The Pioneer Life Assurance company was where my Dad had spent the whole of his lifetime working. It was situated in a fine Victorian building in Dale Street, Liverpool, with an impressive entrance hall in marble. He returned from Glasgow in 1944 having qualified as an actuary and was employed as the companies actuary and later assistant manager and then general manager. In the early seventies it was taken over by a bigger company called The Vehicle and General. Then as now, big companies were always on the lookout to take over profitable smaller companies with a view to making their books look better.
Well Pioneer weathered the onslaught of this company which of course went broke having made money for some people and lost it for others but thanks to Dad they had not been able to get their hands of the funds he held for his pensioners, so the Pioneer went on trading but then along came another entrepreneur by the name of Jim Slater. He was considered a whizz kid of the seventies, but again Dad held the company together and it was still intact when Jim Slater was found wanting. But JimSlater had installed his own man as a managing director, apparently a man whom Mum obsessively disliked. However about this time in 1974 mum was thinking that they should make plans to retire to Australia so this they did and bought a unit in Labouchere Road in South Perth. Dad had plans of doing some part time work and apparently Dad deferred some of his payout to save tax. Well subsequently he got the request to go back to Liverpool to arrange a merger of three smaller insurance companies the Pioneer, the Blackburn and Merchantile Mutual I think. Now I think Dads idea had been to spend six months in Australia and Six months in U.k. He loved England and all his family connections. But Mum always liked her own way and by this time was disillusioned with Australia so they sold up quickly and returned and built a new house in Freshfield Road across the road from where they had used to live. I visited them there with Don and Ian in 1977 I would say. Dad was happy doing his work on the mutualisation of the three insurance companies and Mum enjoyed building a new bungalow in Formby.
However she did not remain happy with it for long. By 1978 Mum had decided Australia was where she wanted to be so another house sale and I purchased on their behalf 14 Warragoon Crescent around the corner from us so Dad finally retired again having put through the merger.He had still deferred some of his payments in a bid to save tax. Well they were settling into life in Attadale again when Dad had his fatal heart attack on Christmas Eve 1978
After initially looking very sick he perked up bit and he did tell us he had been having nightmares about the deferred amount of pension in The Pioneer account so it was worrying him. Well when he died Mum leapt into action to try and retrieve this amount which really died with him. I believe it was about eight thousand pounds.She wrote letters to The Pioneer, and to her brother David in Shropshire.George Dads brother had been given a position on the board of The Pioneer at Dads suggestion so he knew all that was going on."Try and get your mother to stop writing letters to the board bordering on the libellous " he wrote. Well I Had no chance of that but I suppose after some time things settled down.
Now thirty years later Mum has continued to receive a fantastic pension courtesy of the Pioneer indexed to cost of living. The state pension has not been so generous, the British government deciding that as she was going to Australia it would remain at the level it was when she left. Had she gone to Spain say, she would have got the normal raises as did all her peers in England. However she has been well looked after and should have no complaints.
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