Surinder Arora arrived in London at the age of 13, unable to speak a word of English. He was met at Heathrow Airport by a couple he thought were his aunt and uncle. After a few days, they sat him down and told him the truth. He was their son, and they had handed him to a childless couple in India, his real aunt and uncle, when he was born. His parents were now settled in London and wanted to bring him to Britain to give him a better life.
They initially shared a three-bedroom house with another family in Southall, west London. His mother had three jobs. She worked at Tetley during the day, cleaned offices in the evening and cooked at a college over the weekends. She used to take Arora with her to the cleaning job and had, he recalls, high ambitions for her youngest son.
Arora’s story is interwoven with the upheavals of partition and the creation of modern India and Pakistan. His parents lost everything in the turmoil, eventually leading them to Britain as they struggled to rebuild their lives. “My mum and dad used to live in what is now Pakistan, so they had to literally flee for their lives, like a lot of people did if you were in the wrong part of the country.
“My dad’s parents were really well off in Pakistan but they had to leave everything behind. Dad was quite laid back. When they settled in India in Punjab, my mum used to say let’s work hard, let’s educate our children. So she went out and she did a nursing course and became a midwife. Then, in 1965, she had an opportunity on a working visa to come here.”
The hard work paid off. At 48 Arora runs an expanding chain of hotels, many under the Arora brand name, and is part owner of Wentworth Golf Club in Surrey. He is said to be worth £225million, making him one of the richest Asians in Britain. His latest projects are a hotel going up at HeathÂrow’s Terminal 5 and another at the Oval cricket ground.
Arora has a huge office atop the first of his hotels, opposite Heathrow, with mesmerising views of the runway. He has a thing for aviation and has a pilot’s licence. As we talk his eyes keep darting to watch the planes as they take off and land under a slate-grey sky.
His other passion is also pretty evident. A large terrace leading from the office has a putting green with nine holes. He has a handicap of 18 and tries to play at least once a week.
Arora invested in Wentworth with Richard Carey, owner of top London restaurants The Ivy and Caprice. “In the long term, of course, we’ll never lose because there is only one Wentworth, but we both did it from our hearts more than our heads.”
Arora seems almost too nice to be true. He is gentle and modest and frets after describing the hotel industry as being about “bums on beds”, as though he had said something extremely rude. He is keen to talk about his involvement in charity, how he knows almost all his staff members by their first names, how wonderful Sunita, his wife of 25 years, is and his deliberate policy of employing disabled people. He has just been on holiday with Sir Cliff Richard, for cripes’ sake. You know there must be grit underneath; no one makes £200million from scratch without it, but he keeps it well hidden.
Arora met Richard when he opened his first hotel in 1999. “I turned to one of the directors at British Airways (BA) and said I need some help. He said, ‘Who do you want? Royalty, politicians?’ I said: ‘Anyone famous. I’ve written to the royals and to Tony Blair and of course I’ve got Dear John letters from all of them.’ He said: ‘Well what do you think of Cliff Richard?’ I said I’d love it because when my mum used to watch him on telly, she used to say, ‘born in India’.” She was right. The singer lived in Calcutta until he was seven and moved to Britain with his family after independence. Arora and Richard are now co-investors in a hotel in Manchester with themed rooms, including the Summer Holiday suite.
After leaving school Arora had jobs at BA and Abbey Life, waiting tables in the evening at one of the hotels he now owns. At the same time he was investing family savings in property, eventually buying a row of derelict houses opposite Heathrow that he turned into bed and breakfasts. Finding it difficult to get bookings, he would ferry passengers to and from the airport in his white BMW. He eventually persuaded BA to give him the contract to run a hotel for the airline’s crew and bulldozed the houses to replace them with a hotel.
He now has two at Gatwick and two at Heathrow while Manchester was his first venture away from an airport. He bought a further nine airport hotels in a £300million deal last year. The hotels, which include Holiday Inns and Hiltons, are managed by the commercial property arm of British Airports Authority (BAA). “The beauty is not having all my eggs in one basket. We aren’t just reliant on Arora hotels; the family has something to fall back on”.
He has never had a five-year plan, writing down ideas on napkins as they come to him. People think he is mad to open a hotel at the Oval, he says, but he believes the area is undergoing regeneration. He would also like a small hotel at Wentworth.
There is a large set of binoculars in his office so, if he wants to, he can train his sights on the £200million hotel he is building under the Sofitel brand at Terminal 5.
Arora is the first business to be granted a franchise of the five-star Sofitel brand and he had a battle persuading owners Accor to grant him the rights. Arora knew that BAA, which owns Heathrow, would want a better recognised brand than his own. It is a never-say-die attitude that seems to have characterised his career.
He repeatedly mentions family. The staff are like family, he says, Richard is family. He has three children and hopes they might join the business, but will leave it to them.
“The girls, while they were growing up and studying, went to work, filling shelves at the local Waitrose and working in the Thornton’s chocolate shop and whatever. I think it is nice because I had to wash dishes and clean floors and I think it so important that the kids keep their feet on the ground rather than thinking it all comes easy.
‘I’ve seen so many businesses and families where the senior generation has worked and worked to build their business and the younger generations have gone in and destroyed it. They’ve got to learn the value of life, not just money but life, and respect for others.”
Allan Leighton, Britain’s Post Office chairman, another self-made man, is a big admirer. Typically for Leighton, he made his mind up about Arora from the way he treated the maids.
Leighton says: “I’m a sucker for ‘let’s go down and have a look at all the people and the maids’. You know, labour turnover in that business is massive, as you can imagine. At Arora it is very low and all the maids, they all knew him, they all loved him and they had competitions to see who had the best rooms and I thought, hang on a minute, this guy is really incredible.”
Arora needs to rush off, but not without first making sure I have a car to take me to the tube. The staff on the front desk appear to be from eastern Europe, evidence of the latest wave of immigration, and as I leave I wonder whether in years to come we will be reading of Polish or Romanian businessmen and women who have parlayed a bit of hard graft into their own business empires. — Â