New memoir tells entrepreneur’s life story from fruit trade and football to world-class retail

Half a Lettuce – the Life and Times of an Entrepreneur charts Paul Sewell’s upbringing in and around Cottingham, East Yorkshire, from mingling with the barrow boys in Hull fruit market to driving a world-class business agenda as chairman of Hull-based Sewell Group and a key figure behind the Yorkshire International Business Convention and Humber Business Week. Paul was supported in the project...

Care home leaver wins international business award

Sarah Fenwick, who with Gareth Pennington set up Tree Fellas Hull in 2019, has been named Student of the Year by the International Association of Bookkeepers (IAB). But as the couple celebrate they are also changing the way their business works to combat the impact of coronavirus, with orders having slumped after a bumper start to the year dealing with storm damage. Sarah’s trophy was posted by...

Pearson’s Mark

For more than 100 years, Hull was one of the biggest cities in England never to have boasted a top-flight football club. That finally changed in fairy-tale fashion at Wembley in May 2008, when a terrific volley from 38-year-old local lad Dean Windass took the Tigers to the big time at last. By then, Adam Pearson had already left the club – but you’d struggle to find a City fan who didn’t...

The face behind the voice

It’s always a bit of a worry in the back of my mind, ahead of talking to people for this magazine, whether they’ll talk back. The monosyllabic interviewee is the journalist’s worst nightmare. Now, I hasten to add that there really haven’t been many of these as entrepreneurs tend to have the gift of the gab, but I knew I was on solid ground with voiceover artist Liz Drury – a woman who talks for...

How a space can change a life

In the late 1920s, Virginia Woolf published A Room of One’s Own, an extended essay based on her assertion that women of the time needed a safe, private space if they were to be able to write. Hers was a feminist argument, of course, a generation and a continent away from the experience of the young Joe Bvumburai – but the principle is pretty much the same. Growing up in the suburbs of Lusaka,...