Doreen Lofthouse

Very sad and I hope the business continues. Not too many of the original entrepreneurs around the Gold Coast now-thinking of the likes of Keith Gledhill, Doris (and Geoffrey) Thompson, and Trevor Wilkinson to name a few.

RIP Mrs Lofthouse.
 
Sometimes you get leaders that show commitment and loyalty to their local communities and that are prepared to invest their money, effort and resources to that cause. The original founder of Fleetwood, Peter Hesketh was one and Doreen Loffthouse was another. Not only the factory but also the Lofthouse Foundation that has supported the town over a long period. Not many such individuals exist these days. I have a soft spot for Fleetwood as my mum was brought up there and I spent alot of time in Fleetwood as a kid in the 1960s and early 70s, when Fleetwood was still a vibrant community.
RIP Doreen and condolences to her family.
 
Think her son Duncan is a Blackpool fan and also director of Lofthouses,cant see it affecting the business. Sad news for the town of Fleetwood.
 
She was fantastic for Fleetwood and put the council to shame. I'm sure that will live on for many years to come which was bound to be her wish. My mum knew her in the early days when her and her husband were developing cough medicines.
RIP Doreen.
 
The Lofthouse business has been operating in Fleetwood for 156 years and their original cough mixture was a liquid in a bottle. After it became popular with fishermen whilst they were both home and away, it was renamed Fisherman's Friend and the lozenge was developed. It was primarily known in just the fishing community and in the Fleetwood area. It was only when Doreen married Tony Lofthouse and got involved in the 1960s that the product really took off in the UK and across the world. She visited towns throughout the UK to identifiy a shop in each where they could market and sell the product locally and she also persuaded Boots to stock it in their branches. As the UK market rapidly expanded so did the business abroad and different flavours were developed. The firm makes billions of the lozenges each year, has a milti million pound turnover and employs over 250 people. The firm has won a number of awards, including for exporting. A great suceess story throughout the early development and subsequent decline of Fleetwood, and much of that financial success has been ploughed back into Fleetwood, not just in terms of jobs but also in terms of other charitable investment through the Loffthouse Foundation. A truly remarkable individual and family firm.
 
I remember when I was taxi driving a few years back I used to pick them up shortly after they were violently burgled at home.
Unsurprisingly it really shook her up but a very warm & approachable lady. RIP.
 
Her son Duncan is a fanatical Blackburn supporter.
Same class as me at Chaucer Rd School in Fleetwood. Got photos on my mantlepiece of him and me playing in the 6 and 11 a side teams. Nice family who were all commited to the good of Fleetwood. As you say TGBGE, he has supported BR for a long time. RIP Doreen.
 
Same class as me at Chaucer Rd School in Fleetwood. Got photos on my mantlepiece of him and me playing in the 6 and 11 a side teams. Nice family who were all commited to the good of Fleetwood. As you say TGBGE, he has supported BR for a long time. RIP Doreen.

Kav - for a moment I thought i was reading that you were in the same class as Doreen...

Echo the sentiments of others here. Huge custodian of the Fleetwood community and a sad day. RIP
 
RIP Mrs Lofthouse.
When we moved to France in 2006, we went into the local Supermarket and they had loads of Fishermans Friends on display.
Couldn't believe it.
 
RIP Mrs Lofthouse.
When we moved to France in 2006, we went into the local Supermarket and they had loads of Fishermans Friends on display.
Couldn't believe it.
When I spent a year in Germany as part of my degree (94-95) I also noticed Fisherman's Friends everywhere. So when I returned to the UK I wrote to Mrs Lofthouse asking if I could write my dissertation on Fisherman's Friends to which she agreed. Many years later my Uncle got to know her well and one day mentioned my dissertation to her. She remembered. Apparently it was the only such request she agreed to because I was born and raised in Fleetwood. She was great. I was very sad when I heard the news yesterday.
 
I've seen FF in all sorts of far flung places around the world. Always makes me smile (even if they did reject me for a job when I was about 19 :) )
 
My Dad was telling me today that Lofthouse’s chemists had the first electric lightbulb in Fleetwood and his Nan had told him how people would go to the shop and stare at the bulb in wonderment from outside. 😁💡⚡
 
Read a bit about her last couple of days, sounds like a wonderful woman. Successful people who stick around to help their community and give back should be celebrated, as Doreen rightly is. Hope the family and business can continue her legacy.

We shouldn't expect it but Simon Sadler has made a huge contribution to the community in his short time as BFC owner. Us Pool fans should celebrate what he's done, and continue to celebrate him in the same way if he continues, regardless of the performances of the 11 on the pitch. Community and business, but particularly football, should go hand in hand.
 
A fulsome & fascinating obituary in today's Times....

Doreen Lofthouse had a simple sales technique. She would not leave until she had secured an order of Fisherman’s Friend. Thus she almost singlehandedly grew Lofthouse of Fleetwood from a single pharmacy in the Lancashire fishing port of Fleetwood into a multimillion-pound business that exports the throat-kicking lozenge to more than 120 countries.

She was born in the town and, having left school at 15 with no qualifications, went to work in the pharmacy as a shop girl. After marrying the proprietor’s younger son, Alan, Doreen foresaw a much wider market than the local fishermen who had bought the packages for generations to fortify them when they sailed their trawlers into the freezing North Atlantic on the hunt for cod.

