Edwin Boorman Angela Cole

Everyone Edwin Boorman meets is more than likely a Kent Messenger reader. At least, that’s what the man himself believes.

It’s a philosophy that hasn’t let him down much during his time with the KM Group, although there was one occasion he freely admits it may have caused him to seem a touch over-optimistic.

While at The Savoy, where he was due to meet The Queen and Prince Philip, he saw a familiar face coming towards him.

He says: “I recognised this fellow coming towards me. I always reckon everybody I think I know is a reader of the Kent Messenger, so you can never pass them without smiling and saying something.

“So I said 'hello’ to this guy and we had a really pally conversation. I definitely recognised his face.

“But when I turned back to the people I was with, they were laughing and said to me, 'Edwin – you don’t know who that was do you?’ I said 'Why?’ They said 'Because it was Terry Wogan’.”

Celebrities aside, it is genuinely likely that 90 per cent of the people Edwin meets are Kent Messenger readers.

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Certainly, if the number of people who phone the KM’s Maidstone office claiming they know him personally are for real, then the vast majority of people living in the county have met, and conversed with, Edwin, just as Wogan did.

Despite the family associations (his grandfather Barham Pratt Boorman acquired the group in 1882, and Edwin took over from his father, HR Pratt Boorman) by his own admission, he “avoided” anything to do with press and publishing as a youngster, although reluctantly discovered he enjoyed printing, at age 12, while at boarding school in north Wales.

That skill was honed while in the Army during National Service. With a little help from his servicemen colleagues, who each carried a piece of a dismantled printing press with them for him to Dortmund, where he reassembled it, enterprising Edwin set up quite a profitable sideline printing headed paper for the troops’ letters back home.

“In a way my Army career was really as a printer,” he says now. “I escaped guard duty and all sorts of other horrible duties, thanks to my printing. Having decided I didn’t want anything to do with publishing and printing, I kind of couldn’t avoid it.”

But his skills came into their own when he started work with the KM. His employment introduction to the business, though, wasn’t under the most inviting of circumstances.

It was a printers’ dispute, not something that would usually induce someone to want to join the management, which brought him, not long out of Cambridge, to work for the company.

It was 1959 and he was having a chat with his father. He says: “For something to say really, I said 'I hear there’s a printers’ dispute’. He said to me 'Edwin, I’ve got to lock everyone out. I disagree with it fundamentally, but I’ve got to do it.’ I said to him 'Do you want somebody to stand beside you?’ and he said to me 'I’d love you to’.”

With the printers out, someone was needed to work the presses. Suddenly, Edwin’s knack with printing came into its own, and he got to work.

Not long after, he turned his attentions to photographs and ran the Maidstone Engravers, printing pictures, of which he says: “It was a strange business. The acid that was used would rot the hinges in the building. Health and Safety wouldn’t allow it now.”

It meant modernisation because the process was so slow, and change was tough – something he has now experienced for himself.

He says: “This is why my father was so good. What he said in the end was 'The company will see me out in my lifetime; this is your future we are talking about.’

“I find I am having exactly the same conversations with Geraldine.” (Allinson, who took over the business in 2005, one of Edwin’s four daughters. The others are Cecilia, Imogen and Nicola. He also has a son, Henry, from his marriage to Jan.)

“She knows what we must do for the future.”

He adds: “Unfortunately it is difficult for a chap who is 73 to actually grasp that.” His father had been very keen on using photographs in newspapers, partly because his own father had shunned them as they “took up too much space”.

At 26, Edwin became general manager, replacing stalwart Frank Baker. At the time, the Kent Messenger went to a quarter of the homes in Kent, but his father wanted the circulation to be the same as his age (or above). It was a “bad day” Edwin remembers, when the circulation figures came out and the KM was 99,600, against the Kentish Times’ 101,000, losing his father a gentleman’s bet in the process.

Edwin’s early days may have involved working hard but it’s clear from the glint in his eye when talking of his youth, that he played hard too. During a brief stint lecturing on English newspapers at Southern Illinois University in 1962, he admits he “had a ball” with so many young ladies around. His love of sailing was, as he puts it with a grin, “a great way for getting a girl away from her parents”.

In 1968, he started the Evening Post in the Medway Towns. Lady Luck was smiling on him when the KM entered into what was effectively a race to start an evening paper.

With its rivals spending time and effort on design, Edwin and a colleague were so pushed for time, they had no choice but to simply stick a new masthead on to a copy of the current South Eastern Gazette. It turned out to look far better than the opposition’s. “It was a huge amount of luck,” he says.

It was an exciting period. He says now: “Everything had been really slow and pedantic; young people wanted to change the world, and I wanted to do the same.”

He adds: “What is so good about newspapers is that you can actually change people’s lives for the better. People think newspapers only sell because there is bad news. Indeed, they do, but it is the good news of the paper, week after week, that becomes a familiar friend which people then find they cannot do without.”

Although he doesn’t consider himself a journalist, he enjoyed the editorial side of papers. But he’s also a great believer in advertising.

His father drove a Humber Super Snipe, the best car Rootes garage in Maidstone made.

He tells me that Lord Rootes used to say the KM built his business. “That’s what advertising can do,” he says, proudly. “If you think about building a business rather than selling a space, newspapers will always have a place.”

After a fire at the KM in Week Street, Maidstone, Edwin decided to buy some land in Larkfield for £15,000 (despite his father’s claims that he should have paid £10,000). That land became the KM’s headquarters in New Hythe Lane.

Despite what were obviously fun times in the 60s, looking back from the comfort of the president’s office at Larkfield, he says it was the 90s that were his best time in charge, including when the company started printed the London free paper Metro. He says now he has been “very lucky” to be surrounded by such good people.

There have, of course, been many ups and downs. During his six-monthly chairman’s visits to all the KM Group’s offices, when he was infamous for holding up graphs on the company’s economic ups and downs (often the wrong way!) he regularly warned of gloomy times ahead.

He was of course inevitably proved right and agrees that the current recession is “extremely deep”.

He says: “It’s just like my father and me – Geraldine’s saying to me that the future is multi media, it isn’t just newspapers. I know, because I started it.”

He contrasts this with his own father once asking him: “Edwin, what is a computer?”

In 2002, he began to hand over the reins of the company and in 2005, he was finally able to take that sailing trip he had put on hold in the early 60s.

He says: “My wife Jan said to me 'You’ve been going on about it so much, go ahead and do it’, “but she added that there was a nice hotel in St Lucia where we could meet up.”

On board Messenger, the ketch he bought with a payment for helping a friend buy a newspaper, with five friends, he says: “I just find it is a good hobby to have because it takes your mind off everything else.”

“Running a newspaper in Kent, you can feel frightfully important, but when you are out there, you can realise how insignificant you are in the scheme of things.”

Although he may see himself as insignificant when out on the water, he does have an influence on his county, as one of 60 Deputy Lord Lieutenants, and is also genuinely keen on charitable causes, citing various appeals in the KM, including the campaign to get a Gurkha tribute at Maidstone Museum last year.

“Throughout my life, I have had to fight the prejudice that newspapers are about bad news. In fact newspapers are totally the opposite – a newspaper helps people become interested in their community and also it brings people together to help develop the community.”