Sir Ray Tindle: I started a media empire with £300

It's no surprise that 'Noli Cedere' 'No Surrender' is the Tindle family motto. Sir Ray Tindle, 82, has been fighting gutsy battles his whole life. First he fought the Japanese in World War II, and more recently a debilitating throat cancer, which claimed his voice box. "I was a great fan of Winston Churchill," says the founder of Tindle Newspapers. "Everybody thought that we didn't have much of a chance in World War II. And he told us we did. He turned the whole country around."

A captain in the Devonshire Regiment, he printed his first newspaper, using a photocopier, on a troopship off Malaya in 1944. He interviewed the men: "they all had a story. And I wrote them, churned them out and put them on the decks." Back in London, and turned down for jobs on Fleet Street, Tindle joined the Croydon Times, before going on to buy his first newspaper in 1960 with his £300 in demob money. "I could only afford one that was either dead or dying. But that was better than starting from scratch." With £250, he snapped up the Balham and Tooting Gazette, which at the time was selling about 700 copies and "in a pretty poor state".

The opposition, he says, ran a series of broadsheets, changing just the front page of each as they went into the next town. "But my little paper was 16 pages tabloid, and every word was about Tooting." Going to every church, school and sports club in the area, Tindle asked for stories and, if they had them, photos too. "All faces. Everyone has an interest in their own street, their own little patch." Within a year, the paper grew to a circulation of 3,500 and prospective buyers were offering to pay him up to £25,000 for it. "Then a rival offered me either the Fulham Chronicle, the Kensington & Chelsea News, or the Westminster & Pimlico news. I said I won't take any one of them, but I will take all three." The rival agreed, taking the Gazette in a swap as part of the deal and an empire was born.

Try 6 free issues of MoneyWeek today

Get unparalleled financial insight, analysis and expert opinion you can profit from.

Start your trial

Sign up for MoneyWeek’s free twice-daily newsletter.

Join more than 165,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with latest financial news, insights and expert analysis to help you understand what really matters when it comes to your finances.

Join more than 165,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with latest financial news, insights and expert analysis to help you understand what really matters when it comes to your finances.

Sign up

By 1977, Tindle Newspapers was turning over £1m, but it wasn't until 1980 that it hit £1m in profit after a series of canny moves into failing newspapers. The first came in 1978, when he glanced at a copy of the Telegraph propped up against his cornflakes. The West Wales Observer in the seaside town of Tenby had closed, he read. "Half of the staff were gone and the other half were packing up." Tindle snapped it up from the receiver and immediately enforced a new rule. "Every line in the paper had to be about Tenby." Circulation doubled. Renamed the Tenby Observer, it went from losing £50,000 a year to making over £100,000. The key, he says, is ensuring small advertisers, the butchers, bakers and candlestick makers, know they can reach a specific audience. "No one is going to travel 15 miles from Milford Haven for a loaf of bread in Tenby."

He's still buying, taking 27 titles from Trinity Mirror in 2007 for £18.75m and another five last month in Devon and Somerset. Even with this expansion, the group, which owns 230 titles, is debt-free and made a £7m profit in 2008. Tindle shrugs off any suggestion that it's down to his own genius. "I just planned to get big and stay small."