The recipe of liquorice, menthol, eucalyptus oil and capsicum had been invented as a liquid medicine by James Lofthouse in 1865 to relieve bronchial congestion as well as aches and pains. The only snag was that the glass bottle often smashed as the fishing boats rolled on heavy swells. At the fishermen’s request, Lofthouse modified his fiery medicament into a starch-encased lozenge. The Fisherman’s Friend remained a trade secret of Fleetwood’s sailors for nearly a century.

The family’s only concession to entrepreneurialism was opening a kiosk on the promenade each summer to sell the lozenges to holidaymakers from Lancastrian mill towns who were staying in the boarding houses of nearby Blackpool and made a day trip on the tram to Fleetwood. Many suffered from respiratory problems as a result of unhealthy working conditions in the mills. On their return they would write to Lofthouse of Fleetwood to ask where they could buy the lozenges locally.

One day in 1963 Doreen picked up a pile of these letters and suggested to no little bemusement that she make a tour of Lancashire’s mill towns in her battered MG and visit every local chemist to show them the letters as proof that the product would soon disappear from their shelves. “They thought I was a little crazy,” she recalled.

The family gave her permission but no money for petrol. Diminutive, neat and attractive, the fiercely determined Mrs Lofthouse set off on her expedition, depending on a sale to buy the petrol to drive to the next town. She returned with dozens of orders.

By the end of the Sixties Fisherman’s Friend was being “exported” across the country — Doreen had persuaded a branch of Boots near Birmingham to stock the product and sales were so good that Boots wrote to ask if Lofthouse could supply all its UK branches.

The antiquated lozenge machine in the back room of the chemist in Lord Street was now woefully inadequate to supply demand. One cowering bank manager and meekly signed cheque later, Doreen opened a factory on the outskirts of the town in 1971 and developed a rounded aniseed lozenge in 1974, inspired by a button on her dress. The company started exporting to Norway in 1975 and a salted version was developed for the Swedish market.

Word began to spread that the lozenge was a cure for bad breath and could prevent people falling asleep at the wheel. At seven times the strength of the average menthol chew, Fisherman’s Friend gained rapid popularity in countries where people generally had stronger palates. The light-brown pellets began to be sucked as confectionery. Fisherman’s Friend chewing gum was launched. A sugar-free version appeared in 1979 and mint, lemon and apple cinnamon flavours introduced. Varieties such as spicy mandarin and cherry proved particularly popular in Singapore and Japan. By 1994 it was Britain’s biggest branded food export to Germany, which would import some 100 million packets a year.

The product’s retro packaging also proved a hit overseas. The distinctive black and red lettering had first come about because Doreen’s mother-in-law, Frances Lofthouse, had originally typed the words “Extra Strong” in red, underneath Fisherman’s Friend in black, because she did not want to waste the red ink on the typewriter. Meanwhile, Doreen had a created a logo based on a local trawler, Cevic, which ended its ended its days of service after sinking in the Bay of Biscay in 1991.

The Lofthouses even found a market in the Soviet Union, but declined to do a deal when their prospective clients offered to pay them in salt cod or jam.

Lofthouse won the first of three Queen’s Awards for Export in 1983 and during that decade sales rose fivefold. When she met an admiring Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister produced a packet of Fisherman’s Friend from her handbag. Lofthouse ensured that regular consignments were sent to 10 Downing Street thereafter.

Without recourse to corporate investment, the Lofthouses kept the company in family hands and firmly resisted the temptation to offshore production to the Far East in a bid to maximise profits.

While Fleetwood’s fishing industry declined, Lofthouse became the largest employer in the town. Today nearly 400 people work at the factory. Doreen knew each employee by their first name; they all knew her as “Mrs Lofthouse”. News of one of her impending tours of the factory floor would result in frenzied polishing of the machinery that today produces five billion lozenges a year.

Doreen Wilson Cowell was born in Fleetwood in 1930. Little is known about her family background, apart from the fact that she was educated locally; Lofthouse of Fleetwood was “unwilling” to provide any further details. Her first marriage in 1960 to Alan Lofthouse ended in divorce. She is survived by their son, Duncan, who co-owned the business. In 1973 Doreen shook up the family a second time by marrying Tony Lofthouse, the son of her ex-husband’s brother, who was 14 years her junior. Her second husband died in 2018.

The couple shared a plain office with a view of the car park through the net curtains. “Shop talk” was banned at home, a relatively modest three-bedroomed house in the nearby town of Thornton-Cleveleys with two dogs along with donkeys and Shetland ponies wandering around a 30ft replica of Fleetwood’s lighthouse in her garden. They rarely took holidays, preferring to work, and relaxed by gardening. After her OBE investiture at Buckingham Palace she and her husband celebrated with sandwiches back at the hotel.

The family’s wealth is estimated at £120 million. Much of it has been ploughed into local philanthropy, including refurbishing the promenade and a pretty house atop a hillside, known as the Mount. Floodlights were bought for Fleetwood FC and a lifeboat for the RNLI. In 2019 she instituted a £30 million fund for community projects in the town. Her generosity earned her the sobriquet “Mother of Fleetwood”.

She continued to run the business as joint managing director with her husband until his death. He had long given up any pretence of being in charge. “Doreen’s been the driving force round here and still is,” he told the Daily Mail in 2010. “We’d all be terrified whenever she said ‘I’m just off to paint my nails’, because you knew there’d be some big idea when she came back.”

Doreen Lofthouse, OBE, MBE, entrepreneur, was born on February 27, 1930. She died of undisclosed causes on March 30, 2021, aged 91.
 
Interesting read. Sounds like she married her nephew!
When you pass her house on the main road it looks a bit more substantial than a modest three bedroomed home as described.
She certainly did Fleetwood proud though through the years.
 
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