Heaven Can Wait I'm Busy Les Carvell - profile He founded the Charity Heaven Can Wait I'm Busy, is Project Director of The Ultimate Challenge and will produce the film While We Have Time as he journey's around the world in a Suzuki Jimny. - Heaven Can Wait, I'm Busy

LES CARVALL PROFILE
Born 3 July 1940 Glasgow Scotland, Scottish by accident as my parents were in Glasgow as a result of my fathers job. Shortly after my entrance into this world the family moved back to East London, we lived at 17 Aspland Grove, Hackney E8 where I grew up. I met my wife Vi, short for Violet, outside the quality fish and chip shop in Mare Street, just around the corner from Hackney Station. That was her lucky day, we have been together ever since, how she’s put up with me all this time heaven knows. Anyway, I was a baby when the Germans were dropping bombs on London, my only recollection of that time was the roaring of the doodlebugs (flying bombs) going over followed by the deadly silence when they dropped to earth to reek havoc on the people below.

I went to one or two schools in the area but ended up at Hackney Free and Parochial School. Details of what I got up to there I will save for another time, but to say I was a rascal would be an under statement to say the least. No matter what I did I got the cane for it or put on punishment, I couldn’t do anything right. They got me straightened out in the end though, I ended up being head boy of the school and was awarded the Sedgwick Medal for merit, "didn’t he do well".  At 15 years old they let me loose on the world, the one thing I will be eternally grateful for is that they made me learn the times table and that mental adding machine has been with me ever since.

Academically I guess I was a bit of a dunce but out into the world I went. I worked with my brother as an apprentice floor layer for 5 years and then as a qualified floor layer. Six or seven years later we started our own flooring contracting business and grew to become one of the biggest. From there we expanded into wholesale distribution of flooring materials and ended up with a chain of distribution depots through out the UK.

My wife and I got married when she was nineteen and I was twenty, we had two children Carole & Lee.  Unfortunately we lost Lee to cancer in 2008. Vi and I always worked together right up to when we both retired. However in nineteen seventy eight due to disagreement with my brothers I left the company and I was on my own. For a few years I made a living selling marine equipment, then I sold board and panel materials such as plywood and chipboard. We owned a sawmill in the new forest for a while then after that we set up a small business cutting and finishing other peoples panel materials, it was a no hassle business, my wife and I plus two other people working together, it was a good time and we made a profit, can’t be bad.

One day a customer came into the works and asked if we could cut and edge some white melamine panels, I asked what he wanted them for and he replied "I want to build some toilet cubicles". A few days later I found myself thinking about toilet cubicles and my gut instinct told me to look into it. I made enquiries and found out that the established manufacturers were asleep on the job. Every one I spoke to complained about the service of the suppliers and the quality of the product yet there seemed to be a demand for toilet cubicles.

I designed and made some standard cubicles, photographed them and produced a small brochure and went out to sell them. Two years later the competition woke up but by that time we had our foot in the door and they couldn’t shut it. Our company Cubicle Systems Ltd grew from an idea to a multi-million pound annual turnover company providing employment for seventy-four people, who I had the privilege to work with but after fourteen years building the company and at sixty-eight years old the time had come to let go.

Two things I will cherish above every thing else over the last fourteen years was the excitement of watching the company grow and being better than the competition. We were a family business all working together, I’m sure there were times they would have liked to murder me and other times they wished they had, but we got there in the end.

I also was responsible for or achieved

1966 The first person to import decorative ceramic tiles from Portugal, Spain and Italy, into the U.K.
1967 The first person to set up wholesale distribution of flooring materials
1967 Qualified as a scuba diver
1974 Qualified as a helicopter pilot
1975 Qualified as a fixed wing aircraft pilot
1976 Finished building and test flew our home built aircraft (I was mad even then)
2008 Skippered our 47ft Moody from Hamble to Lefkas, Greece
2009/10/11 Competed in Lefkas down hill gravity cart racing.
2009/10/11 Raced a J-24 racing yacht as skipper-helmsman.

Les Carvall – Heaven Can Wait I'm Busy Founder and Project Director.