Founder & CEO Chris Murphy featured in The Old Bradfordians Association Magazine
The Yorkshire boy who speaks Chinese
Having grown up on a council estate, Old Bradfordian Chris Murphy (1986), knows only too well the transformative power of a good education. He talks to us about his entrepreneurial luxury knitwear journey and also giving back via the School’s Assisted Places programme.
One of Chris Murphy’s mottos is being a ‘big fish in a small pond’. Certainly, when he left BGS in 1986, the saying served him well when he became one of the few (if any) students heading off to study Chinese and Korean at university.
“I loved English, but everyone was studying it,” he says. “I wanted to find an area of specialisation where I could stand out from the crowd. When it came to the graduate jobs fair at the end of fourth year there was only one other graduate who could speak Chinese and Korean, which meant we were in a very select pool.”
The graduate fair led to a year in South Korea in management consultancy as a precursor to a fantastic career in textiles, which has seen Chris set up two companies and establish them as some of the leading providers of luxury knitted goods
in the world. His clients range from Chanel and Hermes to Chloe and Givenchy with knitwear worn by models walking runways in Paris, New York and Milan – a long way from the Swain House Estate in Bradford where he grew up.
“I never met my father,” he says. “My mother and I lived with Nana, Grandad and Uncle Leo, who had Down’s syndrome, and it was a very loving family. I started school at the local comp and I was just…bored. Swain House told my mother
I was thick, but she knew the problem was the school and she was determined to get me into BGS.”
Chris’s academic record began to improve when he joined Bradford Grammar’s Junior School, after his mother managed to scrape together the money to pay the fees. He faced leaving BGS at the end of Year 6, as she could no longer afford for him to continue, but fortunately he was given a coveted Assisted Place (which he’s fairly sure came after a Governor watched his fantastic flute playing at an end of year BGS concert!)
“I loved Bradford Grammar School from the moment I got there,” he recalls. “I loved the diversity of the school. There were a lot of wealthy kids, and kids from pretty normal families, but there were also kids like me, from humble backgrounds. No one gave me any stick about where I’d come from. It really gave me a sense of aspiration, that I could do and be better.
I was knocking around and making friends with lads from wealthier backgrounds, it was a real eye opener and gave me a lot of motivation to try and do better for myself.”
Although Chris admits he didn’t do too well at BGS academically until his final year (“I was enjoying doing too many things – sport, music, friends!”) he found early on that he wanted to study Chinese, inspired by a teacher at BGS.
“There was an economics teacher called Sid Greenwood and I really admired him,” he says.
“He was the first person who gave me a sense of social justice and a deep interest in politics. That led to an interest in communism and China and I became fascinated with Chinese history.”
After a brief stint as a management consultant, he heard about a graduate trainee opportunity at Dawson International PLC, which at the time was the world’s largest processor of cashmere and owned much of the UK’s textile infrastructure across Yorkshire and Scotland.
“Not many people are aware the best cashmere in the world comes from China, and once China began moving from a planned economy towards privatisation, Dawson needed someone on the ground who could speak Chinese – that’s when the Chinese speaking Yorkshire boy stepped forward,” he laughs.
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