saw business opportunities to improve and expand.

After a brief holiday in Engand he announced to his family that he wanted to expand into this country too. He built a confectionary business here and, seeing the huge public appetite for Indian food in restaurants, started manufacturing it for the supermarket shelves. After a disastrous fire at his factory in 1994, he built up his business again and now makes more than a quarter of a million curries a day. His biggest seller, not surprisingly, is chicken tikka masala. Gulam Noon was given an MBE for services to the food industry in 1994, and in 2002 was knighted.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Nat Bhairav by Shivkumar Sharma, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Brijbushan Kabra Book: Long Walk To Freedom by Nelson Mandela Luxury: Videos of cricket matches

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2004, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a businessman, he's made his fortune as a result of our
0:34.8	resolutely multicultural taste in food. He grew up in a humble family in Bombay and
0:40.7	came to Britain in his late 20s prospecting for openings for the family
0:44.0	business which was sweets and confectionery. He fell in love with London and he
0:48.2	came back to stay. Spotting that the English love for a good curry wasn't well
0:52.2	served by the supermarkets, he mortgaged
0:54.4	his house, opened a small factory, and before long his spicy preparations were disappearing
0:59.6	from the shelves like, well, hot dishes.
1:02.4	Now a millionaire and a night he can boast that hundreds of
1:06.1	thousands of his meals are eaten in Britain every day. He remains modest and
1:10.6	sincere. I've lost money as well as made it, he admits, I was in the right place. modest and
1:13.7	since sincere. I've lost money as well as made it, he admits I was in the right place at the right time and
1:16.4	that was here. He is Sir Goulam noon. And chicken ticker Masala we're now told Gullum, is our national dish, so it must be your bestseller.
1:26.3	Yes, it is indeed a bestseller.
1:28.6	Overtaken fish and chips?
1:29.8	Completely.
1:30.8	Completely.
1:31.8	But it's all because, as I said in my introduction, you spotted a gap in the market.
1:36.7	Now tell me about the day it dawned on you that what we needed was a good curry dinner.
1:41.2	Yes, I'll I return from the United States completely failed in my
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.