Copywriter and close friend Tim Gill remembers Glenn Maltby, the creative director and key member of the Roses organising committee who sadly passed away last year.

Though the roots of this annual bash can be traced back to 1978, when – as the White Rose Awards – it was a showcase solely for Leeds creative talent, 1984 saw the genesis of the Roses as we know it today.

One of the key players on the Roses organising committee was Glenn Maltby, and those who knew him or worked with him will be saddened to learn that Glenn passed away on 18th December last, aged 62, following a long battle with cancer.

I knew him for over 30 years, and worked with him as a copywriter for several of them. We joined the Advertising Bureau (AB) on the same day, back in 1978, and it was under Glenn’s Creative Directorship that the agency grew into a significant creative force, vying for business with Poulter and Brunnings. Many creatives, to this day, are thankful to Glenn for giving them their first industry break.

They were very different times. Compared to today, we worked just as hard, but usually only in the mornings as the ritual of lunch was woven deeply into the fabric of the business in those days.

Glenn had a prodigious talent for lunch, and his capacity was legendary. I  remember a particularly good one at the Flying Pizza in Leeds. This went on for so long that the restaurant closed but, as we were valued patrons, one member of staff was charged with staying back and serving us more wine, should it be required. I think it must have been, because I vaguely recall the place filling up with early evening punters and we stayed on for dinner. In Singapore, when we were working together at a large multinational agency where Glenn was Creative Director, we took a favourite client out for lunch. The bill for the three of us was so huge that we were later interrogated by the Managing Director as to how many of the creative department we’d taken with us. Shortly after this, in retribution, the cocktail cabinet was removed from Glenn’s office. This was a cruel blow as a large gin at midday made the choice of lunch venue so much easier.

Over the years he won many creative awards for his work, including one (in the Far East) for a stunning series of commercials for the Singapore Armed Forces. On his return to the UK in 1983 Glenn joined AB offshoot Murray, Maltby, Walker and West in Leeds, and soon met Keith McPhail, who later became the ‘M’ in the BRAHM agency.

As Keith, now living in Lanzarote, remembers … “Glenn and the late Ray Sale of Granada TV had lunch and thought it would be a good idea to relaunch the Awards. They conscripted me, Jo Kemp and Neil Molyneux, then of Commercials Unlimited, to help them. It was Glenn’s idea to make the Roses a national event, open to the whole of the UK barring London. However, the judging panel would all be drawn from top flight London creatives. It was Glenn’s remit to recruit a very high profile Chair of Judges and, over the 16 years that we ran the Roses, these included such luminaries as John Hegarty, Barbara Nokes, John Salmon, John Bartle and Graham Watson. The Roses Awards made a huge impact in highlighting the talent and success of non-London agencies and design companies. Without Glenn, it would not have happened. He was the catalyst and he worked hard at it.

But he worked hard at enjoying it too. At committee meetings we always referred to him as Malt Glenby, for obvious reasons. And when the closing credits rolled at the end of an Awards night this was the name that appeared on screen. However, by this time Glenn was invariably well into the ‘spirit’ of the occasion and never noticed! He was once found in his room in the early hours after the Awards Dinner, sitting in a bath full of warm water, fully clothed in his dinner suit, drinking champagne.

On another occasion he decided it would be a good idea to have a laser show above the Piccadilly Hotel, Manchester, on Awards night, so that people would know where to go. It cost £3k. We thought it a lot of money but agreed. Only when it was set up did we realise it would still be daylight as folk were arriving – so nobody could see the show!

One year, at our traditional pre-Judging Day meal at Langan’s restaurant, Liza Minnelli and Shirley MacLaine were at the next table with Richard Dreyfus.
Glenn asked Liza Minnelli if she was available to do a voiceover for Magnet Joinery!”

Glenn was one of the most determined individuals I have ever met. Margaret, his widow who tirelessly nursed him over his last weeks, tells me that he went to 68 interviews before obtaining his first job – at Crawfords, in London in 1968. The two other art students who went with him to the capital, now well-known veteran creatives Alan Midgley and Graham Watson, were still loafing round the flat they shared when Glenn came home with his first wage packet.

Years later, when he joined Avant in Harrogate as Creative Director, he – almost overnight – gave up ‘lunching’ in favour of exercise, and attended a gym daily until very near the end.

I will always remember Glenn for his mischievous sense of fun and enormous zest for life. When he told me he’d been diagnosed with cancer on the first occasion it was “just a bloody joke”, and a “ball ache” – a minor hurdle to be overcome before life could return to normal. There was no resignation, were no tears, no self-pity. He just got on with getting better. I counted over 40 tubes and wires coming out of him after his first operation, yet within days of his release from hospital we were out having a pint as if nothing had happened.

When the cancer returned three years later, his decline was swift but his spirit remained indomitable. After the very un-gloomy humanist celebration of his life (the word funeral was never mentioned) his family and close friends moved on to a local pub where we raised far too many glasses in his honour. I know he would have approved of the send off.