Doug Ellis

Doug Ellis (2014)

Sir Herbert Douglas "Doug" Ellis , OBE (born January 3, 1924 in Hooton , Cheshire , † October 11, 2018 ) was a British businessman and was best known as the chairman of the English football club Aston Villa . The millionaire, who in the late 1950s was considered a pioneer of “ package tourism ” to Spain, shaped the development of the Birmingham club in his two terms in office between 1968 and 1975 and between 1982 and 2006 .

Youth and the rise to a millionaire

Ellis was in the small town Hooton on the peninsula Wirral in the county of Cheshire born. Early on in his life he had to take on responsibilities within the family. The father was at the age of 27 years on a lung and pleurisy died when Doug Ellis just three years old and eight weeks had previously been born yet a little sister. From the age of twelve, the young Doug delivered milk in his area and immediately after graduating from school he started working as a railroad worker. His first independent activities also included starting to breed canaries and budgies at home and occasionally repairing motorcycles.

At the age of 17, Ellis volunteered for the British Army . There he served the Fleet Air Arm (FAA) for four years and was also ordered to Ceylon , today's Sri Lanka , during this time . Here he met his first wife, who had treated him as a nurse while suffering from malaria . In Southeast Asia he then built up his first transport company, which brought Austin Motor Company vehicles from their British homeland to Ceylon to the three FAA bases and ships in Trincomalee . It employed around 80 people, including local Tamils and Sinhalese . When the seaquake in the Indian Ocean wreaked havoc in Sri Lanka in 2004 , the region in which Ellis had worked was particularly affected.

Ellis left the Southeast Asian island again in 1946 but decided to keep the travel and transportation business. He particularly remembered the numerous conversations with soldiers who had seen the world during the war and who wanted to return to these places with their families in peacetime. Back in England, Ellis hired Frames Tours in Preston , the country's second largest travel company at the time. There he brought a number of innovations to the range of offers, including exclusive excursion programs as part of sporting events, which in addition to football games also included boxing and racing events. Although he was very successful with this, his employer did not want to increase his wages from £ 30 a week and so the young entrepreneur founded the "Ellis Travel Agency" with start-up capital of £ 2,500.

From 1955 Ellis started organizing package tours for broad sections of the population in Birmingham . Later, with Manchester , Glasgow , Dublin and Belfast, other cities from the “province” were added and he also did pioneering work in the tourism industry in Canada . He forged an alliance with three other travel agents and thus organized the mass holiday flow to the Spanish mainland and Mallorca . Business developed so rapidly that Ellis was now chairman of 19 companies and built 600 houses and an apartment complex in Birmingham. In addition to numerous shops, he owned an electronics company, a construction company, three butchers' shops and two farms . His son Peter now runs his own brewery, "Aston Manor Brewery", and produces around one million bottles a week. Ellis radically reduced the broad range of companies in 1976 when he sold twelve companies in a short period of time.

Aston Villa

The affection for English football led Ellis to Aston Villa. The club was virtually broke in 1969, and to prevent the worst, he loaned the club £ 100,000. He was chairman and majority shareholder of Aston Villa between 1968 and 1975 and during that time he pursued the concept of training rather than expensive transfers. To do this, he set up one of the country's first football academies, and although the club's greatest recent successes in 1981 and 1982 - the English championship title and the European Cup a year later - did not fall during Ellis' term of office seven players in the squad from their own youth program contributed to these titles.

In 1975 he resigned from the chairmanship of the association and was completely dismissed from the board in 1979. Three years later he again took over the management of the club and held it until the American businessman Randy Lerner took over the club in 2006. Ellis's reputation among Aston Villa's supporters has never been particularly good. Above all, the fans blamed him for the club's decline, which led to relegation from the top English league five years after winning the European Cup - other voices, however, saw the main culprit in the increasing debts the club incurred during Ellis's absence would have.

In May 1997 Aston Villa went public under the leadership of Doug Ellis and had a net present value of £ 126 million. In the period that followed, Ellis sold parts of its block of shares, which had previously been 47% in 1996, successively up to around a third of the number of shares in circulation. Overall, experts assume that Ellis generated around four million pounds with its trading activities as part of the IPO. Over time, the share price fell nearly 90% overall. Other decisions by Doug Ellis, such as the demolition of the grandstand on Trinity Road from the 1920s or paying himself a salary later, led to disagreements among the supporters, who were already suspicious of being on the board of directors of local rivals Birmingham City and Derby Counties and even chaired Wolverhampton Wanderers .

Doug Ellis, now 80 years old, contracted prostate cancer in 2004 and handed some of his duties over to Bruce Langham , whom he made CEO . In May 2005, however, Langham resigned after alleged disagreements with Ellis. In the same year Ellis was awarded the Order of the British Empire as "OBE". After a successful bypass operation and a three-month break, he returned shortly after the start of the 2005/06 season in the Villa Park back. After the successful handover of the club to Randy Lerner, the new club management appointed him "President for Life". In July 2007 he was awarded the Aston University the honorary doctorate and in 2012 he was appointed Knight Bachelor appointed. Ellis died in October 2018 at the age of 94.

Web links

• Obituary in the Guardian (Engl.)
• Obituary in the Independent (Engl.)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ "Who is the Villain of the piece?" (BBC Sport)
2. ^ "Ellis awarded New Year accolade" (BBC News)