Biography | Jim Ratcliffe — The Failsworth Pole That Still Marks the Town Where He Was Born

Readers who meet Jim Ratcliffe only as the chemicals owner at Old Trafford miss the first town.

James Arthur Ratcliffe was born on 18 October 1952 in Failsworth, then in Lancashire and now in the Metropolitan Borough of Oldham, Greater Manchester.

Companies House filings used by Bloomberg give the same date and name Manchester as the registration city. Local reporting and later profiles fix the childhood in Failsworth itself.

His father worked as a joiner and later ran a factory that made laboratory furniture. His mother worked in an accounts office.

The family lived in a council house in this town until he was ten. The house is an ordinary private address today, so this pin stays on the civic marker rather than the door.

The Failsworth Pole on Oldham Road is that marker. A political pole was raised here in 1793. The present clock tower and replica pole stand on the site of a wooden pole that blew down in 1950.

After a 2006 restoration of the pole, tower and gardens, the square remains the place Failsworth uses to say where the town centre is.

At ten the family crossed the Pennines to the East Riding. He would go to Beverley Grammar School, north of Hull, and leave the cotton-and-engineering fringe of Manchester behind.

The later story — INEOS, the Antwerp buyout, the minority stake in Manchester United — is often told as if it began in a boardroom. It began in a mill town four miles north-east of the city centre, under a pole the town kept rebuilding when the weather took the last one down.

The chimneys he later described counting from a bedroom window belonged to that industrial skyline. Failsworth was not a metaphor. It was a council estate, a joinery wage, and a public square that still carries the town's name.

Stand at the pole and the geography is plain. Manchester is down the A62. Oldham is the other way. The boy who left at ten came back to the region as a buyer of football clubs and chemical plants, but the birth record stays here.

Photo: David Dixon, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons / Geograph. Portrait: staff photographer, PET, 25 March 2013, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.