Lord Kalms, retailer who built his family firm Dixons into a pillar of British business

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01-04-2025

​Lord Kalms, who has died aged 93, was one of Britain's most enduringly successful retailers; over half a century he built Dixons, his family business, from a single camera shop in north London into a nationwide chain of what he called 'electronic toy shops for adults'. He was also an ardent Eurosceptic who acquired high influence in the Conservative Party before shifting his allegiance towards Ukip.
Stanley Kalms was a quintessential Jewish entrepreneur whose toughness in business was balanced by a commitment to philanthropy, particularly in the field of education. His stores – 1,200 of them in his heyday, including Currys, PC World and The Link as well as the Dixons chain itself – sold annually more than £3 billion worth of televisions, microwaves, mobile phones, laptops and other gadgetry.
Kalms was a corporate autocrat who could be a steadfast ally, but dealt harshly with those who opposed him, intellectually or commercially. His peers regarded him as the consummate retail professional, in command of every detail of his operation – though he could not work a personal computer, and in the days when he chiefly sold cameras, acquired no skill at taking pictures. Nor did he like to work above the shop, running his empire ran from a quiet, chintz-filled office in Farm Street, Mayfair. But he never took his eye off the core of his business.
His philosophy was firmly grounded in Jewish family values, and he found himself strongly in sympathy in the early 1980s with Margaret Thatcher's credo of free enterprise and personal responsibility. Later, however, he was one of the first of her business supporters to take a revisionist view: 'I don't think [she] gave enough thought to the consequences of adopting the market system. The system works but it is very crude… We have to find a better way of helping those who cannot make the adjustments necessary...'
Kalms was chairman of Dixons until 2002, and president until 2014. In 2001 he took on the role of treasurer of the Conservative Party, to which he was a already long-standing donor, and became a close ally of the then leader Iain Duncan Smith, who he described as 'a great patriot'. But as other donors became increasingly disillusioned at a low ebb in Tory fortunes, Kalms presided over ruthless cuts in Central Office expenditure.
He was one of several large donors nominated for peerages by Duncan Smith after his ousting (to be replaced by Michael Howard) in October 2003. Though Kalms continued to serve the party for a time as a vice-chairman, his relationship with it was increasingly rocky. In the 2005 leadership contest he backed David Davis rather than David Cameron, for whose modernising tendency he made plain his dislike; and in 2006 he called the shadow foreign secretary William Hague 'ignorant' for criticising Israeli attacks on Lebanon.
Matters came to a head on the eve of the European elections in June 2009, when Kalms decribed the poll as 'an opportunity to vote for personal priorities' in which 'for myself, I am considering lending my vote to UKIP.' It was unclear whether, as was sometimes reported, he was 'expelled' as a result, but his connection with the Tory party was certainly severed.
Harold Stanley Kalms was born in London on November 21 1931. His paternal grandfather migrated to England from Lithuania – the family name was shortened from Kalmovitz – and his mother's family, the Schlagmans, came from Poland. Stanley was educated at Christ's College in Finchley, where by his own account he showed little academic promise but developed his trading skills in the playground. At 11 he set himself up as a stamp dealer, offering items from his own collection through adverts in philatelic journals.
Stanley's father Charles opened a photographic studio at Southend in 1937. During the Second World War, which brought a boom in portrait photography, the business expanded to seven outlets, trading as Dixons Studios, a company name that Charles had bought off the shelf. But in the immediate postwar years it contracted again to one studio at Edgware, which struggled to find supplies and turned over barely £100 a week. At 16, Stanley worked with his father for a summer and proved such an asset that he never returned to school.
He soon persuaded Charles to start selling cameras and accessories. Bold advertising, keen prices and easy credit terms for customers helped the business to expand. Stanley was particularly astute on the buying side: on his first trip to the Far East in 1958, he found he could buy camera tripods at a quarter of the price offered by British distributors. So he cut out the distributors and imported directly, adding his own labels. In an era of rapid growth in consumerism, and particularly in hobby photography, the problem was not so much how to sell the merchandise, but how to find sufficient prime shop sites to keep pace with demand.
By the time the business was floated on the stock exchange as Dixons Photographic in 1962 – making Stanley Kalms a millionaire at 30 – it had 16 branches, and soon added 40 more by buying two rival chains. In due course the stores began to sell audio and hi-fi equipment as well. Stanley succeeded Charles as chairman in 1971, and growth continued with the acquisition of another electrical chain, Wallace Heaton.
The step which took Dixons into the top rank of retailers came in 1984 when Kalms won a hard-fought £300 million bid battle for Currys – which had 600 stores, many of them in out-of-town shopping centres. Two years later, Kalms launched a £1.8 billion hostile bid for Woolworth, which failed amid accusations that Dixons' advisers had bugged Woolworth's executives to gather damaging information about them. Kalms knew nothing about the bugging operation, and was deeply embarrassed by it. In due course Woolworth (renamed Kingfisher) launched a counter-bid for Dixons, but was thwarted by the Monopolies Commission.
Kalms, meanwhile, made a self-confessed mistake by buying Silo, a leading American electrical retailer, for £240 million in 1987. The venture accumulated huge losses until it was abandoned in 1993, contributing to something of a fall in Kalms's reputation. But he remained determinedly in charge, and another consumer boom in the latter part of the decade restored his good standing. In 1999 he achieved a brilliant coup with the launch of Freeserve, an internet service provider which was profitably spun off from Dixons.
Asked whether he would ease back as he approached retirement age, Kalms replied: 'The time to step down will be when I get tired of doing the 70-80 hour week I do now. I still feel I have something more to contribute... I would like my epitaph to be something more than just 'he sold a lot of cameras'.'
He was also a director of British Gas, chairman of the King's Healthcare NHS Trust in south London, a member of the Funding Agency for Schools, a governor of the National Institute for Economic & Social Research and treasurer of the Centre for Policy Studies, the free-market think tank.
He supported a very wide range of Jewish causes, and established a foundation to support the study of Jewish culture and values. He was also passionately interested in business ethics, funding a chair in the subject at London Business School and a centre for ethical studies in Jerusalem.
Among his many other endowments, he regarded the Dixons Bradford Technology College, founded in 1988, as 'my greatest single success'. The college aimed to take in teenagers of varying ethnic backgrounds and abilities and equip them to find jobs; Kalms saw it as a virtuous circle of capitalism, in which private wealth funded a project which nurtured the skills necessary to generate future wealth for others.
This was part of Kalms's larger view that businessmen have a duty to act as good citizens – but should also be free to run their businesses in the interests of shareholders. He was a vigorous opponent of the centre-left 'stakeholding' ​school of corporate governance – briefly embraced by Tony Blair – which claimed that staff, customers, suppliers and local communities had rights in companies equivalent to those of shareholders. 'Capitalism has lots of warts,' he observed, 'but you mustn't clip its wings and prevent it functioning.'
Having been knighted in 1996, Kalms was created a life peer in 2004. He kept a handsome apartment overlooking Green Park, holiday homes in Jerusalem (where his sister lived) and Portugal, and a yacht at Antibes. For relaxation in London, he enjoyed opera, ballet and bridge.
He married, in 1954, Pamela Jimack, who worked for Barnet Health Authority and was appointed MBE in 1995. They had three sons, all three of whom worked briefly for Dixons but chose not to make careers there. 'It's not the right thing for kids to be with their dad if he's rather single-minded,' Kalms observed. But the family remained close, eating together every weekend in the Jewish tradition.
Lord Kalms, born November 21 1931, died March 30 2025​
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